Hoodie Justice

Blimpish describes Blair’s Third Way as “Majorism with Marketing“. If you needed any further proof that Blair is the same kind of whinnying little prig as his predecessor, you only had to listen to his self-serving but ultimately hollow homily on anti-social behaviour at his monthly press conference today.

He may speak like a Media Studies graduate in a Marketing department trying to impress his team leader over a lunchtime pint, put his rhetoric is as old as the hills. At any moment I thought he was going to promise to eradicate the Teddy Boy Menace.

“Respect towards other people is a modern yearning as much as a traditional one,” he said in his official capacity of bridgehead to the future.

Respect’s the word we’ve been hammered with since Blair’s victory speech on the steps of Number 10 last week. He wants to “bring back a proper sense of respect in our schools, in our communities, in our towns, in our villages.” Notice the Majorish “villages”, harking to some rural idyll.

And yet you know this is just more empty-headed piffle. Respect. Respect. Respect. It’s just yet another word to be appropriated, repeated until the focus groups are sick if the sound of it and then discarded. This is more about controlling the news cycle and deflecting from Blair’s wounded premiership than ushering in some golden age. Blair might as well as said he wants to bring back chivalry. At least us blokes would get to wear natty capes and carry swords again.

Blair’s and John Prescott’s leaping on the story of the shopping centre banning people wearing hoodies was as New Labour as it gets. Prescott even referred to hoodies as a uniform. Hoodies, oooooh-oooh-ooooh! If only teenagers would wear bowler hats and white boiler suits, they could truly become the terrifying force New Labour need them to be. New Labour have clearly given up on the idea – like it wasn’t a piece of kite-flying Sunder paper filler – of giving 16 year-olds the vote. As if hoodies were a harbinger of dread on a par with the Yakuzas’ missing pinkie. It’ll work like a charm, no doubt, hoodie wearers being the unthinking, unreasoning Morlocks of modern folklore with nothing else but a variety of the Leisure Sportswear Top of the Devil in their wardrobes. Yep, it’ll be hoodie or nekked. The threat of youth thwarted once more.

At the press conference today Blair tried to empathise with people who’d been mugged, like he had even the remotest inkling of what being mugged is like. We’re talking about a man who went from Fettes (“the Eton of Scotland”) to Oxford to the Bar to politics. He has virtually no idea what the real world is like. So lacking in worldly experience is he that he had to make up interesting little vignettes about himself to seem more impressive. Witness how many real people and not party activist stooges he met during the campaign. You put him in front of a Sharon Storer and he hasn’t a clue. I’ve been mugged and it was a terrifying experience. Remember Blair being lambasted by Storer? I was that frightened.

It makes you wonder if Blair gets his impressions of what the world is like beyond his bomb and bullet-proof, gated splendour by watching Monkey Dust. Nobody’s denying that anti-social behaviour isn’t a problem – it’s clearly more of a one than al-Qaeda but all this talk is just that.

It’s not so long ago since Blair was defending a Deputy Prime Minister who’s instinctive reaction on being hit with an egg was to punch the culprit. He also has a son who, at the age of 16, was once scraped up out of his own vomit in Leicester Square and then lied to the police about his name and age.

So, how to restore respect? You can’t pump it into the air conditioning system on the underground or distribute it as a fine mist from crop-sprayers. We’re told that thanks to tax credits and other macguffins, the living standards of the working poor have never been as good and yet the ingrates are still puking in the gutters and fighting in our city centres.

Welfare disincentives have been mentioned today by some pundits (as well as other catch-alls like, natch, single parents and “fatherlessness”) as a potential stick to knock some sense into our underclass. The key to that argument being forgotten in that to make somebody poorer often has the side effect of driving them closer to criminality not further away.

And with New Labour it’s the contradictory policies. They decry binge-drinking but want to relax the licencing hours. Personally, I think it’s a good idea if only it’s regulated properly (which you can’t always bank on under this government) but it’s been sold in such a piss-poor way that it gives everybody against it a free hit. And casinos. We’ve never been so well off so we need new ways to be parted from of our cash. Maybe the new super casino (just one mind. Yeah, right) to be built wherever will be filled exclusively with the idle rich with disposable income to burn. But there might be one or two people in there risking the housing benefit while the kids are God knows where.

Governments of either hue have never been really interested in getting to the root causes of this kind of thing. There’s very few votes to be won in sink estates or from young people. They’re a very effective bete noire for that very reason. But if some young people have nothing to do then they’re going to knock their girlfriends up or get drunk (like teenagers haven’t done that since Adam were a lad, but still). My family weren’t the Rockefellers but I wasn’t a teenage dad or drunk. But then I know families in a similar mould who’s sons were just that.

The maxim of the Devil and idle hands still holds true I suppose but that’s not a very technocratic, shiny, marching to the future, New Labour way of looking at it. I suspect the onus, like with school meals, will be on parents again. No doubt there’ll be some spurious, nebulous rhetoric about rights and responsibilities, respect, choice and other such middle class emollients but very little real support for those at the sharp end.

Support agency staff are overloaded, demoralised, demotivated and apathetic. It’s noticeable that there’s been no mention of how you legislate against a lack of respect and not much talk of what money, if any, is going to be brought to bear on the problem.

It’s an interesting game to play with New Labour initiatives to see how long their shelf lives are. This one’s starting to smell already.