Report to the People
2nd June 2003
Safer Streets for Everyone
Did you see that story last week about the MSP who
wants to ban us from referring to the tracksuited thugs who
terrorise our communities as “neds”? It is,
apparently, “hurtful” to the delicate little souls.
Bless.
I’m not worried, though. I’ve got
plenty of alternative terms I can use to describe them –
although perhaps not in a family newspaper.
Whether or not an MSP should be spending his or
her time (and our money) concentrating on issues like this is, I
suppose, for you to decide. But I am always wary of the
politician whose response to every ill is simply to “ban it.
“ It’s not that easy. Murder and theft have
been banned since the time of Moses, but are they a thing of the
past?
The only serious way to tackle problems is not to
ban its effect, but examine the cause. To return to the
earlier example, the way to stop adults referring to some young
people as neds is to stop young people behaving like neds in the
first place.
This means extending anti-social behaviour orders
to the under 16s. It means tagging offenders. And it
means forcing parents to take a bit of responsibility for their
own children.
Not, though, that I want to demonise all young
people.
As I said in the Parliament during last
week’s debate on the Scottish Executive’s Programme,
the real victims of young people’s anti-social and criminal
behaviour are, in the main, other young people. It’s
young people whose education is disrupted by classroom violence.
It’s young people who are bullied, who are effectively
excluded from community resources because of gang violence and
who are robbed and assaulted in the street.
It’s hardly a surprise, then, that when I
talk to local young people, their calls to get the neds off the
streets are the loudest.
Not everyone, of course, agrees. Trendy
sneering from the usual suspects dismisses the action we are
taking as window dressing – tough talk with nothing behind
it. It is, according to them, a problem politicians have
somehow invented. I wonder whether they would hold the same
view if it was their kids who were scared to play at the local
park, or their parents terrified inside and outside their own
house.
We cannot let a small, selfish minority make
everyone else’s life a misery. And we cannot let those
with no understanding of the issue blow us off course.
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