I Don’t Have Any Thinking To Do, Gaby…

Mainly because, under other circumstances, the police would undoubtedly be hunting him for the murder of another identikit black kiddy-thug. Except they struck first.

Kelyan was a caring boy, according to his mother, and his teachers called him “funny, kind and ambitious”. But he was not an angel. An aspiring drill rapper, he had been expelled from school, spent time in care, and lately got into trouble with the law. He was on the way to meet his social worker when he died and, according to the BBC, was due in court shortly himself on charges of carrying a machete.

QED. 

His mother used a word we have heard a lot over the past few days to describe what had gone wrong for him. He had, she said, been groomed. That adult criminal gangs are using increasingly sophisticated tactics to recruit schoolchildren should not be news to anyone.

They aren't forcing them to make TikTok drill rap videos as well, are they Gaby?  

Boys such as this, Longfield has argued, aren’t freely choosing a life of crime any more than 13-year-olds in Rochdale were choosing (as some police officers wrongly concluded two decades ago) to become sex workers, and in both cases what they need is swift protection from predatory adults.

The children of Rotherham and Oldham didn't get that, yet they killed nobody, they haven't recorded rap songs about killing their tormentors, have they? So I'll pass on any further taxpayer-funded efforts to stop these street rats from killing each other.  

Now the home secretary, Yvette Cooper, is leading a cross-government “young futures” unit designed to bring together the threads of everything that is happening in young people’s lives, from a mental health crisis that may be aggravating offending rates to the loss of specialist youth services. (One recent analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that teenagers in neighbourhoods where all the youth clubs in walking distance had closed – as 30% of youth clubs in London did between 2010 and 2019, thanks mostly to budget cuts – were 14% more likely than their peers to have a criminal conviction.)

Ah, the magical qualities of youth clubs. No, don't quibble, just pay up, taxpayer, and England will be a better place again...