ISLINGTON

INDEPENDENT WORKING CLASS ASSOCIATION

Knife Crime

22nd July 2008

While politicians wring their hands and mutter platitudes it's left to our young people to point the way forward...

In the wake of Ben Kinsella's death, it was perhaps telling that it was young people themselves who took the lead in both word and action.

Ben's sister, Brooke, made a heartfelt plea for youths to put down their knives and it was Ben's friends who organised the 400-strong march in his memory.

And as politicians floundered around for something meaningful to say, it was unsurprisingly Islington youngsters who also offered the most thoughtful contributions.

Michael Potten, 19-year-old winner of an EC1 New Deal Pride award, told the borough's councillors: "The gap between rich and poor leads to violence on the streets. In the capitalist society we are living in, everything is driven by money, so it is no surprise young people are starting to want money themselves. Some feel a quick and easy way to obtain money is to start selling drugs."

Sami Adam, 17 and Mohamed Abubakar, 16 added: "Living in poverty stricken neighbourhoods and with relative deprivation so evident across Islington - with multi-million pound complexes next to council estates - young people are raised surrounded by things they want but can't have, or do not have the opportunity to have. Opportunities are a vital part of putting a stop to violence, giving chances to young people stops them doing illegal activities."

The IWCA doesn't claim to know all the reasons behind the rise in knife crime amongst young people, nor would we claim to have all the answers, but we do believe some of the clues - as articulated by Michael, Sami and Mohamed - are all around us.

Because while it would be wrong to pretend there is ever an 'excuse' for the murder of any young person, whether it be Ben Kinsella, Nass Osawa or Martin Dinnegan (all killed in Islington this year), it would also be wrong to wring our hands, mutter platitudes and stick our heads in the sand like the politicians and pretend there are not deep and serious problems in our society.

As the young lads above have described, our society is a divided one. Inequality is at the highest level since it was first recorded in 1961.

And as recent studies have shown the most fractured communities are the most unequal ones. It is inequality, more than anything else, that affects the ‘mental health' of a community.

When Thatcher took power she made it clear that she believed there was ‘no such thing as society‘. Since then, under Major, Blair and now Brown, Britain has mirrored the cut-throat, free market model of the United States, with New Labour embracing the selfish, individualistic, I'm all right jack mentality of the US ultraconservatives.

And just as Britain mirrors US foreign policy, we also mirror the US boardroom culture that says ‘greed is good', a culture that is in turn mirrored on the streets in the form of a ‘get rich or die trying' culture of drugs, gangs, knives, guns and a booming prison population (the highest in western Europe).

A US-style distribution of wealth is producing US-style levels of violence.

Over the years, the IWCA has been mocked by all the establishment parties, Labour, Lib Dem and Tory, for our emphasis on community and why we believe it to be important.

When we warned that society would pay a high price for privatising public housing, selling off  community facilities, closing youth projects, encouraging a yuppie influx and creating a ‘social apartheid' in Islington, they said we should ‘move with the times'.

Maybe now the politicians might begin to listen to the working class communities of Islington and most importantly its youth.

05 August 2008 05:23