Scum is more than on the surface in the UK

Richard Littlejohn:

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.

...

There is more.

It is a lurid tale of what the welfare state has created in the UK. It is the end product of socialism that has dragged what was the most prosperous country in the world a 100 years ago into a that looks like something from Clockwork Orange. It is where the Democrats want to take us in the name of compassion and "social justice."

As John Kerry might say, he's got the hat.