Another shrine has appeared in North London. On Tuesday lunchtime, Adam Henry, aged 15, was cornered down a side street off Westbourne Road, Islington, not far from Highbury Fields, and stabbed. Someone called 911. Paramedics arrived, and office workers on their lunch breaks saw them trying to save Henry’s life. He was rushed to hospital, where he died.

Within a day, the customary shrine had appeared. At the foot of a low brick wall have been laid flowers, drinks and biscuits, less than a minute’s walk from Henry’s old secondary school, St Mary Magdalene Academy, which he attended until partway through Year 8. His yearbook entry said he enjoyed skateboarding and reading the Bible. It has been reported that, after leaving St Mary Magdalene, Adam was a pupil of the Bridge Satellite School, which specializes in teaching children with autism. Laying flowers on Tuesday evening, Henry’s family told Metro that he was “quiet and respectful… very funny. Just a nice boy.”

The police have opened a murder investigation. As yet it is not known why Henry, nicknamed “AZ”, was stabbed to death one lunchtime in one of London’s wealthiest boroughs, minutes away from £8-a-pint gastropubs, a Bang & Olufsen showroom and the townhouse that was once Tony Blair’s. Like much of London’s Zone 2, Islington is an area where incredible wealth luxuriates a few doors away from poverty and strife. Beside the lawyers, celebrities and investment bankers live the boys and young men embroiled in violent street gangs.

More from this writer

The truth about hitmen

By Max Daly

One might assume that the violence breaks out when one drug-selling gang encroaches on the turf of another, but the truth is more prosaic: stabbings can be precipitated by social media posts and petty personal beefs. If you are spotted talking to the wrong person, or you repost the wrong video, you can become a target. There are only a small number of street gang members, but thousands of children are one misstep away from becoming a target.

And when acts of thuggery take place, they reverberate through the neighborhood. Islington’s new youth safety strategy, which was published in November, found that even among young people in the borough unknown to police and child services, being robbed, and knowing someone who had been stabbed, was commonplace.

The result is an atmosphere of worry and fear. “We have to stay behind [at school] until 4:20pm [when] it’s dark,” said one child, “so when I leave and have to go home, I just shit myself.”

Another said: “As soon as you step out of your front door, you just have to be vigilant; you know you can’t go to certain areas, and you don’t go out when it’s dark,” said another. “You always see young people all ballied up [i.e., wearing balaclavas]. You never know what they are going to do.”

These teenagers are rightly worried, yet they have at least been fortunate enough not to be drawn into the street gangs vortex. The more vulnerable they are — and often this involves having ADHD, autism and other mental health problems — the more likely needy children are to be sucked in, and the more likely they will be abused, brutalized or killed.

“Gangs are just another form of social extremism,” one expert told me. (Because he works with vulnerable children at risk of violence, he asked not to be named.) “These kids are lost boys, and the gangs are found-families. If you’re vulnerable, and looking to belong, you’re more likely to become exploited by these groups.”

And what does it mean to end up in those groups? You might be coerced into missing school in order to go phone snatching on e-scooters; you might be strong-armed into selling crack and heroin on a “county line” from a drug user’s council house in Colchester or Norwich for weeks on end; or you might be required to carry out acts of brutal violence on people you have never met before.

There has always been some quantity of criminality in society, but its expression and scale are in flux. Thirty years ago, in London there were a small number of large street gangs run by seasoned adult criminals. But this order has fractured, and today there are a myriad of smaller gangs, sometimes headed by kids. In Islington, the most prominent street gang are the “Cally Boyz”, who are based around the Caledonian Road, a couple of minute’s walk from where Henry died.

The Cally Boyz made the headlines in July this year when five members were jailed for stabbing to death two people, including a 15-year-old, while on a “rampage” in an Islington council estate in 2023. The gang members wrongly believed that their victims were part of a rival gang who had dared to film a music video on their turf. Mistaken identity, unfortunately, is another recurrent feature of gang violence.

Suggested reading

Surrey cokeheads are lining up chaos

By Dominic Adler

In such a climate, Henry’s death does not come out of the blue, but nor is it run-of-the-mill. Two teenagers were killed in Islington in 2024; one was killed in 2023; in 2022, one 15-year-old was killed by another 15-year-old in Highbury Fields. Compared to boroughs such as Croydon and Hackney, Islington is not a hotspot for youth killings. In 2021, 30 teenagers were killed in London, the highest since the Second World War, but only two of these killings occurred in Islington. The violence is not always teen-on-teen; in March, three teenage girls were charged with killing a 75-year-old man in Seven Sisters Road. Still, the borough is less well known for its street gangs than for the original moped robbery gangs of a decade ago, and for the aging Adams crime family. Its leader, Terry Adams, was described by the judge who jailed him for money laundering in 2007 as “one of the country’s most feared and revered organized criminals”.

Henry’s death comes at a time when the number of teenagers being killed each year on the capital’s streets is falling: that peak of 30, four years ago, fell to 12 in 2024. But behind the fluctuating death tolls, the damage is incessant. “There is harm that’s not deadly, but it can be life-destroying,” the youth expert, talking about how young people get sucked into a 24-hour existence of brutal violence and relentless crime. “These children, they are not going to have good lives. They may not die, but they’re not really living.”

By the time a teenager has been stabbed, he has probably already been badly let down in some way, be it by his family or the state. Adam was killed the day before the Government launched its new youth safety strategy, which is being framed by Labour as an attempt to right the wrongs of the previous Tory government’s regime of austerity. With youth clubs closed, goes this account, teenagers ended up on the streets; as a result, the closures were blamed by multiple government reports for fueling youth violence.

But blaming the Tories for London’s youth murder problem is just “politicking”, says the youth expert. He says Labour could have done more themselves, and that those advising London’s Mayor Sadiq Khan on the causes of youth violence “don’t know what’s happening on the ground… they are not well-informed people”.

He adds the solution does not solely lie with more youth clubs, or the use of tired enforcement tactics such as stop and search, but in changing the school system so children with the kind of problems that can lead to involvement in gangs and violence can be helped earlier. He suggests that too many children with special educational needs are ignored or discarded from schools at an early age, so their problems go unaddressed, worsen and they become more susceptible to joining gangs.

By the same token, any school-age intervention will take years to make an impact on rates of youth violence, and politically, it is far trickier, and more expensive, to a headline-friendly quick fix. There seems little even a beefed-up police force, or a more efficient justice system, could do to stop these attacks. So far, attempted interventions have had little effect on this kind of deep-rooted youth crime. For the time being, the worried teenagers of Islington have little option other than to remain fearful.

Scotland’s current gang war can feel like a Netflix series, from the mob dynasties and the firebombing to the villains-in-hiding nicknamed “Miami”. The current bout of feuding apparently concerns the theft of a cocaine shipment worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yet amid the social media threats and the Costa-del-Dubai exiles, the country’s gangsterism is actually a lot like Hay Drive itself — a strangely retro throwback, to a time before mass migration and when gangsterism was strictly local. It all speaks to the relative isolation of Britain’s Celtic fringe, and offers a useful reminder that not all our problems can be blamed on foreigners.

Much like the country itself, English organized crime is increasingly cosmopolitan. Dominated by multinational gangs, it’s a teeming bazaar, chaotic and transient. Loyalties change and business models adapt, all to the buzz of 24/7 TikTok commentary and grime crews. Criminal intelligence analysts find tracking this stuff like nailing jelly to the wall. By comparison, the Scottish underworld has a vibe reminiscent of a Berkshire high street circa 1995: dependable and dominated by big names. The Daniels and Lyons, two of the long-standing crime families involved in the current feud, might as well be Debenhams and The Gap. To paraphrase another retro classic, it’s a case of two tribes go to war.

More from this author

Surrey cokeheads are lining up chaos

By Dominic Adler

I’ve had a taste of crime north of the border. Serving as a London detective, I was sworn in as a constable at Glasgow Sheriff’s Court. It felt curiously like being in an old Western, swearing an oath like a deputy and signing a register. Working on a corruption investigation, I was given local police powers; English cops have no jurisdiction in Scotland (except for specific offenses, usually around terrorism). As a London copper, Glasgow felt reassuringly familiar, and not just because it’s my favorite Scottish city. Prior to the 2013 amalgamation of Scottish forces into Police Scotland, the city’s police were part of the Strathclyde force, known as the “Scottish Met”.

In my experience, Met officers enjoyed a good working relationship with their Glasgow counterparts. And, like the Met, surrounding forces saw Strathclyde as overly dominant. They were happy to see it taken down a peg or two. Many Glasgow coppers lamented its passing, as police are wont to do whenever change occurs.

Even so, criticism of the new force is about more than nostalgia. Politics often trumps operational effectiveness, with performance-obsessed restructuring sucking up organizational bandwidth better spent on crimefighting. Relations with a deeply political SNP administration have occasionally been strained too — and that was before the investigation into Nicola Sturgeon. Some officers have also felt the SNP are more focused on independence than bread-and-butter issues like education, health, or indeed crime. Did this mean the police took their eye off organized crime? This is the immediate context in which Scottish gangsterism should be viewed: that of distracted ministers and a mismanaged police force.

Even so, Scottish mobsterism is about something deeper than bureaucracy. The country only hosts 5.5 million people, or about 8% of the UK population. And, despite its regional differences, it’s 95% white, something England hasn’t been since the Eighties. The occasionally overegged issue of religious sectarianism aside, that makes Scotland practically a monoculture, certainly compared to Birmingham or London. More to the point, these demographics also make the working class communities of Glasgow and Edinburgh less transient, more cohesive, and more able to resist the encroaching globalization of Somalis or Kurds.

Nor is this simply a Scottish phenomenon. Right across the Celtic fringe, the old ways survive, offering real life folk-horror, with houses burning instead of wicker men. I’m thinking, for instance, of Liverpool, forever an outpost of the Irish Republic. Liverpool boasts the UK’s primary seaport linking the UK to the coca fields of South America. As such, it’s coveted by criminals. Yet law enforcement legend has it that even the brutal Albanian mafia are wary of the city: local Scouse gangs are too well-organized and violent. As for Belfast? Northern Irish gangs overlap with psychotic paramilitaries. They’re armed with assault rifles, and deeply embedded in their communities, strutting like central-casting bad guys in an action movie. The long-suffering, politically hamstrung and underfunded PSNI can only operate a strategy of appeasement and semi-containment.

Contrast all this with London’s traditional crime families. These days, they’re good for little more than straight-to-streaming movies, ghost-written memoirs and the occasional nonagenarian funeral. Terry Adams, the former scourge of Clerkenwell, now spends more time with his art collection. “Dodgy” Dave Courtney shot himself. Other old-school “faces” keep their heads down.

And not only that. For apart from remaining mostly untouched by globalization’s international criminal diaspora, Scottish criminals also employ an MO The Krays and Charlie Richardson would recognize.

This old-school works on familiarity. On personalities. On an understanding of the other side’s way of doing business, be it drugs or protection rackets or smuggling. Not so much movie talk of “codes” or “honor” — but more of knowing what to expect from whom. The threats, acts of violence and feuding all follow a time-honored pattern. Furthermore, the criminals enjoy significant ties to the “respectable” non-criminal world. Compared to, say, London? It’s an anachronism. The south’s multicultural postcode gangs, middle-market cocaine dealers and county lines retailers operate in a relative state of freewheeling anarcho-capitalism.

Then there’s corruption. Organized crime of the sort blighting Glasgow and Edinburgh can’t exist without palms being greased. I’m not suggesting Scotland is uniquely prone to graft. It is, however, vulnerable for the reasons I’ve described: a close-knit monoculture, ruled by cliquish elites. This is why I’d suggest political institutions and law enforcement north of the border are disposed to a specific type of compromise. For instance, Glasgow’s Labour-dominated political machine, prior to the ascension of the SNP, was no stranger to scandal.

As for the police, it’s in a similar vein to the corruption that dogged the Met until the early 2000s, some of it involving working-class detectives and the criminals they grew up with. Some years ago, a Scottish detective told me about an investigation into drug money. It ended mysteriously, when the trail meandered too close to establishment figures. In more recent times, Police Scotland’s Organized Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit was recently compromised by corrupt detectives leaking intelligence. That flavor of corruption is less common in London nowadays, replaced by something equally damaging but perhaps more fragmented: corruption stemming from poorly-vetted, hastily-selected cops, led by inexperienced and out-of-touch managers.

Suggested reading

How the Mob went mainstream

By Andrea Valentino

What, then, is the answer? As the violence escalates across Scotland’s two largest cities, the SNP-led administration has promised urgent action. A 100-strong task force is on the case, backed up by The National Crime Agency (NCA). As for the gangs themselves, the old ways are both a strength and a weakness. Yes, they’re deep-rooted, tough to infiltrate, operating a code of omertà. On the other hand, their identities are largely a matter of record. When your organized crime group has its own Wikipedia page? Yes, you’re lighting up the police radar. The authorities, therefore, know precisely who their targets are. The rest is a question of time, resources, political will and luck. Police officers specializing in proactive operations know all four are as rare as gold dust. And make no mistake: the Scottish Parliament will throw the kitchen sink at the gangs who so blatantly challenge their authority, even if the SNP has to grit its teeth and get support from south of the border.

Nor is needing help from Westminster very surprising. The “pointy end” of fighting organized crime can sometimes feel more like counterinsurgency than beat policing. The mantra “Clear, Hold, Build” sounds like something you might attempt in Basra or Helmand. And it’s something our establishment prefers to deny, not least as it undermines their cozy image of British policing. In this case, anyway, Police Scotland can’t handle the gang crisis alone: 100 officers is a trifling number for an operation of this scale. The NCA, and possibly the Security Service, will need to provide technical know-how and assets (like MI5 did with the Adams Family). At the less glamorous end of the business, meanwhile, local police will have to work doubly hard to develop intelligence by winning trust on the streets. This, as Scottish politicians are about to discover, illustrates the consequences of neglecting neighborhood policing, which has suffered swingeing cuts from Taunton to Aberdeen.

A three-ring circus of law enforcement will therefore be pitching up in Scotland, with its attendant politics, agendas and egos. Can its thoroughly modern methods, reliant on theoretical models, proportionality, human rights and technology, defeat such a tried-and-tested enemy? In Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Wicker Man burns. Let’s hope the officers sent to extinguish it have more luck than Edward Woodward.

Especially given the extreme youth of both boys, and the fact that both ended up dead after being hired to commit murder by an infamous drug dealer, himself in jail, local journalists were quick to characterise the deaths as a tragic novelty. All the same, the newness of these recent killings shouldn’t be overstated. More than a century ago, after all, stories of teenagers butchering each other were front-page stories here almost daily. And then, as now, reporters wondered what caused so much chaos at such a tender age. In 1916, for instance, Le Petit Provençal newspaper characterised the Ace of Clubs gang as a “bunch of young brats” and speculated that they were driven to violence by copying what they read in the newspaper.

These days, members of the DZ Mafia or the Yoda Gang, the two main groups that paint Marseille red, can access their entertainment at a swipe. Yet from their ruthless violence to their international spread, sepia-tinged groups like the Ace of Clubs have nonetheless bequeathed much to their modern successors. More than that, they became inspirations and the names of the gangsters of old are still familiar to the current generation, who like their predecessors often use criminality as a way to climb a social ladder that is otherwise denied to them.

And, perhaps most of all, the continued resilience of criminality in this city by the sea speaks to the utter inability to smash the scourge of poverty — one that ensures there’s always a willing supply of desperate young men willing to kill, or die, for the chance at a better tomorrow.

Suggested reading

Inside Marseille's drug wars

By Cole Stangler

Organised crime in Marseille has a long history. Things began at the end of the 19th century, when the city acted as the gateway to France’s colonial empire. In need of cheap labour, the port attracted immigrants from southern Italy and Corsica. The first criminal gangs quickly appeared, when pimps operating in the so-called Reserved Quarter, then one of the largest red light districts in Europe, chose to join forces. Their first ringleader was a former Corsican sailor named François Albertini. Nicknamed François the Madman, he led the Gang of 21, running prostitutes in the Reserved Quarter and getting into fights with other clans.

These disputes soon turned deadly. In 1907, in an echo of today’s killings, Albertini ordered a 16-year-old pimp to murder several rivals. André Anfriani, the teenage assassin, shot three people before being arrested, tried and guillotined. By 1911, Albertini had been detained too, and sentenced to spend life in a penal colony in French Guyana. In the end, the Madman escaped and disappeared, but nonetheless succeeded in planting the seeds of Marseille’s later crime scene. The routes the Gang of 21 used to evade justice — Spain, Portugal and Morocco, or else straight to the US — would soon be employed to transfer prostitutes to brothels in Africa and South America. Over the decades to come, drugs would flow the same way.

The Twenties and Thirties were a golden age of Marseille gangsterism. Corsican clans took over the business created by Albertini, promptly diversifying their trade. Paul Bonaventure Carbone, a tattooed former sailor who took inspiration from Al Capone, became the local godfather. With his partner François Spirito, Carbone gradually gave up prostitution for more profitable businesses: nightclubs; casinos; smuggling. They also opened laboratories to refine heroin, which proved so effective that Marseille became the dope capital of the world after the Second World War.

At the same time, Carbone and Spirito became local stars, entertaining visiting journalists and sponsoring showbiz celebrities. Music hall shows and films were made about them, cheap flicks with names like Justin de Marseille. Collaborationists during the Second World War, the pair were replaced after liberation by the Guerini brothers, who were close to the local Socialist Party and took over the local nightlife. That’s even as they smuggled drugs and cigarettes into Europe from Turkey and Morocco.

From the Sixties, the growing consumption of drugs such as heroin led to the famous French Connection. The world’s premier network of drug trafficking, it was controlled by Le Milieu, a Marseille-Corsican syndicate with the Guerinis among its leaders. After their demise in the mid-Seventies — Antoine Guerini was murdered in retaliation for killing an ex-cop-turned-mobster — figures such as Gaëtan Zampa and Francis Vanverberghe took the reins. With a surname like that, the latter was unsurprisingly known as Francis the Belgian. Gradually, they gave up drugs for safer and more lucrative ventures, including robbing armoured vans and using casinos to launder money. Given the French Connection was at various times exploited by both the CIA and France’s own intelligence service, with the spooks selling drugs to fund off-the-books operations, a change of focus was probably wise.

