Against Anti †Social Activities Essay

Anti kindly doings the construction of a reachence bug out reclaim the brand-new wear out disposal has revealed its respect agenda, the enigma of a brotherly demeanor has moved to the forefront of governmental debate. But what is it? by Stuart WaitonAnti favorable opposed to the principles on which society is constituted. (Oxford English Dictionary, 1885). Anti fond contrary to the laws and springer of society causing annoyance and disapproval in others childrens unsociable doings. (Oxford English Dictionary, 1989). Antisocial behaviour is use as a catch- completely landmark to describe whatsoeverthing from noisy neighbours and graffiti to kids hanging out on the street. Indeed, it appears that almost any kind of unpleasant behaviour is at i time catego put upd as asocial, with the behaviour of children and puppyish community most often labelled as such (1). This expresses a growing perception that the laws and customs duty of society argon cosmos de-escalat ed by rowdy youngsters. Yet the term unsociable behaviour was r arely used until the 1990s. Throughout the ogdoadies a couple of articles a year were printed in the UK discussing asocial behaviour, whereas in January 2004 alone at that place were over 1,000 such articles (2). Not even the most pessimistic social amateur would suggest a parallel make up in occupation behaviour. Indeed, in recent eld there has been a slight fall in actual vandalism, for example, against a dramatic increase in newsprint mentions of unsociable behaviour (3).When give earing at the outlet of asocial behaviour, the starting point for most commentators is to live with that the caper exists and to then work out why great deal are more(prenominal) antisocial today. The fragment of communities is often seen as a secern influence in the rise of antisocial behaviour, with young sight growing up without positive business office models and a framework within which to develop into sociable adul ts. This idea of the loss of a spirit of community or then of society rings true. We are indeed more atomised and individuated today, and there are fewer common bonds that hold spate together and give them a social identity. It is less clear, however, that this necessarily gist people are progressively out of control, antisocial and on the road to wickedity.Alternatively you could argue that this fragmentation of communities and of social determine has inspection and repaired foment a finis of fearfulness (4) a culture that elevates what were previously dumb as petty problems into socially significant ones. This quiz examines the construction of the social problem of antisocial behaviour, by cogitateing, non on the behaviour of young people, and on the reference of the governmental elite. It may be understandable for a tenants association or local councillor to be engaged by the issue of noisy neighbours and rowdy children tho for the anthesis pastor to pr ioritise this issue as one of his chief(prenominal) vexations for the future of the nation seems rather strange. What is it that has put antisocial behaviour so high up on the semi policy-making agenda? Constructing iniquity as a social problemWhen introducing laws against antisocial behaviour, curfews, and new offense initiatives, the freshly undertaking government invariably asserts that these are in response to the concerns of the normal. While there is undoubtedly a high level of populace disturbance about crime and about the various problems and irritations in a flash described as antisocial behaviour, this anxiety is clear shaped by the concerns of the governmental elite. It is withal worth noning that when the government highlights particular social problems as being significant for society, it puts other issues and outlooks on the stick out burner. The elevation of crime and, more recently, antisocial behaviour, into a political issue has helped both to reinf orce the significance given to this kind of behaviour and to frame the management social problems are understand.By defining antisocial behaviour as a study(ip) social problem, the political elite has, over the past decade, helped to generate a spiralling preoccupation with the petty behaviour of young people. At no time in history has the issue of crime as a social problem in and of itself been so primeval to all of the political parties in the UK and yet, there has been a significant statistical fall in crime itself. The key difference in the midst of the object lesson panics over crime and social dis rig in the past and anxiety about crime and dis rewrite today is that this anxiety has now been institutionalised by the political elite. Up until the 1970s the political elite, as distinct from singular politicians and the media, in the briny challenged or dismissed the panics associated with youth crime and ensuantly held in check the effects they had. In fence certain calls for more laws and regulations on society, more reactionary ways of understanding these problems were often rejected and the institutionalisation of measures that help create new norms were equally opposed.For example, while the honourable panic that arose in the media around the Mods and Rockers in the 1960s has been widely discussed thanks to Stanley