release proclaiming the 27 per cent fall in stab victims. The government news machine had effectively decided that the only way to counter an unhelpful myth was to manufacture another.
Over the next few months, official figures were released which offered a clearer idea of what had really been happening with knives on Britain’s streets in 2008. In London, where many of the high-profile stabbings had taken place, police had been keeping records of knife crime, even though it was not required by the Home Office. When they compared what had happened during the ‘epidemic’ with the same period a year earlier they found that crimes involving knives had actually fallen 14 per cent. When the hospital admission figures were finalised they showed that, while Britain was in the middle of its knife crime panic, the numbers of people admitted to hospital with stab wounds was 8 per cent lower than it had been the year before. In the areas targeted by the government’s programme, the number of stab victims taken to hospital didn’t fall 27 per cent. No, it also fell 8 per cent — a slower reduction, it might be noted, than had been recorded in the months before TKAP.
The Tackling Knives Action Programme kept its name but, less than a year after its launch, it was quietly broadened to cover all violence, whatever the weapon. In other words, police went back to doing what they had always done.
Every stabbing represents an individual tragedy. But there was no knife crime epidemic in Britain in 2008. What we actually saw was an exercise in urban myth-making that may well have left Britain’s communities more anxious, more suspicious and more vulnerable. Far from helping to counter ignorance and expose falsehood, the media became an accessory in undermining the truth.
L is for Learning
The youth of today! What are they like? Can’t sit still for a minute: constantly clicking and flicking channels on the TV; tapping and typing three simultaneous conversations on Facebook, text and Twitter; chit-chatting incessantly on their mobile while managing to listen to some new dance track they are downloading onto their iPod; one wonders that the computer’s processors don’t explode, such is the speed and ferocity with which they career about the Internet, like psychotic honey bees buzzing from bloom to bloom with no time to dwell. Why can’t they just sit quietly and read a book, for goodness sake?
OK. I have got that off my chest. Now let us address the title at the top of this page — learning.
My point is, of course, that the way we access, absorb and use information has changed radically within a generation. Growing up in the 1950s, 60s or 70s, the era of the baby-boomer, was to inhabit a linear world where we read a book from cover to cover, we watched a television programme from beginning to end, a film from title to credits.
The new Internet generation, the so-called ‘NetGen’, inhabit a hypermedia world with fewer straight lines. Rather than reading, listening or watching in a pre-ordained order, my children and their peers routinely engage with information interactively. At the touch of a button they create their own TV schedules; on the Internet they are free to roam — picking up an idea here, researching it there, road-testing it somewhere else and, if they wish, publishing their conclusions too. All text can be processed, all sound can be sampled, all images can be formatted and manipulated.
It is not the end of narrative, thank goodness. Members of the Internet generation, like those from every generation before them, make sense of their lives through stories. They still go to movies, listen to music and read books from start to finish. But new technology has allowed the NetGen consumer to use knowledge in ways my generation, at their age, could not even imagine.
That is what is going on when I see my teenage daughter surfing and texting and listening and reading and chatting, all at the same time. She is participating in a hypermedia world, which has a different relationship with knowledge to the one I recognise. Or at least that is what I suspect my children will now say to me when I find them downloading YouTube clips when they should be revising their French verbs. It is understanding that changed relationship with knowledge that will be key to deciding how the British NetGen fares in an increasingly globalised world.
We talk about globalisation as though it is something new. One could argue that the process began some 5,000 years ago when trade links were forged between Sumerian and Harappan civilisations in Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. But one has to turn the clock back less than two centuries to see new technology transforming the global market: the steam engine was shrinking the planet. The railways revolutionised domestic communication and the development of steam-powered ocean-going ships dramatically accelerated business in the expanding worldwide web of trade. Farmers who would once have taken their crops to market on the back of a cart were able to sell goods around the planet. Huge quantities of agricultural products from as far afield as New Zealand, Australia and the United States were shipped to Europe to feed the hungry masses driving the industrial revolution. The cargo vessels then turned around, packed with new technology, consumer goods and ideas.
‘Glory to God in the highest; on earth, peace and goodwill toward men’: the first message sent across the transatlantic telegraph cable by Queen Victoria on 16 August 1858 to US President James Buchanan. ‘May the Atlantic telegraph, under the blessing of heaven, prove to be a bond of perpetual peace and friendship between the kindred nations, and an instrument destined by Divine Providence to diffuse religion, civilisation, liberty, and law throughout the world,’ he replied. The following morning, there was a grand salute of one hundred guns in New York as the church bells rang.
Unfortunately, the bond of perpetual peace literally snapped a few weeks later and it wasn’t until 1866, thanks to the engineering genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel and the doggedness of the crew of the SS
This communications revolution allowed for the integration of financial markets and provided a massive impetus for the expansion of international business. While the profits from global trading accounted for just 2 per cent of the world’s wealth in 1800, by 1913 it was 21 per cent. Not only a global market, but also a global consciousness had arrived.
The UK, of course, fared very well during this round of globalisation. The invention and innovation of Britain’s educated elite provided the cutting edge that saw it become the richest nation on earth. But British success was also built on harnessing the labour of millions of unskilled workers, people with often little or no education, who were moved from the fields to the factories. This was the formula upon which an empire was created, and it worked a treat in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century a different formula was required: innovation and invention, yes, but in the new era, industrial development would be founded upon technically skilled workers.
The UK did not find it easy to adapt. Britain’s sense of its own social architecture was essentially bipolar: gentlemen versus players, bosses and workers, upstairs-downstairs. The rivalry and tension that flowed along the divide hindered travel between the two distinct camps and prevented development of a respected technocratic class.
When in 1944 a tripartite system of education was proposed for England and Wales, the vision was at odds with the simple adversarial structures that had defined the country’s politics, justice and commerce for centuries. The Education Act introduced three types of state secondaries: grammar schools for the intellectual and academic, technical schools for engineers and scientists, and modern schools to give less-gifted children practical skills for manual labour and home management. It was recognition that twentieth-century development required specific investment in technical and vocational skills. But Britain fluffed it.
Such was the lack of priority and money given to technical schools that very few were ever opened. Instead, state education reinforced the divide between the educated elite and the rest, helping create a schools system in Britain that still produces greater levels of educational inequality than almost any other in the developed world.
Vocational and technical training was usually left to private firms that often resented investing in young workers who might take their skills elsewhere or use their expertise to increase the bargaining power of the unions. Other industrialised nations, meanwhile, were spending heavily in the skills training of their workforces. By 1975, only 0.5 per cent of British secondary school pupils were in technical schools, compared to 66 per cent of German youngsters.
Britain experienced dramatic industrial decline and much bickering about what had gone wrong. Right-wing analysts tended to blame the bloody-mindedness of British unions. Left-wing analysts tended to blame the class
