What Keir Starmer Gets Right About "Adolescence"

There are some things you can't legislate for

Last week, I was stopped outside Waterloo station. A young Black kid, maybe about 19, was raising money to fight knife crime. I had to be at an appointment by a certain time, but as someone who takes a fair bit of interest in the dysfunctions of British life, and of London in particular, I felt I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't stop and listen. He showed me some info, told me he was hoping to help his younger brother get to university. I checked the QR code on his lanyard, and after confirming he was legit made a donation and went on my way.

Part of me wanted to linger and talk more. A glance through his pamphlets showed me what "fighting knife crime" apparently involved: skills development, mentorship, community engagement. "Empowerment" was emblazoned everywhere.

I had thoughts. Those three emphases all seemed like admirable but profoundly insufficient symptom relief rather than real treatments. If a charity is offering "skills development", I wonder why this isn't acquired in school. If it's offering "mentorship", I wonder where the fathers are. If it's offering "community engagement", I wonder why integration has failed.

I did not share my thoughts. This friendly, confident fundraiser had a donation target, and I doubted that even the most mutually illuminating conversation on the steps of Waterloo would do much to tackle those problems that no amount of schemes, fundraising, or youth initiatives can solve.

I've thought of that young man regularly since last week however, mainly due to the ongoing news and media brouhaha surrounding the Netflix drama Adolescence.

Many readers will be familiar and bored to tears with this topic already, but for those blessedly out of the loop: Adolescence is a fictional story about an unassuming 13 year old white boy who stabs a girl to death after being radicalised online by misogynistic, Andrew Tate-like content from the "manosphere."

The mainstream media and political elites have been falling over themselves to praise the series, so much so that Kemi Badenoch was shamed on LBC for not having watched it whilst the Prime Minister has lauded it publicly on multiple occasions, invited the writers to discuss the series' themes with him, and backed a plan to show it for free in schools across the country.

The whole thing has the air of a carefully planned marketing campaign. And this is precisely why many conservative folk are recoiling from the show's adulation. It's not that online misogyny and "Andrew Tate shite" aren't real problems—they are. It's that the huge amounts of time, energy, and money that our cultural and political gatekeepers have poured into promoting the series and creating a discourse around it is vastly disproportionate to the scale of those problems.

Misogynistic violence of the kind portrayed in Adolescence does happen—the story of Kyle Clifford is a grim example. But the idea that Britain needs to be having a moral panic over the possibility of skinny white 13 year olds going on misogynistic stabbing sprees, when we are currently living through the Pakistani rape gang scandal 2.0 and spiralling knife crime among Black youths is quite obviously risible.

It's not even that these other problems don't get turned into TV dramas. For instance, many of those crowing (justifiably) about Adolescence over the past few weeks seem to have overlooked the existence of 2017's Three Girls, which dramatised events surrounding the Rochdale rape gang long before Elon Musk took an interest. But no one in parliament took measures to ensure that Three Girls caused paroxysms of national anxiety or was made compulsory viewing for Year 8s.

I haven't watched Adolescence. I don't plan to. I probably wouldn't have anyway, but I've seen enough of the clunky dialogue to decide it's not worth my time (sorry LBC). One reason I feel it's not at all cynical to see the hype around the show as entirely astroturfed is that the key clips from it make it seem like a PSHE lesson trying (and failing, quite spectacularly) to disguise itself as a drama. This impression has been reinforced by Keir Starmer not once, but twice, referring to the program as a "documentary", despite having watched it himself. If I were a screenwriter whose drama made people feel like they’d watched a documentary, I'd rend my garments.

And yet, in the midst of the tiresome and predictable establishment encomium, Keir Starmer said something which I actually found quite surprising: