AROUND THE corner from me is a council estate that I’m sure the Prime Minister would say is afflicted by the plague of “anti-social behaviour.”
It’s certainly a wretched place. If there’s an addict in one of the slab blocks who hasn’t paid his bills, drug dealers pile in through the communal entrance, trash the communal lift and scare the wits out of all the tenants until they find their victim. Everyone catches a whiff of intimidation that is as pervasive as the damp.
On the face of it there doesn’t seem much wrong with slapping fixed notice penalties on the yobs. Why not give them summary punishments, as the PM says, or make their mothers go to parenting classes if their sons are under 16?
But my neighbours are the victims of crime not anti-social behaviour. Dealing in Class A drugs is a criminal offence. The police ought to arrest suspects and bring them before judges who should send them to prison if they’re found guilty. Reclassifying their crimes as “anti-social behaviour” looks to me like a smokescreen to hide the police’s abysmally low detection rate, and not only on estates
A few streets away from my miserable Sixties blocks is a lovely early Victorian terrace, where a young friend of mine snapped up a cheap first floor flat. It seemed the ideal starter home: high ceilings, rippling cornices and cast iron fireplaces with Carrera marble mantels.
She found out why the price was low on her first evening. The flat underneath was a brothel. The doorbells rang through the night, and there were screams, oaths and the constant risk of violence.
She tracked down the sex crime unit in the Met, but an officer told her it had a huge caseload and she would have to wait her turn. While she waited, she was a victim of anti-social behaviour. When the police finally came, however, they made criminal arrests for running a disorderly house.
The Prime Minister says he doesn’t want to redefine crime away. He plans to intervene early and give the mothers of potential problem children parenting classes before they get into trouble.
As a bit of an unreconstructed Leftie, I ought to approve. The state saving children from crime and prison is what I believe in.
But another unreconstructed Leftie, Harry Fletcher from the probation workers’ union, told me that pretty much every poor child whose parents have split up is a potential problem. If his members, along with social workers and police officers, were going to intervene in hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of families, they would “have to recruit every school leaver in the country.”
If Tony Blair can’t say where the money for this is going to come from, I’m afraid he’s going to have to return to boring but essential work of finding out why the crime detection rate is so low in Britain and what can be done to buck it up.
Kid Gloves and an Old Goat
MING THE MERCILESS sounds a hard-hitting nickname for a hard-bitten politician, but the last thing Sir Menzies Campbell has had to deal with is hard questions.
Because the liberal consensus was against the Iraq War, purring broadcasters have given him interviews so soft a newborn baby could curl up in them.
I have the honour of knowing Kanan Makiya, the Iraqi dissident who first exposed Saddam’s terror, and many other Iraqi liberals. They wanted to know why the Liberal Democrats couldn’t offer them support as they struggled to build democracy in Iraq, but no interviewer spoke for them.
I wonder how long the soft-soaping can go on. If he is leader, Sir Ming will surely one day have to face probing questions. The free ride he has been given by the media means Lib Dem voters have no way of knowing if he will be able to handle such unfamiliar pressure.
La Islington Profonde
TO LIVE the North London cliché, to penetrate to the very heart of La Islington Profonde, I go every week to the farmers’ market.
The scent of righteousness fills my nose as I sniff the organic vegetables. A glow of moral rectitude brightens my cheeks as I pay – rather a lot – for the free-range sausages.
Until this week, that is, when visibly desperate managers all but ordered shoppers to sign letters pleading with Islington Council to allow the market to stay open. Somewhat embarrassingly, it appears to have been trading without planning permission.
I’m not sure if Islingtonians can cope with the ignominy. There are dodgy geezers buying fake Rolexes in Kilburn car-boot sales who are more legit than we are.
A Gasp of Confusion
AS SOMEONE who is so good at giving up smoking I’ve been doing it since 1987, I’m getting very confused by the Government’s plans to ban it in some public places.
Why does Patricia Hewitt wants smoking prohibited in pubs that do not sell food but not pubs that do? Equally, why does she want to stop Kate Moss smoking in a Soho restaurant but not in the Groucho Club across the street? Bar staff are as much at risk in pub, club or restaurant.
Most perplexing of all, why should it be illegal to smoke in front of bar staff in any pub or club but not in front of babies at home? Bar staff can leave and find another job if they don’t like it. Babies can’t.
Given the confusion, wouldn’t it be better to allow grown-up citizens to sort the mess out between themselves?
Nick Cohen
