THE BRIGHTSIDE TRUST: September 02, 2007

Much has been said and written about the shooting of Rhys Jones in Liverpool. This child lived in a middle class area that abuts 2 disadvantaged estates. It might be an unpalatable thought, but maybe the killing of middle class children will be more of a spur to politicians than the mutual slaughter of the disadvantaged. But what action are they going to take? I worry about the inadequacy of the measures being mooted and that there is a naive simplicity to much of the talk. First, the idea that increasing the cost of alcohol is a way of dealing with the problem: in my opinion this will make things worse. The youths concerned will turn to using greater quantities of other drugs to get out of their brains and will then spend the little money they have on alcohol to top the evening off. This cocktail of drugs and drink will make them even more unpredictable and disagreeable. Also, it will push them even further into the hands of local drug dealers; it would be better to push them further into the hands of the local off-licence. Secondly, there has been much talk of there being an easier access to guns in the UK now than there was in the past. This again, is plain wrong. During the 20th century, the UK was always awash with guns; many were trophies from the First and Second World War and this pool of weapons was regularly toped up by a constant feed from returning imperial troops and civil servants. In terms of the law, you didn’t even need to register having a gun before 1920 or need a licence to buy or own a shotgun before 1967.

I think we need to understand a little more before prescribing a fix. In pursuit of that, I think Camila Batmanghelidjh has written an interesting article
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/article2893902.ece
This line of argument chimes with my own experience from when I ran a group for 14 year-old boys on the edge of school dropout and offending. It was a condition of group membership that they attended school and kept out of trouble with the law. One day I received a report from the police juvenile bureau that one of the boys had been caught stealing a vehicle. I spoke to him about what had happened and he told me, in a matter-of-fact fashion, that he had stolen a steam roller (if this is what they are still called) from a road repair site. I couldn’t believe the stupidity of it, I asked him, what were you thinking of; how were you going to outrun the police on a steam roller; what was the point of taking it, you couldn’t sell it - All good rational questions and, of course, completely irrelevant. He shrugged, no answer. The point I only later came to understand, was that he didn’t think because he lived in a world where there wasn’t any point in ‘thinking’. Without outlining his personal history, his life had been chaotic; he couldn’t plan or rely on anything or anyone, so before he did things he didn’t ask himself consequences-type questions. Rather, he lived in the present, and took it from there. This tended to short-termism in decision making and also to doing what made him feel good at that moment. I agree with Camila, this is nihilism, not anarchy.

However, I’d like to ask a trickier question: are these children so very different from the rest of modern British society? The way the press are speaking of gang members they are seen as self evidently, ‘the other’, the jackals of society, living by a different philosophy, uniquely selfish and dangerous to those around them. However, when the gang members look at ‘us’, what do they see? I would say they see a society dominated by a similar ethos of amoral individualism. This ethos includes a similar disregard for others and a disrespect for the law when it is thought to be interfering with an individual’s immediate desires. If we brought a Liverpool gang to London Bridge, might they look no further than the respectable middle class commuter cyclists disregarding all traffic laws and caring nothing for the safety of pedestrians as they hurtle along the pavement? If they asked the cyclists why they do this, they’d be told it’s because they are in danger from the car drivers who care nothing about them, and who similarly breach traffic laws whenever they think they can get away with it, including dangerously making calls on their mobile phones. Our child thugs might then point out that many more children are killed each year by wilfully careless car drivers than by gang members with guns. Also, when people speak of having alternative adult role models for these children, who do they have in mind? Sports personalities perhaps, but what lessons can be learnt from them. It seems to me, that many footballers and their partners are appalling individuals leading trite and dissolute lives. Or perhaps we should introduce them to the City folks who make money out of selling arms to repressive regimes and asset stripping third world countries of their natural resources, what is our juvenile gunman going to learn from them - to increase his prices perhaps. Or the Daily-Mail-reading-60-year-old who rants about the law being flouted, while they park in the parent and baby spaces at the supermarket, allow their dog to run loose and foul the local playing field, and drive home from the golf club drunk as a Lord. Is our visiting crew really so different, when they individualistically and amorally pursue their own self-interest with no concern about the impact on others. I’d go further; I’d ask who came first, who is imitating whom.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advising hugging a hoodie; they’ll either hurt you or steal your money or probably both. You can call these children feral, if you like; life for them is indeed a sort of opportunistic scavenging in an unpredictable and unstable world. There are many more children growing up in chaotic environments than is often acknowledged, for example, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2327918.ece

Finally, I suspect when the young person who committed this latest shooting is caught, their explanation will seem wilfully inadequate. However, rather than reacting with anger about that, I suggest, accept it at face value and see this shooting as a product of lives lived as a series of reactions to events, not as some diabolical strategic gang initiative that went wrong, and then, most sadly of all, recognise that the reasons for murder can be truly banal.

THE BRIGHTSIDE TRUST

Wednesday, 5 September 2007

1 Gangs, Shooting and Anarchy

2 You(test)Tube

3 This Year’s Physics GCSE Paper.

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