Letter to Cameron: Lead, don't demonise

In an ‘open letter’, Professor Gus John challenges David Cameron over his response to the recent civil unrest and calls upon him to stop scape-goating ‘the black community’ and giving ammunition to racists and fascists.

He tells the prime minister:

'The task of the "leader" is not to invite and lead a national lynch mob, a lynch mob to which racists, fascists, separatists, assorted bigots and whosoever seeks revenge on behalf of victims or of a hurting nation could feel they could justifiably rally.

'Much of what I have been hearing from the police, from crown prosecutors, from national and local politicians, from certain academics, from sections of the media and from various commentators is undoubtedly a recipe for strife, divisiveness and further social unrest. It encourages a ‘Big Society’ of bullies, self righteous and otherwise, and a spurious moral crusade that can only breed cynicism and discontent and fuel social exclusion.'

The prime minister and his coalition government have been making policy on the hoof and whipping up hysteria in the nation in the wake of the massive civil unrest the country witnessed recently. They have placed ‘gangs’ at the centre of the unrest and are scape-goating ‘the black community’ for what David Cameron calls the ‘slow moving moral collapse’ in society.

Despite the fact that people of different ethnic groups took to the streets and were involved in criminal acts, the prime minister is focusing almost exclusively upon ‘the black community’. His initial focus was entirely on ‘criminals’ and what they did to ‘our’ nation. Gus John argues that by focusing on ‘gangs’ David Cameron is signalling to the nation that those ‘criminals’ are black and that their criminality has to do with nothing else save for their desire to go out and destroy property, endanger people’s lives, loot and kill.

Even when Cameron began to acknowledge that there were underlying factors apart from a propensity to crime, he compounded the racial stereotyping by laying emphasis on ‘absent fathers’, parents who fail to control their children and ‘gang culture’, all part of the ‘moral collapse’ in sections of our society.

Gus John accuses Cameron of indulging in moral relativism and ignoring the fact that ‘the whole nation is steeped in moral turpitude’, from members of parliament to financiers, to journalists, to the police, reality TV, computer games and all the rest of it. And that is even before one examines the systemic processes over the last half a century that have led to the betrayal of one generation of black people after another.

Gus John reminds the prime minister that although, regrettably, five people were killed during the violent civil unrest, scores of people have been killed year on year since the late 1980s in crimes in which both perpetrators and victims were of African heritage. Gus John asks:

- why this sudden eagerness to tackle the problem of ‘gangs’?
- when our children were being murdered week in and week out in London and elsewhere year after year, why did government not look at the causes of the implosion that was so fatally evident in parts of our society?
- why did government, media and the nation generally regard it predominantly as ‘black on black’ crime and by implication nothing to do with the rest of us, thus allowing us to get on with business as usual?
- why is it only after the nation saw how destructive of property and disregarding of people’s lives that section of the population could be that there is this determination to deal mercilessly with ‘gangs’?

He calls upon Cameron, irrespective of whatever else he does in response to the civil unrest, to establish a ‘people’s inquiry’ into gun- and knife-enabled killings in the African community, a proposal he had sent to Theresa May, the home secretary, on 4 July 2011 and to which he had no response. The ‘people’s inquiry’ would facilitate fact-finding and focused conversations among young people, including those involved in ‘gangs’ or who were former ‘gang members’, those who live in fear of gangs, those doing preventative or rehabilitative work with ‘gangs’, parents and families, schools, neighbourhood workers, police, community safety officers and other key individuals and groups.

Gus John suggests that rather than going down the road of naming and shaming juveniles and creating extra places for them in young offender institutions or in pupil referral units, the crown prosecution service be asked to amend its sentencing guidelines such that restorative justice approaches could be applied in the case of juveniles and of adults charged with less serious offences.

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* Professor Gus John is interim chair of Parents and Students Empowerment, an arm of the Communities Empowerment Network which deals with some 1,000 school exclusion cases per year. He is an honorary fellow and associate professor at the Institute of Education, University of London, and an independent consultant. He was a member of the Street Weapons Commission and an adviser to Boris Johnson on serious youth violence. Gus John was the chair of the Moss Side Defence Committee following the civil disorder there in 1981 and has just published Moss Side 1981 – more than just a ‘riot’, with essays by Michael Ignatieff and Paul Rock.
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