The gentrification of the Marseille-Corsican mob left a vacuum for others to fill. Since the late-Eighties, in fact, the port’s thriving cannabis and cocaine trade has been run by what has been described as La Mafia des Cités (“The Suburbs Mafia”), originally manned by families from cannabis-growing countries such as Morocco. For his part, the pusher who hired those two doomed teenagers is believed to be a member of the DZ Mafia, one of two Cité gangs now fighting over Marseille’s drug trade. The name hints at its origins. DZ stands for Algeria — a nod to the country’s name on licence plates — and indeed many of the group’s founders come from this former French colony with strong historic ties to Marseille.

The second part of that name is important too: by adopting the “mafia” moniker, the gangsters are emphasising their credentials both as an international criminal outfit. To prove their point, they even ran a video on social media claiming they had no involvement in the recent killings, hoping to retain a degree of respectability in the districts they control. And if that hints at one similarity with the past — where Carbone burnished his reputation via music hall ballads, the DZ Mafia uses Facebook — contemporary Marseille gangsters borrow from history in other ways.

That’s clear, for instance, in terms of the way they showcase nationality. When the Corsicans were running the place, family ties were essential to the gang’s survival. Clan members were often from the same village, also a common tactic with the Cosa Nostra in Sicily. It’s a similar story today: quite aside from the reference to the DZ Mafia’s homeland across the Mediterranean, the gang is partly run from Algeria.

Suggested reading

How vice consumed Blackpool

By Jacob Furedi

No less important, gang warfare in Marseille has often been waged along ethnic lines. In the Twenties, for example, black soldiers who remained in the city after the First World War took over parts of the Reserved Quarter, resulting in a deadly conflict with their Corsican rivals. A similar conflict took place in the Nineties, when members of a North African group from the city’s suburbs decided to take over the slot machines, bars and discos controlled by Corsican gangs around Aix-en-Provence. The conflict ended in 2006, when Farid Berrahma, the son of an Algerian miner, was shot nine times at a brasserie outside Marseille. In a strange way, in fact, Marseille seems to have returned to the chaos epitomised by the Ace of Clubs. Just like in the 1910s, the city lacks any single dominant crime lord. Jacques Imbert, Marseille’s last traditional godfather, died in 2019.

More fundamentally, the socioeconomic conditions that allowed those early gangs to thrive remain. Then, as now, large areas of the city are desperately poor — even if the criminals these days have swapped crumbling 18th century tenements for the concrete hell of modern housing blocks.

You can spot echoes of the past elsewhere too. In the Belle Époque, the press sensationalised the gangsters, leading to a situation where they tried to one-up each other in daring and brutality. And where newspapers once fretted about how “cinematographic methods” inspired the Ace of Clubs, their modern successors use social media in a like-minded way, advertising their crimes on Telegram.

Not, to be clear, that everything has remained the same. The wild industrialisation of the early 20th century brought an influx of firearms into Marseille, but François the Madman would surely be amazed at the availability of Kalashnikovs on the dark web. More than that, how criminality actually happens has shifted too. Quite aside from the fall in prostitution, and the rise in drug dealing, how cannabis and cocaine are sold has changed. Until the Nineties, dealers came downtown to sell in the clubs or bars they controlled. These days, punters drive to one of nearly 130 spots, spread across the underpasses and rubbish dumps of Marseille’s northern suburbs. That rendered the competition for territory even more fierce — and bloody.

The year 2023 marked a record for drug-related gang murders. A full 52 people died, most of them youngsters, after a police crackdown led to 2,000 arrests and depleted more established gangs like the DZ Mafia. But crime abhors a vacuum, and the fight to regain control of the most lucrative selling spots now rages more wildly than ever. Things have become so bad that some in Marseille are even starting to romanticise the older generation of mobsters, imagining them boasting a “code of honour” that today’s ruffians lack. That’s leavened by sentimental movies, notably Borsalino (1970) and La Scoumoune (1972), which depict old Marseille as a picaresque film set.

In truth, though, nostalgia is unwise. For over a century, Marseille has suffered beatings, shooting, stabbings. Those early prostitutes, run by men like François the Madman, were treated little better than slaves. And no matter how many thugs the authorities round up, the city’s persistent poverty means there are always people happy to take their place. Especially after a misjudged focus on developing its port to welcome oil shipments — a mistake that wrecked Marseille’s economy after the Yom Kippur War — this has become, to quote one local journalist, “a working class city with bourgeois ghettos”. It hardly helps that though the links between politicians and crime are rather less explicit than during the glory days of the Milieu, graft persists.

After Anfriani’s arrest, back at the dawn of the last century, the French government voted to reform the country’s law and order. New Mobile Brigades were established, with les flics offered a radical new technology — police cars. Nicolas Bessone, the current prosecutor in Marseille, is leading calls for similar shock treatment today. “We badly need new legislation,” he lately proclaimed, arguing that special jails for drug traffickers were sorely needed too.

Perhaps. But challenges remain. Quite aside from Marseille’s underlying socioeconomic conditions, globalisation means modern gangs now have access to faster cars, deadlier guns — and a network abroad that allows them to evade justice. There’s also a lingering distrust of the police in the areas controlled by the gangs, meaning even honest citizens are reluctant to help. That’s hardly unfair: since January, an internal investigation has been examining alleged corruption among local anti-narcotics cops.

Yet these vast hurdles aside, Bessone seems confident that victory is ultimately possible. Asked about whether the war against the dealers could be won, he was defiant: “Absolutely.” He would say that. As those two dead kids so graphically suggest, the fight against Marseille’s gangs is far from done.

Amid this anarchy, Antonio Guterres, the United Nations Secretary-General, has called on the international community to deploy a “robust use of force” — in the form of a UN-sanctioned multinational peacekeeping mission — to disarm the gangs and restore law and order. After all, the situation in Haiti is, as Guterres put it, “nightmarish” — surely the Haitians would welcome a foreign military intervention with open arms? Not quite. When the Haitian government first called for an international mission at the end of last year, people took to the streets and social media to voice their opposition. For them, the brutal realities of gang warfare were less pressing than the country’s fraught relationship with its long history of foreign interventions and occupations — and the disastrous legacy they have left behind.

Haiti declared its independence from France in 1804, following a successful insurrection by self-liberated slaves. But foreign powers — first France, then the US — have undermined Haitian sovereignty ever since. Since America’s occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934, during which the country was transformed into an official US protectorate where atrocities against the local population were rampant, the country’s reins passed from one US-backed dictatorship to another until 1991. That year, following widespread political mobilisation, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a former priest with strong anti-imperialist leanings, became Haiti’s first democratically elected president.

Within a few months, however, he was removed in a coup, which likely saw the involvement of the CIA. In 1994, amid huge protests, the Clinton administration helped restore Aristide to power, but not before getting him to sign an agreement to introduce market-oriented reforms in Haiti. Years later, Clinton himself admitted that these liberalisation policies had devastating consequences for the poor Haitian economy: “It was a mistake… I had to live every day with the consequences of the loss capacity to produce a rice crop in Haiti to feed [its] people because of what I did, nobody else.”

After stepping aside in favour of a close ally in 1996, Aristide returned to office in 2001 in a landslide victory. Three years later, though, he was ousted in yet another coup d’état, after Right-wing ex-army paramilitary units invaded the country from across the Dominican border. Aristide and many others have alleged that the United States had a role in orchestrating the coup against him. At the time, he claimed that US forces, promptly deployed to Haiti, effectively kidnapped him and brought him out of the country against his will. “The way I see it is [US soldiers] came to his house, uninvited,” said Maxine Waters, a Democratic Congresswoman close to Aristide. “They had not only the force of the embassy but the Marines with them. They made it clear that he had to go now or he would be killed.”

The US has always denied that it had anything to do with the 2004 coup or that it forcibly removed Aristide from the country, claiming he acted of his own will. But in 2002, none other than the French ambassador to Haiti at the time told the New York Times that France and the United States had “effectively orchestrated ‘a coup’ against Aristide” by pressuring him to step down and forcing him into exile.

In his place, a transitional government took over, which petitioned the UN Security Council for the intervention of an international peacekeeping force. A few months later, the UN officially launched its “Stabilisation Mission” in the country, comprising a 7,000-strong force led by Brazil and backed by several other countries. However, despite its presence, and the return of formal democratic rule following the 2006 elections, Haiti has continued to be plagued by violence. Several natural disasters, most notably the 2010 earthquake, which killed around 250,000 people, made the situation even worse.

The country was plunged into even further violence following the assassination, in 2021, of President Jovenel Moïse, who had become deeply unpopular amid fuel shortages and spiralling inflation. The 53-year-old president was shot dead inside his home by a group of mercenaries — allegedly 26 Colombians and two Haitian Americans. Two years later many questions remain concerning the true motives behind the murder and its potential masterminds. Not a single person has been charged for the crime in Haiti, while only one person — a Haitian-Chilean businessman — has been sentenced in the US.

