So let’s talk about the five “tragic young lives cut short” on the A66. Because nothing says “heartbreaking loss to the community” quite like a car full of lads with cloned plates, balaclavas in the photo album, and a TikTok history of leading the Old Bill on a merry dance through housing estates before deciding the dual carriageway looks better the wrong way round at 3:30 in the morning. Michael, Theo, Cole, Jacob, Makai. Five names, five sets of parents, and zero net contribution to anything that doesn’t involve blue lights and burnt-out Nissans. Society will not miss them. Not the shopkeepers, not the people who actually pay tax, not the families of the two coppers they turned into roadkill. The only people weeping into their cheap cider are the ones who raised them, and even then it’s mostly performance. Parents should take responsibility. You don’t wake up at 16, 17, 18, 23 and suddenly decide “today feels like a good day for cloned plates and wrong-way suicide by police car.” That starts years earlier when Mum and Dad decide that boundaries are oppressive, that “he’s just a bit lively,” and that the proper response to the third stolen car is another soft interview and a stern look. You produce the product, you own the product. These weren’t angels who took a wrong turn. They were thugs in training, and the training worked perfectly until physics intervened. Two officers, actual useful human beings with wives, kids, shifts to finish are gone because five feral little princes thought the rules didn’t apply to them. And the usual suspects will still try to turn the dead joyriders into victims of “systemic whatever.” Spare me. The system didn’t put them in that Passat. Their parents did, by raising them to believe consequences are for other people. They won’t be missed. The rest of us will just have slightly quieter streets and two fewer good men. That’s the ledger. express.co.uk/news/uk/224164…