Kiran Fothergill is Deputy Chairman of the Richmond and Northallerton Association and the former Conservative parliamentary candidate for Middlesbrough and Thornaby East. He is also the Chairman of The Jobs Foundation North East Business Council.
On Saturday 22nd August, on the A66 just east of Middlesbrough, a Volkswagen Passat travelling the wrong way down the carriageway struck a Cleveland Police vehicle head-on.
Seven people died. Five were young men, the youngest only 17. Two were police officers: PC Matthew Blades, 37, a husband and father of two who coached his local junior football team, and PC Tom Clough, 38, an Army veteran whose family described him as ‘our hero with a fantastic sense of humour.‘
The car had been followed after a camera flagged it on suspicion of cloned plates. The police watchdog will rightly establish precisely what happened in those final minutes. But it will not need to establish the world from which that car came, because everyone on Teesside already knows it.
I run my family’s engineering business from an office in Stockton-on-Tees. We have been on Teesside since 1854; I stood for Parliament in Middlesbrough and Thornaby East in 2024. From my office window, I regularly watch – and hear – young men tearing through town on illegal bikes and in cars that are not theirs, faces hidden behind balaclavas, utterly indifferent to anyone around them. During the election campaign, a car pulled up near us while we were out canvassing. Several men in balaclavas got out, smashed up a house, got back in and drove off. All in broad daylight. Nobody was especially surprised, which is rather the point.
When you knock on doors here, everyone has a story. A stolen car, a break-in, drug dealing, shoplifting that no longer gets reported because what would be the use, dangerous driving, casual intimidation. Cleveland has sat at or near the top of the recorded-crime tables for England and Wales for years. But statistics undersell it. What has really happened is subtler and worse: we have stopped regarding any of this as remarkable. Lawlessness has become weather – something you plan around, complain about and expect. That is what normalisation means, and it is a moral event, not just a criminological one. A society that shrugs has already conceded.
The lazy explanation is the absent dad, and sometimes it is that. But just as often the father is present and every bit as lawless, the same can be true of the mother.
What is actually being handed down, generation to generation, is a debased inheritance: the settled conviction that the law is for other people, that work is for mugs, that nothing is expected of you and nothing ever will be. This is not one lost cohort. It is attitudes and behaviour passed from grandfather to father to son, with nobody inside the family able to break the cycle – and, so far, nobody outside it willing to.
So the question that matters is not simply how we punish the symptoms. More police, tougher sentences: yes, emphatically, to both. But enforcement is the tourniquet, not the cure. The real question is how you interrupt an inheritance, and the honest answer is that it’s not done down at the youth centre over a game of table tennis or with the latest diversion scheme.
You do it by physically taking a young person out of the only world they have ever known and placing them, for a sustained period, in a different one – different adults, different rules, different expectations. There is a name for this, and almost nobody in frontline politics will say it out loud: compulsory national service, with a pointedly military backbone.
Rishi Sunak was onto something in 2024, and was mocked for it by people with preconceptions who had not read his policy. His error was not boldness but perhaps, if anything, timidity: 30,000 selective military places, and for everyone else a weekend a month of volunteering – national service as a CV supplement, easiest to avoid for precisely those who needed it most.
A very serious version would be universal and compulsory: every school-leaver, every background, every postcode, away from home for months of structured service, with no opt-out for the wealthy and no write-off of the poor. I suspect it would have been more popular, not less.
Nor is this theory to me. My aunt and cousins live in Switzerland, and I have spent a good amount of time there. Every Swiss man serves; the militia principle puts the plumber’s son and the banker’s son in the same barracks and hands them shared obligations for years afterwards. What it buys, as any Swiss family will tell you, is not merely defence but cohesion – a common national experience in an age that has abolished nearly all of them. Nobody in Switzerland considers this remarkable. Only in Britain is expecting something of every young citizen treated as eccentric.
Now imagine what it offers a 17-year-old from Grangetown or Thornaby, who has never once been offered anything like it. Take him out of the postcode that is the whole of his known world. Teach him to get up at six, to make a bed, to be relied upon by people relying on him. Let him become the first man in three generations of his family to be told, credibly, that he is capable of more – and to be held to it. Discipline is the precondition for ambition. Respect for others begins with the self-respect that comes from being needed and serving a purpose.
None of this pays off within a parliament, which is exactly why no one proposes it. It is a generational fix for a generational failure, and it requires politicians willing to plant trees they will never sit under. But consider the alternative, because we are living in it.
PC Blades and PC Clough chose lives of service. We will lay flowers, and we should. The better memorial would be a country with the nerve to ask some measure of that service from every young person in it – starting with the ones Teesside is currently abandoning to the night, the balaclava and the wrong side of the road.