In the vacuum left by his death, a power struggle ensued between Claude Joseph, the country’s acting prime minister, and Ariel Henry, a neurologist by training, who was named prime minister by Moïse just two days before his murder but was never officially sworn in. Major foreign powers, as well as the Organization of American States and the United Nations, backed Henry, who was officially sworn in shortly thereafter.

Suggested reading

The first black superhero of the modern age

By Ralph Leonard

But Henry, who was effectively anointed by foreign powers, led by the United States, lacks any real political (or even legal, some argue) legitimation and remains deeply unpopular. The Montana Accord opposition group, which represents a broad spectrum of Haiti’s civil society, has contested the legitimacy of Henry’s government and has been demanding elections for more than a year. Last December, Henry finally reached an agreement with opposition groups to hold elections this year — but no date has yet been set. Adding to the distrust are rumours that Henry may be implicated in Moïse’s killing. The country’s chief prosecutor claimed that he had been in touch with one of the chief suspects in the killing in the days before and hours after the assassination, and asked the justice minister to formally charge Henry. They were both swiftly fired.

If Henry hoped to project an image of strength, it didn’t last, as rival armed gangs started to exploit his weak and controversial rule, effectively taking control of large portions of the country. In recent weeks in particular, the violence has intensified. And yet, as noted, there continues to be widespread opposition among Haitians to a foreign intervention.

Part of this has to do with mistrust in Henry, with many of his opponents convinced that he is calling for foreign intervention in order to strengthen his grip on power and control the outcome of the next elections (or even postpone them indefinitely). But, on a deeper level, it has to do with the Haitians’ resentment over more than a century of disastrous neocolonial interventions and occupations — mostly by the US. As the Haitian sociology professor Jean Eddy Saint Paul recently put it: “Throughout Haitian history, the US has been actively engaged in undermining the legitimacy of Haitian leaders who refused to bow to American imperialism.”

And unfortunately, as the current chaos demonstrates, the latest UN peacekeeping mission — which left the country in 2017, replaced by UN police until 2019 — is no exception. During their 13-year-long stay, the UN peacekeepers raped hundreds of women and girls, or sexually exploited them in exchange for food or support. UN peacekeeping forces were also responsible for dumping toxic waste into the Artibonite River, the longest on the island of Hispaniola, causing a cholera epidemic in 2010 that cost the lives of 10,000 people. Despite acknowledging its responsibilities, the UN has failed to pay any compensation to the victims or their families.

No wonder Haitians revile the prospect of a new UN army coming to their country. For all the responsibilities that Haitians themselves may have for the sorry state of their country, Haiti is clearly paying the price of the West’s systematic interference in the country’s affairs. Rather than infringe once again on its sovereignty, the best thing America and other countries can do is help Haitians recover it. A good starting point would be to stop the massive flow of weapons into the country — the majority of which come from, you guessed it, the US.

Bitcoin Beach, with its old shacks and gleaming new hotels, is home to an eclectic mix from El Salvador, the United States and beyond. Its residents include investors and fishermen, YouTubers and surfers, former beauty queens and former mercenaries. It is more than just a beach club; it is a symbolic landmark of an 18-month-old experiment to promote the cryptocurrency in El Salvador, whose economy is otherwise driven by farming, sweatshops and migrant remittances.

Salvador’s Bitcoin project is championed by globe-trotting entrepreneurs, known as “Bitcoiners”, but is also a key policy of President Nayib Bukele, a 41-year-old former marketing executive who has revolutionised politics for San Salvador’s six million inhabitants. Bukele is most famous for his crackdown on gangs, having suspended civil liberties and incarcerated 1% of the population. But while he has taken an authoritarian approach on crime, in Bitcoin he has embraced a flagship of many libertarians — the controversial blockchain system for digital payment transactions created by the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto.

Bitcoin crept onto the world stage in 2008 and gradually rose in value, attracting hundreds of billions of dollars by the late 2010s. Amid various downturns and scandals (most recently the collapse of the FTX exchange), many dismiss the currency, but it still attracts investment and hardened Bitcoiners insist it will eventually replace physical cash. In September 2021, El Salvador became the first country to declare Bitcoin a legal currency, alongside its use of the US dollar. All Salvadorans received the equivalent of $30 if they signed up to the state-approved “Chivo Wallet”, while Bukele spent $100 million from Salvador’s state coffers on the crypto, shortly before it crashed, immediately diminishing this investment to $66 million. Despite this, Bukele announced “volcano bonds” to raise money for a tax-free Bitcoin City near the Conchagua volcano on the Gulf of Fonseca. At the 2021 Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference in El Salvador, Bukele was introduced with a giant screen displaying an avatar of him in his trademark hipster beard as a flying saucer beamed him down to earth.

For all the fanfare, it’s hard to figure out the mechanics of Bukele’s scheme, such as how Bitcoin City will pay for garbage collection with no tax. It is also unclear what the incentives are, with critics claiming it is really designed to attract money launderers. Like the currency itself, the experiment seems to mean different things to different people, have varying applications (some useful, some shams) and is as much about the image as the product. In short, Bitcoin El Salvador is as cryptic as the virtual money itself.

More from this author

Inside El Salvador's brutal gang crackdown

By Ioan Grillo

Likewise, it’s hard to classify exactly what Bitcoin Beach is. It is not an official district (and is not on Google Maps) but is part of an area called El Zonte. The Californian surfer, businessman and evangelical Christian Michael Peterson is credited with devising the concept in 2019, helping inspire Bukele to launch the currency nationally. Peterson had been visiting El Zonte for over a decade and conducted charity work through a non-profit called Missionsake. The Bitcoin Beach website describes itself as a Salvadoran initiative that Missionsake supports, and the beach as “a sustainable Bitcoin Economic ecosystem… where the majority of people do not have access to bank accounts”. However, while almost all businesses in the area accept the crypto, it’s unclear how many of their transactions use it; one vendor tells me it’s only a tiny amount and he uses those sales for savings.

The project headquarters can be found at Hope House, a white building emblazoned with an orange Bitcoin logo. There, I meet Jorge Valenzuela, a 33-year-old “coordinator” from Zonte. Valenzuela says Bitcoin Beach is registered as an educational and social project which has taught local youths to get a foot in the financial system. But he concedes there are other goals, too. “We can do transactions in Bitcoin and it works. But beyond this there is tourism, economy, new jobs, opportunities, many journalists coming here to see what is going on,” he says. “We have changed the country now. The country of pupusas. The country of waves. The country of Bitcoin. The country of good people. Now nobody is remembering a bad country.”

As successful Bitcoiners have shown, crypto can be promoted not just as a currency or investment but as a lifestyle choice, involving living by the beach, working remotely, and rejecting government interference. Down the road in a gated community, I meet some of those attracted to this newfound libertarian side of Salvador. Nicki and James are a pair of Bitcoiners who moved from New Zealand in early 2022. James was an early adopter of Bitcoin from an entrepreneurial family; Nicki worked in finance. They met during the pandemic as New Zealand’s lockdown restrictions were getting increasingly harsh, especially for the unvaccinated. “They made a two-tier society. You couldn’t go to a café. You couldn’t get your hair cut. You couldn’t do all those things,” Nicki says.

Suggested reading

There's nothing woke about crypto

By Mary Harrington

Then, in November 2021, El Salvador became one of the first countries in the world to remove all Covid travel restrictions. Nicki and James sold up, said goodbye to their families and began a new life by the Pacific, as well as a new YouTube show. Like the few hundred foreign Bitcoiners in the country, they do a mixture of remote work and social media in addition to investing in crypto. As well as saving Bitcoin, they also spend it at the local stores, using apps that can facilitate rapid transactions. “It’s really important for us to utilise it in both ways,” says Nicki. “Eventually, it would be really great to see the fiat system go.” James sees their decision as political: “We literally moved our monetary choices and our time spent to another currency system in another country,” he says. “That’s a really strong vote in our mind.”

The most famous Bitcoiners in the area are Max Keiser and his wife Stacy Herbert, formerly co-hosts of a financial news show on Russia Today. They are considered advisers to Bukele on Bitcoin, a badge that Keiser proudly announces on his Twitter handle to his half a million followers. Their podcast “Orange Pill” applauds Bukele, and discusses Bitcoin in terms laced with near-religious zealotry. “There is always a counterforce for everything in the universe, and Bitcoin is the counterforce to all this: that money-printing; those warmongers; those plunderers,” Herbert said in a recent episode. “Bitcoin cannot be stopped.”

One area where Bitcoin could certainly take off is with remittances, the money migrants send home from their work abroad, mostly in the US. In 2021, migrants wired $7.5 billion to El Salvador, representing more than a quarter of its entire GDP. They often send it in small amounts to their families, and pay high fees using transfer services such as Western Union. Bitcoin, with its blockchain technology, could massively reduce these.

