DAVE CAMERON'S LETHAL ATTACK MISPLACED

You'll remember back last week David Cameron had a moan about how these young rap stars go around encouraging people to carry knives and stab each other.

Lethal Bizzle, the rapper-cum-entrepreneur, thought this was a little unfair and sent Call-me-dave a letter, inviting him to meet and talk about how to get young people interested in the political system again. (Bizzle was part of a coalition attempting to get the black youth vote out during the last election.)

Now, in the olden days of the Tory party, when Dave was merely a senior figure in the party, rather than it's pretty public face, a letter arriving from a black person would cause a certain degree of panic at Central Office, with people running around screeching "it's a letter from a knife-wielding criminal."

How things have changed under Cameron's smartly-suited New Tory.

Now, The party leader merely responds by writing a thinkpiece for the Mail on Sunday screeching "it's a letter from a knife-weilding criminal."

Following my comments last week criticising some of the music played on Radio 1, one UK rap artist, Lethal Bizzle, wrote an article for The Guardian criticising what I had said, telling me: "By making comments like this you're taking yourself further from the young British society."

I think that's rubbish. I was helping a media studies class at a college in my Oxfordshire constituency on Friday and the issue was a hot topic of debate.

As soon as I pointed out that I'm not calling for a ban or telling people what to listen to, but just asking for an intelligent debate about taking and sharing responsibility, heads began to nod agreement. (Checking on the internet, I found one of Lethal Bizzle's lyrics: 'I will b cocking back my steel strait, bullets bullets, run run, fire fire, bun bun, if u don't like killa killa?' so I can see why he might feel a bit defensive.)

Aha, but David Cameron seems to have fallen victim to that age-old problem of believing things just because they appear on the internet - for example, earlier on in this piece I posted to the internet a suggestion that the Tory Party used to be a bastion of reactionary old-school racism and mistrust of people who weren't white, which clearly isn't true at all. Likewise, those, erm, aren't Lethal Bizzle lyrics.

It's also bemusing that Cameron feels happy to reject Bizzle's take on what matters to young people because, while Bizzle has worked with young people and listened to them for a long time, Dave popped in to a media studies class was talking about something their guest had recently said about the media.

Here's a hint to David Cameron: if you pour a load of farmyard slurry over your head, and sit in a railway carriage for the afternoon, you'll come away convinced the entire nation talks of nothing other than the stench of manure in Britain today. But your findings might be slightly skewed.

music david cameron lethal bizzle