Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis (BBC1)
The answer’s obvious to everyone. There are now, on average, four fatal stabbings in Britain every week — and the underlying cause is drugs.
Drugs make organised crime a multi-billion-pound business. Drugs fuel gang warfare over territory and tribalism. Drugs warp young people’s brains, destroy their families and their friendships, and wreck their education.
But Idris Elba, in his crusading documentary Our Knife Crime Crisis, spent an hour blaming everything except drugs for the epidemic of violence.
Drugs didn’t get a mention, not once. You might say there was an Idris Elephant in the room.
The actor especially blamed the Tories, who, he said, cut funding for youth projects by almost half after 2015. But he also blamed Labour, for failing to increase funding in their first budget, and schools for excluding instead of rehabilitating violent pupils, and newspapers for not reporting the meeting he had with King Charles to discuss the problem.
Idris was particularly cross that Rishi Sunak‘s government, while banning the sale of zombie knives and machetes, failed to apply the same law to swords. ‘Some sort of traditional heritage thing,’ he moaned. ‘I just couldn’t understand it, quite frankly.’
A screengrab from Idris Elba: Our Knife Crime Crisis that is currently available on BBC IPlayer
Idris Elba, in his crusading documentary Our Knife Crime Crisis, spent an hour blaming everything except drugs for the epidemic of violence
He says that now, but when he collects his inevitable future knighthood, no doubt he will expect the ceremonial sword, not a mere handshake.
There’s no doubt that the star’s distress at the hundreds of needless deaths is heartfelt.
He took up the cause in 2019, after venting his frustration in a social media rant that went viral.
Visiting a young offenders institution and talking to police officers as well as grieving relatives of victims, he pleaded for local councils to back schemes that turn individual lives around.
We saw a few in action, including a man who spent 16 years in prison over a gang-related murder and now tries to help survivors of stabbings by ‘offering them an opportunity to course-correct’ and ‘approaching it from a trauma-informed lens’.
Pooja Kanda, whose son Ronan was a victim of knife crime, pictured in her home in Wolverhampton
Gobbledegook aside, that’s worthy work if it helps a hand-ful of young people to recover and change. But if Idris still believes, after five years of campaigning, that the solution to knife crime is to provide mentoring, emotional support and better sports facilities for disaffected teens, he is impossibly naive.
For every ten adolescents who benefit from these programmes, ten thousand will be experimenting with drugs for the first time. Idris, and by extension everyone at the BBC involved with this one-off film, made no effort to address this.
The most powerful presence in the documentary was not Idris, nor even the King, but a grief-stricken mother, Pooja Kanda, whose son Ronan was killed as he walked to a friend’s house, by two teenagers with a machete. They mistook him for another boy.
The tragedy is that many of those who suffer, and even lose their lives, have nothing to do with drugs. But the poison is now so endemic that everyone suffers.
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