Abandonment of the white working class is a recipe for anarchy.
Middlesbrough’s descent into lawlessness exposes the fatal cost of post-industrial deprivation and a betrayed underclass
Published 29 August 2026 6:00am BST.
Almost every town, however affluent, has its rough areas or sink estates. The image projected by Middlesbrough over the last week or so, however, is that the whole town is in the tank. Since the shocking car crash last weekend that killed two policemen, and five louts driving the wrong way down a dual carriageway who ploughed into them, the lid has been taken off a community whose law and order problems are more like those we would normally associate with the worst parts of Los Angeles, Palermo or Johannesburg. For provincial England, this is shocking.
Numerous arrests have followed, with Cleveland Police stating there are links to organised crime. In 2019, the force had such a bad report from HM Inspectorate of Constabulary that it was put into special measures. Officers told inspectors the force was “directionless, rudderless and clueless”, and they found it had “collective and systemic failings”. The heroism of the two dead officers notwithstanding, the mayhem in Middlesbrough suggests their leaders may not have raised their game as much as necessary.
The family home of one of the dead youths was rammed by a vehicle, causing serious structural damage. A second house was rammed on Thursday. Another house was set on fire, with a woman and young girl killed, and two men arrested on suspicion of murder. Cleveland Police have not ruled out the fire being linked “to wider organised crime”. On Thursday night, several cars were set on fire at a vigil for one of the victims of the A66 crash.
Two homes in Middlesbrough have been rammed by cars this week, as local criminals are deemed ‘untouchable’ Credit: Owen Humphreys/PA Wire
Locals say this dystopian behaviour has been going on for months. The police say they are expected to deal with a “metropolitan” level of serious crime on funding designed for a “rural” force. It appears that if the law-abiding people of Middlesbrough are to be safe, some exceptional and drastic law-enforcement action will be required. The growing number of arrests suggests this is, however belatedly, under way.
Dealing with the effects, and even the symptoms, is one thing, and utterly necessary. However, dealing with the causes will be far more complicated. What is happening in Middlesbrough appears partly to be the consequence of letting a section of the white working class, or underclass, twist in the wind. In an era of identity politics, their identity appears to be the only one which no one could care less about because of the lack of political value in advancing it.
For generations, the white working class has been pushed aside and left to stew on welfare benefits or in low-esteem jobs. Now, Middlesbrough is one of the most deprived areas of the country, ranking 10th for the number of people deemed to have bad health or classified as long-term sick or disabled, 26th for unemployment (the local rate is 6.2 per cent compared to 4.5 per cent nationally), and 39th out of 361 areas for the number of welfare claimants.
It is easy to blame the de-industrialisation of the Thatcher years for the plight of these people, but it goes back far before that. Now, from being merely mildly disruptive and unpleasant – but largely hidden away – the addition of organised crime to the mix, on a shocking scale, has made it lethal.
Cleveland Police has yet to confirm what exactly the nature of the organised crime in Middlesbrough is, but a local councillor, speaking anonymously because of fear of reprisals, said that shoplifting, joyriding and drug dealing were out of control. The town has the highest level of offending per head outside London. Its most frequently reported offences are violent and sexual crimes. That is likely to be because one promiscuous crime – drug dealing – is not often reported. Police will tell you that around 80 per cent of crime in Britain is drug-related. If not dealing, it is related to robberies and burglaries committed to raise funds for drugs either for dealing or for personal use. Dealing is also linked to prostitution, money-laundering and people-trafficking.
The visible signs of the town’s decline were all too apparent this week. In Grangetown, where a seven-year-old girl and her aunt were killed in a house fire on Wednesday morning, empty, boarded-up properties lie dotted along residential streets lined with tired houses.
Old caravans and the odd abandoned vehicle have been left on pavements and in the driveways of derelict buildings, while only one or two convenience stores remain open among several empty or shuttered shop fronts. The Magnet, a pub that might once have marked the heart of Grangetown – ideally positioned on one of the main roads through the suburb – was once a popular venue that hosted discos and live music, but has now fallen into ruin. Its windows and doors are bricked up or clamped over with green metal security boards.
