Saturday, February 02, 2008 

Gun crime? What about being press ganged?

THERE seems to be a sense that it is no longer safe to walk the streets, and that anyone who pops out at night for a tasty kebab is going to come home spouting arterial blood from a bullet wound to the neck.

David Cameron, however, is undaunted. He made a speech in which he said that gun crime is spiralling out of control.

He brought up the tragic story of Garry Newlove who was kicked to death on his own doorstep and little Rhys Jones who was shot dead in a car park on his way back from football training.

Well, there’s one. And I suppose if I scoured the internet for half a day, I could come up with maybe five more people who’ve recently been gunned down by a gang of savage teenagers in hooded tops.

<This means, then, that so far this year 59,999,994 people in Britain have sustained no bullet wounds at all.

More people, and this is true, are killed by their trousers.

Yes, I’m sure that it would be very scary for a concave-chested little man to walk through certain parts of Liverpool at night while carrying a gold ingot.

But be assured, it was also dangerous to be on Brighton beach in 1965 when the Mods and the Rockers were throwing motorcycles at one another.

It was dangerous in the 19th Century because you’d pop out for a pint of milk and end up in the Navy. And I assure you that it was extremely dangerous on the streets of Doncaster in 1977.

On many occasions, burly miners would offer to “glass” me and when I tried to explain “glass” is a noun, not a verb and therefore couldn’t be conjugated, it seemed to make things worse.

The truth, then, is this: The vast majority of the country is completely safe. The vast majority of the people who live here do not want to murder you. And it is still extremely difficult to buy a gun.


Which politically correct, blind, ignorant and complacent moron wrote this then? Err, Jeremy Clarkson. Can some of our politicians perhaps follow his example and give his message more credence than Helen Newlove's?

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Friday, February 01, 2008 

Here is my grief, tell me yours.

After reading out her list of grievances at the conclusion of the trial of the teenagers charged with her husband's murder, Helen Newlove's back, this time with a more expanded one, and all give ample space in the Scum.

The main article, headlined "Mourning mum could be YOU", has to be one of the most hackneyed and pathetic attempts for sympathy that a newspaper could conjure up.

Mum-of-three Helen, 45, fought back tears as she made her first heartbreaking return to the spot where her loving husband of 21 years was brutally murdered by a pack of teenage savages.

...

Helen moved away from the family home with daughters Amy, 13, Danielle, 15, and Zoe, 18.

But the grief-stricken family summoned up the courage to return there in front of our cameras in order to press home their call for action.


Or, in other words, to get a photograph of Helen crying so she can express just how much she means it, and how badly her demands must be acceded to by the politicians the Sun spends so much time decrying.

Arm-in-arm, heads bowed to hide the pain and sorrow etched on their faces, mum and daughters approached the spot where Garry was found dying 100 yards from his front door.

Once there, they knelt to place flowers and said a silent prayer to their fallen hero, a miracle dad who had beaten cancer 15 years previously.

Carrying a photo of her beloved husband – and clutching his favourite cuddly toy, Leo the lion – Helen said: “It’s traumatic just to be here. It’s still so raw and so painful but we had to come. Leo the lion stands for courage. We gave him to Garry to give him courage when he was in hospital fighting cancer. We brought him along today to give us that same courage. Leo goes everywhere with us now.”

Turning to hug her tearful girls, Helen added: “This is so much harder for them. But if people witness the pain we’re going through, they might just sit up and take notice.


Or they might just think that you're milking your understandable grief and anger to make a political point that politicians are incapable of disagreeing with for fear of being called heartless, cold and indifferent to those who are victims of crime. That's exactly what you're doing, and it's unfair both to all the other parents that have lost children or families that have lost parents to thugs but who haven't decided that it demands that something must be done, and that sad as it seems, it unfortunately happens, and will continue to happen regardless of any campaign. More than anything, it's deeply cynical.

What then, are Newlove's demands? Would you believe that they tie in almost directly with the Sun's own viewpoints?

Sentences that fit crime

THERE are decent, sensible judges in this country, but too often their hands are tied by barmy guidelines and nonsense about human rights.

