Littlejohn: "Britain, land of the rising scum"

From yesterday's Daily Mail, I meant to post it yesterday:

"The first time it properly dawned on me that the game was indeed up was about 20 years ago in Blackpool, where I was covering the Labour Party conference.

As I made my way from the Clifton Hotel, opposite the main pier, past Yates’s Wine Lodge towards the Winter Gardens, at approximately 9.30am, I had to step into the road to avoid a family walking four-abreast on the pavement in the direction of the sea front.

They were all breakfasting on fish and chips from polystyrene containers, washed down with what I seem to remember was Irn-Bru, in the case of the children, and Special Brew, for the parents.

The whole family — mum, dad, son, daughter — was dressed in matching turquoise shell-suits and imitation designer-label trainers. They all had earrings. Each wore a baseball cap.

The father’s cap was distinguished by a plastic dog turd stuck to the peak, beneath a logo which proclaimed: ‘S***head.’

I can remember thinking to myself, as I watched them window-shopping at the pork butcher’s: ‘What chance have these kids got?’

The other thought which occurred to me was, given that the children were aged, at a guess, eight and six, and this was late September: why weren’t they at school?

Now I know what some of you are thinking. Don’t rush to judgment, Rich. They could have been a blameless, sophisticated couple, who had taken their children out of their fee-paying convent school for the day to treat them to a field trip to study the varied marine life to be found in the Irish Sea off Blackpool, and had decided to dress down for the occasion.

Feeding them fish and chips for breakfast was simply a way of giving them an authentic working-class day-trip experience to broaden their horizons and drum home the message that not everyone starts the day with organic muesli from Waitrose.

The novelty baseball cap could have been an ironic, post-modern take on the nature of unbridled consumerism or a witty protest about societal stereotyping.

Then again, they could just have been scum.

You know what? I’ve just thought about it again. I’m going with scum. Sorry, but there’s no other word for it.

For all I know, those children could have grown up to become brain-surgeons.

My guess, though, is that they’re both living on benefits in some scruffy council garret, halfway up a burned-out tower block, surrounded by raggedy children who look pretty much like they used to on their jolly outing to Blackpool.

Only the fake designer labels have changed.

We’re now on to second- and third-generation scum, sustained by a patronising and non-judgmental welfare juggernaut. We’ve always had what sociologists prefer to call an underclass. But not on this scale and never so visible.

A quick glance at the news is all it takes to confirm the worst. In Haringey, North London, the child of a dysfunctional ‘family’ is tortured to death under the noses of social services. When the tragic Victoria Climbie died in similar circumstances on the same manor, we were assured it would never happen again. I wrote at the time that it could and it would. It has.

The £100,000-a-year, hatchet-faced harridan in charge of the social services washes her hands of the death, refuses to resign and boasts of providing a ‘three star’ service,
backed by pie charts, graphs and a perfect paper trail of criminal incompetence and wilful neglect.

Somewhere out there, there’s a baseball cap with her name on it.

Frankly, I can’t bring myself to read the details of this horrific case, other than to note that the father was an SS freak and the mother spent all day in pornographic chat rooms on the internet, when she wasn’t smoking in the street. What did they do for money? What do you think?

In Yorkshire, a ghastly-looking woman and her gormless boyfriend’s uncle are on trial for abducting her daughter and attempting to extract a reward for her safe return. They
look as if they have stepped straight out of Little Britain, in which Matt Lucas and David Walliams’s Burberried chavs captured perfectly the gruesome reality of so much of our modern landscape.

This week, a court heard of the conditions imposed on poor Shannon Matthews while she was in captivity. She was allowed to watch TV and play computer games provided she didn’t look out of the window. Sounds pretty much like her everyday life — and that of thousands of children her age, I would imagine.

The Guardianistas railed against Little Britain’s portrait of the underclass, accusing it of cruelty and making fun of a ‘vulnerable’ section of society. The truth is, the Leftist bien pensants have built a land fit for Vicky Pollards.

This was life imitating comedy. In Little Britain, Vicky Pollard swapped her baby for a Westlife CD.

Meanwhile, in Manchester, a three-year-old child and a three-month-old toddler are stabbed to death allegedly by their mother.

Outside the house, neighbours are interviewed by TV reporters. Not so long ago, they’d have looked like Les Dawson and Peter Butterworth’s doughty Northern battle-axes.

Of the two women I saw, one was wearing a grey hoodie and the other had her hair pulled back in a Croydon facelift, a stud through her nose and so many earrings in her left lobe it looked like a curtain rail. Both appeared old beyond their years, a legacy no doubt of cheap cigarettes and super-strength lager.

In Hackney, East London, a teenage girl is gang-raped for not showing sufficient ‘respect’ to a local yobbo. It barely makes the newspapers.

Britain seems to have cornered the market in welfare layabouts, drug addicts, feral gangs of obese children and hideous, drunken scrubbers, littering the gutters of even our more genteel suburbs.

The women are the worst of the lot, giving birth to a procession of bay-bees by different, transient fathers and expecting — nay, being encouraged by — the state to pay for their upbringing.

The Government’s preferred solution is to keep on throwing money at the problem, hiring legions of social workers and ‘parenting skills advisers’ to keep the scum in check, while importing hundreds of thousands of immigrants to do the jobs our indigenous idle are paid not to do.

It doesn’t work and things aren’t going to get any better. It’s at least 20 years too late.

The game’s up."