Gangs

Diane Abbott Excerpts

Tuesday 11th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[Mr David Lammy (Tottenham) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to raise this important issue in the Chamber this morning, and I am grateful to my good and hon. Friend the Member for Streatham (Mr Umunna), who had the original idea for this debate, and brings such issues to the House regularly. You will recognise, Mr Caton, that in August we saw some awful scenes of social unrest in this country that we had not seen for a considerable time. Following those riots, much has been said about gangs in our society.

As the MP for Tottenham, it is important to say that although I recognise that gang members were certainly caught up in the violence, the evidence made available to me by local police, the arrest sheets and the issues arising from the riots suggest that it would be wrong to infer that those riots were orchestrated by gangs, or at least that gangs were central to them. The issues are complex and many, and include policing. The riots involved not just people who do not have a stake in society, but those who got swept up in the social unrest and found themselves doing unimaginable things.

We have an opportunity this morning to reflect on gangs and gang membership, how we are tackling the problem, the other crime and violence issues relating to gangs, and some of the underlying causes. The starting point is that gangs are not new. We probably all recall reading “Great Expectations” at school, and recognise that gangs are not a new phenomenon in British cultural life. Indeed, in other periods of hardship, young men in particular have clustered together and caused mayhem and havoc for those around them.

A particular phenomenon has developed in London, and has accelerated over the last decade. Associated with the gang profile are members who are increasingly younger and often teenagers, and a growth in knife crime. The figures for knife crime rose last year, as did those for violent crime among young people, and those of us who represent London seats suspect that we are seeing a rise in knife crime as we speak. Drug-related activity is also associated with gangs.

The issue is of tremendous concern. I am aware of four knife crime victims in the London borough of Haringey in the last two weeks alone. During the summer, one gang member was stabbed twice on two separate occasions in as many months. That is the toxic and worrying nature of the issue. When trying to understand the problem in the context of what success looks like for young people in a constituency such as mine, I usually boil it down to five issues: education, employment, community, aspiration and parenting. I want to touch on those five issues in relation to gangs and why young people in constituencies such as mine are being seduced into gang membership.

Constituencies such as mine and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) are often described as inner-city constituencies, although I have never liked the phrase because it suggests that it is acceptable to have an inner city when I would like to live in just one city. Some crimes are associated with seats such as ours, but the profile of youth violence throughout London has changed. The face of gang membership is diverse, and seems to be associated as much with the inner city as with suburban London. Parochialism is manifest in gangs, and I constantly find it peculiar to see the turf wars that go on between one gang in the N17 and N15 postcode and another in the N22 postcode in Wood Green.

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

Many incidents of gun and knife crime relate to conflicts between Tottenham-based gangs and Hackney-based gangs criss-crossing the border between the two boroughs.

[Mr Lammy]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. In days gone by, she and I have had to discuss attending funerals and memorial services for gang victims because of the sensitivities between those on one side of a street and those on the other side. In the Stamford Hill part of my hon. Friend’s constituency a wonderful young man, Godwin Lawson, who was an aspiring footballer, lost his life when he was brutally stabbed in the street one evening. His family have been so honourable in the tragedy that befell them. I remember walking with my hon. Friend in Stamford Hill where one side of the street was in her constituency, and the other was in mine. It seems that poor Godwin had simply strayed into a different patch, and died as a consequence. My hon. Friend has great experience of that, and we have seen hyper-parochialism develop throughout London.

Hon. Members in the Chamber will have similar experience of the obsession with postcodes. Many young people are worried that when they leave school, particularly secondary school, at 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon or travel on the bus to and from school they may cross postcodes and go into other areas. Parents who attend our surgeries say, “I don’t want my daughter or son to go to that school. I have to get to work, so they go to school on their own, and I am worried. They say that there are gang members on that bus, and that because they come from the wrong postcode there will be problems.” The local authority is co-ordinating and staggering school exit times to try to avoid such problems, but there are areas of London where young people who come from different postcodes meet—as one would expect—and things flare up. Gang activity is at the centre of that.

Over the past few years there have been gains in education, particularly secondary education, but all London boroughs have seen an increase in the number of children in care following the cases of baby P and Victoria Climbié. When I visit pupil referral units and look at the issues faced by children in care, I see a pattern that still prevails for young people in such circumstances. I am concerned that pupil referral units and help for children out of school remain, to some extent, a Cinderella service. Frankly, it should be a Rolls-Royce service if we are to support young people when they are at their most fragile, and prevent them from falling into trouble during those initial stages.

