Another week, another brutal knife attack. This time it’s Huntingdon, a quiet market town ripped apart by chaos on a train, passengers screaming as a man armed with a massive blade went berserk.
Several people were hospitalised, and reports say he’d already stabbed before; he was already known, and yet somehow he was still walking the streets.
How on earth have we got here? How has carrying a knife, not a penknife, not a small blade, but a weapon that looks like something out of a horror film, become normal for our youth?
These aren’t the pocketknives your dad might’ve had growing up. These are “Rambo” knives, “zombie” knives, machetes, weapons that could take a man’s arm off. And they’re being carried by kids, too.
Let’s be blunt, Britain’s knife culture is out of control. Go anywhere, any city, any estate, and ask a teenager, “Do you know someone who carries a knife?”
Almost every single one will say yes. They’ll tell you it’s for protection, that “everyone else has one.” That’s the rot that’s set in, the idea that carrying a knife is just what you do.
And while the streets get more dangerous, what’s our justice system doing? Nothing. Liberal judges are handing out suspended sentences to people caught multiple times with knives.
They wave them around in public, threaten people, post videos on social media, and walk free. Then we act surprised when someone gets murdered.
What’s happened to our judiciary?
Where’s the deterrent?
Where’s the fear of punishment?
We are lying to ourselves about knife culture because no one wants to draw the straight line - Adam Brooks
|Getty Images
There isn’t any. If you get caught with a knife, you should go to prison. Simple. Five years mandatory for adults, three years for under-18s. No excuses, no second chances. You carry one, you’re gone.
And let’s stop pretending it’s “discriminatory” to use stop and search. It saves lives. It’s the only thing that keeps weapons off the streets. Ask the parents who’ve buried their children whether they’d rather see more stop and search or more coffins. The answer is simply obvious.
But this isn’t just about policing, it’s about prevention. The truth is, kids today don’t fear the consequences because they don’t understand them. They’ve grown up seeing knives on social media, glorified by influencers and music videos, treated like accessories. They think carrying one makes them powerful. They’ve never seen what it does to a human body, they’ve never sat in a cell, they’ve never faced the look on a mother’s face when her son’s gone because of a blade.
That’s why we need education. Real education. In schools, on social media, in magazines, on the telly. Show them the aftermath. Show them a prison cell. Show them a grieving family. Show them the blood and the heartbreak.
We need a nationwide campaign, paid for and pushed by the government. Millions spent getting into every kid’s head, showing the dangers and consequences of carrying knives.
We managed it during Covid, didn’t we? Daily briefings, posters, slogans, adverts. We can do the same here. Flood the airwaves, flood social media, flood the schools. Make “Knives Down” a national message.
Because this is an epidemic, not just of crime, but of fear. Ordinary people are scared to take the train, scared to go out at night, scared to tell their kids to get the bus home. And who can blame them? When men with machetes are walking around unchecked, when judges are letting them off, when politicians are too busy arguing about language to deal with the violence that’s ripping through our communities.
Enough is enough. We need more police on the streets. We need mandatory sentences. We need to stop and search back in force. And we need to hammer home the message to every young person in this country that knives destroy lives. Not just the victims, but the perpetrators too. Their family, their future, everything gone in one stupid moment.
We can fix this. We just need the guts to act. So let’s do it. #KnivesDown
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