Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  The scribblers didn’t take much wooing — the news media thrive on stories about crime and disorder. Journalists like to justify their fascination in terms of their responsibility as surrogate watchmen, metaphorically patrolling the city walls and ready to issue a hue and cry if they identify threats to individual or collective welfare. But crime’s main attraction to the press is that it is a money-spinner. Like popular folk and fairy tales, the best crime stories reflect the endless struggle between good and evil and are cast with monsters, angels and heroes. We can’t get enough of them.

  Lawyers and journalists, wig and pen became partners in crime — neither could operate effectively without the other. Both feed on what Colquhoun dubbed the ‘criminal classes’ living outside ‘civilised society’: the greater the apparent external threat, the better for business. This symbiotic relationship is not unique to Britain, but the nature and intensity of the relationship here has had a powerful effect on public attitudes. As a result, huge amounts of research have been conducted into the impact of crime news. From the early 1980s, academics began producing evidence to suggest that the more crime stories people consume, the more they fear crime and the greater the demand for more police, more prisons and more punitive responses to crime.

  The number of crime stories appearing in the British media has risen markedly. Criminologists had a happy time examining random samples of The Times and the Mirror newspapers for each year between 1945 and 1991. Immediately following the Second World War, roughly one twelfth of news stories was about crime. By 1991, in both papers, the figure had risen to one fifth.

  The type of crime being reported also changed. In the 1940s and 50s property crimes featured frequently in news stories, but since the mid-1960s they have become rarities unless there is some celebrity angle. What the British press has increasingly focused upon instead is violence. The British Crime Survey estimates that approximately 6 per cent of crimes reported by victims are characterised as violent. But that is not the impression given by the media. One study focusing on one month in 1989 found that 64 per cent of the crime stories in the national press related to violence. On local television news bulletins in 1987 it was found that violent crime stories accounted for 63 per cent of all crime news.

  Since our sense of the criminal justice system is shaped largely by the media, we could be forgiven for thinking there is a lot more crime and most of it is violent.

  But there has been another change to crime reporting that has supercharged its impact, transformed the politics of law and order and, according to some, threatened to subvert the justice system. Barely mentioned in the 1950s, now centre stage is the victim.

  No big crime story is complete these days without the press conference at which the police display the injured and bereaved. The cameras flash at every hint of raw emotion. Suffering has become a key component of these contemporary morality tales. This changes the way we think of criminality — from an offence against wider society to a matter of one individual harming another. It is a reversion to the principles of the ancient manor courts. It personalises crime. One might say it consumerises criminal justice. Victims sell papers, and the most effective are those who can be described as incontrovertibly innocent. The ‘blameless victim’ has become the most influential voice in the national debate about law and order.

  The disappearance and murder of 10-year-olds Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman in the village of Soham in 2002 resulted in deep political soul-searching and led to changes in the way the criminal justice system operates. The young girls’ faces are seared upon the conscience of the nation. Few, however, will remember 13-year-old David Spencer and 11-year-old Patrick Warren from Chelmsley Wood in Birmingham, even though their story is eerily similar. They went missing on Boxing Day 1996 and the suggestion is that they, like Holly and Jessica, were abducted and killed by a paedophile.

  David and Patrick’s disappearance received a tiny fraction of the coverage that the Soham story did because they were not ideal victims. Both boys had been in trouble at school. One of them had been caught shop-lifting. On the day they went missing they had been scrounging biscuits from a local petrol station. They did not possess what has been described as ‘the complete and legitimate status of being a victim’. David and Patrick’s bodies have never been found.

  Criminal reform in Britain has been driven by the emotional power of victims. The murder of 2-year-old James Bulger was a seminal moment in the politics of crime in this country: the justification for New Labour’s ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric and the inspiration for what’s been described as the crime policy arms race of the mid-1990s. Madeleine McCann. Stephen Lawrence. Sarah Payne. Damilola Taylor. Jill Dando. All these tragedies have changed the debate about crime and criminal justice in this country. They also all have at their heart an unambiguous victim.

  The terrible deaths of Robert Knox, Jimmy Mizen and Ben Kinsella became the catalyst for press and political demands for action to deal with knife crime. While the victims of stabbings were young black men from drug-riddled estates in the inner cities, the calls for a government response were barely heard. Robert, Jimmy and Ben were all white boys described as ‘blameless’ by the press: Robert — the grammar school pupil who had appeared in a Harry Potter film; ‘Gentle giant’ Jimmy, the Catholic altar-boy; Ben, the GCSE student whose sister was a former soap star.

  The innocent faces of Holly and Jessica, Sarah Payne and Madeleine McCann ensured paedophilia was cast as the threat from the predator, the outsider, rather than the much more common but no less damaging abuse that occurs among families and close friends. The political response was inevitably shaped by the risk from the former rather than the latter. It is an important point: the focus on the innocent victim reinforces the concept of them and us. They are criminals. We are respectable. There is little room for ambiguity or nuance.