Cohens famous study Folk Devils and Moral Panics, head start print in 1972 (5), these concerns were marginal to politicians, and never became an organising principle of political life. More recently, however, the political elite has panicked and legislated on the strength of extreme one-off events, like for example the Dunblane shootings in 1996, which resulted in the banning of handguns, or the killing of capital of Seychelles Climbie in 2000, which led to ordinance requiring schools to organise around child tax shelter. An central consequence of the institutionalisation of anxiety is that in counterpoint to the intermitt ent moral panics of the past, panics are now an almost permanent feature of society. And whereas moral panics especially before the 1990s were generated within a traditional conservative moral framework, today it is the new amoral unquestioning of strongty within which they tend to develop.Politicising crimeThe politicisation of crime can be dated back to the 1970s, with the 1970 blimpish government being the first to identify itself explicitly as the party of law and recount. As crime certain as a political issue through the 1970s, however, it was fiercely contested. When Conservatives shouted law and pronounce, the left-hand(a) would reject the idea that crime was increasing or was a social problem in and of itself, pointing instead to the social problems thought to underlie it. Significant sections of the left, influenced in part by radical criminologists in the USA, challenged the panics as they saw them promoted by the so-called unfermented Right. They questioned th e official statistics on crime, challenging the labelling of deviants by agents of social control, and attacked the moral and political basis of these panics (6). Thus, the idea that crime was a broader social problem remained contested. annoyance became a political issue at a time when there was an increase in terrible political and social conflicts, following the more consensual political framework of the postwar period. Un practicement and strikes increased, as did the add together of political demonstrations, and the conflict in Ireland erupted.In contrast to the current concern about crime and antisocial behaviour, which emerged in the 1990s, the New Right under Margaret Thatcher promoted crime as a problem very ofttimes within a traditional ideological framework. In 1988, Alan Phipps described the Tory preliminary to crime like this Firstly, it became conflated with a number of other issues whose connection was continually reinforced in the public mind permissiveness, yo uth cultures, demonstrations, public unsoundnesss, morose immigration, student unrest, and trade union militancy. Secondly, crime by now a metaphorical term invoking the drop of social stability and decent values was presented as only one aspect of a bitter harvest for which Labours brand of social democracy and welfarism was responsible. (7) As part of a political challenge to Labourism in the 1970s and 80s, Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher genuine an authoritarian approach to the enemy within, which attri provideded greater political significance to criminality than its effects on victims.Despite an increase in the financial support to the Victim Support schemes in the late 1980s, victims of crime were themselves often used politically, paraded by Conservative politicians and by sections of the media as symbols of dis battle array, not as the central focus of law and order policy or rhetoric itself. Sociologist Joel Best describes a process of typification, wh ereby an often extreme example of crime is used to define a more general perceived problem (8). The typical criminals of the 1970s and 1980s were the violent trade union militant and the young black mugger. Traditional British values and individual freedoms were contrasted to the collectivist, promiscuous values of the enemy within (9). in time burglars were understood as being part of the something for goose egg society. Here the criminal, whether the trade union member, the mugger or the burglar, far from being a victim of circumstance, was an enemy of the state, and, importantly, the damage being done was not primarily to the victim of crime simply to the moral values of society as a whole.Social control and public order were promoted within both a political and moral framework in which the deviant in question was likewise understood to pee certain political or moral traits that needed to be confronted. Where the petty criminal acts of children were mentioned, the signal was not simply this behaviour itself, nor the impact it had on individuals, moreover rather the soft liberal moral values held by teachers and social workers that it was argued were undermining British Victorian values of discipline and hard work. In guardianship with this, Thatcher saw the responsibility for cutting crime not simply as that of the government or legal philosophy, only also of the public, who, it was argued, should take action to defend themselves.Go directly to jailThe demand for law and order, which at first sight appears to taste a restoration of moral standards, actually acknowledges and acquiesces in their collapse. Law and order comes to be seen as the