Lord Bird
Main Page: Lord Bird (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, I am pleased to be speaking on the important and inclusive report and discussion from the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor. She has got everything in there, absolutely everything. The noble Baroness has even included the roots, so we have to go to the roots; we have to solve the problems. We cannot just keep dealing in arithmetic or with the manifestation or effects; we have to get to the cause.
I commend the Government for saying such wonderful things, but I would like to know where the word “austerity” comes in, because I think that is the only term left out. We cut the youth offending team bill by 50% since 2010, and you think whether that brings us any nearer the solution. Is it necessary to cut money and take 20,000 policemen off our streets? Is that a strategy for improving the chances of us not having so many of our children murdered? Does cutting the YOTs add to our chances of getting nearer to Valhalla, when we will have the chance of enjoying our children knowing they are all out there, doing very well, prospering and having an incredibly long life?
That is the problem with this discussion, because we always leave out money, when it should be brought forward and talked about—the arithmetic of the capital that you put in and the returns from that capital, the social capital of investing. For instance, there is the bizarre situation where we fail 38% of our children at school and yet wonder why a decisive amount of those who fall into crime come from this failed group of people. According to some of the organisations that work there, 80% of the people who fill our prisons come from a failure at school. If you were to ask those children who were carrying and running drugs, and sticking their knives into other people, how they did at school, I bet you a pound to a penny they would say, “Not very well at all”.
It is interesting that we talk about wanting to sort out the tree by getting down to the roots. The roots all go back to poverty, unfortunately. There is no other major reason why we have crime on our streets, murders, gangs and young people who are prepared to move drugs around the country than this shortage of resources way down the line.
I will talk about who this person is. Imagine there is one person who ends up sticking a knife in somebody, dealing in drugs or even becoming a victim. If you look at that person, you will see that it is someone who comes from need and, often, as the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, has pointed out to us, comes from a broken home—but that person will come from a family which was probably uneducated after the Second World War. In 1948, we had that wonderful thing called the welfare state, invented in a very strange sort of way, as well as a pretty good way. They creamed off the 11% so that they could run the system and become the managers, and then they created the secondary modern school system, which actually created a curriculum or pedagogy to produce people who did unskilled and semi-skilled work. If you look at those children who are now involved in crime, I bet that their fathers or grandfathers come from that cohort of undereducated people, where the state educated people for jobs that were seriously disappearing.
As Margaret Thatcher proved, when she broke the link with government support and removed all the subsidies for the major industries, what you need to do is to move forward with the times and close down the old industries. What happened was that an enormous number of unskilled and semi-skilled jobs disappeared, and we started to grow an underclass of people who moved from one generation to another generation and who themselves were blasted in the kind of culture that they were given.
I know many of those people—I come from them—and there was a person whose family I grew up with who imported the largest amount of cocaine into this country. I know why he did it—he was a criminal—but I also know that he was dyslexic and a person who, when he went to the North Thames Gas Board to get a job, was not given one because he could not read the meters. I know that there were precious few forms of skills that he could tap into, because he had been to a comprehensive school that did not recognise him as someone with enormous organisational skills who should be given the job of running the Bank of England.
I know all sorts of other things. If you actually look at the culture and social profile of most of these young children who are being murdered or are murdering people and running drugs, I am sorry to say that very rarely do they come from the comfortable classes; they come from the discomforted classes, the people who have been short-changed on the kind of education that they desperately need. Until this Government, the next Government or the Government after that really get behind the idea of skilling up the neediest among us, we will be talking about crime, inventing YOTs and JOPs and ROPs and all sorts of other things. We will be talking about cutting police officer numbers or putting on more—we will be doing all those sorts of things, but we will not be addressing the major thing until we hit poverty. That may mean that this or the next Government have to step back and ask what this ecosystem of failure is that we keep repeating and talking about; we keep coming up with solutions, but they never configure.
It is interesting what the noble Lord, Lord Hogan-Howe, said—that you can go to the marketplace and buy cocaine quicker than you can buy a pizza. There is another element, is there not? What is happening is the commercialisation of all the sensations that you can pick up, and this is a lot to do with how we train and educate our children. We have to break people from that kind of stimulus and that kind of world where they take any kind of placebo to hide the fact that their lives are ill formed, unadventurous and unexciting.