Loitering.

With promises of public punishments and pre-crime powers for landlords, Sunak and Starmer are both cheered by a press that delights in cruelty.

Previously: Noticing.
Baroness Casey's report on the Met and Boris Johnson's appearance before the Privileges Committee lead to a brief and illuminating bout of noticing.

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The government will make it easier for landlords to prove antisocial behaviour in court by clarifying that any behaviour “capable” of causing “nuisance or annoyance” can lead to eviction. At present landlords must prove that antisocial behaviour has already caused annoyance or nuisance. 

— The Times, the morning of 28 March 2023

Landlord blamed tenants’ lifestyle for mould in flat where boy, 2, died

— The Times, the afternoon of 28 March 2023

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The British press often presents dystopian concepts as if they are simple expressions of common sense. In the paragraph quoted above, the plan is to let landlords (one of the nation’s most sociopathic groups) pass verdicts on pre-crime — an idea born in Philip K. Dick’s fiction — into a reality. Why should a landlord have to prove you are causing annoyance or a nuisance — already highly subjective terms — when they can simply claim that you might because you have a musical instrument, some cooking utensils, or worst of all, a baby (unborn or already ex-utero; a constant noise complaint in waiting)?

The piece is bylined to Matt Dathan, nominally the paper’s Home Affairs Editor but functionally a hype man for the Home Office provided by a generous grant from the Rupert Murdoch Fund for Global Decrepitude, and includes no quotes from opposition parties (no point in asking Labour because it will just demand even more authoritarian measures), academics, or campaign groups who might object to the policy proposals. There is also a howling absence of analysis.

Look at this paragraph:

All new private tenancy agreements will have to include clauses that specifically ban antisocial behaviour. The notice period for eviction on these grounds will be cut from four to two weeks. Grounds for eviction will include “persistently problematic tenants” who cause disturbance through noise, drunken behaviour, drug use and damage to property, as well as falling behind on rent.

Someone engaged in journalism rather than acting as a fleshy megaphone might ask what the government proposes to do when homelessness — already rising — is vastly inflated by this policy of speed evictions. They might also query why landlords, already turned into border guards by the hostile environments, are to be encouraged to cosplay as Judge Dredd. Finally, they would probably ask how the state intends to help vulnerable people, particularly children, who are thrown out of their homes with two weeks’ notice.

In its 2019 manifesto, one of that year’s least read and yet most successful bits of fiction, the Tory party promised to end Section 21 ‘no fault’ evictions. It has stalled on that pledge and now proposes to hand landlords (of whom there are many on their benches and the opposition side) a new set of ways to force tenants out. Anyone who has rented from a private landlord knows that what counts as ‘unacceptable’ behaviour is elastic and irrational; the criteria shift depending on the whims and commercial interests of the individual rentier.

Aisha Amin and Faisal Abdullah were not renting from a private landlord when their son Awaab Ishak died in December 2020 from a respiratory condition caused by exposure to mould in his home. Their landlord was the social housing organisation Rochdale Boroughwide Housing, where racist managers blamed the damp in the flat on “ritual practices” and ignored multiple complaints from the family about the condition of their home.

The housing ombudsman for England, Richard Blakeway, concluded that tenants were judged according to “staff members’ prejudices, lazy assumptions and an attitude towards asylum seekers and refugees that is wholly unacceptable”. A survey of the estate where Awaab lived and died found that 80 per cent of the homes suffer from damp and mould and that 12 of 380 properties were classed as category one hazards (posing a serious and immediate risk of harm).

Landlords — especially the gobby landlord ‘influencers’ of Twitter and TikTok — will be quick to note that Amin and Abdullah were not renting from one of their faultless number. Well, in February 2023, Citizens Advice research found that 1.6 million children currently live in privately rented homes with damp, mould and/or excessive cold and that 2.7 million households are facing one or more of those issues right now.

The very landlords that are not addressing health-threatening conditions in their properties are the ones the government wants to give more power to kick people out for ‘causing a nuisance’, like, perhaps, complaining about the damp. And we have a political and media class that is absolutely lousy with buy-to-let landlords; the rentier class runs through the centre of them like the most odious possible message in a stick of Brighton rock.

Analysis by Transparency International UK in July 2022 showed that at least 312 residential properties owned by 177 MPs (27 per cent of the MPs in Parliament) were not occupied by them or a family member, and of those 113 MPs generated significant income (£10,000 or more) from their additional properties. 107 of the landlord MPs are located in London and the South East. MPs are three times as likely as the general public to own rental property.

Hypocrisy is at the heart of the authoritarian circus acts being performed by both government and opposition. Sunak’s Tories are promising to bring in two-year jail sentences for possession of nitrous oxide (scare storied up as “hippy crack” by newspapers like The Sun and The Daily Mail whose staff toilets have seen more white powder than a snow globe).

The point man for talking up the ‘tough’ new policies on the Sunday morning shows was Michael Gove, who admitted in 2019 that he had taken cocaine on “several occasions” when he was a young journalist. His “mistake” came with no professional, personal, or custodial consequences, as it rarely does for well-connected products of Oxbridge.