More from this author

Mexico’s cartel corruption on trial

By Ioan Grillo

In the more deprived areas of the capital San Salvador, however, residents seem less enthusiastic. Flogging bananas on a stall in the Margaritas slum, Yamileth Gonzalez, 40, says she received her initial $30 with the Chivo Wallet but hasn’t used it since. “It’s fiddly. A hassle. I prefer cash,” she says, although she is a firm Bukele supporter. Meanwhile, less than 2% of remittances used crypto. The migrants sweating in fields and restaurants seem to lack the patience and trust to turn their earnings into Bitcoin. This isn’t too surprising: many cryptocurrency ATMs in the country appear to be broken. Standing on a street corner in San Salvador, I watch a line of people try to use one, only to walk away empty-handed.

Yet a few streets away, there are signs of El Salvador’s Bitcoin revolution taking shape. Outside Chivo Pets, a government pet hospital that charges in Bitcoin, a trail of dog owners bursts out of the waiting room and onto the street. Here, customers who pay in Bitcoin are charged massively reduced fees — just a few dollars for hundreds of dollars worth of treatment. One queuing dog-owner, Veronica Serrano, tells me she is not a supporter of Bukele but thinks that launching Bitcoin was a popular policy, despite people not using it much. “People like the idea of Bitcoin because it seems modern and futuristic. It seems like we are going forward,” she says.

This strikes me as a key motivation for Bukele, a marketing executive who is very tuned in to the image of his policies. In terms of its PR value, for Bukele, the country’s broken crypto ATMs are a sideshow. As long as places like Bitcoin Beach and Chivo Pets continue to succeed and dominate the headlines, there will always be a victory for him to sell.

This situation has radically changed since March, however, when President Nayib Bukele launched an unprecedented and brutal crackdown on gangs, involving mass imprisonment. “It’s a huge improvement,” Alas tells me, explaining that the maras on her block have disappeared. “Now we can go outside when we like. Our family can come and visit us. No president has cared about us here before.”

Alas’s comments reflect the widespread support for the anti-gang offensive and for Bukele: a December survey found 87.8% of voters approved of him, making him the most popular president on the continent, perhaps even the world. Such popularity contrasts sharply with the harsh rebuke of Bukele’s crackdown by human rights groups, journalists and members of the US Congress.

This gang offensive, though, is ruthless and violates human rights. Following a record 62 murders in a day, Bukele beseeched his legislative assembly to pass a State of Emergency on March 27, and ordered heavily-armed military units to move into the barrios — the poor neighbourhoods where most people live. “No terrorist involved in the wave of violence against the Salvadoran people will go unpunished,” Public Security Minister Gustavo Villatoro posted on Twitter, a favoured communication tool of the government. “We will take them off the street and put them behind bars.”

Since then, more than 60,000 people have been imprisoned — 1% of the entire population — adding to another 40,000 already in jail. It’s a mass incarceration comparable with some of the harshest regimes and wars in history — the equivalent of locking up more than three million in the United States in under a year.

Outside the Mariona prison, in the northern outskirts of the capital San Salvador, hundreds of family members are gathered, mostly mothers and wives, waiting to pass on packages of rice, cornflakes, soap and even prison uniforms to their loved ones. Javiera Maricela, 37, describes how police and soldiers called on her house in a farming village in April and took away her 20-year-old son, saying he would be processed and returned. She has had no contact with him since and does not know if he is still in that prison, let alone alive.

“The lack of information is torturous,” Maricela says. Like most of the detainees, her son is charged with a crime called “agrupaciones ilícitas”, roughly translated as “gang affiliation”, although it applies to those who help gangs as well as actual members. It carries a maximum sentence of 30 years, or 45 years for gang leaders.

Through a contact, I meet a prisoner who succeeded in getting his charges dropped and being released from Mariona. He describes how he was crammed into a cell with 162 inmates and the stink of faeces, had his ribs broken by guards, and frequently heard the screams of prisoners being tortured. During his month in jail, he says, he saw five corpses being carted out. Human rights groups have documented 90 deaths in prisons since the emergency was declared, although many believe the real number is much higher.

“Many of those captured are innocent,” says Samuel García, a former government official who has founded the Victims of the Regime Movement. “The families have proof but the regime doesn’t care. Bukele is very Machiavellian… What he is doing is illegal. He has broken the rule of law.”

More from this author

Mexican cartels have turned to fentanyl

By Ioan Grillo

Despite this, the crackdown remains popular and has certainly had an immense impact on reducing crime. For decades, the two main gangs, the MS-13 and Barrio 18, brazenly controlled barrios, towns and villages across El Salvador. New members committed murders as part of their initiation and continued to kill to elevate their status in their “clique”, or gang chapter. And it was not only other gangsters who were gunned down. Civilians could be murdered for simply walking on the wrong street. I recently spoke to one woman who was gang-raped when she travelled from a Barrio 18 neighbourhood where she lived to visit her mother in MS-13 turf. In the worst atrocity, in 2010, maras torched and shot up a bus killing 17 people.

I have interviewed dozens of gang members in visits over the years; you could often find them openly hanging out in the centre of neighbourhoods. But since the state of emergency, their presence has been greatly reduced: Maras are largely in prison, have fled, or are underground. The number of murders, as a result, has plummeted. Last year, El Salvador’s government reported that there were 496 homicides — a murder rate of about 8 per 100,000, which is lower than the United States for the first time on record. Back in 2015, El Salvador suffered 105 murders per 100,000, making it the most homicidal country on the planet.

“It’s like if you have a patient with cancer, the doctor has to use chemotherapy,” says Tito Elias Ponce, who works in a government agency for barrio outreach. “These criminals are like a cancer for El Salvador.” When I meet Ponce, he is working with youths painting up walls of a slum. As well as wielding the stick, Bukele offers the carrot of rehabilitating poor areas, building football pitches and community centres.

Nearby, I spot a 23-year-old soldier from the motorised infantry who has pulled over at a stand to buy pupusas, a popular Salvadoran food. The soldier claims that the troops are welcomed in the barrios and he denies that innocent people are being carted off. “Some of them may not be full gang members but they are involved in some way,” he says. “We have found messages on their phone or something. Of course, the mothers will protest. For a mother, her son is always an angel.” This claim that no innocent people are swept up seems dubious considering the sheer scale of the arrests. Detainees are stood before judges in mass closed hearings, so it is unclear how convincing the evidence is. Meanwhile, citizens are urged to inform on gang members, which could encourage people to finger anyone they have a beef with.

Suggested reading

This was not Brazil's January 6

By Alex Hochuli

One reason the crackdown is so popular is that Salvadorans are fed up with gang extortion. Unlike Mexican and Colombian gangsters, maras are not big players in drug trafficking but make their money shaking down everyone from bus drivers to grocery store owners. The emergency has reduced extortion, according to reports, but lingering shakedowns remain a part of daily life. I meet a taxi driver whose base used to pay both the main gangs, but now only pays one, whose member actually drives a taxi there. “I am paying these criminals half the amount I used to,” he says “But at least that means I have more money in my pocket.”

The second reason so many Salvadorans support the offensive is more deep-rooted, a consequence of them living most of their lives in warlike conditions. Between 1980 and 1992, a civil war between a series of Right-wing US-backed governments and a Left-wing guerrilla movement tore the country apart. Young refugees largely fled to Los Angeles, where they formed gangs to protect themselves in violent inner-city neighbourhoods. And when they were deported, they turned to crime in their shattered homeland and found plenty of willing recruits among the war orphans and scarred veterans. El Salvador’s new rulers promised peace, democracy and respect for human rights. But the country was drowned in the blood of gang warfare.

Bukele, the son of a wealthy businessman of Palestinian descent, first joined the party of the former guerrillas, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front. I interviewed him in 2017 when he was mayor of San Salvador and he spoke of rehabilitating the barrios and rescuing young men from a life of crime. He won the presidency on a populist platform, railing against the corrupt elites, and formed his own party to smash the power of the old guard in the midterms.

By 2021, Bukele had halved the homicide count, but he is accused of doing this by reviving a truce with the gangs. According to reports by the independent news outlet El Faro, the truce gave gang leaders better treatment in prisons and allowed the gangs to carry on with their shakedowns while they dialled down the murder rate. It was only after this truce broke down with a spree of killings that Bukele launched his State of Emergency. Bukele denies this pact, though many Salvadorans I spoke to don’t care much if it is true; they simply want less violence.

Suggested reading

Meet Mexico's cartel influencers

By David Matthews

Yet it remains to be seen if the drop in murders now secured by the State of Emergency will hold in the long run. The gangs may be in hiding now but they could regroup, and perhaps turn to guerrilla tactics. It is also tough and expensive to keep almost 2% of the population behind bars. To achieve this, Bukele is constructing a new mega prison, baptised the “Centre for Confinement of Terrorism”, which he claims will hold 40,000 inmates.

Meanwhile, the external criticism looks unlikely to make Bukele shift course. US Congressman James McGovern called the crackdown “draconian”, while Amnesty International warned of “a human rights crisis”. Elsewhere, the US Treasury has sanctioned several officials close to Bukele on corruption allegations, freezing their bank accounts and banning them from entering the States. But there is not much more leeway for Washington to pressure Bukele. Sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have not stopped human rights abuses there. What’s more, the idea of a return to a more interventionist US foreign policy in Latin America inspires wrath on both the Left and Right these days.

