Clapham: how our weak society emboldened the mob

You couldn’t ask for a better state-of-the-nation snapshot than the one coming out of Clapham in south-west London right now. Those clips of young, dumbfounded cops trying and failing to stop a mob of masked TikTok twats from running riot is Britain summed up. The dystopic vision of families barricaded inside shops as entitled delinquents swarm the streets for sport speaks to our crisis of social order. To see what lunacies the corrosion of adult authority can unleash, look no further than Clapham.

For two nights now, feral youths have poured on to Clapham’s streets seemingly for nothing more than the fleeting thrill of causing annoyance to ordinary people. Their performative twattery is apparently part of an Easter holiday ‘link-up’ organised via TikTok. In their digital playpens, these bored juveniles plotted to assemble in public with that most anti-social of intentions: to vex people. In their black garb and daft masks, they menaced shoppers for larks. Marks & Spencer, Sainsbury’s and Boots were all forced to close, some allowing shoppers to stay inside until the irritants had dispersed.

There were serious incidents. Three girls were arrested on suspicion of assaulting an emergency worker. Mistreating public servants is proper lowlife behaviour. The same group were also arrested for shoplifting. In one video, smoke can be seen billowing from Clapham Common: the fires of asocial arrogance. The police lamented the ‘disorder’ and issued a dispersal order for the youths. But I won’t be the only one wondering if those clips of masked brats escaping the clutches of floundering officers tell a worrying story about the state in the 21st century.

This street explosion of gleeful spite feels simultaneously pathetic and sinister. It’s not the Brixton riots, when vast numbers of youths rose up in anger over social issues, in particular police brutality. This nonsense is far smaller, far dumber and far more likely to fizzle out quickly, possibly even by tonight. After all, they’ll need an evening to narcissistically search for vids of themselves on TikTok to give a big thumbs-up to. And yet it is a serious incident. We must not turn a blind eye to such a brazen display of contempt for social norms. It speaks to a simmering nihilism among sections of our youth, one likely emboldened by adult society’s wilful abandonment of its duty to discipline, reprimand and guide the next generation.

To me, the events in Clapham flow from the breakdown of adult authority. Everywhere now, discipline is frowned upon as a borderline fascistic pursuit. Parenting experts warn mums and dads not to scold their littl’uns. Schools long ago abandoned their core duty of admonishing bad behaviour, replacing the stern telling-off with a therapeutic hand on the shoulder. And out in the wild, in everyday society, you hardly ever see adults giving kids an earful. Teens yell and swear and play their tinny music, and few if any of their elders bark: ‘BEHAVE.’

Not to be an old fart about it, but it is worth noting how spectacularly different this is to the not-so-distant past. We were told off by strangers all the time. Daily we were told to pipe down, grow up, get out. Once an old duffer on a bus clocked our distinctive Roman Catholic school uniforms and ominously said: ‘You go to the convent on the hill?’ We shut up instantly, because bringing the school into disrepute had consequences, sometimes corporal ones. There was an infrastructure of discipline that extended from the home to the school to the world itself.

That’s gone now. It feels like adults have been decommissioned, subtly instructed by society that their wisdom and firmness are no longer wanted. This mad deactivation of yesteryear’s social custodians has let infantile antics flourish. Even petty crime is now pretty much permissible. Teens jump the barrier at Tube stations or nick crisps and chocolate and rarely face consequences. If they have got the message that they can do whatever they like, whose fault is that? A society that refuses to say ‘NO’, loudly and resolutely, has no right to be shocked when its members behave like entitled children, even after childhood. Whether it’s the boy in a skirt who thinks he has the right to waltz into the girls’ bathroom or the boy in a mask who shuts down Boots for a laugh, this is what happens when we fail to tell the young to get a fucking grip.

It has bizarrely become a ‘progressive’ virtue to be anti-discipline. So what if youths steal beer or don’t pay their Tube fare – it’s no biggie, say the hipster nihilists of the bourgeois left. Some of these leftists live in Clapham – who knows, maybe they’ll change their tune now that they’ve seen where such adult cowardice masquerading as liberal coolness can lead.

As Slavoj Žižek says, there is unquestionably a ‘growing decay of manners’, and it really matters. Such ‘everyday insecurity hurts the poor much more than the rich who live calmly in their gated communities’, Žižek says. Well, now one of London’s better-off boroughs has been targeted by the post-manners madness stoked by the faux-progressivism of the elites. Clapham confirms that when adults vacate the terrain of moral guidance, they normalise mob behaviour. We need to get a grip before we can tell the kids to.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.