Knife Crime

Debate between Bob Russell and David Lammy

Tuesday 27th November 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am grateful to have the opportunity to contribute to this important debate, Mr Davies. I congratulate the hon. Member for Clacton (Mr Carswell) on securing the debate and on the manner in which he made his remarks. I fully agree with aspects of what he said, in particular on the importance of the criminal justice system, but in some areas I would choose to differ.

I have now been in the House for 12 and a half years. Tottenham is my home and the community I grew up in, and when I first became its Member of Parliament, it had been in the news for many but not great reasons—I am not now talking about the football club—so I expected the tough, gritty inner-city issues to be my fare. One would expect London’s housing crisis and its immigration challenges, and issues such as welfare benefits and crime and disorder to be mainstream stuff for the Member of Parliament for Tottenham to bring to the House for debate, discussion and even disagreement, both with one’s own Government and that of other parties. What I did not expect 12 and a half years ago was that serious crime, such as murder, would escalate from being an issue affecting individuals and small communities to a serious national problem.

My period in the House has coincided with Operation Trident, which was set up to look at gun crime in parts of—I emphasise “parts of”—the black community. People use the phrase “black-on-black violence”, but it is not one that I have ever been comfortable with, and I have voiced that on several occasions. A small group of criminals, who were trading in drugs that originated in the Caribbean and America, made their way here through drug-trafficking routes and created a gun crime problem in certain neighbourhoods and communities in London. Legislation covering guns, together with serious enforcement by the police, bore down on that problem, and to some extent it has been contained, but in our capital city and our major cities we still see guns go off and we see crime related to guns. At the same time, the problem of knife crime has increased.

[Sir Bob Russell (Colchester) (LD)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman confirm for the record that three times as many people are killed by knives as by guns?

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am happy to confirm that that is exactly the case, and that goes to the point that gun crime morphs into knife crime. We saw knife crime morph from something we associated with particular tough, inner-city environments into a real problem across London, Manchester and Birmingham. It is significant that the hon. Member for Clacton is raising this as an issue in his community. This is a moment to pause and ask ourselves what has really happened, and why teenagers and young people so callously take life in this way. It is a criminal justice and enforcement issue, but only in part. There are underlying causes in our society which we must uncover.

There was a time in the 1980s when many of us would have looked across the Atlantic to north America and wondered whether drive-by shootings in cities such as Los Angeles and New York were just part and parcel of life in that country and had to be accepted, or whether the authorities would bear down on the problem and deal with it. Knife crime in this country is at that junction.

When we debate this issue, I think of so many families whom I have comforted in my surgery because they have lost children to knife crime in north London. The names do not now take up whole pages and sections of newspapers, but are small columns because knife crime has become such a regular occurrence in our country. Teon Palmer was 23 when he was stabbed to death in Edmonton last month. Pavel Zekaj was stabbed to death outside Burger King in Wood Green last month. Kevin Duhaney from Bruce Grove in my constituency was stabbed to death in Hackney over a girl, and his mum had to fundraise £7,000 for a funeral. Steven Grisales was 21 when he was stabbed to death on his way to Silver Street station in Edmonton where he was pelted by conkers by a gang of youths.

The case of Godwin Lawson touched me greatly, as did his parents. He was a wonderful and incredibly talented young man who went to a great secondary school. He was just 17 and doing so fantastically well at football that he had been picked by Oxford United. He was training in Oxford to become a great footballer of the next generation, and perhaps to play for Spurs one day. He came back to north London for a weekend to see his family and friends, and when walking innocently down the road in the Stamford Hill area of my constituency he was stabbed to death for no reason other than being on the wrong side of the road and looking in the wrong way at someone in a gang of youths. He lost his life. I pay great tribute to his parents, who set up the Godwin Lawson foundation.

What lies behind such actions? Why are young men—on the whole it is young men, but sometimes it is young women—choosing to pick up knives? Why do they need that weapon? Is something going on in our society in how young men are forming a mature understanding of masculinity? Should we look at that in a more meaningful way? Does it matter that the young men who commit those crimes have so often not had responsible male role models in their lives? Is fatherhood a feature, and are we willing to discuss that, or is it irrelevant that there is an absence of responsible role models, be it a father figure or a school teacher? Does it matter that some of our primary schools have an absence of male teachers? Does it matter that we are living in a society that has made decisions similar to those in the United States of America, which have led us down the road of rampant materialism and consumerism, creating deep feelings of violence and misogyny, and leading to a culture in which whole groups of young men think it is okay to stab someone for no reason? Is that relevant to the debate and, if so, what are we going to do about it? I think it is relevant.

I was deeply disturbed to be contacted by a games console company a few months ago, which was putting together a game for which it was using the Tottenham riots as the backdrop. Is that acceptable? The company rang my office to ask me whether I wanted to feature in the game. What kind of society are we living in if it is okay to profit from something that caused so many Londoners and others across the country so much despair, and indeed, in which five people in Britain lost their lives? Does this matter?

I have come to the view that only five things are the ingredients of a successful society and country: education, employment, community, aspiration and parenting. We have a lot of discussion about education in the House and, although there is still much to do in our schools, my sense is that teachers are doing a hell of a lot, and there has been a great deal of attention on that area of policy.