  In 2002, the government announced that it intended to rebalance the criminal justice system to place victims at its heart. Ministers proposed a Victims’ Advisory Panel for England and Wales, accountable to Parliament and headed by a Victims’ Commissioner empowered to advise ministers on how to do things better. This alarmed senior figures within the legal world, who suggested it wasn’t so much rebalancing as destabilisation. The criminal justice system, they pointed out, is sanctioned by the state to protect the state. Prosecutions are conducted on behalf of the Crown, not the victim.

  Senior politicians agreed. A committee considering the government’s proposals concluded that telling a victim their views were central, or that the prosecutor was their champion, amounted to a damaging misrepresentation of reality. ‘The criminal justice system is set up to represent the public rather than individuals, and there are good reasons for this.’ Ministers were accused of blurring the critical distinction between criminal (state) and civil (private) law. Putting crime victims ‘at the heart of the process’ implied a return to the days of the medieval feudal courts, when accuser and accused argued their case on equal terms. Such a move, it was argued, threatened the legitimacy of the justice system as protector of the wider public interest. It might also undermine the right to a trial based on objective testing of the evidence, rather than passion or sentiment.

  Another consequence of putting the victim centre stage has been the rise of ‘penal populism’ — an increasingly punitive attitude to crime that has forced politicians and the judiciary into having to defend themselves against the accusation that they are ‘soft on crime’. When the press covers a big trial, it is usual practice to ask the victim of the crime on the steps of the court what they thought of the sentence. It is entirely understandable that most would have wanted the judge to have been tougher. Should they actually say they thought the sentence was fair, we cast them as curiously forgiving. No victim is ever likely to say the sentence was too severe.

  Penal populism is not driven only by the media. The criminal justice system itself is sometimes complicit. In 2007 the Ministry of Justice put out a press release under the
headline ‘Victims of crime want punishment’. It cited a survey which found that almost half (49 per cent) placed punishment as the most important part of an offender’s sentence. But read on and one discovered that 81 per cent would prefer an offender to receive an effective sentence rather than a harsh one and that an overwhelming majority of respondents (94 per cent) said the most important thing to them was that the offender did not do it again.

  Part of the reason that most people in Britain still believed crime was rising fifteen years after it began to fall is that government ministers, police chiefs and others did not seek to challenge that mistaken view too strongly. In political terms there was a perceived danger that they would appear complacent, but also, pragmatically, they knew that resources tend to follow the problem; if the public were to accept that their chances of being a victim of crime were lower than at any time since government first started measuring these things in 1981, budgets might well have been cut. In fact, in the decade from 1995 in which recorded crime levels halved, the budget of the police increased by 40 per cent in real terms.

  There is another reason as to why people believed crime was rising when it was falling — their relationship with the world just beyond their front door. As I discuss elsewhere in this book, when local roads, alleys and parks were busy with people walking about, communities effectively operated a watch and ward scheme by default. But the retreat from the street, the move from the public to the private domain inspired by the motor car and the television set, left large areas of our towns and cities unsupervised. Into this vacuum have moved the twenty-first-century equivalent of the ‘Boys & Girls, wandering & prowling about in the streets & by-places’. Loitering youth is, according to surveys, the single biggest source of community anxiety.

  Just as Patrick Colquhoun looked to a police force to deal with ‘pursuits either criminal, illegal or immoral’ on the River Thames in 1795, so the public today look to the police to deal with antisocial behaviour in their neighbourhood. Britain’s obsession with crime and disorder reflects anxiety about the state of our society and has little to do with the scale of the threat. The sadness is that the fear feeds on itself and eats away at our quality of life.

  K is for Knives

  On my first day as a cub reporter on my local newspaper in the late 1970s, I held the naïve view that the press was there to oil the wheels of our precious democracy. With my humble pen I would expose falsehood, prick pomposity and counter ignorance. I was a force for truth: power to the people! Thirty years later I still strive to tell the truth. But I do so with the knowledge that daily news is a commodity, just like pork bellies, coffee beans or silicon chips. It is manufactured to be marketed, traded, bought and sold.

  Of course knowledge of contemporary affairs is a force for good, but I am not so green as to imagine that the news industry is always governed by principle ahead of profit. Globalisation and consumerism has transformed the newsroom in the same way it has the high street. Just as I can now buy a soda or a sofa at three in the morning pretty much anywhere in the developed world, I can also get my fix of headlines.

  Staying ahead is thought to rest on staying in touch, as if to avert one’s eyes from the 24-hour news channels for more than a few moments would see competitors race past you. Vast news hypermarkets churn out stories around the clock — some of their output little more than cut-and-paste rehashes, but sold with the thin promise that customers will know what is going on.

  Demand for high-quality news massively outstrips supply and outlets constantly struggle to fill the shelves. There isn’t always enough important stuff happening to keep the presses continuously rolling and so the vacuum has been filled by thousands more news production lines: story factories run chiefly by those who wish to influence the news agenda for their own advantage.

