23 June 2006
In a lecture on the criminal justice system, the PM mentioned an article he wrote in 1988 on the "climate of violence".
Anti-social behaviour article in the Times, April 12 1988, by Tony Blair MP
Gary was walking home around midnight after an evening out in Spennymoor, Co Durham. He never saw his attackers clearly. They jumped on him from behind, stove in his face with billard cues and left him bloody and unconscious. The object of the crime was not mercenary: no money was taken. It was an initiation rite carried out by youths to prove their fitness for membership of a local gang.
In another village only a few miles away, a different gang forced a car, driven by an elderly couple, to stop and smashed its windows and bonnet.
A week ago two gangs met at Ferryhill Working Men’s Club. They wrecked the concert hall and sporadic fighting then broke out around the village. A dozen people were taken to hospital. The concert hall is now closed, losing the club thousands of pounds in revenue and spoiling a good evening out for the law abiding majority.
These events are significant, not because they are exceptional, but because they are unexceptional. It becomes increasingly plain that organized gang violence is to be found in many towns and villages in the area and there is every reason to suppose it is replicated in most parts of the country.
It is also, both in its nature and extent, a new phenomenon. The gangs have names - ‘The Casual force’, ‘The New Breed’ etc - elaborate codes of conduct and they are well organized. (One Darlington gang even has a ‘contingency fund’ to pay legal expenses of members charged by the police).
This is more than mere hooliganism. Indeed, in a wider context, the term ‘football hooliganism’ is misleading. It is noting to do with football or football supporters. The match is just the venue chosen for the disorder. But outside the football ground and unreported, similar scenes occur in town centres each Friday and Saturday night up and down the country.
Neither is the word ‘hooligan’ appropriate. It suggests random rowdiness - young men with too much beer and too little brain. This violence is done with premeditated malice and intent.
Of course, gang violence has been a feature of society since time immemorial. But it has tended to be confined to the big cities. Elsewhere violence has traditionally been after the pubs have closed, between rival groups of youths out to give each other ‘a good hiding,’ as an old regular in the working men’s club explained. But when asked whether he and his friends would search out an old pensioner and beat him up, he looked outraged. ‘We weren’t bloody sick.’
this new lawlessness cannot be blamed on deprivation of a material sort. Many of the youths involved are still at school or employed and, in any case, unemployment usually acts as a depressant turning a person inwards, not as a stimulus to group activity.
Nor will it be remedied only by stiffer penalties, though some sentences for violent offences seem absurdly light. The main difficulty is catching and identifying the criminals, not in sentencing them.
In any event, that deals only with the symptoms. To perceive the underlying causes for this violence is more exacting and more troubling in its message. But it surely has something to do with the decline in the notion of ‘community’, of the idea that we owe obligations to our neighbours and our society as well as ourselves. It is instructive that the police, the representatives of law enforcement in the community, are often the victims of violence. The days when the arrival of even one policeman would break up a fight are long gone.
The members of the gangs, devoid of the discipline that comes from recognizing that the value of oneself is in some way related to the value given to others, prove their ‘worth’, that they are ’somebody’, by inflicting fear upon someone else. It is a profound and corrosive form of alienation.
But none of us should escape responsibility. For we, collectively, determine the values of our society. When a sense of community is strong, that adds its own special pressure against anti-social behaviour. Instead, we have learnt to tolerate what should not be tolerated. A victim can be assaulted violently in a public place and ignored by others present.
We are living in a society where increasingly the term is itself becoming meaningless, where social responsibility and the duties that come with it are seen simply as a drag anchor on our private pleasure.
For the better off, their wealth may increase, but they will pay an ever larger price for their security from the world outside. The victims - the young, the poor and the elderly - will be those that cannot or will not, hide away. This is Britain 1988 style and it is time we woke up to it.
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