only sound deterrent in a society that no agelong knows the difference between right and wrong. (Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World, 1977.) American sociologist Christopher Lasch identified key festerings in the USA in the 1970s. In the UK, while an increasing emphasis on law and order reflected a certain weakening of the political elites grip on society, crime had been understood in largely ideological and political terms. Thatcher used the issue of crime in the battle against Labourism and welfarism. By the early 1990s, however, things were changing fast. John major(ip)s desperate and ultimately failed attempt to revitalise the political dynamic of the Conservatives with his Back to Basics campaign in 1993 demonstrated the Tories inability to develop a political direction that engaged both the elite and the electorate, and it was at this point that the government activity of crime took on a new, less ideological, however even more authoritarian character. The issue of persistent young wrongdoers became a political issue and a recognised social problem in 1992 and exploded as an issue of concern in 1993.The violent trade union militant was now replaced by this persistent young offender as the typical criminal, and, as then home secretary Michael Howard explained, self-ce ntredyoung hoodlums would no thirster be able to use age as a way of hiding from the law (10). It is important to note that under Thatcher, despite the most consistent, vitriolic and vindictive affront to justice and offbeat in general, the criminal justice approach to young people developed under principles that resulted in diversion, decriminalisation and decarceration in policy and practice with children in trouble (11). Despite the tough rhetoric with regard to adult crime, the Thatcher brass maintained a pragmatic and even progressive policy towards young offenders. Under John Major this all changed.The enemy within became minors rather than the miners (12). With the end of the contestation between right and left, and the resulting decline in the ideological politicisation of crime, the direct control and regulation of the population substantially increased, and between 1993 and 1995 there was a 25 per cent increase in the number of people imprisoned (13). Politically-establ ish authoritarianism was replaced by a more re active apolitical authoritarianism which was directed less at the politics and moral values of the organised get movement and other enemies within, than at the more psychologically-framed behaviour of individuals.Antisocial behaviour now began to be recognised as a significant social problem around which new laws and institutional practices could be developed. Following Lasch, it appears that by 1993 law and order had come to be seen as the only effective resource for a political elite that no longer knew the difference between right and wrong. preferably than using the fight against crime in an effort to shape the moral and political outlook of adults in society, the Conservative government increasingly opted simply to lock people up, thus acknowledging and acquiescing in its own political and moral collapse.Cultures of crimeAs part of the growing preoccupation with the under trend, the floundering Major government also attacked what he described as a yob culture. This identification of an alien, criminal culture had developed in the late 1980s, as crime panics began to move away from concerns with the organised working class and transmited on to the behaviour of hooligans and lager swellings. The criminalisation of the working class, by the early 1990s, was framed not in political terms, but increasingly as an attack on the imagined cultures of alien groups. These aliens were no longer black outsiders or militants, but white, working class, and young, who could be found not on demonstrations but in pubs and estates across the UK. The room access was now open for an attack on the personal behaviour and habits of anyone seen to be acting in an antisocial manner. The idea of there being alternative cultures, expressed by conservative thinkers at this time, implied that significant sections of the public were no longer open to civilising influences.However, and somewhat ironically, within criminological theory, this idea of impenetrable cultures had developed from radicals themselves back in the 1970s. Stanley Cohen and the cultural studies groups of the Birmingham Centre had been the first to identify youth cultures and deviant subcultures as specific types of people existing within a different life-world. At a time of greater political radicalism, these groups were impute with positive difference. With the decline of radical thought these imagined cultures were rediscovered in the 1990s, but this time were seen as increasingly problematic (14). In reality, the growing preoccupation with cultures for example the discovery of a knife culture in 1992 was a reflection of a loss of tactile sensation in politics as a way of understanding and resolving wider social problems. With the loss of ideologically based politics on the right and the left, reflected in the rise of New Labour, the problem of crime became increasingly understood as a problem of and for individuals.New Labour, New