Cameron’s sharp initiative?

It was hard to avoid thinking about the politics of knife crime when I was out and about in London yesterday

Walking along Oxford Street, where a young man was stabbed to death earlier this summer, I managed to catch the Prime Minister’s voice on a shop radio being quoted, of course, on knife crime. And at least one of the capital’s free dailies had a front page story about knives. But perhaps this concentration of overlapping factors was no coincidence since national media stories have tended not to focus on the fact that teenage stabbings appear to be a particularly London problem. And arguably this says something but our Londo-centric political and press culture.

Be that as it may, it got me to thinking about who the public think is best placed to tackle this problem. Everything the Labour government touches at the moment appears to go wrong. Witness the backtracking by the Home Secretary on her announcement that knife users would be marched round accident and emergency wards visiting victims of stabbings. Meanwhile David Cameron appears to have tuned into the thoughts and concerns of middle England in a way that Tony Blair did so well in the mid to late nineties. But Cameron’s claim that society is broken has not been universally well received by the press. There was a very good editorial on this in the Times recently:

“The biggest problem with the broken society claim is statistical. The singer Lily Allen pleaded last week on her website: “Please can everyone stop stabbing each other in the UK.” Sometimes, when following the news it seems as if everyone is indeed stabbing everyone else. Of course, they are not. The Metropolitan Police recorded 70 knife killings last year: the same as a decade ago.

This is 70 killings too many, but numbers matter. There is a big difference between arguing, as Mr Cameron does, that society is broken, and believing, as we do, that there are broken individuals, families and communities, having an impact on the law-abiding and decent majority. If social breakdown is general, policies are needed to alter behaviour of the average citizen; if the problem is concentrated, so should be resources and attention. Arguing that mainstream society has gone bad demonises the average teenager, the average family, the average public space, the average entrepreneur. Mr Cameron’s broken society rhetoric is in danger of leading him astray.”

This came on the back of a recent spotlight on Cameron in the Economist questioning whether the Conservative party leader could outline his “vision thing”.

See the leader column here

And the longer briefing article here

Which, if any, of the political parties can most effectively lead the nation is an important question that goes beyond mere consideration of A level Politics and party policy. I reckon that many of the readers of this blog will be old enough to vote by the time the next election comes around and we have to ask ourselves if parties are offering us anything beyond the usual short term gimmicks that politicians are so fond of. Returning to the major news of the day as an example, are the complaints about a lack of individual responsibility amongst young people and calls for ever tougher punitive sanctions really an answer? If the UK locks up more youth offendors than any other country in the Council of Europe bar Ukraine yet levels of crime remain relatively static then tougher punishment doesn’t seem to offer a solution. Longer term thinking is needed. For instance, the Guardian reported yesterday research by experts suggesting that current attempts to tackle gang culture are at best ineffective and at worst counter-productive:

“Among the six gangs in the research, not one was dedicated to dealing drugs. Members survived on “cafeteria-style earning”, mixing paid employment, benefits, living off friends or family, and opportunist crime, including selling cannabis and committing street robberies.

Although access to firearms was common in all six gangs, it was found that turf wars about drugs were not generally the cause of violence; it was far more likely to be triggered by disputes over friends, family and romantic relationships, often within the gangs rather than between them.”