Blood on the streets (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Blood on the streets

10:43am Monday 13th July 2009 in Reviews By Jim Greenhalf

How familiar is this to you?

“A twenty-something man cycles past on a tiny BMX bicycle. He cuts a preposterous figure, but the outreach workers shrink from his glare as he cycles past. He’s a gang member who’s on a perfect mode of transport from which to ‘gun and run’.”

John Heale spent several years walking and talking with young gangsters and former gangsters. His encounter with the man on the BMX occurred in a part of Waltham Forest, my home town in London, a chunk of which, from Leyton in the east to Chingford in the north, he designates as ‘gangland’.

The phenomenon of armed teenage gangsters in areas of London, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford may be new – Heale is inclined to blame the 1980s – but gangs and gangsters are not. In the late 1950s, for example, the Kray brothers and their crew dominated an area of London north and east of the River Thames. On the south of the river, the Richardsons ruled.

They ruled by fear to protect the various rackets they ran which brought in the money that supported them and their families. They were fiercely territorial. Gang membership, although hazardous, gave them street credibility and respect.

Heale identifies the same criteria binding together members of the Elders, the Youngers, Piff City, Beaumont, and other gangs.

But there are differences too, not only of age. The Krays and the Richardsons were criminals who flourished at a time of full employment and social and demographic stability.

Contemporary Britain is almost a different country. The make-up of its population, the operation of schools, the police, Parliament and much else has changed so rapidly and become almost beyond recognition.

Teddy boy punch-ups, bank holiday seaside battles between Mods and Rockers, pre-planned scraps between the supporters of rival football clubs, were manifestations of an age-old problem of young men trying to prove how tough they were.

But these days guns, booze and narcotics are widely available. Youngsters are doing each other in. Something new is happening when police apprehend a three-year old carrying a weapon (as a courier).

If people of my generation feel estranged in an urban jungle, the young who grow up in it probably have known little else. Dysfunctional parents, indifferent schooling and scant job opportunities can create a vortex of hopelessness.

Heale asks a number of gang members from North London if they have ever ventured out of their territory to have a go on the London Eye.

“‘Nah, man, I don’t go down them ends.’ Would he like to? He would – he speaks of it as a holiday abroad. So many of the Youngers inhabit this strange cognitive landscape – where the peer group is all that provides safety, when there is none at home, and even less when they travel out of their area to encounter grave danger… This is how many of the gangs evolve; from a playgroup, from boys looking for adventure, to crime, to a siege mentality.”

Heale is on weaker ground in his assumptions about the cause of the 2001 Bradford riot. Although he is aware of the city’s reputation as a centre of the heroin trade, drugs and gang membership do not automatically go together. Therefore he is persuaded that racial provocation prompted 1,000 or more young men to do what they did on that July Saturday.

A Bradford race relations officer told me several months before the riot happened that the summer would see some sort of territorial battle to take over the streets of Bradford. To some degree the riot was planned.

One Blood gives a vivid and disturbing account of life inside inner-city gangs and how the phenomenon of street shootings, as happened in Sheffield recently, is getting worse.

One Blood, by John Heale, Pocket Books, £7.99