Socia l ProblemsWhat my constituents see as politics has changed out of all recognition during the 20 years or so since I first became their Member of Parliament. From a traditional fare of social hostage complaints, housing transfers, unfair dismissals, as well as job losses, constituents now more often than not ask what can be done to stop their lives being made a misery by the unacceptable behaviour of some neighbours, or more commonly, their neighbours children. The Labour MP Frank Field, in his oblige Neighbours from Hell The Politics of Behaviour (2003), explained how politics had become a matter of regulating behaviour. Field unheeded to ask himself whether poor housing and a lack of opportunities are no longer problems, or whether his constituents sop up simply lost faith in politicians ability to do anything about them. Similarly, Field ignored the role the Labour Party itself played in reducing politics to questions of noisy neighbours and rowdy youngsters, and the way in wh ich New Labour in the 1990s helped to repose traditional social concerns around issues of crime and disorder.A more fragmented and atomised public was undoubtedly subject to a culture of fear, but the role of New Labour was central to the promotion of concerns related to antisocial behaviour. Under Tony Blair, crime became a central issue for the Labour Party, especially after Blairs celebrated tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime speech in 1994. This ended any major political opposition to the recently reposed social problem of crime. A key right for New Labour now became the right to be, and to feel, safe. By 1997 the New Labour manifesto was strikingly confrontational around the issues of crime and antisocial behaviour. As the guardian paper noted in April of that year at that place are areas where Neil Kinnocks manifesto barely ventured. In 1992, crime, for instance, rated cinque paragraphs and mainly concentrated on improving street lighting. Now law and order rates dickens pages with the now familiar zero tolerance strategies and child curfews fighting for room next to pledges to early legislation for a post-Dunblane ban on all handguns. Such policies seemed unthinkable five years ago.However, in this case, Blairs radicalism with its social authoritarian tinge may play better with the centre rather than the Left. Freed from the politics of welfarism and the comminute movement, New Labour in the early 1990s reoriented its approach to the politics of crime, not only accept that crime was a key social problem in and of itself, but also in expanding it to complicate the non-criminal antisocial behaviour of neighbours from hell and antisocial youth. With the prioritisation of crime and antisocial behaviour came a focus upon the emotional reaction of victims, reflected in the concern with the fear of crime. Tackling the epidemic of crime and disorder was now a top priority for Labour in government and securing peoples physical security and los s them from the fear of crime and disorder was described as the greatest liberty government can stock warrant (15).Liberty was transformed from the active freedom of individuals, to the protection given to them by government and the police. In contrast to the social and economic framework within which crime had been largely understood by the active labour movement in the 1980s, New Labour now masterminded the problems of crime and disorder with reference to a more passive, disorganised and fragmented public. As the government took a more direct approach to tackling crime in its own terms, so the issue expanded to consume problems that previously had been understood in more political terms. Accordingly, social, economic and political solutions were replaced by attempts to regulate the behaviour of both criminals and antisocial neighbours and children. Imprisonment, antisocial behaviour orders and more intense forms of behaviour management of parents and children increasingly became the political solution offered by New Labour to these problems.Engaged by safetyThe term community safety did not exist until the late 1980s, but has subsequently become a core strategic category around which local authorities and case government have developed community-based policies. Community safety is not about crime as such, but is more broadly about the fear of crime and of petty antisocial acts, especially committed by young people, and thought to undermine communities sense of security. Here the loss of community that has been generated by such major social shifts as the defeat of the old Labour movement and the weakening of the postwar institutional welfare framework has been reinterpreted as a problem of mischievous children creating fear across society. An important watershed in the organisation of society around the issues of safety was then shadow home secretary Jack shucks notorious attack in 1995 on the self-assertive begging of winos, addicts and squeegee merch ants (16). Only a year earlier, Straw had accused John Major of climbing into the gutter alongside the unfortunate beggars when the prime minister had made seemingly similar comments (17).There was an important difference, however. Major and his chancellor Kenneth Clarke had attacked beggars