The killing of a schoolboy sets Gordon Brown his toughest test in London

12 April 2012

Soon words themselves begin to feel weak. How do you describe the murder of yet another teenager on London's streets? Do you say Tuesday night's killing of Martin Dinnegan, aged just 14, in Holloway was appalling? A tragedy? A wicked crime? It was all three, of course, but somehow the words seem tired if only because we have already used them nine times in the past five months.

Each one of the nine teenage killings since February had its own story and represented its own horror, Martin's case is as poignant as the rest. Not a gang member himself, he was, it seems, unlucky enough to be caught between two duelling gangs. He was chased down the street and then stabbed to death.

But if his murder seizes our attention it might be because of its time and place.

He was killed in Holloway, in the London Borough of Islington, which boasts both multi-million pound homes and pockets of grim poverty. There are high-earning City types living just a few streets away from the hopeless and aimless. And this is not peculiar to Islington. On the contrary, it is true of our entire city, where intense deprivation and social breakdown now exist cheek by jowl alongside the bottomless wealth of the super-rich.

In today's London you can meet women who will pay £10,000 for a handbag, men who will pay £100,000 for a watch and teenagers who will push a knife into the heart of a boy for no reason at all.

As for the timing, there is of course the shock of discovering that a young lad could be murdered in a busy area in the still-broad daylight of a Tuesday evening in June. But Martin Dinnegan was also murdered on the eve of a change of prime minister for this country, which makes it a kind of challenge to Gordon Brown and every one of us.

Until now, some Londoners may have tried to give themselves the false comfort that these teen killings were not their problem. They happened to other people's

In today's London you meet women who pay £10,000 for a handbag - and teenagers who will push a knife into the heart of a boy for no reason at all children in other people's places. If kids were getting shot, it was in the badlands of Tottenham; if they were getting stabbed, it was on the rough streets of Acton far away from them. But Martin Dinnegan was murdered on a busy street in an area barely a brisk walk from some of the plushest housing in the capital. He hadn't been dealing drugs or been engaged in a turf war with gangs.

He was a boy who did his homework, supported his football team and whose only mistake, according to his mother, was that he was looking at some other boys "the wrong way".

Middle-class Londoners can pretend this is happening somewhere else no longer. Astonishingly, there have been seven murders in London in the past eight days alone, starting with the stabbing of an 18-year-old in Croydon on 19 June and ending with the stabbing of another 18-year-old in Ilford just yesterday.

This is now a threat to all of us.

Coming together to combat that threat will require a profound shift in a city that is growing ever more economically divided, as the super-rich with their eight-figure residences, six-figure Aston- Martins and four-figure restaurant bills soar off into a stratosphere of their own, insulated most of the time from the lives of the rest of us. They are especially blind to the London underclass, those confined, generation after generation, to housing estates that are rundown and riddled with every conceivable social problem. London in the early 21st century is coming to resemble the 1980s New York of the Bonfire of the Vanities a tale of two cities, one populated by the stylish and wealthy, the other heaving with poverty, anger and violence.

We have to face this, if only because the deprivation endured by London's poorest is itself a cause of crime. Dip into Criminal Obsessions, a 2005 study for the Crime and Society Foundation. It declares baldly that: "The key component to what makes one place more dangerous to live in as compared to another is poverty. The poorer the place you live in the more likely you are to be murdered." And it's not just the absolute state of privation of those at the bottom that leads to violent crime. Their relative poverty matters too. Enver Solomon of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King's College is quite clear that inequality an "economically polarised society" like London's can be a contributory factor to violent crime. He explains that radically unequal societies become socially unstable, boiling with frustration and resentment, as those at the bottom feel permanently excluded from the possibilities enjoyed at the top.

So easing the hardship of those most deprived areas will not be enough: society itself has to change. That means narrowing the gap between rich and poor. Closing the tax loopholes that allow the barons of private equity to pay less tax than their cleaners would be a symbolic, but welcome, start.

But it also means improving social mobility, the chances of individuals to lift themselves up the social ladder. Incredibly, despite all the congratulation heaped on Tony Blair yesterday, Britain is a less fluid place than it was 10 years ago. Alan Johnson has admitted that it would be far harder for a working-class, council-estate boy like him to make it into the Cabinet now. And the problem is only getting worse. On Monday the Sutton Trust revealed figures showing that even the expansion of university education hasn't helped: most of the extra places have gone to middle-class kids.

If we want the killing spree that took away Martin Dinnegan's young life to end, this is the problem we will eventually have to solve. It will mean finding remedies for those trapped in the most stubbornly poor estates, ranging from intensive early-years education to wellfunded youth services aimed at preventing teenagers drifting into bad company. Education is key, the only sure way to break the cycle of poverty that sees one workless generation follow another. If city academies can make good their promise, enabling bright kids to flourish regardless of their background, they will be part of the answer.

No one pretends this will be easy but it is necessary. Labour legend has it that it was, in fact, Brown, not Blair, who coined the slogan "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". Well, now he has the chance to prove he meant it..

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