On the flip side, other Latin American governments are taking note of Bukele’s approach. Over the border in Honduras, President Ximora Castro, the country’s first female leader, has launched her own partial state of emergency to fight gangs. In Mexico, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has largely abandoned his call for “hugs not bullets” to bolster the army.

Outside a San Salvador church, I watch a dozen mothers light candles and pray for their loved ones behind bars. They share stories, their faces full of torment from not knowing whether their sons will ever return. I wonder if support for this mass incarceration shows a tyranny of the majority, and these are the victims. Or if the benefits could outweigh the injustices. Or if one evil has simply been replaced by another evil. But the truth is, Bukele has only arisen because of a failure to deal with an immense problem of organised crime that is a central issue for most people here. And unless liberal governments in Latin America can find a better solution that works in practice, not just rhetoric, we will surely encounter more authoritarian populists and more mega prisons in the years to come.

While little is achieved without hard work and personal responsibility, the narrative around idleness has been cursed since the Eighties, largely because the conditions of the post-war consensus (partly established by Beveridge) have been dismantled from above. The poor are expected to honour their side of a social contract that no longer exists and was destroyed without their consultation for the great profit of others.

The Tory rhetoric of “get on your bike” did not just fail to motivate but seemed designed to demoralise, as any gaslighting would. Here was a form of magical thinking that we might now call “manifestation”, but this was a particularly unholy form of magic, given it was being proposed by many of those who had presided over the de-industrialisation of the areas and populations they were now hectoring for their “idleness”.

This attitude persisted longer than might be expected, with the tabloids providing salacious moral panics around single mothers and benefits cheats. These were designed to enrage anyone striving to work through increasingly precarious conditions. The problem was that, unlike money, moral lessons do trickle down. In place of the now-dishonoured social contract came a society run by and for rentiers and lenders, a place where tax evasion and asset-stripping were not as rare as they may or should have been.

What incentive is left for those struggling to patch together a living wage from what had once been side-hustles, who have little job security in the age of zero-hour contracts, where the differentiation between work and life has been obliterated, where effective unions and collective bargaining are for most industries ancient history, where savings will be eaten away by inflation, where there is a chasm between wages and affording a home, where an accident or sickness might spell financial ruin, and having a child is an unaffordable luxury? What moral instruction about idleness and hard work are they expected to believe in?

More from this series

The betrayal of Britain's seaside towns

By Madeline Bunting

Again, Beveridge is instructive here. For all his paternalism, he was right in identifying that one of the primary ills of his time was not just unemployment but casual employment, which trapped many people in an inescapable cycle of poverty. Worryingly, this trend of “flexibility” appears to have returned, and even when there is relatively secure employment, the results can be disastrous, calling to mind Mr Micawber’s sterling advice in Dickens’s David Copperfield: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

According to the Department for Work and Pensions, there were 3.9 million children living in poverty in the UK in 2020-21. The same study states that “75% of children growing up in poverty live in a household where at least one person works”. This was the environment I grew up in, watching my parents work hard and with great dignity only to be punished at each turn. This was echoed in the pride and resilience of our town in Northern Ireland, which was not so much left behind as scuttled. One of the major factors was institutionalised sectarianism, against Catholics, in almost every aspect of that society as well as the murderous bloodshed of the Troubles that had erupted. Having to listen to lectures, full of callous piety, about the idle poor from the idle rich added insult to injury. Across the UK, the situation remains, with condescending talk of “populism” from elites, who switch around their seating arrangements periodically.

Many politicians and commentators have the luxury of ignoring how most people live, never mind those who live below the poverty line. There are, however, groups of people paying to the poor, which brings us to the reason why the Giant of Idleness is so destructive. When the best prospects for young people in a city or town are stagnation through unemployment or badly paid jobs with no prospects of career or life advancement, the mind turns to other routes of betterment. Fringe groups such as gangs and drug-dealers fill the vacuum, offering a way out and a way up, as corrosive as they are. When society fails to utilise talent and drive, more nefarious entrepreneurial agents will take advantage.

More from this series

Britain's squalid housing crisis

By Mary Harrington

In the town where I grew up, paramilitaries served this role. Initially, recruitment was organic. There was a low-level though bloody civil war, which affected every aspect of life, and harassment, discrimination and the massacre of civilians sent many into the arms of Republicans and Loyalists. Now in deprived areas of Northern Ireland, even maintaining the pretence of a cause has largely fallen away for these groups, who to varying degrees have embraced gangsterism. I was watching the Northern Irish news one evening with a friend when a well-known paramilitary and “community spokesman” appeared and gave a talk on “the plague” of drugs in Loyalist neighbourhoods. My friend burst out laughing and informed me that the gentleman was their first point of contact when procuring substances.

The Troubles may have abated, or rather been placed in a medically induced coma, but power-sharing is paralysed, the communities are still largely segregated, and the fundamental economic and social issues go unacknowledged and unsolved. Poverty is endemic in many areas of Northern Ireland. In a sense, the conflict and division continue in an even more degenerated form. First as tragedy, then as farce.

In the Nineties, I saw this process first-hand. Many of my childhood friends were bright, sometimes brilliant, young men who had few legitimate paths open to them. The paths they chose, while they were underage admittedly, were an abomination. One of them killed a man, a father of four, outside a Chinese restaurant one night. Another was exiled from the city for drug-dealing. I lost count of how many ended up damaged by seeking escape through drink and drugs. With all of Beveridge’s Giants, there’s a haunting sense of contingency. My suspicion as to why Idleness is placed last is that it’s the one ill where, at its worst, one conspires in the ruin of oneself and those around them.

More from this series

The workers were never ignorant

By Terry Eagleton

Northern Ireland is a place that has been continually othered for decades by the rest of the UK and the Republic of Ireland. While it is a unique province in many ways, it is not quite as distant as people would like to believe. I see similar dynamics at work in London gangs and with Islamist extremists in terms of how and who they recruit or groom. In county lines cases, I’ve witnessed a familiar pattern, not just in the incentivising of drug-dealing and evasion of the police, but in the use of drugs as a temporary “escape” from places where there is little to do.

We were those kids and the devil made plenty of work for us. If we’d been approached then with sanctimonious lectures, or panaceas like a community centre, or “just talk to your friends about your feelings” platitudes, we’d have replied with laughter and scorn because even as children, we knew that, for things to change, there had to be a fundamental reassessment of the way the entire society had been stacked and who was benefiting. In our inarticulate way, we knew that it wasn’t a question of work or idleness but the right work and the right idleness, and that, ultimately, though we didn’t then know its name, it was decadence that we had to avoid, by which I mean, doing that which is harmful even catastrophic to oneself, either as an individual or a society. And this is why Idleness will be the last, and not the first, Giant to go. Only when we have begun to confront all the other Giants will this final one begin to collapse.

I have lived through the estate’s highs and lows, and have counted far more lows than highs: its rapid decline at the hands of Thatcherism, the riots that took place in 1981, and the rocketing unemployment the following year. Coupled with a ceaseless spate of burglaries, car crime and vandalism, Cantril was transformed from a council vision of new prosperity and hope into a social abyss, nicknamed the “the worst estate in Europe”.

Today, the estate has tried to build a way out of its past. Gone are the design-for-crime dimly lit subways and three of the nine tower blocks that had been turned into a springboard for those weary of their misery and in search of an early grave. But these architectural changes, part of a major regeneration programme in 2010, have only diverted attention from the real problems so conveniently avoided by local councillors and our representatives in Westminster. The facades of our buildings may have crumbled and been replaced, yet the accompanying cloud of social exclusion and cultural deprivation still lingers. With an estimated 49% of its male inhabitants still unemployed and youth unemployment reaching 80% by 2019, it is hardly surprising that young people in the renamed “Stockbridge Village” see little alternative to following their fathers, mothers and brothers into the temporary escapism of drug and alcohol-induced stupor — and then, inevitably, into the dark and violent economy of gang culture and organised crime.

Since nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel was shot dead in her home in Dovecot last Monday, Merseyside Police have carried out dozens of raids and arrested more than 200 people. When Olivia’s killer is eventually found, I suspect that he, or at least his motives, will have roots in an estate like Stockbridge. As well as living here, I have spent the last decade studying the city’s criminal underworld, and have interviewed more than 50 young people — males and females aged between 18 and 25 — involved in violent gangs across Merseyside. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that when a community collapses, organised crime often fills the void.

My research points towards three significant drivers of gang culture on Merseyside: the absence of both bonding and bridging in communities; the powerful allure of risk-taking; and the blurring of perception between legal employment and criminality. All of these, if addressed effectively alongside inequality, could prevent young people from being driven into the arms of gangs and violent criminality. If unchecked, they stand little chance of escaping the city’s lawlessness, dragging innocent children such as Olivia Pratt-Korbel into the vortex with them.