as dole scroungers beggars in designer jeans who receive benefits and think it is perfectly acceptable to add to their income by begging. hush up understanding crime through the political prism of welfarism, Clarke saw begging as a criminal act that defrauded the benefit system. In his later attack on beggars, Jack Straw re specify the issue. For Straw the problem was not the crime of begging or the political or economic problem of benefit fraud, but the disorderly and intimidating behaviour of the aggressive beggar, which was understood to increase the fear of crime and help to undermine societys sense of wellbeing (18). Jack Straw believed that the Tories had failed to understand the signif icance of street disorder as a cause of the fear of crime, the loutish behaviour and incivility that made the streets uncomfortable, especially for women and black and Asian people (19).The issue for New Labour was not the political question of benefit fraud, but the emotional sense of security of a newly discovered vulnerable public. By the time the pick year of 1997 came around the soon to be prime minister, Tony Blair, had elaborated on the typical beggar. This was not a man quietly scrounging money off the public, but the often drunken in your face lout who would, push people against a wall and demand money effectively with menace (20). No figures for the rise in bullying beggars were given, but Tony Blair noted that he himself sometimes felt frightened when he dropped his children off at Kings Cross in London a notorious area for winos, prostitutes and aggressive beggars. Straw, using a well-worn feminist slogan, demanded that we reclaim the streets streets that had been bru talised by beggars and graffiti vandals.The radical creation of victimhoodBecause lots of this rhetoric of intimidation, abuse and the collapse of communities has its origins in the radical school of criminology, Labour politicians felt able to employ it without embarrassment. In the late 1980s, left-wing and feminist criminologists had a significant influence on Labour-run inner-city councils, carrying out victim surveys, and sitting on a number of council boards particularly within the Greater London Council. Developing out of the radical framework of the early 1970s, a number of such criminologists had become disillusioned with the fight for political and social change and, rather than challenging the focus on crime as an expression of class prejudice as they once might have, increasingly identified crime as a major issue, particularly for the poor, women and blacks who were now conceived of as victims of crime. Instead of identifying with and engaging its constituency in terms o f politics and public matters, the left sought a new relationship with the poor and oppressed based on their private fears and their sense of powerlessness.Identifying fear as a major factor in the disaggregation of these communities, the so-called left realists noted that it was not only crime but the non-criminal harassment of women and petty antisocial behaviour of young people that was the main cause of this fear among victimised groups (21). The identification of harassed victims of antisocial behaviour rose proportionately with the declining belief in the possibility of radical social change. As the active potential of the working class to do something about the New Right declined, Jock Young and other realists uncovered the vulnerable done to poor. Discussing the shift in Labour councils from radicalism to realism, Young noted that The recent history of radical criminology in Britain has involved a rising influence of feminist and anti-racist ideas and an encasement of left-w ing Labour administrations in the majority of the inner-city Town Halls. An sign ultra-leftism has been tempered and often transformed by a prevalent realism in the wake of the one-third consecutive defeat of the Labour Party on the national level and severe defeats with regards to rate capping in terms of local politics.The need to encompass issues which had a widespread support among the electorate, rather than indulge in marginal or gesture politics included the attempt to recapture the issue of law and order from the right. (22) Indeed, crime and the fear of it became so central to Youngs understanding of the conditions of the working class that, on finding that young mens fear of crime was low despite their being the main victims of crime he argued that they had a false consciousness. Rather than trying to allay womens fears about the decoct chance of serious crime happening to them, Young asked whether it would not be more advisable to attempt to raise the fear of crime o f young men rather than to lower that of other parts of the public?. For the first time, it was safety that began to frame the relationship between the local authorization and the public, expressing a shift from a social welfare model of that relationship to one of protection.The significance of the left realists and feminists at this time is that they were the first people systematically to redefine large sections of the working class as victims, and thus helped to reorient Labour local authorities towards a relationship of protection to the public at the expense of the newly targeted