The government’s own advisors on drugs policy cautioned against criminalising laughing gas but the clue to why they were ignored lies in Gove’s focus on canisters “despoiling public spaces” before going on to say the drug “can [also] have a psychological and neurological effect, and one that contributes to antisocial behaviour overall.” It’s a description that applies equally — in fact, more so — to alcohol which keeps its plum spot in British public life through tradition and taxability.

Labour’s sneering deputy to the deputy chief prefect and shadow culture secretary Lucy Powell was also giddy — through the natural Labour Right means of endorphins triggered by an opportunity for cruelty — about the laughing gas ban and also led with the true horror — litter:

I think it does cause a huge amount of littering, of disruption, and of antisocial behaviour challenges as well.  

Laughing gas is an easy one to target because its a drug taken by young people with a waste product that’s noticeable to the voters from whom both Tories and Labour most crave votes:

The pinched face curtain twitcher; the garden fence complainer; the bus stop sneerer; the Waitrose volunteer Stasi; the sort of person who buys their own noise pollution monitor for Amazon Prime next-day delivery; the pub snug hanging judge; the people who share their Ring doorbell footage on Facebook groups and in feverish NextDoor posts; the Daily Mail reader who is never happier than preventing someone else from experiencing the joy that they have not felt since a brief moment in 1987, which probably involved a fresh pile of Filofax pages.

It is for this character that Keir Starmer raged about the life-destroying smell of weed in his crime and punishment speech last week, and for whom the following proposals briefed to The Times by the twitchy Tory Party are designed:

• An expansion of drug testing on arrest and plans for on-the-spot tests.

• On-the-spot fines for littering and graffiti will more than triple to £500, and penalties for fly-tipping will more than double to £1,000.

• Offenders will be forced to wear jumpsuits or high-visibility jackets while carrying out “community payback” within 48 hours of being caught.

• Members of the public will be given a greater say on how antisocial behaviour offenders are punished.

All of these proposals — eagerly welcomed by Labour frontbenchers whose only criticism is that the Conservatives will not implement them efficiently enough — are about showing other people being punished and, if possible, young people being punished. There is no greater crime in the minds of Britain’s meanest than to be young; something that the readers of the country’s newspapers believe passionately was not stolen from them by the remorseless march of time but by their own kids hoarding all that youth for themselves just as the Boomers lock up all the housing wealth.

The Times’ leader today crystalises that mindset:

Antisocial behaviour is a hardy perennial of politics — and with good reason. Crimes sometimes dismissed as “petty” are anything but to people who live in communities affected by them. The perception that persistent antisocial behaviour — such as vandalism, aggressive begging or overt drug taking — is going unpunished is corrosive to public trust in the police and legal system. And it can create a climate of unease and even threat among people forced to endure it as the backdrop to their daily lives… 

… There is a long history to this approach. The so-called “broken windows” theory of the 1980s posits that turning a blind eye to minor offences such as vandalism can result in an area degenerating into lawlessness. This creates a climate in which more serious crime can take hold. The aim, therefore, should be to stop the rot early and instruct police to come down hard on lesser infractions.

The ‘broken window’ theory — so beloved of Rudy Giuliani in his time as Mayor of New York, before fake tan totally poisoned his already rotten mind — was introduced to the world in a 1982 article for The Atlantic by political scientist James Q. Wilson and criminologist George L.Kelling, who wrote:

Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one un-repaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)

It was a ‘reckon’ which books and studies that followed tried to stand up and gloss with a veneer of ‘science’. But where ‘broken window’ theory-inspired ‘zero tolerance’ policing — now rebranded as “hotspot policing” by the Tories — has been tried and declared a success there have always been other factors.

In a 2004 paper published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (‘Order Maintenance Reconsidered: Moving beyond Strong Causal Reasoning’), David Thacher, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, argues:

[S]ocial science has not been kind to the broken windows theory. A number of scholars reanalyzed the initial studies that appeared to support it... Others pressed forward with new, more sophisticated studies of the relationship between disorder and crime. The most prominent among them concluded that the relationship between disorder and serious crime is modest, and even that relationship is largely an artifact of more fundamental social forces…

… Still other social scientists have questioned the effect that New York City's police strategies had on that city's crime trends, arguing that factors like the decline of crack cocaine played larger roles than order maintenance, and that other cities that have not implemented order maintenance tactics have achieved comparable reductions in crime.

The ‘broken window’ theory appeals to politicians and hacks in equal measure because it offers an easy explanation and one that can be dumped at the door of ‘louts’, ‘yobs’ and ‘hooligans’ (or perhaps the smashed windows they used instead of doors). The wider policy platforms of both New Labour and Classic Tory (‘All the shit taste you’re accustomed to…’) politicians can be exonerated of any involvement in crime and misery; the blame falls on the ‘yobs’ who are merely disaffected because of their feral criminal nature and if, by some odd coincidence, those targeted happen to be people of colour, well, that’s just how the cookie crumbles (and the window breaks).

