Perspective is perhaps the most difficult aim to achieve in politics. And particularly so when dealing with emotive subjects. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first thing that has been lost in the debate about the current spate of youth killings in London is a sense of perspective.
Let us begin with the numbers. The killings over the past three months – more than 50 so far – have been terrible and the causes need addressing. But they have not turned London into the New York of old, or even the London of old. In the 1990s, New York was recording on average more than 2,000 murders a year; in 1990, 2,245 were murdered. The homicide rate in London peaked in 2003, when 204 people were killed, and then fell until 2015. What we have witnessed in London in recent years is a rise in youth killings, in which the victims have primarily been black or of minority ethnic background.
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Placing the killings in context is important, not because the current spate is not a problem with which we need to deal, but because blind panic always leads to fraught solutions. Already there are demands for single, simple answers as to why the killings are happening, and single, simple solutions to deal with them. Too often, such demands only exacerbate the very problems they are meant to address.
Many, including the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, have pointed to cuts in policing as a primary cause of the spike in killings. No doubt such cuts have played a part, but the issue is more than simply one of policing.
Austerity policies have helped erode the social fabric necessary to socialise young people and inculcate them with a sense of obligation to others. The influence of many of the institutions and mechanisms that once acted as the weft and warp of the social fabric have eroded – traditional institutions such as the church and more modern ones such as youth centres or sports clubs.
As communities have fragmented, gangs have taken their place as organisations through which young people, especially young men, find a sense of belonging and meaning. Being in a gang gives a young person a sense of being somebody. Defending one’s gang, even one’s postcode, provides a purpose often missing elsewhere in life.
At the same time, rage has become normalised as a feature of public life. People take offence at the slightest hint of disrespect and respond in exaggerated ways. One only has to look on Twitter to see how perceived slights escalate into major disputes and how threats of rape or murder have become part of everyday discourse. The sense of restraint has worn dangerously thin.
Translated on to the streets, such rage can become deadly. When gangs provide meaning to a young person’s life, perceived disrespect demands a response. And where in the past feuds between gangs were settled with fists or baseball bats, these days it’s more often than not with knives or guns.
And then there is the question of race. Most of these killings take place within minority communities. The trouble is that when we talk of race, we seem able to talk only in causal terms: liberals tend to see racism as the cause of the problem, conservatives often see the cause in the presence of minorities themselves or in their culture or moral attitudes.
We need to learn to talk about racial issues without necessarily seeing race as causal. Many of the issues touched on above, from the impact of poverty and cuts to the erosion of the social fabric and adult authority, have particularly affected areas with large black or minority ethnic communities. We need to be able to talk about that without finger-pointing.
The media and politicians tend to focus on such communities only when there is a spate of killings or a riot. For much of the rest of the time, little attention is paid to them.
If we want to address the acute problems thrown up in such communities, including youth killings, we needs also to address the chronic issues that arise from erosion of the social fabric, the lack of authority and the nurturing of rage.