  This is not necessarily as sinister as it may sound — a charity’s media team will work tirelessly to compile a ‘news story’ in order to highlight their cause; a pressure group researches and writes a report to promote an issue close to its heart. But, in Britain, the most powerful and influential of all the manufacturers are to be found in a small patch of London SW1. Indeed, a great deal of what we think of as ‘the news’ reflects the particular and current interests of those inhabiting the Westminster bubble: the politicians, lobbyists and journalists who ply their trade around Parliament.

  Political salience dictates what is important. In the crowded middle ground where British politics is now conducted, arcane differences become front-page headlines, with the elbow jostling of the parties turned into a narrative of accusation and rebuttal, spin and smear. Weaknesses must be exploited, attacks must be neutralised. In such a fevered environment, there may be little time for sober reflection. When this happens, reality can easily get drowned out by the thunderous rattle of the Westminster story machine. Whisper it not, but our democracy sometimes manufactures myths.

  This is the tale of one such fable: the knife crime epidemic that never was.

  No one in Britain during the summer of 2008 could have been left in much doubt that the country was suffering from a wave of fatal teenage stabbings. The leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, attended a vigil for one victim and described knife crime as having reached ‘epidemic’ proportions. Each new tragedy, granted front-page status by the papers, added to the sense that a ghastly phenomenon was sweeping the streets of Britain. ‘If we don’t do something now, it will go on and on,’ the leader of the opposition said.

  The Tories knew that the horrible crimes, documented almost daily, played neatly into a broader narrative they were hoping would take hold. With the government suffering in the opinion polls, Mr Cameron was determined to ram home his advantage by painting Britain as a ‘broken society’. The phrase had particular poignancy alongside the punctured corpses of young men.

  That there was no hard evidence that knife crime was getting worse was irrelevant. As I was told by hardened hacks on my local paper thirty years ago: ‘Never let the facts interfere with a good story.’ Prime Minister Gordon Brown had no option but to respond to the rising sense of alarm. It was politically inconceivable to deny there was a problem — that would leave his party exposed to the charge that they were callous and complacent. So a knife-crime ‘summit’ was held at Number Ten Downing Street. There was the promise of a ‘crackdown’ and ‘tough measures’. It was a classic sequence: moral panic, hurried political reaction, futile (probably counter-productive) response.

  On this occasion, part of the response was the unveiling of a new acronym — TKAP. The Tackling Knives Action Programme demanded that police resources in high-crime areas across England and Wales should be targeted at young men who carried blades. However, among some senior police officers there was puzzlement and anxiety. Evidence that knife crime was getting worse was restricted to the number of stories in the newspapers. The official crime statistics did not include a category for knives and so it was difficult to know what was happening. The Home Office data suggested no obvious spike in serious violent crime overall. If anything, the figures appeared to show violence declining. Some thought TKAP had the smell of a short-term political fix.

  As a rough average, two people are murdered every day in Britain. The most common weapon used is a blade or other sharp instrument. The most likely stab victim is a young man. It has been like that for decades (see ‘M is for Murder’). So, after the Downing Street summit, as the months rolled by, there was no shortage of fresh tragedy, further fatal stabbings to advance the knife crime fable. From this raw material, news organisations were able to fashion other stories: tales of human interest, political intrigue and passionate polemic in abundance. Editors knew that these accounts played to a common fear: that the security of traditional community values was being usurped by the brutal individualism of blade and bullet.

  Inside Number Ten there was a different anxiety: that the government would seem powerless against a tide of viciousness on the nation’s streets. Gordon Brown — portrayed
by his opponents as a ditherer unable to repair a broken Britain — needed to appear decisive and in control.

  In late 2008, the Prime Minister attempted to seize the initiative. It was decided that the 11th of December would be the day he would go to a community centre in south London to launch a new ‘No to Knives’ campaign, endorsed and supported by a host of celebrities from sport, music and television. But a foray across the river, even with soap stars and a couple of Premier League footballers, would not be enough to convince the public that the government was making a difference. Mr Brown needed some facts.

  The problem for the advisors looking to prove the success of government activity was that there were very few hard facts to exploit. The Home Office held no statistics to show that knife crimes had been rising, never mind data to show that it was now going down. Still, Number Ten was determined to demonstrate progress and so they scoured Whitehall for evidence. The search led them to the Department of Health, which counted patients discharged from hospital after being admitted with stab wounds. The NHS stats people were contacted and the latest provisional figures were sent to London.

  It looked as though Brown’s team had found what they were looking for: the statistics showed a 27 per cent fall in the number of stab victims admitted to hospital in those English areas targeted by the government’s action programme. Here was the ‘proof’ that the PM’s decisive plan on knives had worked.

  A press release was put together, trumpeting the success of TKAP. But with just hours to go before the Prime Minister’s glorious announcement, the NHS stats team got wind of what Number Ten was planning — and they were not happy. The figures had only been sent to Downing Street on the understanding that they would not be published. It is standard procedure that ministers may look at statistics before formal publication only if they promise not to release the figures. On this occasion there was very good reason not to publish them: the hospitals hadn’t finished counting stab victims and so the figure was likely to give a misleadingly rosy picture.