ASBOs again

[Martin Cassini]

I’m always on the lookout for parallel philosophies. In last Saturday’s Guardian, Richard Sennett, professor of sociology at the LSE, welcomed the demise of the ASBO. They hand out "restraining orders to prevent people from possibly committing a crime. Blair thought social behaviour could be ‘reformed’ top down, and in this he exactly missed the point. Cultures hold together or fall apart for reasons that transcend power. On the housing estate in Chicago where I lived, frail African-American grandmothers and Italian grandfathers commanded a moral authority which no policeman or social worker will ever possess. Good social behaviour is all about the family countering peer pressure. ‘Values’ arise from the habits of everyday life; they are not abstract imperatives. Children in English-speaking neo-liberal countries are much more likely to be bullied; ours is a society that inculcates aggression, a problem inflected by inequality. Working-class life has become atomised. I would subsidise pubs rather than banks. New Labour’s answer to practical failure was always another policy. The asbo is an icon of the regime’s negligence. May it rest in peace." You will see the parallels with traffic lights and other anti-social, interventionist traffic controls. The sooner we see the back of them the better, too.