Following on from my defence of hug-a-hoodie I thought I'd add my tuppence worth on a related issue that I touched on there: "have-a-go-heroes".
On Tuesday night 28 year old Dee Willis was stabbed in the chest down the road from the Home Secretary's house, hours after the march against knives that followed Ben Kinsella's murder the day before. The stabbing of 16 year old Kinsella came a day after Hamouda Bessad was knifed in the chest in an internet cafe. This really can't go on.
Mayor Boris has rightly made tackling knife crime a priority but there's only so much that stop and searches (27000 of them have been
conducted in the last six weeks under Operation Blunt II), scanners and
amnesties can do. It's part of a knife and gang culture that requires cultural solutions as well as state solutions.
Boris was quoted yesterday telling young people not to intervene when their friends are getting beaten-up:
"Don't risk it, someone might have a knife - even if that may show a lack of public spirit if someone is being badly attacked".
It's a completely understandable message that will be echoed by mothers across the capital, but as sensible as it is - it sticks in the craw. Something's gone wrong with society when taking the public-spirited course of action is the wrong call. Ben Kinsella wasn't wrong to help his mates, he was unlucky that the real wrong-doers decided to pick on him.
In April the same Boris said people should "take a risk" in tackling trouble-making yobs because there was a "microscopic" chance of them stabbing you in retaliation. Have the odds really changed so much since then? Isn't the spirit that compels people to challenge anti-social behaviour the same sense of social responsibility that we so urgently need to nurture? Few things embody my political worldview more - actively taking responsibility for what's going on around you, not just leaving it to the blunt tool of legislation.
Don't accept the cycles of poverty on your council estate as inevitable, set up a community project to help people break out of them... Don't leave it to the government to green tax you to death, stick a windmill on your roof... And don't just stare at your newspaper wishing that abusive man on the tube wasn't there, do something.
Why has it become so bloody British to cower, to pretend nothing's happening? Labour's social policies over the last decade have done a lot to inculcate us with a sense that you do what you have to in terms of the law and taxes of the land, but do whatever you want with little regard for others outside of that - not least because conforming to the former is hard enough. But it's not enough. Do we want to live in a culture of fear or a culture of responsibility?
I'm not saying that you're a selfish coward if you don't attempt to physically tackle someone if you know they have a knife - most macho self-defence experts will tell you
that the odds will be stacked against you and that the best option is to always to run away.
But like with child molestation, as Graeme Archer wrote about brilliantly last week, the fear of that occurring is disproportionate to its likelihood. For every time someone is stabbed for intervening in a situation, there must be tens of thousands of situations that people are wrongly dissuaded from intervening in because "they might have a knife".
There is a dutiful, slightly old-fashioned strain of Britishness that still persists, particularly amongst the war generation. This gold dust is found in the people not afraid to tell you off for dropping litter, who give their seats up for others, who have a strong sense of what it means to live in a community.
Thankfully, it's also found in our new Shadow Home Secretary. Dominic Grieve, himself something of a have-a-go-hero, has hit on a key hurdle - that the state is hardly conducive to these acts of citizenship:
“If you grab a 12-year-old by the scruff of the neck now, you might be in trouble and this is something that we should be looking at."
He's called for the police and the Crown Prosecution Service to be given new guidelines for dealing with people who intervene to prevent crime. Good on him.