Sunak wrote a morality play for the Mail On Sunday this weekend:

Why should anyone be made to live in fear because of the persistent bad behaviour of others? Why should whole neighbourhoods suffer due to other people’s litter, graffiti and fly-tipping?

It offends me, and it offends you too. This is not the country we are, and it’s not the kind of communities we want. 

I know Mail readers care deeply about the places where you live – just look at the fantastic support you have given to the Great British Spring Clean in recent years.

That’s why we’re launching a new action plan to stamp out anti-social behaviour for good – because when threats emerge in our communities, it is right that we act.

First, we’re going to treat anti-social behaviour with the urgency it deserves. We’re going to target the worst affected areas with intensive hotspot policing, meaning more uniformed officers going after prolific offenders. 

This will start with ten trailblazer areas, before expanding across England and Wales next year.

Once caught, and within as little as 48 hours, we’re going to make offenders repair the damage they have done – an approach we call Immediate Justice.

Were Sunak not sucking up to the Mail titles, they might berate him for his love of buzzwords, the emptiness of his promises bearing in mind how long the Tory Party has been in government, and their disconnection from reality. But, he is still their boy and he is promising to punish their greatest enemies: the imagined work-shy wasters and the young who make Daily Mail readers’ lives so hard at any family event.

Sunak comes from a gang that has made people live in fear while persistently behaving badly: It’s called the Conservative Party. It’s enabled the theft of many millions of pounds in public money by its friends during the pandemic; tolerated the shittification of Britain’s rivers; and put some of its favourite undesirables in the House of Lords; among many other things. The Tory Party is a gang of “prolific offenders”.

The Daily Telegraph is, of course, ecstatic that the Conservatives and Labour are in a bidding war to establish which party can be the most performatively and poisonously draconian. In its leader column, it crows:

Rishi Sunak wants to put paid to anti-social behaviour “once and for all” – a laudable ambition shared by all law-abiding citizens. Whether it is possible is a matter of political will.

Placing a crackdown on crime at the centre of his political message is astute because it resonates with voters who have to put up with vandalism, graffiti and a general decline in order. Sir Keir Starmer outlined similar promises last week for a future Labour government.

Some neighbourhoods, so-called crime hotspots, are more prone to this than others. Everyone who lives there knows it and so do the police. Moreover, they have known this for years.

Tony Blair set out on precisely this course of action in 1997. Anti-social behaviour orders (Asbos) were brought in to target the small group of repeat offenders but were loathed by civil liberties groups, most of whose spokesmen did not live in the worst-affected areas. They were abolished by the Tory-led coalition in 2010.

While its acid enthusiasm for Asbos is grotesque, the Telegraph is right that both Sunak and the Thatcher-quoting Starmer are fighting over who can do the best karaoke impression of the Blair government’s “tough on crime” agenda (notice, I didn’t add the end of that slogan, “tough on the causes of crime”, because they’ve fucked that bit off).

The mentality of both parties was summed up horribly in a BBC Breakfast appearance by policing minister, Chris Philp, a man who looks perpetually like he is glorying in the bitter musk of his own farts. Talking about the laughing gas ‘crackdown’ he said:

… we are concerned about the very widespread use of nitrous oxide amongst under-18s. It’s now the third most consumed drug and it does, we think, fuel antisocial behaviour, people — young people, in particular, loitering in public places, like parks… 

Yes. Parks: notoriously a public space not designed for ‘loitering’. But then that’s what we’re dealing with; public space has been being diminished, degraded and destroyed since the 1970s. The point is to reduce the areas where you can be without spending money. If you are not an active consumer when you are out of your house, what’s the point of you?

Parks are to be ‘enjoyed’ by those economic units who will vote for parties that despise the young and despise the idea of any kind of ‘fun’ that isn’t delivered by a corporation, ideally one that makes the right amount of political donations. Every other behaviour is ‘loitering’, a ‘nuisance’ that is bothering the people who are paying good money for their fun.

Of course living in an area where people are unhappy, where there is violence, crime, and vandalism is terrible. It does make people’s lives worse but the answer is not to criminalise the young and find more substances to prohibit, creating new offences punishable with fines that hammer the poor and serve as nothing but speed bumps and inconveniences to the children of the rich.

The last Tory Prime Minister before Sunak — Liz Truss, whose stint was just a failed work experience placement, doesn’t count — was Boris Johnson, who was a member of the same ‘yobbish’ vandal gang, the Bullingdon Club, as the Tory PM that started their current run in power: David Cameron.

The children of the rich make ‘mistakes’ and ‘learn lessons’; the children of the poor ‘commit crimes’ and must be punished in ways that change their lives forever. The promises of Sunak and Starmer, eagerly welcomed by a sadist press, are about making a malicious middle class feel better, reassuring them that the ‘yobs’ won’t spoil their view.

As the Tories toy with pre-crime again, it seems only fitting to end with a Philip K. Dick quote from a book our politicians don’t lean on like Minority Report. In Valis he writes:

It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.

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