To stem yob violence we need real deterrents before it’s too late.

We have a mandatory life sentence for murder, but I fear Garry’s killers will escape with as little as ten years each behind bars.

That’s not justice. They will be out on the streets at half his age. For me, life should mean life, and at the very least 25 years. Surely it is time to re-open the debate about bringing back the death penalty — or at least the birch? These people deal in pain - it’s the only commodity they understand.

If Garry’s killers were put to death I would feel absolutely nothing for them. Why should I? They knew full well they were committing the most heinous of all crimes.

Ignoring the jibe about human rights, in actual fact, judges under the last Criminal Justice Act to come into effect have been given far more power over the sentences they can hand down. Life should only ever mean life in the case of multiple murders, or where the offender poses a distinct, special threat to the public, and judges can also now opt for an "indeterminate" sentence if they feel that's the case. The few in prison that are on effective life sentences - Ian Huntley, Ian Brady, Peter Sutcliffe, etc - are those that do genuinely deserve them. It should also always be the judge and not a politician that decides on what requires a life sentence that means life, for obvious reasons. As for bringing back the capital punishment or the birch, apart from the fact that the former doesn't work as anything approaching a deterrent as America aptly demonstrates, it brings us down to the level of those who commit the crimes themselves. A yob beats someone up, so we give him a good state-sanctioned thrashing in return? A wonderful example, to be sure. I also doubt that when they beat her husband up that they had the intention of killing him, whatever despicable bravado they've since displayed.

YOU rarely meet a cop these days, if you do they are often overweight.

This is because most of them drive around instead of being where people need them — on the streets.


Really? I think it's a long time since I've seen an overweight police officer, but then what do I know? I haven't had my husband killed.

We’re entitled to a proper response to every 999 call. CCTV and community support officers are no substitute for a bobby on the beat.

A proper copper knows his beat. He can sense trouble and intervene before it’s too late. And officers need to be fit and strong.


And I'm sure that the Sun will be delighted with the rise in taxes necessary for every community, street, or estate to have its own individual set of police officers, as will those that have no need for them. We already have around 140,000 police officers, and over 15,000 community support officers. Exactly how many more are needed, or necessary? A far better idea would be genuine community policing, not necessarily involving the law itself but active citizenry and groups working together to nip problems in the bud themselves. That though might make too much sense, or involve trying to rebuild a sense of community that has vanished through the rise of ruthless individualism.

I’VE worked in courts and seen the justice system from both sides.

All too often the victim’s family are made to feel like second-rate citizens. Their rights come second to the rights of perpetrators.


Or as they're also known until convicted, the accused.

When Garry’s killers stood trial, the defendants came to the dock smiling and laughing. They were staring at us as if we were scum.

Nobody told them to pack it in. We were the ones told not to show emotion or call out in case it swayed the jury. Why wasn’t there a place for us to watch proceedings free from the menacing glares of yobs?


Why didn't you make a stand and ignore the advice? If you can do this now, why not then? Besides, the layout of most courts often means that those in the dock have to turn right around to stare at those in the public gallery. We could put closed off sections into courts or curtains, but why when most of the time they wouldn't be used? She perhaps does have something a point when they could watch proceedings in a side room via CCTV, but surely most also want to be in there and experience what's going on as well as watch?

I’m so angry at the way these kids play the system. The law says children of ten know what’s right and wrong — so why do we treat teenage killers like babies? They can have their mums sit with them and get refreshment breaks. No wonder court holds no fear for these kids.

Possibly because children mature at different ages, especially as we don't consider them adults until either 16 or 18. Again, they're not killers until they're convicted, and it's worth pointing out that not all of those tried for Newlove's murder were convicted. That's been conveniently forgotten.

BAD parenting is at the heart of Britain’s demise.

We live surrounded by incredible technology — yet some kids behave as if it was the dark ages.

When are lazy parents going to realise life is not a soap opera or a PlayStation game? I’ll tell you — when we strip their benefits, fine them heavily and shame them in the papers.

All of which has been shown to work so effectively in the past.

