YouthNet blog
An insight into youth issues, volunteering trends, charity life and more from the UK charity YouthNet
All | Events | Youth | Technology | Volunteering | YouthNet | Charity World
Thursday Jun 08, 2006
Official: David Cameron no longer down with the kids
Oh David, you disappoint me!
Back in April I blogged here that the leader of the Conservatives was showing small signs of dragging his party into the modern era.
How naive I was. Yesterday, Cameron showed his true colours by playing to middle England with an attack on hip-hop music. At a conference of magazine editors, he put the knife in to Radio 1, and implicitly, Tim Westwood's Saturday night rap show.
He said:
'Do you realise that some of the stuff you play on Saturday nights encourages people to carry guns and knives?' Some people say that's part of the nanny state - I say the opposite."
This is a tough one for some pundits. The people who don't like David Cameron much but really don't like Tim Westwood don't know where to stand on it.
Westwood is usually lampooned (by other white people) as being a wigga; a white, middle class English guy who 'acts' like he's black. I've always found this a little disconcerting. Sure, Westwood is easy to parody, but the underlying message seems to be that black music is for black people and us whities should stick to our Coldplay and Kean records.
Anyway, back to David Cameron. Blaming music and films for crime is simple-minded and lacks any understanding of youth culture. People don't carry knives and guns because 50-Cent told them to; they carry weapons because they live in areas where there is high crime and they're afraid of being attacked.
Posted by 10.0.0.8 on August 22, 2006 at 11:06 AM GMT+00:00 #