K is for Knives
On my first day as a cub reporter on my local newspaper in the late 1970s, I held the naive view that the press was there to oil the wheels of our precious democracy. With my humble pen I would expose falsehood, prick pomposity and counter ignorance. I was a force for truth: power to the people! Thirty years later I still strive to tell the truth. But I do so with the knowledge that daily news is a commodity, just like pork bellies, coffee beans or silicon chips. It is manufactured to be marketed, traded, bought and sold.
Of course knowledge of contemporary affairs is a force for good, but I am not so green as to imagine that the news industry is always governed by principle ahead of profit. Globalisation and consumerism has transformed the newsroom in the same way it has the high street. Just as I can now buy a soda or a sofa at three in the morning pretty much anywhere in the developed world, I can also get my fix of headlines.
Staying ahead is thought to rest on staying in touch, as if to avert one’s eyes from the 24-hour news channels for more than a few moments would see competitors race past you. Vast news hypermarkets churn out stories around the clock — some of their output little more than cut-and-paste rehashes, but sold with the thin promise that customers will know what is going on.
Demand for high-quality news massively outstrips supply and outlets constantly struggle to fill the shelves. There isn’t always enough important stuff happening to keep the presses continuously rolling and so the vacuum has been filled by thousands more news production lines: story factories run chiefly by those who wish to influence the news agenda for their own advantage.
This is not necessarily as sinister as it may sound — a charity’s media team will work tirelessly to compile a ‘news story’ in order to highlight their cause; a pressure group researches and writes a report to promote an issue close to its heart. But, in Britain, the most powerful and influential of all the manufacturers are to be found in a small patch of London SW1. Indeed, a great deal of what we think of as ‘the news’ reflects the particular and current interests of those inhabiting the Westminster bubble: the politicians, lobbyists and journalists who ply their trade around Parliament.
Political salience dictates what is important. In the crowded middle ground where British politics is now conducted, arcane differences become front-page headlines, with the elbow jostling of the parties turned into a narrative of accusation and rebuttal, spin and smear. Weaknesses must be exploited, attacks must be neutralised. In such a fevered environment, there may be little time for sober reflection. When this happens, reality can easily get drowned out by the thunderous rattle of the Westminster story machine. Whisper it not, but our democracy sometimes manufactures myths.
This is the tale of one such fable: the knife crime epidemic that never was.
No one in Britain during the summer of 2008 could have been left in much doubt that the country was suffering from a wave of fatal teenage stabbings. The leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, attended a vigil for one victim and described knife crime as having reached ‘epidemic’ proportions. Each new tragedy, granted front-page status by the papers, added to the sense that a ghastly phenomenon was sweeping the streets of Britain. ‘If we don’t do something now, it will go on and on,’ the leader of the opposition said.
The Tories knew that the horrible crimes, documented almost daily, played neatly into a broader narrative they were hoping would take hold. With the government suffering in the opinion polls, Mr Cameron was determined to ram home his advantage by painting Britain as a ‘broken society’. The phrase had particular poignancy alongside the punctured corpses of young men.
That there was no hard evidence that knife crime was getting worse was irrelevant. As I was told by hardened hacks on my local paper thirty years ago: ‘Never let the facts interfere with a good story.’ Prime Minister Gordon Brown had no option but to respond to the rising sense of alarm. It was politically inconceivable to deny there was a problem — that would leave his party exposed to the charge that they were callous and complacent. So a knife-crime ‘summit’ was held at Number Ten Downing Street. There was the promise of a ‘crackdown’ and ‘tough measures’. It was a classic sequence: moral panic, hurried political reaction, futile (probably counter-productive) response.
On this occasion, part of the response was the unveiling of a new acronym — TKAP. The Tackling Knives Action Programme demanded that police resources in high-crime areas across England and Wales should be targeted at young men who carried blades. However, among some senior police officers there was puzzlement and anxiety. Evidence that knife crime was getting worse was restricted to the number of stories in the newspapers. The official crime statistics did not include a category for knives and so it was difficult to know what was happening. The Home Office data suggested no obvious spike in serious violent crime overall. If anything, the figures appeared to show violence declining. Some thought TKAP had the smell of a short-term political fix.
As a rough average, two people are murdered every day in Britain. The most common weapon used is a blade or other sharp instrument. The most likely stab victim is a young man. It has been like that for decades (see ‘M is for Murder’). So, after the Downing Street summit, as the months rolled by, there was no shortage of fresh tragedy, further fatal stabbings to advance the knife crime fable. From this raw material, news organisations were able to fashion other stories: tales of human interest, political intrigue and passionate polemic in abundance. Editors knew that these accounts played to a common fear: that the security of traditional community values was being usurped by the brutal individualism of blade and bullet.
Inside Number Ten there was a different anxiety: that the government would seem powerless against a tide of viciousness on the nation’s streets. Gordon Brown — portrayed by his opponents as a ditherer unable to repair a broken Britain — needed to appear decisive and in control.
In late 2008, the Prime Minister attempted to seize the initiative. It was decided that the 11th of December would be the day he would go to a community centre in south London to launch a new ‘No to Knives’ campaign, endorsed and supported by a host of celebrities from sport, music and television. But a foray across the river, even with soap stars and a couple of Premier League footballers, would not be enough to convince the public that the government was making a difference. Mr Brown needed some facts.
The problem for the advisors looking to prove the success of government activity was that there were very few hard facts to exploit. The Home Office held no statistics to show that knife crimes had been rising, never mind data to show that it was now going down. Still, Number Ten was determined to demonstrate progress and so they scoured Whitehall for evidence. The search led them to the Department of Health, which counted patients discharged from hospital after being admitted with stab wounds. The NHS stats people were contacted and the latest provisional figures were sent to London.
It looked as though Brown’s team had found what they were looking for: the statistics showed a 27 per cent fall in the number of stab victims admitted to hospital in those English areas targeted by the government’s action programme. Here was the ‘proof’ that the PM’s decisive plan on knives had worked.
A press release was put together, trumpeting the success of TKAP. But with just hours to go before the Prime Minister’s glorious announcement, the NHS stats team got wind of what Number Ten was planning — and they were not happy. The figures had only been sent to Downing Street on the understanding that they would not be published. It is standard procedure that ministers may look at statistics before formal publication only if they promise not to release the figures. On this occasion there was very good reason not to publish them: the hospitals hadn’t finished counting stab victims and so the figure was likely to give a misleadingly rosy picture.
The chief statistician in the NHS wrote to one of Gordon Brown’s inner circle, to assert that the data should not be released because ‘they are potentially inaccurate and may give the wrong impression.’
This was the last thing Number Ten wanted to hear. The whole knife crime strategy — the PM’s date with soap and soccer stars; the photo opportunity; the launch of No to Knives; the chance to get some positive publicity on a story that had been causing immense damage to the government — all of it was now jeopardised by some jumped-up data wonks in Leeds arguing that the figures were ‘provisional’ and might ‘give the wrong impression’.
The Home Office had pulled together some other numbers but these, frankly, were pretty thin, if not outright dodgy. ‘Number Ten are adamant about the need to publish this statistic,’ the NHS team were told in an email. Even a desperate call from the National Statistician herself would not get Mr Brown’s team to budge.
The following morning the Home Office released their knife crime ‘fact sheet’, with an accompanying press