Parents need to instil respect in kids and teach them right from wrong. If kids run wild their parents should be hauled into court alongside them. And if kids get community service, the parents should have to join them.

Courts come down hard on pensioners who don’t pay council tax. So why pussyfoot around parents who don’t give a damn? And I’m sick of women playing the single mum card.


But this also risks punishing parents when they've tried their hardest. How many youths commit the odd offence, mostly receive a caution and never do anything like it again? You can imagine the parents becoming embittered if also having to attend community service meant them losing their jobs. How would impoverishing families impress upon them the need to bring their children up right, or indeed enable them to do so? It might be reasonable for repeat offences, but not in all cases. The council tax example is also ludicrous: perhaps one or two get sent to prison a year for refusing to pay, if that.

... When a head expels a violent pupil I want him or her to decide without having to explain it over and over or fill out endless forms. A head should be judge and jury without having his authority questioned. Teachers should also be free to intervene if they see a fight without the fear of losing their job.

Except the appeals process has time and again shown that decisions over expulsions are often made hastily and without thinking out the consequences. As for teachers intervening in fights, in all my years at school I never saw them being in the slightest bit afraid of breaking them up or cracking down hard on those who did.

And they should have the right to search pupils for drugs or weapons - a child who has nothing to hide won’t mind.

There's no better way to earn the respect of someone than to spend every morning either frisking them for something they haven't got or peering into their pockets using x-ray machines or metal detectors. There's a lyric that seems to sum this up: "And our schools look like prisons / and our prisons look like malls."

Finally, there's the Sun's leader:

ONE minute, Gordon Brown claims crime has fallen under Labour. The next we learn gun and knife deaths have spiralled by a chilling 20 per cent in one year.

There's nothing like selectively relying on the figures. Overall, homicides were down last year, and gun crime was also down. The quarterly figures showed a rise from 49 deaths involving guns to 59, but then the annual figures to September last year showed them falling back down to 49. Deaths involving knives were up from 219 to 258, which perhaps shows a change in weaponry or the force used, or even failings in hospitals. It's difficult to tell.

Yesterday, Justice supremo Jack Straw promised new prisons — but don’t hold your breath.

Today we discover 3,000 violent offenders are being released early because jails are full.


By a whole 18 days, and those that have re-offended have done so on a surprisingly low level. The Sun and others' demands led to the overcrowding crisis, yet all they want now is.. more prisons and ever harsher crackdowns. Just where does it all end?

Ministers seem hopelessly adrift.

But as murder victim Garry Newlove’s devastated widow Helen points out today, there is a simple remedy.

More bobbies on the beat, tough action at home, discipline in schools and real justice in court.

It comes to something when a bereaved wife and mum can come up with a better cure for crime than our cops and politicians.


Except it's the same cure that's been tried for over a decade and which in their opinion has so egregiously failed.

Where is the liberal response to this sabre-rattling? Where is the politician brave enough to stand up and say, yes, there are problems in certain areas, just as there always has been and always doubtless will be but that we'll try as hard as possible to try to change? That the the police, good as they are and as hard as they work, cannot be everywhere at once? Where despite populists and opportunists claiming that Britain is either broken or a failing society, by most accounts we're doing quite well, and up until recently, the middle classes, unlike the poor and vulnerable, have never had it so good? Or indeed, to end all taboos and stand up to a bereaved person and tell them that grief or anger is never a good motive for change and that their solutions are not necessarily the best ones? The Liberal Democrats have said they'll oppose any return to the "sus laws", but where are they or indeed anyone else with different solutions or suggestions that don't involve either the military, the birch, a "rebalancing" of the criminal justice system or ever more prison spaces? It's time that the narrative was changed and that the needle was taken off the broken record.

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Thursday, January 17, 2008 

The political tyranny of grief.

