Contribution
I am sorry, but I do not think we should spend the whole time disputing the statistics. I can cite statistics suggesting there has been a 60% increase in knife crime in the last year. Let us not trade stats, but by all means let us take this offline, if the hon. Lady would like to trade citations. The fact is that significant studies demonstrate there is a real problem—an increasing problem—with knife crime in some areas. As I said, any knife crime is unacceptable, and the tragedies that lead to death are to be enormously regretted.
For the last 20 years, I have run a charity working with people in prisons and with ex-offenders—many of them involved in knife crime and violence—to try to reduce reoffending in London. I know from first-hand experience, and indeed from encounters I have had this week, how much our justice system is disrespected in our communities. So I absolutely agree with the central point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield (Lee Anderson): we need to increase the deterrent effect of the justice system, and that means having clearer and sterner punishments for the crime of carrying weapons. We need swifter justice, to ensure that the time between the committal of an offence and punishment is as short as possible. We also need—this is the work I do—to focus on rehabilitation and reducing reoffending, because the cycle of crime is the cause, the real heart, of these terrible statistics. It is not the number of first-time offenders, which is always terrible; it is the number of people who stay in a life of crime.
I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Ashfield for referencing the families of the victims. Ultimately, those are the people we should bear in mind when we consider these tragedies. But I also pay tribute to him for mentioning the families of the attackers, whose lives are also ruined when their son—it is usually the son—goes to jail for many years as a consequence of knife crime. As my hon. Friend said, they suffer shame and trauma.
I want to mention family—this is really my only real contribution to the debate—because I do not think we have heard the word “family” mentioned yet, and it is rare that we do. All my experience of working with offenders is that in almost every case—it is almost absurd how standard it is—the father is absent from the young man’s life; it is not always the case, and of course there are exceptions. I therefore pay tribute to the amazing women who try to bring these boys up in very tough circumstances and who overwhelmingly do their best to ensure that their boys stay on the straight and narrow. But in the absence of a father, how are those boys to understand what it is to be a man, to respect authority, to respect women and to collaborate constructively with their peers? Those lessons are so much harder to learn for boys growing up without a positive male role model in their lives.
I want to make a simple point in response to a remark the hon. Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) made earlier about the public health approach to crime. I respect that concept; if we are talking about knife crime as an epidemic comparable to a contagious disease, that is a very apt analogy. I also respect the principle that we should have a whole-community approach to knife crime. My concern is that the concept of a public health approach is really code for a statutory response that says that the reason we have knife crime is that the wider community—which really means what the Government are doing—is inadequate and needs to step forward in some way. As I said, a lot of my life has been committed to the principle that community needs to step forward.
However, the role of the state is fundamentally to enforce justice; the job of the Government is to ensure that people are safe in their streets and that the law is respected. The real source of the knife crime epidemic, and the resolution to it, does not lie with the state, nor with the nebulous community; it lies with the individual themselves, who needs to grow up learning and knowing what it is to do right and wrong, and it lies with the family. If Government can do anything apart from enforce justice—which of course is their primary function —they should be instilling the principles of right and wrong in our young people through the education system. More importantly than anything else, they should be supporting stable families, because that is the context in which young boys will grow up much less likely to go off the rails.