It Is Time To Stop Hugging Hoodies
Jerry Hayes is surprised that these riots haven't happened sooner, and believes that the thugs should face the full force of the law.
10 Aug 2011, 11:15
Should we make hoodies illegal?
But the real shock is why none of these Blackberry riots has happened sooner.
We have been building up to them for years. The feral youths who arrogantly swagger around our communities delighting in causing terror, mayhem and nuisance to ordinary decent people trying to live their lives in peace, have been with us for a very long time. They were rather quaintly accused of anti social behaviour. And those grimfaced, drug ridden, hooded scum who steal from their local Asian convenience stores as a pastime, have been part of our culture for time immemorial.
But if I hear another well meaning Guardianista wailing that the thugs who have owned our streets for the last few days have been excluded from society, I will scream. They haven’t been excluded, they have rejected the values of decency, respect for the person, for property and even for human life. They have chosen that way of life because we as a society have been too docile, too soft, and too tolerant.
We haven’t excluded them. They have excluded us.
Those of us who work in what is whimsically called the criminal justice system, cringe when we see the sort of laughable sentences handed out to trainee thugs in the youth courts. Why? Because there is the overarching principle that youths are only sent to detention centres as a very last resort. And if you want to see the product of this folly just stand outside any youth court on a week day (not before twelve as most will still be in bed) and see the same hooded, nonchalant arrogance, the same disdain for those not part of their feral pack.
The rot would have started at school. Truancy, smoking drugs, petty thefts. On the odd occasion that they deigned to turn up to classes they would be disruptive, bullying and eventually assault teachers. They would then be chucked out, illiterate, innumerate and unemployable. Not that that would matter too much, as most of them wouldn’t want to work anyway.
So we mugs give them money to sleep all day in cannabis fugged rooms until they are ready to hang around the streets to be low level drug dealers and graduate to robbing and burgling, rather than stealing, from their Asian convenience stores.
These people are the prime targets for those who want to foment unrest. It is not a consumer society that makes them steal, it’s just that these outlaws want the trainers, the tracksuits, the watches and the Ipods, without having the inconvenience of paying for them.
So the first thing that must happen is the Sentencing Guidelines for youths will have to be departed from. From April judges have had to obey the Sentencing Guidelines, “unless it is in the interests of justice to do so”. Well, I hope that the Lord Chief Justice will shortly give a Practice Direction giving the green light that it will be in the interests of justice to pass sentences of imprisonment for first time offenders caught up in this wave of lawlessness.
I am not in favour of curfews. It is not British and would be wasteful of manpower to enforce. However, there is no reason for there not to be legislation to do what shopping centres have been doing for years. Make it an offence to cover your face in a public place. Don’t hug a hoody, make it illegal to wear one.
Finally, let us remember that the overwhelming majority of young people in this country are kind, decent, amazingly tolerant and want the opportunity to work. Just look at them in Operation Clean Up. It is heart warming and perhaps the seeds of Cameron’s Big Society. So let us bend over backwards to help them achieve their potential.
And for those who reject our way of life? Not an underclass, who through no fault of their own find themselves in poverty, but the outlaws who reject everything that is human and decent. They should have a very large doe of painful reality. The communities will put up with them no longer.
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Jerry Hayes
Jerry Hayes is a former Conservative MP and leading barrister defending and prosecuting high profile cases
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Comments (12)
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It should be a pre-condition of early release from prison and possibly a condition of release at all that prisoners must be able to read, write and do sums. If prisoners can read, write and do sums on their admission it should be a pre-condition of their early release that they assist in teaching others.
I know it was abolished in 1948 (and not until 1976 on the Isle of Man) but wouldn't birching be a very effective punishment for much of this behaviour? Just a thought.
10/08/2011 12:14Birch would be a problem with Europe (I know! I know!) but your education ideas are very sensible indeed.
10/08/2011 12:22Perhaps introduce a law that being disguised in any way in order to commit or assist a crime, should, (on conviction) result in a doubled sentance (and monitor to make sure they are doubled)?
10/08/2011 12:41I agree with most of what you say Jerry but not the making of wearing a hoodie an offence.
Make it unacceptable in certain circumstances and refuse service as we have now with crash helmets certainly.
It is not dissimilar to the Burqa issue. While superficially appealing I am not in favour of the state dictating what can and cannot be worn and this could be the thin end of a very un-British wedge.