Abandoned vehicles, caravans and rubbish are among the visible signs of decline on Middlesbrough’s streets Credit: Lorne Campbell/Guzelian
“It’s been like that for 10 years, maybe even more,” says one woman, in her mid-60s. “I used to go with my husband and his friends all the time, and we loved it. Everyone did. They were going to make it flats at one point, but I don’t know now. It’s sad looking at it every day.”
In nearby South Bank, the neighbourhood where the fatal crash happened and where the house was rammed on Thursday morning, several teenagers and young men could be seen circling the streets this week in small groups riding bikes, almost all wearing balaclavas.
There, too, caravans sat among abandoned properties, just a street away from where new homes are being built. Some of the worst-looking streets were littered with rubbish and bordered by front gardens, which were often full of building materials or junk.
All over Britain, and not just in Middlesbrough, disaffected young people – those from dysfunctional families, with poor educational records and no settled employment – are vulnerable to recruitment by “county lines” drug dealing operations. “Organised crime” has become synonymous with this. The days of robbing banks and Securicor vans, as a senior policeman told me not long ago, are over because we are now a mostly cashless society. It is also why people walk into shops, scoop up goods from shelves, and walk out again.
A demoralised, poorly funded police force – further disaffected, doubtless, by the shocking fate of the two dedicated officers in the A66 crash – seems to Middlesbrough residents to have all but given up on such crimes. Regrettably, there are lessons here from Bill Bratton’s New York policing policy that pulled that city back from anarchy in the 1990s – if you assiduously pursue minor criminals, they may be saved from becoming major ones.
What is happening in Middlesbrough is a problem of the post-industrial white working class, and self-inflicted. Just over a century ago, their forebears on Teesside unhesitatingly joined the Army to fight in the Great War. The next generation did the same in 1939. They were patriotic, brave and generally honest. Even in the 1930s, when some parts of the North East had half their men out of work (in Jarrow before the March, unemployment reached 75 per cent), they did not easily resort to criminality or self-pity.
The Jarrow March took place in 1936, when unemployment had reached unprecedented levels Credit: E. Dean/Hulton Archive
Such vices are the product of welfarism – the encouragement of the notion that one can simply become the state’s, or rather the taxpayer’s, responsibility – and the idea that any misfortune must be somebody else’s fault. Such a mentality has reduced the toughness of a once-resilient people, and helped dilute the essential distinction between right and wrong. The latter has been aggravated by the ease with which criminals get away with many of their crimes. Today, it is Middlesbrough that appears to be in a state of anarchy. How long, given that these toxic attitudes and inadequate law enforcement pertain around the country, before it becomes commonplace rather than exceptional?
For make no mistake, there are sink estates all over Britain, even in the most affluent areas. Mostly, the middle classes are insulated from them, but the people who have to live on them and are not inevitably amoral are being betrayed by a state whose first duty is to protect them. No wonder so many of them feel no connection with it, and bring up children who can see no reason to adopt its values.
A Cambridge don I knew grew up in London’s East End in the 1950s and, thanks to a superb grammar school, he reached university and then the top of his profession. He talked to me some years ago about what he perceived to be the death of the respectable working class. He had recently been back to visit his elderly father, a Second World War veteran who still lived in Stepney, and had worked all his life in a lowly occupation. He told his son: “We’ve gone from the salt of the earth to the scum of the earth in a couple of generations.”
Never has the story of the decline of this social group been told better than by Michael Collins in his stunning and still indispensable book, The Likes Of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class, published in 2004. Much of it was about the gentrification of the part of Southwark where the author grew up, and the consequent dispersal of those who had lived there and the loss of their distinct culture. Collins reminds the reader of various London riots of racial motivations, such as Brixton and Broadwater Farm. One takes away the idea that while much has been done to provide outreach schemes and other services and facilities for the marginalised black working class, nothing equally targeted appears to have been done for its white counterparts.
The widely available grammar schools that offered a passport to the middle class and a professional career for self-starting working-class boys and girls in the 1950s were steadily destroyed after 1965 by Tony Crosland, the privately educated Labour education secretary. When one looks at Middlesbrough and other deprived areas, schools of low expectations and outcomes are all too obvious. On Teesside, a tiny percentage of A-level students get into Oxbridge, even though admissions tutors are desperate for state-educated students.
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