Last updated 12:50, Tuesday, 15 July 2008

How would you shock a kid with a knife into changing his vicious, stabbing ways? Throw him into jail for a few years – right?

Jacqui Smith

Wrong. Put an arm around his shoulder, lead him gently onto a hospital ward and show him how knives draw blood, disfigure, scar, maim... kill. Then, when he’s started to appreciate the scale of his power over victims of his chosen blood-sport, give him a cosy little lecture about altering his behaviour and keep fingers crossed for a Damascus-style enlightenment.

Give the woman her due, when Jacqui Smith tries to get on the right lines of crime and punishment, she always manages to choose the wrong track... even when she switches later.

Her touchy-feely plan to be nice to young knifemen has been delivered, denied, fiddled with and finally bluffed out by her Prime Minister and the party more comfortable with penalising people who walk dogs, overfill dustbins, drop litter, smoke cigarettes or have untidy gardens – the logic being that miscreants who commit all those vile offences will surely have done so deliberately. Kids who attack with machetes and kitchen knives, on the other hand, are helpless souls, woefully misunderstood and in need of government sponsored TLC.

Not so emergency doctors, nurses and stab-victims who suffer the consequences of knife crimes, apparently. Ms Smith and her boss are more than happy to add insult to their spiralling injury by letting them take on her law and order duties. They will be delegated the job of persuading thugs to lay down their arms – which won’t be easy for those in a semi-conscious state, fighting for life on a ventilator.

Doctors roundly attacked the idea of bringing knife-carrying yobs into hospital as “secondary victimisation” of the injured.

Dr Donald Mackechnie, clinical vice-president of the College of Emergency Medicine, said: “The priority for us working in emergency departments is the patient, not the perpetrator of any crime. When someone is brought in having been stabbed or assaulted with a knife, it’s a very emotive situation. Doctors and nurses first of all have got to assess the injuries and then manage those injuries.

“We certainly don’t think it would be a good idea if then potential or actual perpetrators of knife crime were marched through to see these patients, who are in an extremely vulnerable state. It’s tantamount to secondary victimisation of someone who has already suffered a horrendous insult to them.

“From a practical point of view, working in an A&E department, it’s very difficult to see how this would work. There’s no evidence that US-style scare tactics have worked there.”

Would any of that worry Ms Smith and co? Will actually it did – enough to deny she ever said it, live on TV, to an audience of millions.

But nobody bought that. Passing the buck on soaring urban street violence is all that’s left to this government now our prisons are full, they’ve failed to build more and have tied up their own law and order system with more pressing matters of prosecuting wheelie-bin offenders.

“When someone is carrying and using a knife there is absolutely no doubt that they should go to prison,” Gordon Brown said yesterday.

“But I notice those people who were proposing prison simply for there being a knife, have drawn back from that and talk about a presumption of prison and about the different kinds of knives that would be exempted.”

So, that’s all right then. Somebody has whispered in his ear about the need to be gentle with the misunderstood boys pocketing carving knives, who really didn’t ought to be treated anything like as harshly as lads and lasses carrying meat cleavers. He probably even believes that makes sense.

Which is, of course, the problem we ordinary folks have with all politicians who make improbable, unenforceable law that does nothing to keep us any safer or bring peace on our streets any closer.

If parliamentary politicians spent a little less time shopping with our cash at John Lewis and took a walk into the real world – spent a Saturday night in any emergency department – they might think a little differently. Correction: they might start to think.

They have lost control of violent youth crime in this country’s towns and cities. Never having given clear signals that knife and gun crime would not be tolerated, they are now giving signals that generally, in some circumstances, both will.

Mr Brown said there were 110,000 families in need of support where children were at risk of becoming prolific offenders.

Early intervention would take place in about 20,000 families, where, he said, “it’s clear that the mother or father have lost control of their children and their whole life is actually in difficulty.”

What a shocking indictment on a Labour government, that is. What a terrible snapshot in time of an administration fiercely and nauseatingly focused on life’s incidentals, as defined by corporate business backers, green hobbyists, civil rights navel-gazers and banks at the painful expense of family fundamentals and struggling people’s essentials.

Crime that is a result or symptom of broken lives, lost hope and the angry frustration of sinking into underclass doesn’t materialise overnight. It grows in strength, purpose and fury over years of neglect by those charged with the responsibility of cultivating respect, education, aspiration and meaningful contribution to future stability. When responsibility is not met – and when it’s passed on recklessly – angry crime grows until it’s out of anyone’s control for at least two generations.

Still Gordon Brown doesn’t get it. So Jacqui Smith doesn’t stand a chance. Welcome to our world, where knives are a commonplace part of young people’s lives, where crime feeds on crime until the only security a youngster puts faith in is a weapon, where no street is safe – just some less dangerous than others.

Welcome to Gordon’s new world, in which – even as victims of stabbing – all we can look forward to is having to tolerate the ferocious little thug who inflicted our wounds, sitting at our hospital bedside with a cynically triumphant smirk on his face.