The tyranny of the tearful, grieving left behind seems to be an ever growing constant on both our TV screens and newspapers. The wife of the fallen soldier demands that the MoD and government do more to stop what happened to their partner happening again, even if it was an understandable accident; the parents of the missing child travel the globe warning of the dangers of strangers, even when they themselves have been by no means cleared of personal involvement; the parent of the murdered school-teacher urges the government to ban "extreme pornography"; and now we have the widow of the brave have-a-go hero setting out a list of everything that she thinks is wrong with society, and everyone is expected to ably nod along, wring their hands, comment that it really is appalling, or demand instant ever more draconian crackdowns, usually for their own short-term political gain.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not impugning on the right of those dealt the harshest blow that life can throw at them from pouring out their hearts at the injustice of it all; in fact, I'd encourage it. Better to let it out than to bottle it up. You can't fail to be disgusted at Garry Newlove's death, a man who had survived cancer being taken from his family at the feet of the local hoodlums, who deserve everything that they have coming to them, hopefully a sentence that will mean they'll at least be middle-aged before they're released from prison. His wife's eloquent statement, even if I disagree with large parts of it, took courage to both write and read out in front of the country's media.

The best policies on crime and punishment, or indeed on everything are however reached in the cold light of day, not motivated by vengeance or to buy off campaigning newspapers or individuals. The very last thing that should be indulged is knee-jerk reactions that aim towards ever harsher penalties, but rather focus on what works; outrage and apoplexy, along with the momentum that a tragedy provides a person with, have worked to huge disadvantage in the past. You only have to examine the dangerous dogs legislation or the video nasties farce to see what moral panics bring about.

Such rationality however can never stand up to emotion. The Sun's headline to one of its reports is "Get this evil off our streets". Its leader, which I'll return to later, is at least not as demanding of change as it was in the aftermath of the murder of Rhys Jones last summer. Easy answers, such as David Davis's statement today for zero tolerance, which would not have stopped the murder of Newlove even if it had of been in operation, typically miss the point and would only further stigmatise those who get in trouble once and where the shock of being caught is enough to stop from them committing any further crimes. The Tories' complete lack of any real alternative, only claiming that there is a broken society which Thatcherism and its continuation under Blair have done the most to create, and their promotion of bribes through tax cuts which would only help already married middle-class couples show the continuing failure for the party to come to terms with modern Britain. How school discipline could possibly be blamed when all three of those convicted had already left is also a moot point.

Helen Newlove's analysis and diagnosis also shouldn't be above criticism. She says that "[youths] should not be allowed to congregate on street corners", but the only solution she offers is the army or boot camp. One would think the very last thing we wanted to do with bored violent young people is introduce them to an organisation where they're trained to be even more violent, but such logic seems to go out the window in such circumstances. The solution appears to be for the young to be seen and not heard, or out of sight and out of mind. As long as they're off the streets and not scaring the adults, who cares? She talks about the government needing to put "into place an effective deterrent", but just what sort of punishment will make a young person who has spent the whole day drinking think twice before attacking a man who's challenged his authority? There simply isn't one. What can the government do when someone over the legal drinking age is only exercising his right to purchase alcohol? It's their responsibility, not the person who sells it to them.

This isn't defeatist, but does anyone really have an answer to how we can prevent the above without intervening in society in such ways that are neither necessary or likely to even have that much of an effect? Some of the suggestions are the equivalent of stating that we either need a policeman on every corner or a CCTV camera equivalent that recognises offenders and is ready to bark out orders; how else are we supposed to keep tabs on every single person that's out on bail that just might go on to kick someone to death? How are we supposed to change a drinking culture of getting smashed with all the side-effects that entails when that's exactly what the structure of the working week and phony individualism encourages? Why should we surprised that the young feel embittered and disenfranchised when the illusion of meritocracy which New Labour bases itself on is so exposed in the schools they often leave with such low aspirations?

In fact, this whole case leaves the typical blanket recommendations floundering. One of those convicted, Stephen Sorton, had nine GCSEs and was at college studying mechanics. It defies both casual prejudices and the typical assumptions, which is precisely why it's completely wrong to turn to them out of either type or comfort. Even so, it's still apparent that the young need somewhere to go more than ever, but at the same time also want to be left alone. Youth clubs and organisations are one thing, but they've never going to stop them from congregating and potentially intimidating others even if they don't mean any harm. Labour's anti-social behaviour legislation has given the police just the powers to move them on even if they're not doing anything wrong, just the sort of thing that makes teenagers respect their elders. Again, when cases such as these emerge and get blanket coverage, all of those who think they're in a similar boat feel threatened, and the constant scaremongering about "yobs" or "hoodies" only encourages fear and mutual mistrust.

