I'm embracing my inner Karen

Spectator

11-08-2025

I told off four strangers last week. The first was a foreign gentleman lounging on a side lawn at Marble Arch and cooking a meal. He fanned the flames of his makeshift barbecue with a flap of cardboard as four women in long robes looked on, awaiting their feast. 'You can't cook here', I said. He looked at me blankly. His harem scowled. 'It's disgusting', I said. Smoke swirled at my ankles. I left.
Next up was a middle-aged man at Portman Square who was roaring into his mobile phone in Arabic. Is it wrong of me to consider this doubly rude – not only to bellow so thunderously in a public area but in a language you know few people will understand? 'Can you stop shouting, please?', I said. 'Sorry, sorry', he replied, and because I still have wet liberal tendencies, that made me feel bad.
Then there was the boy putting litter into the basket of a Lime bike. 'That isn't a bin. That is', I said, pointing across the road. He shrugged and strolled off.
Finally there was the young lady on the Tube recording a voice note on her phone. For a moment I was dazzled by her aplomb. At her age I would have turned beetroot red if someone so much as said 'Good morning' to me on the Underground. And yet here was this girl noisily regaling a carriage of perfect strangers with the piffle of her social life. My wonderment was shortlived. 'Can you stop, please?', I said. She muttered sheepishly into her phone: 'I have to go, a man is shouting at me.' I didn't shout.
I am a Karen. I have joined that least loved section of society: white people of a certain age who feel a burning urge to rebuke the loutish and ill-mannered. And you know what? We need more Karens. We need more people willing to confront the crisis of manners, to stand against the withering of social decorum that has reduced so much of public life to a cold, lawless-feeling moral minefield. Join me – embrace your inner Karen.
I'm not a London doomerist. I laugh when people say 'London is over', as if this ancient metropolis that survived sackings, plagues, the Fire, the Blitz, the Smog and Sadiq Khan (so far anyway) might now fall down because people are behaving like oafs.
Yet there is a problem. You can feel it. You can hear it. Sometimes you can smell it. Those cursed e-bikes whizzing by. Tinny music on the bus. Idiots FaceTiming with abandon. People tucking into meals on the Tube. Teenagers who never shut up. Not to mention the graffiti, the phone-snatching, the shoplifting, all of which the police are too busy making pronoun badges to solve. London feels tetchy, acrimonious even. You get the feeling that you're less a free citizen of a great city than an NPC in the videogame of someone else's life.
Some on the right blame it on the surge in migrants. I'm sure that's part of it, but it can't be the whole story. I grew up in a community of immigrants in London. There were us Micks, Indians, Pakistanis, some Windrush descendants, a smattering of Italians. And everyone knew how to behave. Indeed, our immigrant parents were often more disciplinarian than the English kids' parents. A red ear awaited the kid dumb enough to play up in public.
No, the problem is the slow corrosion of the informal infrastructure through which we once put manners on people. The young are shocked when I tell them we were often told off by strangers when we were their age. It's true. Old men on the bus would tell us to pipe down. Stressed mums would bark 'Move it!' at teens clogging up shop doorways. Once, an old duffer irritated by our noise clocked our distinctive RC school uniforms and said: 'You go to the convent on the hill?' It put the fear of God into us: bringing the school into disrepute had consequences, sometimes corporal ones.
It is these checks and balances of everyday life that have wilted almost to extinction. For me, the most depressing sight in London in 2025 is not the vexing teens or mobile-phone blatherers or supercilious players of music – it's the cowed older men and women. There they are on public transport, on the streets, in shops, stooped, hushed, always staring ahead to avoid eye contact with the post-social boors.
These are the men and women who helped to turn even us rowdy, pasty Irish kids into something resembling gentlemen. Yet now, whether from fear or exhaustion, they've given up. It's like they've been decommissioned, put out to pasture by a society that thinks discipline is fascism and that someone cooking a meal in Marble Arch is a fab expression of 'cultural difference' rather than a smoky, insufferable eyesore. The wings of our elders have been clipped by the tyranny of relativism that grips our rulers.
Absent that intergenerational duty of care, of course things will fall apart. People need signals, and right now, courtesy of our silence and timidity, the signal they're receiving is that they can do anything they want. Karens, step up. Call out the anti-social. Demand quiet. Expect respect. The restoration of manners is the starting point of the restoration of Britain itself.