LENIN'S TOMB: ASBOs, "community", atomisation and a few other things for New Labour to choke on.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

ASBOs, "community", atomisation and a few other things for New Labour to choke on. posted by Richard Seymour

Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) exist to criminalise behaviour that is not in fact criminal: the make imprisonable conduct that is perfectly legal and often relatively harmless. The remit of the law concerning ASBOs is so broad and vague that a judge might outlaw practically any kind of legal behaviour if it is deemed to have caused any form of "harassment, alarm or distress" to an onlooker, a pedestrian, a neighbour or anyone who does not reside within one's own household. For example, a suicidal woman who tried to throw herself from a bridge and had to be rescued by a passerby (who was undoubtedly distressed by the incident), was banned from going near railway lines, multi-storey carparks, rivers and what have you. Is an attempt to commit suicide anti-social? Apparently so. Is the tendency of young people to congregate at certain sites anti-social? It seems to be, for that too can be banned under an ASBO. And anyone who breaches an ASBO can be imprisoned. What about a fifteen year old boy with Tourette's syndrome given an ASBO instructing him not to swear? (The flesh-sizzling stench of behaviourism is never far away: the council claimed that the order had improved the boy's behaviour). Or - for those of you who imagine Britain to be a haven of free speech and secularism, what about a man threatened with an ASBO for joking about the death of the Pope? Or a ban on a teenager wearing a hoodie? Surveys show that many people are being imprisoned for behaviour that has not been imprisonable in the past, including begging and prostitution. The press reporting on this is misleading, since it tends to confuse an ASBO with a prohibition on behaviour that is already illegal, and also to imbricate reports of the use of ASBOs with resentful stories about Neighbours From Hell (See this collection of stories, for instance).

The policy of ASBOs is cruel and absurd, and is so in part because the definition of anti-social behaviour is so broad, so nebulous, so impenetrably miasmic that practically any form of behaviour can be made effectively illegal. These are the powers of a dictatorship, not a democracy. Louise Casey of the government's Anti-Social Behaviour Unit, offered this excuse: "We know for a fact that people perceive there to be high levels of antisocial behaviour; that this perception is greatly magnified in deprived areas - and we also know that perception is most often based on actual experience. We recently asked over 1,800 people in the most deprived wards of three cities if they knew what was meant by antisocial behaviour: 90% said they did. Most people living with antisocial behaviour would not, I think, thank us for filling these pages with a discussion about its definition. They know only too well what is meant by it and they want something done about it." Roughly translated, I take this to mean that since Ordinary Decent Hardworking Law-Abiding People perceive there to be antisocial behaviour and think they know what they mean by it, the government does not feel obliged to define it in order to outlaw it - it's an insulting non-sequitur, leavened as always by a prolier-than-thou, sentimentalised version of the kinds of salt-of-the-earth working class areas that the government pretends to be serving. (Actually, they daren't say "working class" any more as the phrase is too soiled with the notion of class politics. They prefer the whiter-than-white, Daz-sponsored "deprived communities"). And of course, the attention to public perception is quite telling: for what other reason would the law permit newspapers to "name and shame" individuals given ASBOs, to publish photographs and personal details about those served with an order, even children?

Hoodies wearers demonstrate in Elephant and Castle.

The crushing irony is that New Labour's relentless production of its Master-Signifier - "community" - comes precisely as it destroys communities, and lays the basis for further atomisation and alienation. What is more, the policies that are formulated under this rubric are specifically designed not to solve the problem but to repress its symptoms with brute authoritarianism. Having abandoned meaningful reform of capitalism in the interests of the human beings most oppressed and exploited by it, New Labour tries to reform the most oppressed and exploited in the interests of capital (perhaps ideologically represented by a small shop-owner in New Labour's petit-bourgeois "community").

It used to be stereotypically held that depression was most common among middle-class housewives, whose aspirations had outrun their actual station, whose sense of worth was belied by a largely sedentary lifestyle that did not compare favourably to their dreams of opulence and status. It is now fairly conclusively established that depression is most common among the working class, and particularly among women. This is caused, some such as pop-psychoanalyst Oliver James argue, by an environmentally-conditioned low-serotonin state, one that is brought about by low status, and which correlates to higher levels of depression, aggression, paranoia, violence and alcoholism. While women are more inclined to turn their violence inward, men are likely to take it outside for a drink and a fight. Booze, fags and illicit drugs are a form of self-medication (often self-defeating, since alcohol, tobacco and MDMA tend to reduce serotonin in the long run). On top of which, the increasing competitiveness in schools imbues most pupils with an exaggerated sense of failure and worthlessness which they take into adulthood. It is not exactly controversial to suppose that since the worst off in society experience the worst of society most often, they will tend to suffer from more stress, more anxiety, more depression and therefore react in the quite predictable ways mentioned above. What the government has done is to take all the manifestations of that, including what are obviously conditions of medical distress and penury, and criminalise it - in such a way, moreover, that the burden of evidence is drastically reduced (from 'beyond reasonable doubt' to 'the balance of probabilities').

Criminal.

At the same time as their policies increase inequality, at the same time as they allow the destruction of the manufacturing sector to continue at great cost to working class communities. New Labour's education policies meanwhile encourage this sense of failure for most children: selection means rejection, and it usually means rejection for the poorest. By expanding the advantages already enjoyed by upper and middle class parents, New Labour will compound the correlation between the parents' wealth and the pupil's achievement. They will make education less worthwhile for many, and increase the rate of truancy - and that, too, they seek to countervail with callous authoritarianism, threatening the parents of truant children with jail - as if it was strictly and exclusively the fault of parents that many children look at their school and see nothing in it for them. To add to that, the growing culture of testing as a result of New Labour's policies is compounding the increasing trend of depression among young people. At the same time as this toxic policy mix rips off, represses and disables a generation of future adults, the ridiculous obeisance to the upper-bourgeois obsession with property values, and the attempt to destroy council housing, is creating a huge layer of hidden homeless, now in the hundreds of thousands and expected to continue to rise on current projections. If those homeless people have the audacity to ask someone for money, they can be served with an ASBO. If they breach the ASBO, even once, they can be jailed. This has already happened several times.

It is no surprise that a government wedded to neoliberalism, dedicated to waging a ruthless class war against the domestic working class, not to mention an imperial war for the preservation of Britain's vicarious Empire status in the world (as America's loyal lieutenant), has to resort to the old jackboot. And the explanation of this tendency in terms of the lingua franca of communitarianism (cf The Respect Action Plan) is also entirely predictable, reporting as it does an ersatz rejection of individualism even as the ideological coordinates of Thatcherism - economic individualism and social authoritiarianism - are conserved. The community is the state.

The mind reels, and the stomach churns. They dare, that disgusting shower of unctuous platitude-merchants and wealth-worshipping sycophants, to prate of "shiraz-quaffers", and "bruschetta-munchers", and "woolly Hampstead liberals". They dare to counterpose this imaginary cultural elite to the imaginary Ordinary Man on the Street for whom New Labour, according to Peter Hain, is "a lifeline" and who "wants something done" about crime so long as it is what New Labour wants, and who doesn't go in for the abstractions and argot of Guardian-reading intellectuals. Lock them up, I say. Let these ruthless social vandals experience the increasingly overcrowded prisons that their policies have created. Better still, let this crowd of sociopaths, careerists and fuck-ups eke out their days on the Big Brother house, from whence none of them will be evicted.