Also typically missing the point is to blame those who are only attempting to do their jobs, as the Sun leader does:

Garry, a devoted husband and father, had repeatedly called on police to act against local vandals and hooligans.

They failed to do their job.

I'd say that they did everything they could: you can't do much more than arrest one of them and charge them with assault, and confiscating their alcohol. Unless they're in a special "no-drinking zone" and aren't disorderly, what else are they supposed to do?

So did the judge who set free killer cop Gary Weddell.

Having hanged his wife, Weddell last week blasted her mother and himself to death.


Surely just as much blame has to lie with his brother, who put up £200,000 bail and then failed to keep the tabs on him that he promised he would. That Weddell was a police officer and had a motive for murdering his wife (who had been having an affair and told him she wanted a divorce) and therefore didn't appear to be a threat to anyone else must also be considered.

A common theme can be found in all three cases — a reluctance to put dangerous people behind bars.

Prisons and police cells are so full of violent criminals that known villains are allowed bail.

And innocent members of the public are paying for that with their lives.


There lies the inherent contradiction - the prisons aren't full of violent criminals, they're full of the mentally ill and those who shouldn't be there, as well as the violent. The Sun's constant hardline is partially responsible for just that, and yet it now in effect demands all those charged with assault are kept in custody when such a policy would be complete lunacy and cost an extortionate amount for such a small possible benefit. Besides, those charged with assault have never been kept in custody regardless of the prison spaces available; it's just the Scum as usual conflating something with its own prejudices.

Put simply, we are never going to prevent every such tragic murder. There always have and always will be hotheaded young out of their heads and suitably inclined to beat up an easy target. Without taking a step back when such strong emotions and feelings inevitably manifest themselves in the aftermath, we'll be forever putting right the mistakes from the last knee-jerk. Reacting to each one as if it must be the latest to change us irrevocably is not just daft, it's dangerous.

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Saturday, August 11, 2007 

The grief industry.

In today's Guardian, Ian Jack recalls the end of summer 10 years ago:

It is worth recalling that first week of September 10 years ago, when 10,000 tonnes of flowers were dumped outside the royal palaces and Gordon Brown was said to be seriously considering a proposal to rename August bank holiday "Diana Day". I knew few people who felt as the crowds did, but this minority (or perhaps majority) largely remained silent and invisible to the media: in the climate of those days, to be sceptical was to be labelled unfeeling. A few brave people wrote to the newspapers to say they were disturbed by the dominant mood. Later in September, writing a piece for Granta on reactions to the Diana's death, I tracked down and interviewed eight or nine of them. Ten years later, what they said bears repeating. Peter Ghosh, an Oxford historian: "We kept being told that the country was united, which it was in the sense that we were all watching the same television programme. But in any other sense - that divisions of class and race were being healed, for example - well, it's crap, obviously."

Maggie Winkworth, a psychologist in Chiswick: "I'd call it mass hysteria, a kind of mania. You saw the power of the crowd. To me, those pictures of mounds of flowers were quite repulsive ... It seemed a kind of floral fascism ... a country controlled by the grief police." How many people felt like this? I suspect many millions more than were apparent at the time.


Jack doesn't mention whether some of those who questioned the mass-mourning which occurred then came under the same opprobrium which poured down upon the head of Professor Anthony O'Hear when the Social Affairs Unit published a book which contained an essay of his on the public reaction to the death of Diana, but it's probably safe to assume that they were replied to voluminously in the press.

