Foul language on the street feeds a culture of abuse

THEY SAY it’s a sure sign of getting older that policemen start to look younger. Another is that they don’t act like you’d expect.

Like the two uniformed officers I watched in Whitby a few days ago who looked on – and did nothing – as a group of drunken louts staggered across the road near the swing bridge, effing and blinding at the top of their voices.

Heads turned at the racket and parents ushered their children away because they didn’t want them hearing this wearisome stream of profanity.

Call me old-fashioned, but I thought that the police would step in and tell the yobs to pipe down or they’d be in trouble. No. They just watched as the drunks went shouting and swearing on their way across the bridge towards Church Street and presumably the next pub on their crawl.

But then it struck me that if they intervened every time somebody went past repeatedly using the F-word – or worse – at a volume that could be overheard by others, they’d be stopping perhaps one in 10 of everybody in Whitby that day.

That’s how prevalent swearing and abuse has become, a grubby thread running through conversations heard in the street, shops and especially pubs.

Landlords who would once have warned drinkers to tone down their language no longer do so, partly because they don’t want to risk confrontation and partly because it is as futile as trying to hold back the tide.

Those who habitually and unthinkingly talk like this don’t have the least shred of shame about it, nor does it apparently cross their minds that it’s offensive to others.

You see parents effing and blinding not just in front of very young children soaking up the words like a sponge, but at them as well.

When the children of parents like these graduate from pushchair to primary school, it will be the unenviable task of teachers to try to erase these words from their vocabulary because it certainly won’t happen at home.

It isn’t just bad parents who are reinforcing this habitual swearing. It’s television, films and song lyrics, all doing their bit to coarsen the way the country communicates, driving the same few words once only used at moments of extreme emotion into virtually every sentence uttered.

There are those who would argue that this doesn’t matter, that language and the way society communicates is always evolving, and that this just happens to be the way things have turned out.

But it’s more concerning than that. It’s no coincidence that this torrent of essentially abusive and violent language has gone hand-in-hand with the growth of online abuse and threats of violence. Inhibitions have been loosened, and the old norms about what is and isn’t acceptable to say have been trampled by its constant use. – even uttered in jest, as it surely was – would be vile coming from the most foul-mouthed scum of the earth. That it should be expressed by a leading public figure is reprehensible, and Osborne deserves condemnation by all right-thinking people.

It’s time for a national conversation about the way Britain is expressing itself. We’ve woken up at last to the malicious use of social media, and started to do something about it, but still need to go deeper to tackle the roots of abuse.

And that means tackling the bad language, not only in schools, but in workplaces and especially the home, where parents need to be encouraged to watch what they say.

We’ve had public education campaigns about issues including smoking, drinking and healthy eating. Why not about swearing and causing offence to others?

If it returned Britain to being a politer place to walk the streets or go out for a drink, that would be quite an achievement. If it also helped to stamp out a mentality of abusing others, that would be even better.