Ban bags and boozes, not knives and thugs? (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

Ban bags and boozes, not knives and thugs?

10:06am Tuesday 11th November 2008

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By Simon Munk »

A local supermarket has banned anyone from taking shopping trolleys into their shop. You can't drink in the town square or surrounding area any more. What is it with this current rush to pettily prohibit all sorts of behaviour that isn't really hurting anyone? If you ask me (and hey, if you don't ask me I'll tell you anyway), these things are a diversion – so people can pretend, to themselves and the rest of us, that they're doing something about their problems, without actually doing anything too challenging about any serious issues.

The Gazi supermarket at the western end of Walthamstow High Street is currently banning "drag bags", trolleys and backpacks after a shoplifting crimewave. But as one commentator notes, this is the same store where staff suffered serious assaults by a group of armed thugs earlier this year.

The store's managers have chosen to respond to one problem with a massively over-the-top approach that sees shoppers virtually frisked before entering, and then their bags left in a pile. And on the other problem? Well, nothing really seems to have been done about that one.

That's because it's easy to see a solution, even if it's a completely daft one, to the small problem. But very difficult to see a solution to the much bigger, more serious one.

The same could be said of the ban of street drinkers from the town square and surrounding area. Sure, the presence of a few staggering, smelly oddballs in the town square or bus station is a bit off-putting. But while they're prone to the occasional argument amongst themselves, none of them, to my knowledge, have stabbed anyone yet.

So we're going to drive out a relatively harmless, mildly annoying sector of the local population? The only people, in fact, who spend any time watching the shiny new giant telly in the town square? And of course, they'll still keep drinking and arguing and smelling – they'll just do it round the corner nearby. And what about the real problem?

What about the kids carrying knives and stabbing each other with them on a depressingly regular basis (as sadly happened earlier this year in Walthamstow Town Square)? That, apparently, seems much too much like hard work to tackle right now.

If politicians, the police, even store managers think they can fob people off with showy solutions to problems that don't really need fixing, while ignoring the real problems most of us see around us every single day, they must think we're stupid. Are we stupid?