O'Hear's essay, which also considered the sentimentality and general mawkishness exhibited at the time, was in fact far less of an aggressive critique than that offered by Winkworth. As Francis Wheen noted at the time (reproduced in Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies, pp 68-70) O'Hear only went so far as to suggest that the grieving had lacked a sense of proportion. Nevertheless, this didn't stop the Mirror from calling him a "rat-faced little loser" and Tony Blair describing him as an "old-fashioned snob." Even a Guardian editorial suggested that the Social Affairs Unit as a whole was a "slightly fogeyish bunch."

Even if the events of this week have suggested something of a backlash against the McCanns, you get the same sort of feeling reading today's press coverage of the 100th day since Madeleine has disappeared. After 3 months of an unending media campaign, it has come to precisely naught. The only thing we still know for certain is that Madeleine, on the evening of May the 3rd, disappeared from the McCanns' apartment of the Mark Warner Ocean Club complex in the Portuguese resort of
Praia da Luz. Everything else is still conjecture.

Not that this has stopped the press here at home pointing the finger variously at paedophiles and then the only declared suspect, Robert Murat, with gradually decreasing credibility. The Portuguese press, for its own part, has spent much of the last week speculating, along with police leaks reminiscent of those to the Sun in similar cases, that either the McCanns themselves or friends of theirs on holiday with them were now under suspicion. No one seems to have been able to strike the right balance; the British press and media being utterly craven, for which see this hagiographic account of the last 100 days in today's Sun, papers running front page splashes condemning a German reporter who dared to question whether the McCanns themselves might have been involved in some way, while the Portuguese press have been apparently happy to publish innuendo which appears to have absolutely no foundation. Even those sections of the media we usually depend upon to rise above the clamour and shrieks of the gutter press don't seem to have been immune to the image of a pretty missing white girl: the Grauniad running an interview with the McCanns which tells you absolutely nothing, and today's Telegraph, featuring another interview with the two.

It started with the equivalent of emotional pornography, coverage by turns both mawkish and pointless, urging the public to pray for "Maddie" and then to wear yellow, as if either could in any way possibly do anything to help the investigation, a display of fake empathy, or even possibly real, with hardened hacks going native in their refusal to even examine any alternative possibilities. The results of such coverage were displayed in comments on the Sun's own website: if they're to be believed, some seemed closer to a complete breakdown than the McCanns themselves have. After a couple of weeks, it mutated into something much more familiar: coverage for the sake of coverage, designed purely to try to boost sales, without offering any real support, while still indignant about anything negative directed towards the sainted couple. The Express, which was has probably featured Diana on the front page more since she died than before (see Daily Mail Watch), changed from the Diana Express into the Daily Maddie, the cynicism behind such blanket splashes being only too visible. Today's coverage has then come full circle: back to the Scum opening up "books of support" rather than books of condolence.

The main difference between the atmosphere of then and now is that in 1997 there was hardly no one who dared to raise their head above the parapet and suggest that this was all a little over the top. Private Eye's front cover jibe about the press coverage being revolting resulted in WHSmith temporarily removing it from their shelves. Major mass usage of the internet was also still in its infancy; while Usenet quickly started to buzz with conspiracy theories, debate and resistance to the rolling coverage was still mostly absent. This time round it's been very different: forums have been full of threads either critical of the McCanns or even suggesting that they have the most questions to answer. Whereas those nonplussed by Diana's untimely death and the reaction to it were underrepresented in the media then, with 44% apparently feeling alienated by the BBC's coverage of it according to their own research, the internet has now allowed those with a very different opinion to that dominating the mainstream to raise their own flags. It's not surprising that this change has left some of mainstream media both confused and angry by their failure to monopolise public opinion: the Sun describes the McCanns today as the victims of a "vicious smear campaign", something it ought to know about considering the number of ones that it itself has run in the past.

Responding back in April 1998 to O'Hear's essay, the Sun not only described grief as "a vital safety valve", it also told readers it was perfectly OK to "keep grieving". It shouldn't surprise you that the paper's leader now is full of similar sentiments, ending with:

As another day of torment passes, Sun readers will hope and pray for a new landmark. When Maddie is back with her loving parents.

It seems unlikely that the grief industry will be slowing down its production, online opposition or not, any time soon.

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