Lord Hannan of Kingsclere was a Conservative MEP from 1999 to 2020 and is now President of the Institute for Free Trade.

I keep trying to imagine the pitch:

“It’s a four-part drama called Adolescence. It’s about misogyny. About how men can get radicalised online. It’s set in a northern English town, and…”

“Wait, what? Are you really sure you want to go there? We don’t want anything that might look racist.”

“Oh, no, not that kind of misogyny. I mean, the perpetrator’s white. No, it’s about, you know, Andrew Tate and all that.”

“Ah, OK, then. Sounds great.”

I don’t want to full Brendan O’Neill here, but it’s quite an achievement to write a drama about violence against women set in a post-industrial town and to make the culprit a working-class white boy. Have we truly forgotten the abuse of thousands – almost certainly tens of thousands – of underage girls in the grooming scandal?

The answer is that, until Elon Musk decided resuscitated the debate on X three months ago, was yes, we had. Or, more accurately, we did not like to talk about it.

Yet the scandal precisely one of neglect. Police and social services looked the other way rather than risk being thought racist. Journalists looked the other way even after the facts had emerged; there was vastly more coverage of the death of George Floyd than there had been over the mass rape of children in our own towns.

Even after prosecutions had been brought, the imperative of anti-racism trumped everything else. The New Zealand judge who was originally brought in to chair the inquiry into the child abuse was removed after reportedly making racist remarks. What remarks? Apparently, she linked the abuse to the presence of “so many Asian men”.

Ed West, one of the few writers tenaciously to have pursued the story, found the attitudes of Official Britain so far removed from customary morality that he felt as if he were describing “a distant, ancient society in which rapists were punished with a small fine but blaspheming one of the gods could result in execution.”

He went on to chronicle the institutional racism revealed by the dreadful saga:

“In one case a judge ruled that there should be harsher sentences for rapists who attacked Asian women than for those who raped white women. In another incident, ‘a rape gang beat two girls so badly they required the hospital’ but police instead focused on the racist language of the victims. The abusers weren’t arrested.”

That was the prevailing ethos when Adolescence was first commissioned. It was only 12 months ago, but it already feels like a different age. Society was seen as a pyramid of hierarchy and oppression; TV shows about men being nasty to women were fine, but it was not acceptable to cast ethnic minority actors as baddies.

(This made for very poor drama, since you could infer how characters would turn out from whether they had protected characteristics.)

Hence the framing of Adolescence. The baddies are misogynist influencers, and the cops are competent, caring, and efficient. We are not supposed to think about how real-life police officers treated rape gang victims.

Nor, indeed, are we supposed to think of real-life instances of girls being killed with knives. The case that most closely resembles the one in the drama was the horrible stabbing of 15-year-old Elianne Andam in a Croydon shopping centre in 2023. As in the Netflix series, the murderer was a teenage boy who felt disrespected when girls teased him.

But that is where the resemblance ends. The real-life murderer was not a sweet-looking lad unknown to the authorities. Hassan Sentamu, who was 17 at the time, had had a history of violence and mental health problems. He was also an immigrant.

Obviously, boys of every background commit crimes. But the casting of Adolescence was aggressively finger-wagging. Although the Home Office does not compile ethnic data on knife-crime, a survey by the London Assembly in 2022 found that 61 per cent of knife murderers were black; black Londoners, at that time, made up 13 per cent of the capital’s population.

Separate data, compiled from the police national computer, showed that between 15 and 23 per cent of sex offences were committed by foreign nationals.

None of this is to detract from Adolescence as entertainment. I agree with the critics: the acting is outstanding, and the one-shot takes work beautifully. The trouble is that it is not being treated as entertainment. There are calls to show it in schools and in Parliament; the Prime Minister even described it (before correcting himself) as a documentary.

Judged as a documentary, it fails. Yes, teenage boys are capable of cruelty and, yes, some might react against a female-coded education system by seeking out nasty types online. But the current obsession with Andrew Tate, a low-grade pornographer-cum-fitness-guru, shows all the symptoms of a moral panic. Most boys have either never heard of him or think he is a loser.

No, the documentary waiting to be made is about how some immigrant communities cling to attitudes that are at odds with those of their new country, and how pusillanimous the police, social services and local government are in confronting that fact. Somehow, I can’t see Netflix rushing to screen it.

The post Daniel Hannan: Commissioned just a year ago, ‘Adolescence’ is a relic of a different age appeared first on Conservative Home.