Suggested reading

Gangs are menacing London hospitals

By Jane Smith

Where the importance of friendship networks was concerned, “bonding” and “bridging” appeared to be the prime determinants that decided whether a young person fell in with the wrong crowd. My study noted that most of Merseyside’s communities, including my own, were extremely insular, suffering from high levels of minimal bonding with very few, if any, forms of bridging — that is, very few attempts by residents to connect to other areas, people and organisations outside of their boundaries. This had a significant impact on the young people I interviewed: those who became embroiled in gangs and violent crime developed restricted friendship networks consisting of friends from only their school days and residential street. This meant that values and beliefs were often bound around the dominant philosophy of street gangs and violence. As one interviewee told me: “It was on my doorstep.” By contrast, those young people who decided to abstain completely had done so through building extended friendship networks beyond their respective school and street — taking up Saturday jobs or becoming involved in activities that had brought them into contact with law-abiding peers.

But friendship networks aren’t everything. As the American criminologist Jackson Katz noted in the Eighties, there is a seductive nature to organised crime: a “black box of criminality” which very few researchers can open. Katz was referring to the difficulty of getting offending individuals to discuss the attraction of the actual risks posed by criminality — what in criminological terms is now referred to as “edgework”. In the context of street gangs, Katz argued that it wasn’t just the allure of criminal participation that was so enticing. More important was the emotional charge of the preparation and run-up to the act, climaxing in the adrenalin rush of successfully getting away with the crime and the rewards that it brought.

Katz asserted that such an allure can also extend to projecting a street identity. Even by dressing as a gang member, he claimed, individuals can derive criminal (almost erotic) physiological pleasure from the entire experience of this role-play.

My research found considerable support for Katz’s observations within gangs on Merseyside: that such causes lay not merely in the need for the external material benefits derived from crime, but also a craving for risk-taking, with this latter element expressed in dress. (In most cases: a black North Face hoodie topped off with tracksuit bottoms and “110” Nike trainers.) This was further emphasised in the marking of territory through graffiti, which talked of “street soldiers” whose condemnation of Merseyside Police was projected through the simple graffiti tag of FTM (“Fuck the Matrix”).

Suggested reading

The Tories are criminally blind

By John Oxley

Interestingly, my study found evidence for the allure of risk on two levels. In the first instance, in the much-cited and discussed traditional form, the great majority of male gang members reflected on the buzz derived from going out and the unpredictability of what the night might bring. Second, my research identified a newer form — what I call indirect “vicarious edge work”. This saw young women associates derive a dose of excitement through the turbulent criminal life of male gang members.

As I continued my interviews, it became clear how infectious this allure really is. Every community I visited was home to chronic levels of unemployment which had disproportionately affected young people. And without any real prospect of securing a legitimate job, these people were being forced to find alternative means of financial survival through gangs and drug crime — to the extent that the boundaries between legitimate employment and criminality had become entirely clouded. From the vivid descriptions given to me, the young men I interviewed had long-ceased positioning themselves as gang members. Instead, they had adopted an alternative identity of deviant entrepreneurs ready to utilise marketing strategies: they offer Buy-One-Get-One free on bags of “lemo” (cocaine) and send out price menus, with opening and closing hours of serving, via text message. They have, in effect, convinced themselves that they are doing a job just like any other. They have internalised their own language and normalised their crime. Its allure is simply too potent — and is infectious, too.

It’s no coincidence, after all, that more than a week after the horrifying killing of Olivia Pratt-Korbel, her killer is yet to be captured. This, despite the fact that we know who the target was, and despite the fact that, the day after Olivia’s death, the chief constable of Merseyside Police reassured reporters on the scene that “Merseyside is different in terms of where it was 15 years ago”. The truth, however, is that while it may have taken a new form, the allure of gang crime on Merseyside remains as strong as ever. Olivia’s death was the fourth in Liverpool in just one week; afterwards, relatives of the intended target warned on social media that “snitches get stitches”. None of this suggests that the allure of gang crime is waning.

Suggested reading

The men who watch gore porn

By Simon Cottee

And yet, perhaps there’s a glimmer of hope. Merseyside Police have started to think about what is being called “preventative policing”. It’s not going to change anything overnight, but it’s a start. Finally, there is the realisation that partnership collaboration has become a vital cog — that, to have any impact on this problem, structural issues must be addressed and the social biographies of communities must be scrutinised. But this will take time, and time doesn’t fill me with hope: in Knowsley, we have seen out-of-touch ministers brag about levelling-up on our TV screens, but so far haven’t seen any tangible solutions to poverty, homelessness and, of course, organised violent crime.

So when Olivia’s killer is finally found, and the national news cameras inevitably move on, I can’t escape the feeling that business as usual will return. Social exclusion and cultural deprivation have created a vacuum in Merseyside — and without any meaningful alternative, the region’s gangs will continue to fill it.

Where I work, there’s a “code red” every day. That’s what we call the arrival of a stabbing victim. The patient is almost always a teenager. We should provide a safe refuge. But just a few weeks into working in a London hospital, I had witnessed two stabbings.

Just a few weeks ago, a boy came in with knife wounds and was taken to have a CT scan to assess the damage. But his attackers were not satisfied with wounding him — they wanted him dead. After turning up at the hospital, the whole gang rushed to the CT scanners. The nurse and radiographer tried to stand in their way — my colleagues tend to be extremely brave — but they were attacked and knocked to the ground. At this point, security arrived: the gang fled, successfully escaping.

If you’ve been to a hospital recently, you’ll know that you can pretty much walk in and around as you like. There are far, far too many to check. There are numerous restricted and locked areas, and we have permanent security guards posted on the highest risk areas for gang violence — but most entrances are completely open at all hours. You can’t get into other wards without buzzing and being let in, but anyone can get into A&E.

The injured boy came in on a Saturday morning, when the hospital was quite empty. Later that day, someone walking around on the first floor suddenly heard loud shouting and yelling. One of my friends was working in a ward adjacent to A&E, and saw a man run up and start banging on the door, closely followed by a group of young men.

The gang had returned, found a target, and were chasing him down the corridor, knives out. All the wards were locked, and the man was trying his best to get away, hammering on all the doors — but no one was opening up. None of the staff wanted men with knives running around their wards — and, frankly, probably didn’t want to be in harm’s way themselves. We’re not paid danger money. My friend felt guilty for not opening the door, but what was she supposed to do: put herself and all the patients in her ward at risk?

More from this author

Inside the Covid ward

By Dr Jane Smith

Usually when there is a gang-related incident, there are stabbings on both sides. Hospitals go to great lengths to ensure members of rival gangs are taken to separate trauma centres. But sometimes a mistake is made — or both victims are too unwell to reach another hospital — and they end up in the same place. Either way, if gangs are determined to take their feuds into hospitals, there is not much we can do.

Gangs come up with all sorts of ways to try and access victims who have survived. Sometimes, they pretend to be family members. The hospital has started to set code words that genuine relatives can use to identify themselves when they come and visit. But on one occasion, a hostile gang created fake ID badges. They managed to get hold of their target’s location and just called on the intercom. They were buzzed in, and at least a couple got onto the ward.

Occasionally, gang members who’ve been stabbed are personally guarded by the police during their admissions. I know of at least one who was discharged straight into witness protection.

Suggested reading

The truth about teenage knife crime

By Max Daly

There was blood all over the floors of the corridor when the gang left that Saturday. Their victim, the man who’d been banging on doors, was rushed to the Intensive Care Unit. He was at — in terms of treatment quality — one of the best hospitals he could hope for. The Major Trauma team often includes ex-military doctors. There will be up to five different surgeons working to save one victim simultaneously. This, of course, places a great strain on the health service, but the upside is that London surgeons have become experts — the best in the world — at treating stab wounds. People survive horrendous attacks that would have proved fatal only a few years ago.

Some are not meant to kill, though; gangs sometimes go in for “bagging”, which is when they stab the victim in the rectum, so that they need a colostomy bag for the rest of their life. This is meant to be the most humiliating punishment.

At another hospital I worked at, a couple of stab victims came in almost at the same time, one a 16-year-old boy with a deep wound to the leg. How did this happen, I asked, and he said he was just messing around with a knife in his kitchen and had thrown it in the air, after which it had landed in his leg.

Naively, I was inclined to believe him — especially because his mum was there. But I then went to discuss the case with my consultant, who said: “You don’t believe him, surely? Ask the mum what kind of knife it was.” Neither could describe it, of course.

I did find it slightly ironic that the boy turned out to be terrified of needles, grabbing at my arm as I tried to inject some local anaesthetic with something less than half a millimetre in diameter. He then asked me: what would be the most dangerous place to be stabbed in the leg? Is there any spot which would kill someone? Somehow, I doubted his wound had awakened a yearning to undertake an anatomy degree, so I feigned ignorance and responded vaguely.

Later, his mum kicked up a massive fuss about her son not being seen straight away by doctors. He had a six-hour wait; it was a deep cut, but the risk of infection from kitchen knives is small. Of course, if it hadn’t been a kitchen knife, but rather a knife used in street fights, then there was a much higher risk of infection. In the boy’s defence, he was quite understanding when I told him I would have to report the incident to the police, and said he “could see how it looked.” Still, he rigidly stuck to his knife throwing story.

More from this author

Did I give my patients Covid?