We see problems when we look at the environments that so many of the young men who are committing this crime come from. They are from some of the toughest housing estates in the country, and particularly, from some of those tower blocks—such as the one that I grew up in; Broadwater Farm in Tottenham—that have gone from being working-class environments to workless-class environments. That workless class is not just about our GDP; it is about the character and dignity that comes from work, and particularly, about what surrounds the masculine culture in the environments that these young men come from and thrive in. If there is a culture of sitting around and doing nothing, then we get decay, and then we get petty criminality. There is a lack of value, particularly as regards women, I might say, so we get domestic violence and so on. We see repercussions from income not coming in. There are neighbourhoods and estates where those things happen. I know—because I have visited them—that those environments are to be found in places such as Essex and Kent, and particularly in some of the seaside towns.

There is the business of aspiration and what one aspires to. Is someone aspiring to have the latest pair of trainers? If they do not have them, are they prepared to stab someone who does, or to break into Foot Locker or JD Sports, as we saw during the riots? What we are aspiring to is hugely important. How do we create a culture in which the idea of aspiration is deeper and more meaningful than some of the frankly lightweight and superficial ideas of it that we see? I do not want to knock shows like “The X Factor”, which I enjoy, but I worry that there is a dominant idea that aspiration relates to being in the public eye, like a pop star, when it can just mean doing meaningful work, and contributing to and raising a family. Those are much simpler notions of what genuine achievement is.

There is also community. One thing that we saw during the riots in Tottenham was that the idea of community is problematic, because there can be communities within communities. There, we saw a community on Blackberry Messenger, which was exclusively made up of young people and was closed—the police could not see it—who communicated with each other and caused mayhem and violence across our country. Communities within communities exist on Facebook, on Twitter and in some unhealthy counter-cultures and sub-cultures that we are tolerating in a world that says, “Choice is everything. You can choose to be in that community or not.” The problem is that if someone’s child is knifed as a consequence of the violence and the obscene ideas of human life that exist in those communities, my God, they wish that someone had intervened in a meaningful way, to give a different vision of what was possible.

Of course, we come back to parenting, recognising that, in the end, two thirds of a young person’s life is spent out of school, so it is not sufficient for us to berate schools and tell them to do all the work. Parents matter, but it is also about recognising that where there is only one parent struggling in one of these housing developments where people are not able to make a living wage, so they cannot be with their kids because they are doing two jobs and do not have the time, that can militate against parenting and against being family. It is also about recognising that far too many of the young people caught up in this problem have been through our care system in this country, where the state was meant to be in loco parentis, but basically failed. That has been captured very well by Plan B in his film “Ill Manors”, which hon. Members should get on DVD, if they have not seen it. It is a good illustration of what goes wrong. I want to emphasise to the hon. Member for Clacton that yes, there is a criminal justice context to this issue, but we have to get to the bottom of some of the reasons for it.

The police, through the gangs initiative that was launched by the Government last year, are doing a lot around enforcement, certainly in communities such as mine. We are seeing many young people who are caught up in gang activity and knife crime being arrested and put through the criminal justice system. The problem is that I am not at all convinced that prison, with its recidivism rates, or Feltham and institutions like it are yet at the point at which I can say with full confidence that young people will come out reformed, and they will not get caught up in crime again. We seldom want to discuss that in the House.

The Mayor of London launched the important Heron initiative in Feltham prison, which was designed to work with young people before they left. There were bespoke services to help young people into employment, to work on drug addiction, and to work on the things that they needed outside, but unfortunately, the results of that were poor. It looks as though the scheme has been scrapped by the Mayor because it was costly, and the payment-by-results method that he hoped would underline it did not work.

There is a lack of ideas in this area. The Mayor said that he wanted to create a generation of mentors, which is hugely important in this area, and I am sure that young people in Clacton will need that. However, if people do not have the time to be a mentor, that is a problem. It is hugely disappointing that although he announced that he wanted 1,000 mentors when he was first elected in 2008, the Mayor has managed to get only 28. That, too, is an area that will need a lot of attention if we are to halt the decline.

I heard what the hon. Gentleman said about stop-and-search. Blanket section 60 notices, as we saw in the run-up to the riots last year, are not the way forward for Britain’s young people. Those notices designate a whole constituency as somewhere that the police can stop and search. In Tottenham, we saw the figure rise from 50 such searches in January 2011 to 237 searches in July of the same year, and we can recognise what is significant about that July, coming, as it did, the month before we saw serious unrest in London.

Doing intelligence-led, informed stop-and-searches is not the problem; the problem is when the police get lazy, frankly, about who they stop and search. We have found in London that the issue is about the police officer distinguishing between a young man on the way to the gym or university wearing a hoodie, and a young man carrying a knife. In the end, in our model of policing—policing by consent—we must carry communities with us. Our policing relies on good young people working with the police and, ultimately, not being in fear of them.

I caution the hon. Gentleman to ask himself whether stop-and-search will help, and to reflect on the underlying causes of the problem. In this era, when there is enforcement activity, the diversion and engagement of young people will be really important. That will require resources, and it will require us to understand fully what works, but it will also require us to be honest about the phenomena in our wider culture that are bringing us closer to the United States than to some of our continental European cousins, and that are driving warped senses of masculinity so that teenagers think that masculinity can be found in a knife or a gang, rather than in watching football or doing something constructive in their local community.