A village reclaims its own streets
I am particularly interested in a story in today’s Times about residents of the Hampshire village of Four Marks, who were so fed up with the crime and hooliganism in their neighbourhood and the failure by the police to do anything about it that they took matters into their own hands and set up street patrols, with the backing of the police:
Clad in luminous yellow jackets and armed with mobile phones, rape alarms and notebooks, the platoons marched out each evening to confront the troublemakers... Street patrols have since spread to several other wards in Hampshire and six forces have visited the area to see the project in action.
The initial group gathered by Mrs Hebbron included a director, a retired nurse and a charity administrator. They were warned by police not to take risks but to note down any impropriety. Before the scheme started many residents in Four Marks were afraid to leave their homes after dark and avoided eye contact with groups of youngsters. Most evenings Mrs Hebbron had to contend with youths vomiting or urinating in her garden and tirades of verbal abuse.
... ‘Our quality of life was falling,’ Mrs Hebbron said. ‘We went to the local police and wanted to be more of a partnership than be seen as victims. Now I have got to know those people I once feared and thought of as hooded nonentities. It is just about saying hello. I am able to reassure lots of elderly people that things are not as bad as they seem. It turns out it is just a minority of people going over the top and causing trouble.’
I have often written about a similar initiative I closely observed in Balsall Heath, Birmingham, where a group of locals organised a 24/7 street patrol to deter kerb-crawlers and drive out prostitution from their area. The outcome was not just that prostitution was driven out – and did not resurface down the road, either – but crime levels fell dramatically and the locals’ quality of life was transformed for the better.
There is of course a fine line between this kind of street action and vigilantism. Which is why it is imperative that any such initiatives must be organised with the co-operation of the police. But it seems to me that these schemes tackle one important reason for our increasing social disorder. This is that the informal policing mechanisms which once preserved public tranquillity, such as social disapproval, adults feeling the collars of young tearaways and perhaps most important of all, the presence on the streets of people specifically looking out for signs of trouble and thus sending the simple but crucial signal that disorder would be noticed and not tolerated, have generally disappeared.
This has been hugely exacerbated in turn by the general demoralisation of the police into serial bureaucratisation, political correctness and sheer professional incompetence, one sign of which has been the virtual disappearance of patrolling officers from our streets. That de-professionalisation needs to be corrected, for sure; but the policing of social norms cannot be left entirely to the police. If a community wants to be orderly, it first has to behave like a community and collectively draw very clear lines in the sand. And that, it seems to me, is the important insight of Four Marks.
Daily Mail, 15 March 2010
After the Night Of The Long Knives (the immortal term for the axeing of Cabinet ministers in the Sixties), is the hapless British electorate to be subjected to the Fight Of The Leaders’ Wives?
Last night, Samantha Cameron was unveiled to the nation as her husband David’s not-so-secret electoral weapon.
In a TV interview, she revealed such gems as how she fell in love with ‘Dave the politician’ on holiday, that he never picks up his clothes and makes a terrible mess in the kitchen, but that he has ‘never let her down’. Yuck. Tacky, or what?
This was not a one-off appearance by Mrs Cameron, but the opening of a new political front by the Tory leader. Indeed, he clearly deems this to be of such strategic significance that, in his own chummy TV chat with Alan Titchmarsh recently, he announced in advance that we would be seeing ‘a lot more of her on the campaign trail’.
This is in direct response to the starring role being played by Sarah Brown in the re-branding of her husband from dysfunctional weirdo to brave, stoical and tender family man.
Gordon Brown’s wifely weapon was first deployed when she introduced the Prime Minister at the Labour Party conference as ‘my husband, my hero’.
Subsequently, she has become regarded as his greatest asset, with more than 700,000 people on Twitter hanging on her every Tweet, not to mention her numerous celebrity acquaintances and high-profile championing of causes.
Not to be outdone, we are solemnly informed that Miriam Gonzalez Durantez, who hitherto has been all but invisible as the lawyer wife of the LibDem leader Nick Clegg, will speak publicly about her husband in yet another TV documentary to be broadcast next weekend.
We are told she is expected to give a ‘thoughtful’ appraisal of life with Mr Clegg, rather than a gossipy account of household trivia. Doubtless, few of us can contain our excitement.