Where would it end? Criminalising political slogans on T shirts? There must be a better way.
I am also a bit 'off' just banning stuff, didn't we have enough of that with the last lot?
10/08/2011 13:58Hattori you are quite right. I should have just kept it to making it an offence to cover your face in certain circumstances. It was a bit of journalistic shorthand I'm afraid!
10/08/2011 14:52The 'welfare state' really needs to be sorted out as many of these so called feral youths and their families are supported by the state. The state should demand something in return for benefits.
11/08/2011 12:49"I should have just kept it to making it an offence to cover your face in certain circumstances. "
Glad you clarified that - I have a number of hoodies; they are warm and comfortable and just the thing for a winter jog. But the problem, surely, is the same as that faced when some enterprising clothes retailer made those jackets that covered the entire face except the eyes. When a ban was mentioned, it was pointed out that since it is not an offence - and the public wouldn't wear it becoming one - to wear a scarf round your mouth and nose and a hat pulled low in bitterly cold weather, it could hardly be an offence to "cover the face." Would it not be more sensible to have an element of discretion, such as (I believe, I'm in no way a legal expert) is granted to allow a chef to carry his knives to work but not a gangster, or a locksmith to carry his tools but not a burglar?
12/08/2011 10:41I attended a funeral a few years, at the crematorium here in Harlow. A former employee of mine had been tragically killed in a motorbike accident. He was a lovely lad and sadly just 22.
As I walked up to the crem a cacophony of 'Arla' voices called out from the darkest depths of a 100 or so hoodies, "hi, Coleen, how ya doin'? D'ya 'member me?"
12/08/2011 22:32Of course I remembered, how I could I ever forget? All of those horribly early mornings when I clambered through the graveyard of old fridge and bike carcasses on their lawns to peer through their cannabis fogged letter boxes and screech,
"Get your backside down here in two minutes, Aaron....Jason...Mahmood....Donna...Wesley....Jamey...Sean...Sabine...Jean Paul...or you're bl**dy sacked!"
Followed by a shout of "Aaaah, is that the time! I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm comin'!"
A platoon of a naked little children, all under five - the ones who slept behind the upstairs windows with the rusty bedsprings propped against them, to stop these little sprogs falling out - appeared in the field of vision of the letter box.
"Ee's cumin'", said the eldest child, "Got any biscuits?"
12/08/2011 22:33Many horrible young hoody wearers, most of them aged 16 to 18, began working for my company during the last recession. We'd won a contract which required a lot of extra staff for quite basic manual work and which paid the staff and my company rock bottom rates. In a deep recession, beggars can't be choosers, so we took on the contract, despite the poor rates. It saved the bacon of our company and our staff.
Those young hooligans, though they required wet nursing like babes to persuade them to get out of bed and to turn up at work, proved to be remarkably good workers once there.
As I walked around the crematorium that day years later, I was greeted by a legion of these, by then, former young staff and asked them how they were doing.
Every one of them was still working. One had started his own roofing company, another had a managerial position at Motability, a number of them were factory workers, some were working in offices. They all had jobs.
That early work experience had been crucial for those young people, it gave them self esteem, a work ethic and a sense of responsibility that they wouldn't otherwise have had.
12/08/2011 23:04My company can now no longer afford to take on such poor paying contracts. These have been made totally uneconomic by ever mounting staff costs, including minimum pay rates, holiday and sick pay plus the cost of the mountain of red tape and regulatory procedures and paperwork we must comply with.
We consequently don't have a requirement for very basic manual workers any longer, so we don't employ these young hoody wearers now.
In my experience, most companies are in the same boat, which is why a whole generation of young people are out of work and many of them will never be in employment.
Who do I blame for this? The politicians who erected the barriers to a whole generation's employment.
I condemn these criminal rioters as angrily as the next person, what they did was an outrage against everything decent in our society and against all of the hard working people who pay for the benefits which keep the majority of these rioters.
Yet I do feel that we as a society went begging for these riots. We have not only deprived a whole generation of the opportunity of work, we have transformed our police force, justice system and prison and detention systems, the only institutions capable of keeping criminals in check, into a shadow of their former selves.
Put these factors together and you don't need to light the touch paper and stand back, do you?
12/08/2011 23:42Sock puppet; you are quite right. It is what I envisaged. It is the way the law deals with offensive weapons and going equipped to steal.Good point from Jose too. Colleen you have touched an interesting but raw nerve.
13/08/2011 12:10