The Wire

I came across this blog post on the internet a couple of days ago regarding the crass, headline-chasing remarks by Conservative MP Chris Grayling - who if the Tories win the election will be Home Secretary and someone who seems most unlikely to have the box sets of this excellent TV series in his collection.

It is a well written critique that exposes how thoroughly ridiculous and self-serving Grayling's outburst was.



by John Owens

Two figures huddle over a man, wrapping him in cellophane ready to be sealed in an abandoned house. His body is just one of many that fill the numerous empty buildings in the area, people killed for a bad look or a bad word. The police, already in over their heads with murders, would rather not find out- he's just another statistic, no one important.

This is modern life in Britain. Broken Britain. Under Labour. Except, of course, it's not. It's a scene from series four of The Wire. Which is set in Baltimore. Which has a murder rate of 36.9 per 100,000. The average murder rate in britain is 1.4 per 100,000 .

Shadow Home secretary Chris Grayling, who today made a speech in which he claimed that violence in society had become "a norm and not an exception" and talked of "when The Wire comes to Britain?s streets" , seemed to like the soundbite enough to gloss over these minor disparities. Talking of time spent in Moss Side, a notoriously rough part of Manchester, he described how "urban warfare", generated by gang culture, was a daily fact of life for residents in the area.

Detective Superintendent Darren Shenton, who heads Manchester Police's anti-gang crime unit, was nonplussed by the assertion, labelling the term urban warfare "sensationalistic" . Unimpressed that his patch was being used by Grayling to ramp up hysteria, he also pointed out that gang-related shootings had plummeted by 82% on the previous year's figures. A man armed with the facts to prove that the police's strategy was actually working, Shenton was right to speak up.

I'm not going to dispute that places like Moss Side are blighted by a dangerous gang culture. Or that the ever-intertwined issues of poverty, deprivation and violence need to be discussed. But Grayling's efforts at being down with the kids through the use of pop culture posturing does nothing to address these issues. Instead, it relies on conjuring up entirely inappropriate and ill-fitting images to misportray what Britain is like today.

Let's not forget that The Wire's gaze does not just fall upon the law enforcers and the law breakers. It extends to politicians, and shows a number unafraid of using a bit of hyperbole to stir up fear and score a few electoral points.

Grayling's speech makes sense within the overblown framework of the 'Broken Britain' campaign, which, as slogans go, is up there with 'War on Terror' for utter unhelpfulness, and though the comparison with Baltimore does not tell us much about what is really going on in terms of crime, it does point us towards why British residents are so much more terrified about this issue than they need to be.

Recent figures from the British Crime Survey show that though the number of homicides dropped by 17% in 2008/9 to a 20 year low, and crime decreased generally by 5%, 75% of the public believe there has been an increase in crime nationally. What is striking is that only 36% believe this increase in crime occurred locally- i.e the fear of crime is not a fear borne by a sense of personal threat, but by a general impression that someplace elsewhere things are getting worse.

People are not stupid. But as the soundbites like this one gather up they become difficult to ignore. Someplace elsewhere - let's call it Baltimore-on-Thames- becomes not just slightly more crime ridden, but the home of a crime pandemic that must be wiped out, no matter how harshly.
There always needs to be the drive to improve things. Complacency signals the death knell of effective democracy. But transposing the imagery of some of America?s toughest streets onto Britain and pretending it sticks just doesn't cut it. All that happens in a make-believe battle over imaginary crime statistics is that an increasingly paranoid society will accept, and endorse, increasingly paranoid behaviour by parties that, when in government, have to live up to their electoral talk.

The media are far from blameless and the Tories are hardly the only political party responsible of generating this atmosphere. But with the kind of poll lead they possess, you'd hope the Conservatives could avoid the damaging kind of point scoring that comes with cheap and tacky rhetoric like this.