A Broader Societal Malaise
- Pete North
- May 30
- 3 min read
Pete North
May 30, 2025
Robert Jenrick's recent social media post on fare dodging has attracted criticism from those on the left, praise from those on the right. Is travelling without paying a symptom of something else however? Pete North provides this analysis:
Fare dodging is just one symptom of a broader societal malaise. It is a consequence of stripping adults of their public authority to assert social standards. Clip a kid round the ear for playing loud music on a bus and you might find yourself in court on an assault charge. This contributes to an overall decline in standards of public conduct because the feral is always thinking "what are you going to do about it?".
This starts in schools, where teachers no longer have the authority or the personal gravitas to impose discipline, knowing that a misstep could easily cost them their job and see them barred from the profession. They also know it's futile since their decision-making authority is not respected by management or parents, and discipline is not reinforced in the home. As such, if parents are not imposing discipline, nobody is.
This is what you get for three decades of hyper-individualism which is not grounded by any kind of social obligation or civic responsibility. This is exacerbated by an overall decline in the quality of teachers and police. Nobody would would want to do what is increasingly a dangerous job for bad money, where your own authority is undermined by commanders and managers, and politicians further up the chain. Why stop a fare-evader when it potentially leads to a racial harassment inquiry?
Increasingly we see that police officers have very little personal gravitas and their authority is routinely challenged. Increasingly policemen and women are too young, too weak, too fat, and too soft. Similarly, teaching has become overly feminised, where junior teachers are not especially bright and wetter than a haddock's bathing costume. This is further exacerbated by "gentle parenting" (respecting the autonomy of the child) where nobody asserts authority and everything is a debate.
It should also be noted that TfL staff are unlikely to intervene. Many of them are foreigners on minimum wage, who don't know the conventions and would thus not even notice breaches. The rest aren't going to risk getting stabbed over something trivial. It's also why we see foreigners looting shops and openly smoking marijuana without fear of consequences. Shop security staff aren't paid enough to worry overmuch, and why should they care when the police don't?
There is also an immigration dimension to this. Conventions in public conduct evaporate when an increasingly number of people are largely ignorant of them. This is partly why we see a collapse in social trust. The convention of queuing for a bus has completely collapsed in parts of London. There was a time when senior citizens would assert their own authority, but now that's potentially a life-ending decision.
The issue of fare-dodging can be addressed with more barricades and surveillance technology, and perhaps more policing, but this further erodes our liberties in public. It didn't used to be like this, and it was never necessary. Something more fundamental has changed in the composition of the public, especially in London. It's not something that happened overnight, and it arrived imperceptibly slowly, but we've now reached a tipping point where it is impossible not to notice.
Public life is manifestly worse. London is more dangerous, dirty and unpleasant. All the while we are told this is vibrant diversity. There is no easy fix to this. This is not an isolated issue.
Yes, the symptoms can be addressed individually with crackdowns and a show of force, but while we have open borders and an overly permissive society, there is no likelihood or repairing those basic public conventions. We simply become a police state, but one in which the police themselves are lazy, risk-averse and incompetent - where it is easier to maintain public order by giving low level criminals and anti-social behaviour a free pass, and police increasingly harass the law-abiding.
To a point, this does require us to lead by example as Robert Jenrick has done, but I think we have already crossed the Rubicon. Without remigration, London may very well be beyond repair. We're not very far away from the anarchy that gives way to low grade civil war.
We must prepare accordingly.
© Pete North 2025.
Image - Kevan James
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