Never mind the anarchy

David Cameron didn’t specify when exactly anarchy broke out in the UK, although he decided to tell us when he got back from holiday, just when he needed to regain the political initiative from a bouncing Brown.

But how much worse have things actually got? As Polly Toynbee notes in today’s Guardian, Home Office figures show that, while there has been an increase in gun and knife carrying, there were more deaths from shootings and stabbings in 1995 than there were in 2006.

Furthermore, the sight of rude youths hanging about on bikes is hardly new. I’ve lived for two years in north Islington, which has one of the worst reported crime rates in the country, and daily walk past the kinds of kids supposedly throwing our country into anarchy. When one of them nearly collided with me on his bike as I crossed the road, he apologised and rode on.

If your only experience of such people is through the lens of the media – library footage of kids jumping on burnt out cars, CCTV pictures of hooded gangs roaming the streets  - it is easy to become paranoid. But day-to-day life in these communities is not like being in a war zone: it is more mundane than that. Which is one of the reasons that bored teenagers get involved in petty crime and confrontations that occasionally escalate into acts of bloody violence, all the more shocking for their rarity.

When Cameron talks about anarchy in the UK it looks suspiciously like he’s playing on people’s fears to make political capital rather than trying to find a solution to why there are problems in the first place.