Tag: Knife crime

Posted on

Tories are deaf to anything but their own voices

Robert Booth reports in The Guardian, “United Nations poverty expert has compared Conservative welfare policies to the creation of 19th-century workhouses”.

The Guardian

I wanted to write something angry about this government, at the way they have so wilfully and aggressively attacked the poor, but I don’t have the strength to list all of their many failings. I know this, their attacks on the poor are an attack on us all.

For as long as I can remember they’ve promoted an agenda of individualism, while absolutely refusing to see how we individuals interact with all of the other individuals around us.

They can’t see and don’t care, not everyone was created in their image.

Take social care. When you reduce spending on social care, old people who end up in hospital will stay longer. They can’t go home if they don’t have the right kind, any kind, of care waiting when they get there. Most people don’t have the privilege of a private nurse to look after them. Longer stays in hospital are one of the many reasons waiting times in accident and emergency are so long.

Consider the recent rise in knife crime. I have no problem saying it’s a direct result of Tory cuts to youth services. At risk individuals who would’ve been helped by a youth club or a social worker, have been abandoned to the care of gangs. When individuals with little or no self-respect start demanding respect on the streets, challenges are met with violence.

These youngsters aren’t getting the kind of care and support most of Tory politicians enjoyed growing up. They’re being sent the message you’re on your own, you have to survive by any means necessary, but without the wealth and self-belief you need to survive in a world of individuals, fighting other individuals for a slice of the pie.

It’s easy for the Tories to blame bad seed individuals for young people dead on the streets. They point blank refuse to see their part in the problem.

As wealth inequality rises, crime will rise, and the Tories will blame the criminals, not considering their crimes in creating a society in their image.

I know they’re deaf to anything but their own voice.

How else could they behave the way they do?

Posted on

The Independent vs. Double Down News

Two stories about the rise in knife crime. The first from Lizzie Dearden in The Independent, the other from Temi Mwale for DoubleDown News. One is direct and to the point, the other is not.

The Independant
Double Down News
Posted on

Thatcher decline caused crime

Jamie Doward in The Guardian reports a first of its kind study linking the “industrial collapse of Thatcher years” to a rise in crime.

The Guardian

“Four decades after Margaret Thatcher swept to power, research has found that in areas where the coal, steel, ship and railway industries were hit during the 1980s, young people were much more likely to find themselves in trouble with the police.”

Those people currently wringing their hands over the rise in knife crime might want to take a long hard look at this study. It confirms what anyone who doesn’t look the wrong way down a telescope knows, there’s a “link between offending and economic factors”.

Posted on

London records fifth death from knife crime with a week

There is really in nothing more to say. Five deaths in a week, five people killed, and for why?

The Guardian

The Guardian: Press Association: London records fifth death from knife crime with a week

Posted on

Knife crime and homicide figures reveal the violence of austerity

James Treadwell’s article in The Conversation make for grim reading. I see the latest crime statistics are confirmation in reverse of arguments put forward by the “rogue economist” Steven Levitt in Freakanomic.

The Conversation

In Freakanomics Levitt researched the statistics on crime in the 1990’s. He realised that the legalisation around abortion in the United States in the 1970’s was the reason crime came down in the 1990’s. Put simply, the unwanted children of the 1970’s were not born. Twenty years later, these children were not there to be the criminals of the 1990’s.

The Tories can only see the world from their position of privilege. They are wilfully blind to the pressures on the most vulnerable, because they have never been venerable. Austerity removed services that helped the most in need. No services there to intervene, to help, vulnerable individuals can easily become involved in things like crime.

The Tories presume it’s a choice to become involved in crime, as if the most vulnerable can choose to hide huge sums of money in off-shore accounts to avoid paying tax. Crime for the vulnerable is not a choice, it is a consequence. No money, poor housing, disrupted education, this list could go on, and on, and on. Show me a circumstance and I’ll give you a reason why someone might end up getting involved in crime.

It’s not as simple as the Tory narrative would have us believe. What they’re doing is blaming the victim for the crime, without seeing the cause.

There are no easy fixes for the problems caused by austerity. It’s taken ten years for austerity to get us where we are now. It may take ten years after it’s ended, if it ever does, to see crime figures decline. 

What if austerity continues? What will Britain look like with ten more years of rising crime figures? If it’s a “war zone” now, what will ten more years of austerity bring, an apocalypse?

Posted on

People need to join the dots

I agree with the key points in Iain Brennan’s article, weapon-carrying is a complex behaviour. It is not driven by “social media, drill music, and middle-class drug use” as the mainstream media would have you believe.

The Conversation

Knife crime is driven by “individual factors like a history of violence, interpersonal factors like peer offending and community factors like neighbourhood disorder”. Brennan can only suggest as plausible, what I will say emphatically, “austerity, which has resulted in dramatic cutbacks to public and charitable services for young people” is a key contributor in the rise of weapons carrying. The services that could’ve helped, by “working with peer groups of at-risk young people” have all been cut. Blaming the evils of youth culture is a distraction, drawing attention away from the real causes, and the policy makers responsible for this tragedy. People need to join the dots.

No funding, no services. No services, no interventions. No interventions, a rise in violence.

Posted on

The reasons for the recent rise in knife and gun crime

This article in The Guardian asserts that “Knife and gun crime has surged in England and Wales, but the causes and solutions are unclear”. I don’t think the causes are unclear. The blame rests firmly at the feet of the Conservative Party and their policy of austerity.

The Guardian

Austerity has meant local authority budgets have been slashed, cutting support for all kinds of social programmes, there to help “at risk” kids stay out of trouble. Even something as simple as a youth club can provide early interventions, offering support to young people, and stop them getting involved in crime.

Those who think the causes are unclear should look at the work of Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in their 2005 book Freakonomics. They argue access to abortions in the USA in the 1970’s reduced the crime rates in the 1990’s.

Crime rates in the 1990s came down because there were fewer unwanted pregnancies in the seventies and eighties. Women who felt they were not ready to care for a child, were able to terminate the pregnancy.

Apply that same logic to the rise in instances of gun and knife crime in the UK. The Home Office blames “changes in the nature of drug sales and use, highlighting crack cocaine, social media and music glamorising violence as among the issues fuelling the problem”.

I’m going to say that drug sales, social media, and music, are not the cause of the problem but a consequence. Austerity is the cause.

Ten years ago austerity started to remove support for youth programmes.

We now have a rise in gun and knife crime.

Is it really that hard to see the link?