antisocial youth. It is this sense of the public as fundamentally vulnerable, coupled with the disengagement of the Labour Party from its once active constituency within the working class and the subsequent sense of society being out of control, that has informed the development of New Labours antisocial behaviour initiatives.Issues related to inner-city menace, crime and what was now labelled antiso cial behaviour, which had been identified as social problems by conservative thinkers periodically for over a century, now engaged the Labour Party. Increasingly for New Labour, having abandoned extensive socioeconomic intervention, the problem of the disaggregation of communities and the subsequent culture of fear that grew out of the 1980s was identified as a problem of crime, disorder and more particularly the antisocial behaviour of young people.The Hamilton Curfew and the politics of fearThe development of the politics of antisocial behaviour was accelerated in 1997 when the first curfew in the UK was set up in a number of housing estates in Hamilton in the west of Scotland. Introduced by a Labour council, this was a multi-agency initiative involving the notoriously zero tolerance Strathclyde constabulary and the councils social work department. The curfew that followed was officially called the Child Safety Initiative. This community safety approach reflected a number of the trends identified above. Rather than tackling crime as such, the initiative was supposed to tackle the broader, non-criminal problem of antisocial behaviour, in order to keep the community free from crime and also, significantly, free from the fear of crime (23). The rights of people in the community promoted by this initiative were not understood in terms of a libertarian look of individual freedoms, nor within a welfarist conception of the right to jobs and services. Rather it was the right to be safe and the right to a quiet life that Labour councillors promoted.Without a collective framework within which to address social problems, and concomitantly without a more sturdy sense of the active individual, a relationship of protection was posited between the local authority and the communities in question. Talk of rights and responsibilities implied the right of vulnerable individuals to be and feel safe, not by being active in their own community but rather by either tutelage th eir children off the streets, or by phoning the police whenever they felt insecure. Advocates of the Child Safety Initiative identified all sections of the community as being at risk children were at risk simply by being unsupervised adults were at risk from teenagers who hung about the streets and young people were at risk from their peers, who could, by involving one another in drink, drugs and crime, set patterns for the rest of their lives, as the head of the social work department argued. Even those teenagers involved in antisocial and criminal activities were understood as an at risk group the new-fangled delinquents of the past were thus recast as vulnerable teenagers who needed protection from each other.The centrality of the concern with victims of crime, which has developed since the Hamilton curfew was first introduced, is reflected within the curfew itself. In effect all sections of the public were understood to be either victims or vulnerable, potential victims of th eir neighbours and of local young people. The legitimacy of the police and the local authority was based not on a wider ideological, political or moral platform, but simply on their ability to protect these victims. The politics of antisocial behaviour lacks any clear ideological or moral framework, and therefore it has no evident constituency. In fact, the basis of the Child Safety Initiative was the weakness of community. Rather than being derived from a politically engaged public, the authority of the council and the police was assumed, or borrowed, from that public in the guise of individual victims. Accordingly, the police in Hamilton endlessly felt under pressure to show that the potential victims they were protecting especially the young people who were subject to the curfew supported what they were doing.Of course, nobody has a monopoly on borrowed authority. A number of childrens charities similarly took it upon themselves to come up to for the children, arguing that t he curfew infringed their rights and coming up with alternative surveys showing that young people opposed the use of curfews. There was little effort to make a substantial political case against the curfew, however. In fact, child-friendly groups and individuals tended to endorse the video display of young people and children as fundamentally vulnerable potential victims, and some opposed the curfew only on the basis that children would be forced back into the home where they were even more likely to be abused. only if as Blair was put on the defensive over his attack on aggressive begging by charities campaigning for the rights of the victimised homeless, so the curfew exposed the authorities to charges of harassing or bullying young people. Since the curfew was justified just on the basis of protecting young people from these things, the charge was all the more damaging.This was more than a