Politics & Power Quote by Kamal Ahmed

The line walks a tightrope between acknowledging a real public anxiety and quietly accusing the culture machine of inflating it for sport. Ahmed frames anti-social behaviour as "a genuine worry" first, a strategic concession that inoculates him against the charge of being soft on disorder. Then he pivots: it is "also being fed by a lot of scare stories". That "also" is doing the heavy lifting, implying a feedback loop where isolated incidents become a constant moral weather report, updated hourly, until everyone feels rained on.

Dropping "as we saw in the Queen's Speech" is a canny move because it drags the anxiety up to the level of national ritual. The Queen's Speech is supposed to be above the daily churn; invoking it suggests the state is laundering a tabloid mood into legislative seriousness. "The political theme of the moment" is the punchline without the joke mark: this isn't timeless principle, it's trend. It hints at opportunism, the way governments pick a fear that photographs well, promises control, and conveniently shifts attention away from messier, slower crises.

As a comedian, Ahmed isn't doing policy detail; he's doing diagnosis. The subtext is that "anti-social behaviour" functions as a flexible label: vague enough to absorb everything from teenage noise to social breakdown, useful precisely because it can be made to mean whatever the headline needs. The intent is to make the audience hear the phrase the way politicians want it heard - then notice the ventriloquism.