A faraway England of which we know little
Posted on Thursday 13 September, 2007
Filed Under Society
Seventeen London teenagers have been gunned down so far this year. But it has taken the recent shooting to death of an 11-year-old boy enjoying a kickabout in a Liverpool pub car park really to highlight the issue of teenagers and guns.
Maybe it was because he was so damn young. Maybe it was because he happened to be white. Or maybe just that the slaying happened in a slow news month.
Whatever the reason for the publicity, the killing of Rhys Jones – pictured left – has touched a national nerve, and forced the politicians to offer analysis and solutions.
David Cameron – allegedly egged on by new spin doctor Andy Coulson – sought to make political capital from the tragedy with his facile ‘anarchy in the UK’ and ‘broken society’ soundbites.
There was even an attack on magazines that glorified ‘getting wasted’, a pastime with which Mr Cameron is sometimes said not be entirely unfamiliar, and on music firms which ‘grew fat on the profits of exploiting black youth’.
Labour’s Jacqui Smith responded in the manner of home secretaries since time immemorial, promising a specialist national police unit and a new ministerial task force on gun crime.
Whatever the merits of either approach, both seem to want deliberately to avoid the big picture. If society is indeed broken, who or what broke it? And what can fix it?
Liverpool, like all British cities, has always had its share of poverty and it has always had its teenage gangs. What it hasn’t always had the toxic level of permanent long-term unemployment that stems from the deliberate policy of successive governments to deindustrialise the UK economy.
These are points well made by Tony Mulhearn, one of the key leaders of the Militant-dominated Liverpool council in the 1980s:
Work [for residents of Liverpool district Norris Green] was found in the factories that lined the roads leading from the estate. Plessey’s, CAV Lucas, English Electric, bus manufacturers, and the Kirkby industrial estate, three miles up the East Lancs Road, provided work for tens of thousands.
In addition many continued to work as dockers, shipbuilders, merchant seaman and the plethora of trades connected to the thriving maritime industry, as well as finding trades in the construction, printing and the supply industries.
And now? Some 41% of Norris Green’s population is out of work, compared to a Liverpool average of 34%. Meanwhile, 45% of Norris Green youth have no educational qualification.
Such jobs as are available are badly paid. Average income in Norris Green is £17,000 compared to a Liverpool average of £22,500, and a national median wage of £23, 244.
A report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2000 revealed that in parts of the Croxteth area where Rhys lived, and usually considered more affluent than Norris Green, between 50-70% were in poverty, and unemployment has been consistently around 36% since the 1970s.
Throw cheap drugs and almost as cheap handguns into the mix, and the corpses of 11-year-old underline the result. Is that not enough to give rise to second thoughts from those on the left who advocate full legalisation of drugs and an unrestricted right to bear arms?
And yes, this post is from the keyboard of the same blogger who recently wrote about the growth of working class living standards and the problems posed by the two-thirds/one-third society.
I don’t think the piece above contradicts the earlier one. It’s just that the excluded one-third constitute a faraway England of which Cameron, Smith and London-based journalists know little.
<<Go back
Comments
9 Responses to “A faraway England of which we know little”
-
- Yemen: an unfinished revolution
- Comment Is Free: An honours system for those who fight to make Britain a better place
- Democracy crushed; elected President arrested; World wrings its hands
- Fabians change policy on unpaid internships
- Kamal al-Fayoumi arrested as Egyptian regime retaliates to strikes
-
-
Meta
-
Dave, you say:
“Is that not enough to give rise to second thoughts from those on the left who advocate full legalisation of drugs and an unrestricted right to bear arms?”
I am unaware of any mainstream current of tought that calls for the full legalisation of drugs, as opposed to the decriminalisation of drugs.
Legalisation would open the narcotics market to full and open exploitation by finance capital and would result in an explosion of drug use and huge profits.
Decriminalisation on the other hand would stop posession of drugs being a criminal offence, and allow those addicted to gain drugs on perscription while still making unlicenced trade in drugs illegal.
The hoped for result is that addicts would no longer need to commt crime to get money for drugs, it would decrease the number of new addicts (you could hardly go to the doctor and say you are curious about H and want to give it a try), the scale of the addiction problem would be known and the money currently spent on prisons and courts could be spent on programs to get people off addiction. Once the main market for narcotics was catered for by the state then the profits for the illegal trade would dry up.
This would also have an impact on gun crime as disputes between different drug gangs are a large part respsonsible for import and use of guns. (As McVicar explained if one business defaults on a 2 million pound contract in most businesses you go to court, in the drug trade you have to turn to guns)
Do I gather from you comment that you are opposed to decriminalisation?
Given that the current policy of criminalisation is a manifest failure and the problem is escalating further, I find it hard that anyone can defend it.
I’m from a rough arsed bit of the Northeast, but I had never, ever, until I visited Liverpool, seen offies where you get served through a hatch in a bulletproof screen. That scared me, to be frank.
Good article Dave, nothing like a bit of humility, though of course like everywhere some bits of Liverpool are booming, though haven’t been back for years.
“offies where you get served through a hatch in a bulletproof screen”
I’m not so sure about the bulletproof bit but we’ve had these in parts of Scotland for going on 10 years now.
On the drugs legalisation/decriminalisation issue I would have thought statuary licensing was the only way forward.
Shows just how far to the right England has moved, I don’t think I have seen a reference to Dave Spart in Private Eye in the last five years. All the ex-Trots are now effing New Labour!
Talking of drugs, how about putting them on presciption and distributing them as generics through pharmacies. All addicts should be able to afford £6.50 a month for their fixes without knocking over all the gaffs in their neighbourhood and being generic, Big Pharma couldn’t make any money on it so they would stay out of the business. Because it would be so cheap to buy your smack/crack from your local chemist, nobody would bother knocking them over either. Then all the profits/money saved by reduced policing costs could be spent on rehab. What the hell, why not go the whole way and have them as B.P. OTC drugs.
Red Deathy:”“offies where you get served through a hatch in a bulletproof screen”
Eddie Truman: I’m not so sure about the bulletproof bit but we’ve had these in parts of Scotland for going on 10 years now.”
For only 10 years? My dad’s from Ibrox (Glasgow) and left for the south in the early ’70s, he still “reminicises” about such bars (in which women weren’t allowed in either) of his youth.
Rhys Jones was killed in Croxteth Park, very different from Croxteth which you quote.
Dave
Just wanted to say that you have at least addressed a subject I’ve been thinking about for a while.
Surely it can’t pass anyone’s notice that there is something different about the society we are bringing young people up in? There may always have been young hooligans but in the past they had a punch up and were done with it. Now the most trivial of arguments (an even some kind of mistake which seem likely with Rhys) can end up with some kid pulling a gun or a knife.
Too many thoughts about this to put down in a comment but somehow I can’t see Gordon Brown’s coalition with selected Tories meeting the needs of this layer of kids.
For a chirpy sing-a-long version of Dave’s observations in this post, check out ‘Thatcher Fucked The Kids’ by Frank Turner.
http://www.myspace.com/frankturner
Not 100% sociologically accurate, but in punk-folk terms: it’s the dog’s bollocks.