tricky PR issue it demonstrated a fundamental problem with the politics of antisocial beh aviour. In presenting the public as vulnerable and in need of protection, the state transformed the basis of its own authority from democratic representation to a more precarious quasi-paternalism in effect it became a victim protection agency. The very social atomisation and lack of political cohesion that underlies the politics of antisocial behaviour means that the authority of the state is constantly in question, despite the fact that its assumptions about the vulnerability of the public are widely shared. As such, the Hamilton curfew gave concrete expression to the attempt to re-engage a fragmented public around the issue of safety, and the difficulties this throws up.Criminalising mischiefIn contrast to the pragmatic approach of past political elites to the issue of crime and nonchalant panics about delinquent youth, the current elite has come to see crime, the fear of crime and antisocial behaviour as major social problems. With the emergence of New Labour in the 1990s any m ajor political opposition to the issue of crime as a key social problem has disappeared and its centrality to political debate and public discourse was established. Under New Labour, however, the concerns being addressed and the social problems being defined are less to do with crime and criminals than with annoying children and noisy neighbours. These petty irritations of everyday life have been relabelled antisocial behaviour, something which is understood to be undermining both individuals and societys sense of well being. At its most ridiculous extreme what we are witnessing is the criminalisation of mischief (24). Basil Curley, Manchester councils housing executive, told the Guardian Yes, we used to bang on accesss when we were young. But there used to be badger-baiting once, too.Its different now, isnt it? Things are moving on people want to live differently. (25) This casual comparison of children playing knocky door neighbour with the brutality of badger-baiting tells us no thing about young people, but indicates that what has changed is the adult world with an expand sense of vulnerability driving all antisocial behaviour initiatives. For New Labour the problem of the disaggregation of communities and the subsequent culture of fear that grew out of the 1980s was located within politics as a problem of crime and disorder. Devoid of a sense of social progress, in the 1990s it was the political elites both right and left who became the driving force for reinterpreting social problems within a framework of community safety. Lacking any coherent political direction, the government has both reacted to and reinforced panics about crime and disorder, institutionalising practices and initiatives based upon societys sense of fear and anxiety. In an attempt both to regulate society and to reengage the public, over the past eight years New Labour has subsequently encouraged communities to participate in and organise around a raft of safety initiatives.Despite the fall in the official crime statistics societys sense of insecurity has remained endemic and no sense of community has been re-established, much to the governments frustration. However, rather than recognising that constructing a society around the issue of safety has only helped to further the publics sense of insecurity, New Labour is becoming ever more reactive and developing more and more policies to regulate a growing range of antisocial activities and forms of behaviour. By thrashing around for solutions to the politics of behaviour in this way, the government is helping to fuel the spiral of fear and alienation across society. Rather than validating the more robust active side of our character, validation is given to the most passive self-doubting aspects of our personality.Communities and a society that is more at ease with itself would expect men and women of character to resolve problems of everyday life themselves, and would equally condemn those who constantly deferre d to the authorities as being antisocial. Today, however, we are all being encouraged to act in an antisocial manner and demand antisocial behaviour orders on our neighbours and their children. Rather than looking someone in the eyeball and resolving the incivilities we often face, we can increasingly rely on the CCTV cameras to do this, or alternatively look to the community wardens, the neighbourhood police and the antisocial task force to resolve these problems for us.We are told to act responsibly, but are expected to call on others to be responsible for dealing with noisy neighbours or rowdy children. As this approach develops a new public mood is being created, a mood based on the notion of safety first where an increasing number of people and problems become the concern of the police and local authorities. This weakened sense of individuals is a reflection of the political elite itself, which lacks the moral force and political direction that could help develop a sense of co mmunity. Ultimately, it is the crisis of politics that is the basis for the preoccupation with curtain-twitching issues the product of an antisocial elite, which is ultimately creating a society in its own image.