Comment Archive:
Saturday 1st July 2006
Bus Surfing Scum Must Die
Newspapers around Leamington Spa have recently been reporting on one of the most shocking developments to occur in the town’s august history - news that a dangerous and potentially deadly craze has somehow reached the Royal spa town and taken hold of a minority group within the town’s population. The incredible news has been sending local townspeople reeling in apoplectic spasms of outrage and incomprehension as they try to make sense of why this is happening.
The new craze first manifested itself last month when CCTV cameras spotted three local youths hanging precariously off the back of a moving bus in Leamington’s busy town centre. "Oh lorks," cried old ladies waddling incontinently out of Tesco, "it looks like bus surfing has finally hit Leamington Spa, oh what a foolish and dangerous craze it is!" But in this they were wrong. For bus surfing was not the craze. The real craze, ladies and gentlemen, was located in the hearts and minds of the drivers of the vehicles that happenstance had placed directly behind the beleaguered buses.
"I couldn’t help myself," said one driver who wished only to be known as Madame X, "as soon as I saw that shoddy piece of council estate scum hanging off the No. 66 by his fingertips I knew I could get the little git beneath my front wheels if I hit the accelerator quickly enough... it took a good deal of skill, timing and determination I can tell you but I was soon rewarded by a very satisfying bump as my Renault Grand Espace ground the head of the annoying little hoody into the macadam. There was blood and white trash snot everywhere. It was great."
It seems the craze soon caught on and quickly spread across the entire county. Convoys of hummers and people carriers were soon witnessed tailgating local buses or lying in wait adjacent to bus stops like metallic sharks waiting for the right moment to strike. Reports that a point scoring system has been developed akin to cult film Death Race 2000 have yet to be confirmed though the unofficial word on the street is that a Tommy Hilfiger bounced off the bonnet is worth 100 points while a Nike footwear owner mashed into your chassis is worth a cool 250. Police are advising local youths to either ride buses properly (i.e. from the inside and with a ticket) or learn to ride their effing bikes...
Ok, so maybe that’s taking things a bit too far and in reality I certainly wouldn’t advocate anyone deliberately mowing down a hood-wearing spotty faced know-it-all in cold blood as part of some understandable revenge fantasy just because I’ve made it sound supercool and righteous. I mean come on, folks. Live and let live and all that.
But things in Leamington have been taking a worryingly troublesome turn of late. Gangs of youths - mostly underage I hasten to add - have been seen roaming the town centre being offensive, threatening, obnoxious and just generally malodorous. And I choose my words very carefully ‘cos you just know that these little dullards can’t understand any word that contains more than two syllables. Geez, I’ve even seen one slack jawed, thick-headed troupe lashing out at passing buses and motorists with a golfing umbrella (which they’d probably nicked... I can’t see these guys paying green fees, can you?)! Most other town users ignore them, a few give them the odd mouthful but most simply avoid them. Having experienced a few close encounters with these social misfits myself (cos I just can’t keep my opinions to myself) I can’t say that I blame people who decide to walk by on the other side of the street and not get involved. Because getting involved is usually deeply unpleasant. These sulky little twots might not be able to string a cogent argument together but they certainly know their rights under the Law and are prepared to push things right to the limit. All you can do at the end of the day is walk away and hope that someone else less disciplined and less principled than yourself encounters them and beats the living daylights out of them with a baseball bat.
Cue hordes of emails from snivelling liberals and mushroom-numbed hippies who believe that giving people carte blanche to express themselves in absolutely any way they see fit is the best way to achieve a happy, safe society that is fit for absolutely everybody...
But I digress. The main point of this Comment is that this anti-social behaviour has caused a new procedure called "Dispersal Of Groups" to be brought into play by the local police force. Basically, under section 30 of the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003, the police have the power to disperse troublemaking groups from "designated areas" - Leamington’s town centre has now been designated such an area. Any troublemaking group - and this is defined as a gathering of two or more people engaged in anti-social behaviour - can be ordered to leave the area by the police for up to 24 hours. If they return within the time specified or refuse to leave they can be arrested.
Now on the face of it this seems like a damn good idea. The police have at last got some concrete authority with which to deal with these irritating toss monkeys who spend their summer holidays aggravating their fellow citizens before kicking off careers in petty crime and white trash drug addiction and then ending up dead in the gutter, face down in a congealed pool of their own frothy sputum. Great.
But another side of me is deeply concerned. The term "anti-social behaviour" is disturbingly elastic. What if, for example, a group of people were protesting against the war in Iraq? Or were on a march to protest against cuts at the local hospital? Or were on official strike outside a building that happened to fall within the designated area and somebody decided to complain about the noise they were making...? Their activity could quite conceivably be construed as anti-social behaviour and the people consequently dispersed or arrested. Elastic laws have a habit of being stretched and manipulated to suit those that wield them. Sound far fetched? Look at it this way, the anti terrorism laws (for example) have already been used by the powers that be to stop perfectly legal gatherings and protests that have had little or nothing to do with terrorism. It does and will happen.
But I can’t have it both ways, right? I can’t moan about namby-pamby liberalism allowing local yobs to run wild on one hand and then moan about Big Brother-style draconian curfews on the other. It’s make your mind up time.
The solution, of course, is to find the middle ground. Though that’s always the answer I suspect.
From where I’m sitting it seems to me that ultra liberalism ultimately leads to ultra restrictive forms of control in the long run. When we get too liberal, too afraid to lay down sensible laws - when we become too afraid or too complacent to police ourselves - the touchstones of society (decency, respect for others, charity) break down and selfish abusive behaviour then becomes the norm. And then life turns sour for everybody. And gets more and more sour as time goes by. Until people get so desperate and unhappy about it all that they’re willing to have huge bites taken out of their own civil liberties just to have some sense of law and order re-established.
And then we ALL lose out.
The yobs are costing us our freedom. But they’re not the real culprits.
The real culprits aren’t even the smug politicians who secretly love the yobs - "ah marvellous, more crime! Another excuse to pass a law that increases our power whilst eroding that of the common man."
No. The real culprits (as ever) are ourselves. For crossing over to the other side of the street. For not raising our kids properly. For abusing our freedoms in the first place. For not holding fast to and passing on the ideal that any kind of freedom MUST be rooted in a deep sense of respect for other people - otherwise your freedom can only restrict the freedoms of other people.
That’s the kind of liberalism I believe in. These bus surfers need a few months in boot camp. Their parents need advice on how to raise their kids. End of story.
Lastly. Why did the police need special powers to stop troublemakers in the first place? Isn’t it part of their normal remit to stop anti-social behaviour? Isn’t it a bit like granting fire men special permission to put our fires?
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