I have been clear that the rioting that we saw across London was of a complex nature. One important issue, however, is unemployment, and it falls to national Government to do something about that. The Northumberland Park ward of my constituency has Tottenham Hotspur football club at its centre, but it is also the ward with the highest levels of unemployment in London, with 20% of young people claiming jobseeker’s allowance. In some communities—I think of the Somali community and parts of the black community—that figure is double, and such unemployment stretches out for months and months. I am from Tottenham which, I remind the House, saw similar levels of unemployment during previous recessions in the 1980s. It is a tragedy that the parents who were unemployed then now have children who are unemployed—whole families who have not seen employment.

The issue is simple. As my mother used to say, “Idle hands make the devil’s work.” We need a firm grip on growth in our economy, and we must look at where jobs are and how we can get them to those families and young people. Most of my constituents who were in employment worked in the public sector—it has always been that way in the borough of Tottenham—but many of those jobs have been cut. Those employed in the private sector often work in retail and the service economy but, as the House will have seen from the latest figures, that sector is shrinking and no one is anticipating a boom Christmas sale period. It is hard for those twenty-somethings to get a foothold in employment and the economy. We have seen a growth in apprenticeships, but it is not clear that we have seen the scale of growth that is necessary, particularly in London and constituencies such as mine.

Despite all that we may learn from American senior police officers, unless they come with a growth strategy in their back pocket it will be pretty hard for my constituents to believe that staying off the street and in meaningful employment is a genuine prospect. One can knock on any door in the Northumberland Park ward and what people say is simple: why are there so many young people on the streets with apparently nothing to do? That is how people get caught up in gangs. As I have said, this is not a new subject; Dickens wrote about it—the Artful Dodger was effectively in a gang. A bit of petty theft here and a bit of small drug running there; that is how people get caught up in criminality, and before they know it they are carrying a knife for protection or, if really serious, a gun. That is the pattern we see.

[Ms Abbott]

I agree with everything my right hon. Friend has said about employment, but one aspect of the way that some young people are caught up in gang culture means that if they were offered a decent job tomorrow they would not take it, because they have grown accustomed to easy money and an easy life, and do not know what it means to get up and go to work at 8 o’clock in the morning, as our parents did. I do not want to take away from what he has said, but how to wean a generation away from a semi-criminalised subculture and into the world of work is a complex question.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Diane Abbott (Hackney North and Stoke Newington) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to speak in this important debate. The first thing to say is that gangs are not a new problem: many of the issues being debated today have been raised in the past. What has become frightening in recent decades, going back to the 1980s, is that inner-city gangs who once upon a time would have solved their disputes with their fists began to do so with knives and guns.

There is sometimes an assumption that gang culture, knives and guns are all a euphemism for young black criminality, but let me put it on record that there is not a racial issue with gangs. People are often surprised when I say that the knife crime capital of Britain is neither Hackney nor Tottenham, but Glasgow, which has had a knife crime problem since the 1950s. Gangs are about a toxic convergence of collapse of existing economic structures, a hyper-masculine culture, and increasing materialism, which we are seeing in the 21st century. I wanted to nail that because some of the debates that we hear in the media would have us believe that the problem is one for a particular ethnic group.

Although we in the House often talk about gangs as if they were all the same, gang culture is quite complex. For instance, an increasing number of girls are involved in gangs; there are even girl-only gangs. Some gangs are more on the classic Kray and Richardson model, which are relatively organised groups of men in their 20s or older involved in systematic crime. Often, however—this is one of the big issues in areas such as mine—much younger children in their early or mid-teens are involved in gangs, which are entirely chaotic, using firearms because of issues of respect, such as if someone steps on their shoe in a night club. Such gangs are harder to deal with and less amenable to control than the more stable and relatively sophisticated adult gangs. The police have told me that adult gang members despair of teenage gangs because they are so chaotic and cause so much uproar and upheaval.

As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) said, gangs did not cause the London riots. Clearly, many gang members were involved in the riots and were on the streets of London, but the idea that the riots were a consequence of organised gang activity is almost too easy and stops us from looking at the complexities behind the issue.

