The conservative appeal of drug gangs

According to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick, the easing of lock-down will be accompanied by a rise in crime in the capital, including the violent type associated with drug gangs. Just last week, the police recovered two zombie knives, two Rambo-style blades and a kitchen knife at the scene of an attack on a 16-year-old boy in Brixton. But it would be wrong to view this coming crimewave as a problem that just affects London’s underclass. According to Sheldon Thomas, the chief executive of an outreach organisation called Gangsline, a rising number of middle-class teenagers are being sucked into the gangster lifestyle in the wake of Covid.

Thomas rather uncharitably attributes this to ‘the phenomenon of loveless middle-class homes’. The teenage children of white-collar workers, he says, having been confined to barracks for the best part of a year, now realise their parents ‘tolerate rather than like them’. In an interview with the Telegraph, he suggested the tight-knit communities of county lines drug gangs become surrogate families for these love-starved teens.

I’ve often puzzled over why it is that drug dealers and assorted minor underworld figures are considered so irresistibly glamorous by middle-class London children. This has come up in conversation with teachers at the secondary school I co-founded in west London, as well as with other dads of teenagers. For boys brought up on the local council estates, becoming a county lines drug mule may be their quickest route out of poverty, albeit a risky one. But their middle-class counterparts have no such excuse. They could be lawyers, accountants, management consultants, yet they’ve decided to pursue a career in the marijuana business instead. Much less money in the long run, and if you screw up you don’t end up looking for another job but entangled in the criminal justice system.