Nor does this stop at political wives. For also appearing in last night’s documentary about David Cameron was none other than his mother, who informed the nation of such vital matters as how little David had sought to gain attention when he was in short trousers (nothing new there, then).
This surely gives a whole new meaning to the old joke that a politician will sell his grandmother to achieve power. Mr Cameron is selling his mother and wife — in order to sell himself. How many more relatives, one wonders, are lurking in the Cameron repertory support company?
Whatever next — a three-way TV debate between the leaders’ wives, perhaps, refereed by Richard and Judy?
Once, it was considered bad form to use political wives to prop up their husbands’ careers. Such women were merely seen, but not heard. A different world altogether now, it seems.
How deplorable. Not because leaders’ wives should be looked down upon as mere arm candy, but because it muddles up the public and the private spheres — which should be kept apart — and in the process demeans the whole business of politics.
This is not just because it focuses attention on the trivia of what these women wear or encourages a prurient fascination with domestic details that should be kept private.
More significantly, when we go into the voting booth we are being asked to choose between the candidates on the ballot paper. It is they and not their spouses who are standing for election.
So our opinion of those spouses should be irrelevant. But they are being paraded for our interest and admiration in order to influence our view of the candidate and make us interested in and admiring of him.
In fact, this should make us all the more wary. For the reason these leaders want to use their wives in this way is that they fear they can’t get elected on their own account.
Gordon Brown needs to combat the lethal impression that not only does he combine political incompetence with flying into violent and uncontrollable rages, but also that he is unable to relate normally to other people.
Hence the deployment of his wife, not only to paint a different picture of her husband as brave and loving, but also more subtly to suggest, through her own eminently grounded and sympathetic public persona, that Mr Brown must be a decent bloke since he is married to her.
Mr Cameron, by contrast, has gone to enormous lengths to portray himself as a normal family man: washing dishes, pushing prams, looking after his children.
Yet, despite all this effort, he is still regarded with suspicion. With the Tories’ opinion poll ratings falling, people think he is a supercilious product of public school and Oxbridge and thus remote from ordinary lives.
So his wife is being wheeled out to convey the message that he really is just like us, flaws and all. More subtly, this is also supposed to tell us that Dave can’t really be a toff because he’s married to Sam Cam with her ‘bohemian’ background, her dolphin tattoo and possibly (whisper it softly) the fact that she might once even have voted Labour.
This is, of course, absurd since it is Mrs Cameron who is the real toff, being the daughter of a landed baronet and stepdaughter of Lord Astor.
What all this cynical manipulation really tells us is that these politicians are just big girls’ blouses, using their womenfolk as the equivalent of political human shields from behind whose protective cordon sanitaire they can fire volleys of bogus bromides and pointless promises.
Shamelessly, it is designed to garner human — and particularly female — sympathy, particularly in view of the remarkable fact that Sarah Brown and Samantha Cameron have each tragically lost a child.
Playing upon the widespread view that politics is all about spin and distortion, it markets as an explicit contrast an image of family life that is presented as unarguable reality, with the leaders’ wives standing as guarantors of its authenticity. But we have no way of telling whether it is true.
It is also dangerous territory. For it drags into the public arena not just wives but family life in general, which was previously deemed to be immune from public scrutiny, particularly in order to protect the children.
By breaking the unspoken compact that wives are to be seen but not heard, these politicians are trying to have it both ways.
On the one hand, they assert that their family lives are private and therefore off-limits to the media; yet on the other, they are ruthlessly using their wives or mothers to help win them power.
So for our party leaders, it seems that this is what ‘family values’ really amount to — the political value to them of their own family.
Moreover, when political wives become the story, there’s often trouble, precisely because they are unaccountable. Think of Cherie Blair, or Hillary Clinton while her husband was in the White House.
Mrs Blair was widely resented for appearing to exploit her position as the Prime Minister’s wife, while Mrs Clinton was regarded in some quarters as the puppeteer pulling her husband’s strings. Yet this kind of disturbing uxorial ambiguity is being turned into a political virtue.
Using leaders’ wives in this way spells likely grief for them in an unseemly and distasteful contest, while our democratic currency, already so tarnished, is yet further debased.
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