The delusion of the UK's cultural elites

A new Netflix show makes regime propaganda, because not even the brutal murder of society’s most innocent and vulnerable members can be justification for Wrongthink

A new Netflix show about knife crime ripped through the national conversation here in the UK these last few weeks, and now I’m about to do something that is normally rather ill-advised. I’m going to write about it, without having actually watched the show.

But I’m not going to opine on whether the show is good or not. In fact, two people I hold in high regard, and are far from being woolly-minded libs, told me that it is actually very good. I take them at their word: that it is made with depth and nuance and the acting is extraordinary. But it’s not the actual quality of the show — called Adolescence — that has made it so topical, and so controversial. The problem is the very heart of the story, which bothers me so much I cannot bring myself to watch it.

The series is about a young teenage boy in the north of England who fatally stabs a female classmate. Knife crime among young men, many of them underage, is an extensively reported-on problem in England, almost a cultural phenomenon. Both the victims and the perpetrators are majority black and Asian young men. Research suggests that the rise in knife crime among young people is due to things like family breakdown, robberies, and gang fights.

In the Netflix drama, however, our young stabber is a white boy with a stable family. His father is a plumber. The motivation behind the stabbing is toxic masculinity.

Of course, The Guardian loved it:

“On a street level, it’s about knife crime. Over the past decade, the number of UK teenagers killed with a blade or sharp object has risen by 240%. On a cultural level, it’s about cyberbullying, the malign influence of social media and the unfathomable pressures faced by boys in Britain today. Male rage, toxic masculinity, online misogyny. This isn’t just all-too-plausible fiction. It’s unavoidable fact.”

Again, since I haven’t seen the show I am not saying it’s a terrible piece of work. But I am saying that even to build a story line around the topic of young male violence, and to tie it to “online misogyny” is an exercise in propaganda. Its purpose? To both demoralise young men and profit off said demoralisation. Its creators would absolutely know that they would be showered in accolades by fellow upper middle class, feminist, cultural creators, because they were making a cultural artefact that fit perfectly into their myopic worldview. And indeed, the show is being hailed as the greatest thing to come out of England since the Beatles.

As my friend Michael Rainsborough said in an interview we did yesterday (and which I will publish next week), Adolescence “a pro-regime narrative, and while those narratives may convince some of the population, and reinforce their own sense of guilt, or that incel-dom is the massive problem that we should all be aware of. But a lot of other people can see through it now.”

It is a pro-regime narrative because it conveniently intercepts and then misdirects the audience’s attention and emotional connection away from the growing anger over migrant related crimes, to problems that can be blamed on right-wing white men.

The most important piece of context here is what happened last summer in the seaside town of Southport, outside Liverpool. On 29 July, 2024, a 17-year-old by the name of Axel Rudakubana, the child of Rwandans who were granted asylum in the UK after the genocide there, walked into a Taylor Swift-themed dance class.

"Twenty-five little girls, the youngest five years old, signed up for a morning of dancing, yoga, and making friendship bracelets,” the BBC reports.

But Rudakubana instead unleashed “a planned and premeditated attempt to commit indiscriminate mass murder,” according to the Crown Prosecution Service. He stabbed to death Elsie Dot Stancombe, 7; Bebe King, 6, and Alice Da Silva Aguiar, 9.

Prosecutors said: “A number of weapons were recovered [from Rudakubana’s home], including the biological toxin ricin, which the defendant had produced in his bedroom. Searches of his laptop and phone showed a sickening and sustained interest in death and violence.” They also found an Al Qaeda training manual — not, that we know — of Andrew Tate merch.

The breathtaking consistency of the urban elites’ campaign of cultural destruction against their lower-status compatriots will never cease to shock me. It is unrelenting. Rudakubana, it transpired, had long been known to child protection services, local police and even the anti-terrorism Prevent programme. Yet none of these professional managerial class ‘experts’ managed to do their jobs — i.e. neutralise the threat he so obviously presented.

When a shocked, grieving and traumatised Southport erupted in protests that turned violent, and riots spread across the country, these same PMC’s — in the media especially — immediately blamed the white working class’s inherent racism and hatred of immigrants. Never mind that a second generation immigrant had just stabbed three little girls — to the bourgeoisie, not even the brutal murder of society’s most innocent and cherished members can be justification for Wrongthink!

As the riots unfolded, the familiar refrain of ‘misinformation’ soon began echoing across all channels, because on Twitter/X the Southport stabber’s name was given incorrectly at first. But the rage that has built up across the UK was not whether this monster had one particular name or another. It was that the children of the white working and lower middle class are being subjected to violence on a historically unprecedented scale, and their betters keep calling them racists and sending them to prison for noticing that the perps are not white.

There is something I find particularly galling about the father of the murderer on Adolescence being a plumber. The parents of Southport victim Elsie Dot are a supermarket manager and a Royal Mail employee. While there may have been no intention to do so, the show creators have placed their fictional family of a murderous white child, squarely in the same class and demographic as the real-life murder white victims of one of the most awful crimes in recent British memory. If the film makers had wanted to really be brave, they would have made the mother of the murderer a vegan, Guardian editor who regularly practiced yoga and the father, a male feminist who worked for an climate NGO. But no. The class superiority is so deeply ingrained in the culture sector, that such a thing cannot even be imagined.

Left: the fictional stabber from Netflix show Adolescence; Right, Alex Rudakubana, Southport stabber

I can’t really overstate the dire condition of the United Kingdom right now. It’s so odd because you can walk the streets in parts of the country and not necessarily see it, but we are not living in the same place we once knew. Charlie Bentley-Astor, a prominent right-leaning independent journalist and social critic, covered the Rudakubana trial earlier this year. She announced this week that her detailed reports on proceedings, which she posted to X, were disappeared after her account was hacked. The Rudakubana information was the only thing no longer visible from her timeline.

The UK based, Canadian academic David Betz made a splash in the alt online political commentariat recently with his dire predictions of an imminent civil war, which he detailed extensively on Louise Perry’s podcast a few months ago. His views are based on a number of factors, but overall — as he said on the podcast — “society’s self-perception is out of kilter with reality.” And a society so out of touch with itself must lose its legitimacy.

On Friday, it was reported that back in January, six police officers were sent to the home of a family whose parents had complained about their children’s school on a parents WhatsApp group. There is footage of the father being led away in handcuffs. The mother had called a school administrator “a control freak.” The parents were held for eight hours before being released at midnight. They were informed a few days later that no further action would be taken against them. One has to assume that another parent on the parents WhatsApp group snitched to the school, and the school was able to retaliate by reporting the parents for “harassment and malicious communications.” Life in the UK is now like something out of The Lives of Others, the film about the monitoring of East Germans by the Stasi.

These are just three, relatively minor examples of what is happening in this country right now. But it is in this context that Adolescence, the most successful piece of British culture in years, needs to be considered.

“It may have relatively high production values, but it’s still sort of fundamentally late stage post-totalitarian propaganda,” Rainsborough said.

He means post-totalitarian in the Vaclav Havel sense, which refers to a system “that touches people at every step, but … with ideological gloves on,” Havel wrote in Power of the Powerless.

Here we see that the mechanisms of both lying and control are embedded so deep in the culture and the population, that it is not a traditional top-down, externally imposed dictatorship — but rather a melding of the individual with the ideology of the state.