By Dr Jane Smith

After a stabbing victim arrives, you often see the victims of the revenge attacks coming in the very same day. This boy had arrived at 10pm and later on that night another few boys with knife wounds were brought in; some were in a worse condition and were sent to a major trauma centre with life-threatening injuries. We assumed the incident was a response to the earlier violence.

What feels odd, to me, is that so many people — children — are being stabbed in London hospitals and yet almost no one outside the hospital seems aware of it. Unless someone happens to tip off a reporter, these incidents seem to get swallowed in the general mass of crime stories and injuries. Perhaps it will only get reported if — perhaps I should say when — someone is murdered in a hospital.

I suspect this is part of a general increase in knife crime, although it’s entirely possible it’s been like this for a while. After all, even if last year’s 132 London murders made it the worst for almost a decade, things were far worse in the 90s and early 00s. In 2003 there were 204 murders — and there were almost two million fewer Londoners then — although, with better treatment now available, some of those would have survived in 2021.

Perhaps wards have always been stormed by teenagers acting out rivalries in the most brutal possible ways. The grim determination with which our staff grin and bear it suggests they have become used to it. But even if that’s the case, the danger we face shouldn’t be secret — in the same way that the poor pay, hours, conditions and career prospects of junior doctors, relative to their peers, should also be public information.

Suggested reading

Why did Tottenham erupt?

By David Matthews

The security guards we have are pretty impressive and fearless, but theirs is a massive job — do we really want to ask Joseph and his buddy Emmanuel to stand up, unarmed, just the two of them, against 12 teenagers with 12″ kitchen knives who have stabbed before and are here to do it again, all for £18,000 a year?

It would make me feel safer if there were a few more Emmanuels. But the very nature of hospitals makes it hard to have a strict policy on who comes in and out. We know the risks, and have constant security coverage on the major trauma ward.

When the victim is treated and cleaned up, we try to ensure they don’t turn up again. We liaise with charities that talk to youths who have been stabbed, and with charities that employ ex-gang members who try to them out of the lifestyle. These organisations offer training days for hospital staff: we learn how to speak to gang members, and which gangs work in which areas.

But after that, it’s a tick-box exercise. I have to refer the victims to social services, but mostly I wonder why I bother. The boys don’t want me to, and it takes so much of my time. Just filling in the forms takes an hour, and remember: stabbings happen every single day.

Obviously, we have to report them to the police. But they often seem to accept these incidents as a fact of life in London. So do the boys, their general attitude being: “Yeah, I got stabbed and I’m fine”. Their mothers are a different matter, and I suspect the last boy I treated got a big talking to when he got home. But will it make any difference? Probably not. Many victims will be back again — in either the hospital ward or the mortuary.

I’m not sure what else we can do, other than pass on these horror stories — because how can we fix a problem that most people don’t even realise exists?

Nobody really knows what happened next. Nobody ever does in these situations. But the trigger is always the same: someone is pushed or punched; something is thrown or kicked; a fire is lit and a riot starts.

Having grown up in Walthamstow, Tottenham’s East End neighbour, I know the area intimately. I’ve been a member of London’s “black community” all my life; and when the community sneezes, the capital catches a cold. Watching the wall-to-wall coverage of the riots, I only had to glimpse at the predominantly black faces of those caught up in the melee for my jaw to drop, my stomach to churn. Familiar landmarks, streets and memories burned beyond recognition. Within three days, the same scenes were being played out in towns and cities across England.

The country soon became gripped by a desperate need to discover the “truth” behind the riots. Pantomime historian David Starkey appeared, shamelessly, on BBC2’s Newsnight claiming that “the problem is that the whites have become black”, evoking Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech with incendiary glee. “His prophecy was absolutely right in one sense,” Starkey waxed. “The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent. They wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham.”

On the other side, those who had lived in the shadow of bigotry, structural inequality and what they described as the “institutionally racist” Metropolitan Police saw the riots — or “uprisings”, as the Marxist fringes put it — as yet more evidence of a Britain broken by racism and class war.

More from this author

How drug dealers won lockdown

By David Matthews

At the time, the official line was straightforward. On August 4, 29-year-old Duggan was shot dead by police officers from Operation Trident, the Metropolitan Police unit charged with investigating gun crime in London’s black communities. Trident had mounted an operation to apprehend Duggan, who they suspected of being in possession of a firearm, without informing the local police.

Make no mistake: Mark Duggan was no saint. In fact, he wasn’t even “no saint” in the George Floyd sense of the term. Duggan wasn’t choked to death on the street, unarmed and seemingly of little threat. He was shot dead while trying to escape on foot, in possession of a firearm he’d bought 15 minutes earlier. As one former officer who was attached to the unit that killed Duggan told me: “If you don’t want to be shot and killed by someone like me, don’t go out on to the streets of Britain with a gun or a deadly weapon.”

As a Fellow of the Design Against Crime Research Centre at the University of the Arts, it is my job to examine criminal behaviour through a creative lens. So when I look back at the Tottenham riots, what I see is a theatrical, operatic event — albeit a dark one triggered by those addicted to daily drama and a need to be heard. As one old Caribbean saying goes, which is generally applied to getting a good hiding: “Those who don’t hear must feel.”

In a similar manner, a riot gives the voiceless, especially those with low dopamine levels, an opportunity to get caught up in the rush, the excitement and the drama of anarchy. A riot is like Glastonbury for sociopaths. Antagonists see fires burning, smoke billowing, shouting, screams and sirens and they get high. Somewhere between the peaceful demonstration and the five deaths, hundreds of arrests and damages estimated to be as much as £300 million, someone made a critical error of judgement — and then the rioting started.

Suggested reading

The truth about teenage knife crime

By Max Daly

Perhaps the biggest tragedy of all is that it could have been avoided. Even police experts have conceded the anarchy was preventable. “There was a disgraceful absence of visible leadership, and that should be shaming for the Metropolitan Police,” was the verdict of retired Met Police Deputy Assistant Commissioner David Gilbertson at the time. “With rank comes responsibility, and part of the responsibility is visible command… It’s blindingly obvious to say that you [should] push them away from target-rich environments; a shopping area, a retail park — all of the places that were trashed by the rioters.”

At the time, Tottenham MP David Lammy told me he knew the riots were coming. Unlike most MPs, he was born and raised in the constituency he represents; but like many of his constituents — like me, in fact — he comes from an immigrant, working-class family, too many of whose relatives have had negative encounters with the police. He understood the existential problem between black people and those tasked with protecting them.

But many of us predicted a riot. Tottenham was always going to erupt. Even today, despite now being home to a gleaming £1 billion football stadium, recent deprivation figures show that Tottenham remains one of the top 6% most deprived neighbourhoods in England. Beyond the escalating property prices and significant high crime “powder keg hotspots”, volatile Tottenham — and its surrounding boroughs of Hackney, Waltham Forest and Islington — has long been home to rabbit warren council estates that look like open prisons where an absence of “boots on the ground” policing, partly due to falling or reprioritised police resources, allows gangs to act with impunity. The atomisation, alienation and cynicism — on all sides in such human Petri dishes — means the business of predicting riots is an exercise of “when” not “if”.

After all, we’ve been here before. In 1985, the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham erupted. Fuelled by racism, social exclusion, police brutality and poverty, youths took to the streets. Duggan lived on that estate; PC Keith Blakelock died on it. The anger of the rioters, and indeed many pacifists, was articulated graphically by Bernie Grant, Lammy’s predecessor, who infamously remarked: “The police got a bloody good hiding.” Grant’s words were strong — too strong given that an officer had just been murdered in the line of duty. But those words became the tagline of the 1985 riot. Something political had happened.

On the other hand, the 2011 riots were, as Lammy later wrote, “an explosion of hedonism and nihilism”. In Out of the Ashes, he suggests that lack of education, ineffective parental guidance, poor role models, ill-discipline, unemployment and a host of social and developmental ills created the perfect storm for a riot.

Suggested reading

Can London be saved?

By Henry Wismayer

Yes, the rioters’ behaviour was criminal. Yes, they should be held to account. But go to Tottenham, says Lammy, and witness the conditions people are living under. For him, the finger was there to be pointed at the mindless criminals at the heart of the riot, and indeed failed police tactics and leadership. But it was also there to be pointed at Cameron, Blair and Brown too. This trio had arguably mortgaged British society, economically and morally in the run up to 2011, just as Thatcher had previously done with the resultant miners’ strikes, poll tax riots and previous Tottenham, Toxteth and Brixton disturbances.

Of course, plenty of black people have died at the hands of police in Britain. But barely a handful have led to serious rioting in the 73 years since the arrival of the Windrush. So why Mark Duggan?

To some extent, people rioted over his death because “his people” were able to mobilise a demonstration outside of Tottenham police station, which then got out of hand — not because he was a galvanising figure like Rodney King or George Floyd or Cynthia Jarrett, whose death sparked the first Tottenham riot in 1985, but because the moment presented itself.

Perhaps that’s why we’ll never be able to explain what happened ten years ago. The chaos was already there. Duggan’s death was merely the trigger. And as communities in Tottenham and beyond continue to rot, I suspect it won’t the last.