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Veteran journalist Kelvin MacKenzie writes why no one should shed a tear for the five 'joyriders' who died

You have to wonder what the collective IQ among the young is in the town of Middlesbrough. Probably fits neatly into a thimble. And the thimble will have been nicked.

Half the place appears to be made of would-be gangsters steeped in drugs and organised crime.

The rest is of dim-witted youngsters who are prepared to mourn five young criminals who, if they had survived that A66 crash, would be facing a jail sentence of 20 years for killing two police officers.

And yet, a woman in her 20s gave the following quote to the Daily Mail while she paid her respects in a party atmosphere in a field in Middlesbrough along with hundreds of other halfwits, some driving quadbikes, some firing flares.

"Jakub was a lovely, caring lad and he’s not just a scumbag who should be written off and forgotten."

Along with the rest of the youngsters who lost their lives by driving the wrong way down a dual carriageway, he was a criminal. In his case, it was simply a couple of driving offences.

The others were up to their neck in crime. Drugs. Shoplifting. Possessing a knife. Assaulting a police officer. You name it, they did it. 37 offences in all.

You would have hated to be their teacher or their neighbour.

I imagine there are a lot of towns where residents don’t have the wherewithal to get the hell out of their neighbourhood and have to suffer every day with thugs like the Middlesbrough Five making their lives hell.

Must have been clear from their school days that this lot were likely to either end up in jail or dead.

After all, since the crash Cleveland Police have arrested a total of 17 people, a number for participating in organised crime and others for possessing a firearm. Serious stuff.

LATEST ON THE A66 CRASH:

If Andy Burnham is to be taken seriously with his move to No10 Coronation Street stunt, he should seriously consider moving it from Manchester to Middlesbrough.

It’s clear that when it comes to the state of family life, the state of education and the respect the people show towards law and order Middlesbrough needs all the help it can get.

Mind you, the Labour MP for the area, a woman I had never heard, called Anna Turley, seems to be as dim as the young mourners.

Ms Turley is MP for Redcar but more surprisingly is a Home Office Minister which just goes to show how desperate Labour is to fill up the Government benches because she decided to publicise the fact that she had shown her respects to all seven victims of the crash.

By doing so, she appeared to give equivalence to the two brave officers who died simply doing their job and the five young criminals who couldn’t give a damn about their own useless lives and were quite prepared to take anybody with them.

This was picked up by Nick Timothy, the Shadow Justice Secretary, who has been quite cleverest of the Tory front bench and should be in line for a healthy promotion in the upcoming shuffle by Kemi.

Of course, Ms Turley, under pressure, I presume, from No10, has now said that she did not show equivalence but words matter.

And although I accept that the scumbags would probably have voted Labour, she would have been much smarter to ignore their nasty criminal lives and focused simply on the police officers.

The fact she couldn’t do that makes her unsuitable to be a minister and I suspect will lead to her being kicked out at the next election.

The only good thing that will have emerged in this horror show for Middlesbrough.