My right hon. Friend also mentioned the problem of postcode gangs, which shows how hyper and how calcified gang culture has become in the past 20 years. I remember walking down my road—Middleton road in Dalston, Hackney—and a young man buttonholing me and saying, “What are you people going to do so that there are more facilities for me? Otherwise, there is nothing for me but crime.” I said, “What do you mean? We have just built a brand new swimming pool at the end of Middleton road in London Fields park.” He said, “You don’t understand. The park is in one gang’s territory, and I live at the other end of the road, in another gang’s territory.” That young man genuinely was not able to cross the boundary to go to the end of the road to use the facility. The postcode nature of gangs makes it difficult to work with young people and provide the leisure facilities and youth clubs that they want. We can pump a lot of money into a club, but a lot of young people will not set foot in it because it is in the wrong postcode.

We talk about gangs in an entirely judgmental and negative way, but we must consider what they offer our young people. Unless we understand that, we will not know how to contest the culture. For many young people, the gangs offer a family, a structure and people whom they can look up to. In a completely warped and criminal way, the gangs offer guidance on being a man. We must understand that and the breakdown in the family structure that has happened if we are seriously to engage with the issue of gang culture. Of course we need to spend money on law enforcement, but we must understand that the gangs offer many young people safety and a quasi-family structure, which they do not get anywhere else.

There is also a huge amount of peer group pressure on young men, particularly on young black men, to join gangs. I live in Hackney and have brought up a son in Hackney. It is very difficult for someone to walk down the streets in Hackney if they are not in a gang or do not know what streets to avoid. We cannot underestimate the peer group pressure on perfectly decent young men from decent families to get involved in this semi-criminal activity.

The final incentive for being in a gang is economic. Someone who does not have a job and has no prospect of having one will view a little drug dealing, a little drug running and a little this and that as an economic model.

I want to talk about education, which is not the responsibility of the Minister but relates strongly to the issue of gangs. By and large, young men who are in college doing their AS-levels are not on the streets involved in gangs. There is a direct relationship between educational failure and criminal activity. Years ago, Martin Narey, who is now the head of Barnardo’s, said, “On the day you permanently exclude a child from school, you might as well give them a date and time to turn up at prison.” Until we engage with the long-term issue of educational failure, we will not properly deal with the roots of the gang culture, which is something that I have worked on for many years.

A few weeks ago, I went to my sixth annual awards ceremony for London’s top-achieving black children. The right hon. Member for Carshalton and Wallington (Tom Brake) was right when he said that for every one gang member there are thousands of young people in London who are trying hard, trying to get qualifications and trying to move forward. It is important that we do not see all our young people, particularly those in minority ethnic groups, through the prism of gang culture, because there is so much more going on; there are so many young people who are really trying.

Clearly, gangs are a law enforcement issue, and it is appropriate that we will hear from the Home Office Minister and his shadow, my hon. Friend the Member for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy). None the less, gangs are complex. They cover issues of family, breakdown of employment and access to jobs. When I was a child, my father was a sheet metal worker—he left school at 14 in Jamaica. Every day that God sent, he went to work. On Friday, he would come home with a brown wage packet and give pocket money and a bar of Cadbury’s fruit and nut chocolate to my brother and me. We grew up believing that a real man goes out to work and looks after his family, but the children on my estates have never seen that. Very often, they are in households with no male, let alone a male who gets up every day and goes to work. In the absence of that family structure, the lure of the gang with the apparent easy money, the glamour and the girls is strong.

There are issues of family structure, education and educational failure. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Tottenham said, pupil referral units—I do not mean to disrespect the people who work in them—are often little training academies for gangs. There are also issues of law enforcement and of resources. However, we must remember that each and every gang member, however frightening they may be and however abhorrent and criminal the activity they engage in, is someone’s child. There would have been a point in their lives at which, with the right intervention and the right diversion, they could have been put on the right path.

The Minister will talk about the law enforcement issues, but we also need a holistic strategy if we are to save a generation of young men of all colours and all ethnicities from a life of the street and the gangs. We all know that the life of a gang member is often very short. If these young men could see what awaits them, whether it is prison or dying in the road in a pool of blood, the immediate attraction of gangs would not be so apparent. It is for us as politicians and as members of the community to offer holistic strategies on the gang culture.