Britain’s anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) have long been considered a bad joke. Kids boast that having one is a‘badge of honour’, market stalls sell ASBO t-shirts, and the acronym is used to christen dangerous dogs and evenvicious swans. Little wonder few people take them seriously – 57 per cent of ASBOs have been breached, rising to up to 100 per cent in some towns. They should rightly be scrapped. But in announcing a souped-up successor, the UK coalition government is making things worse, exacerbating the inability of communities to deal with anti-social behaviour themselves.

The Lib-Con coalition just can’t help themselves. When announcing the imminent dumping of the ASBO this week, home secretary Theresa May declared: ‘It’s clear the old top-down approach to the problem [of anti-social behaviour] hasn’t worked.’ So far, so good. However, in announcing new criminal-behaviour orders – which have quickly been dubbed‘Crimbos’ - and crime-prevention injunctions, she demonstrates that no lessons have been learned. These replacements are designed to be more efficient and cut bureaucracy, but they remain as intrusive as the old ASBOs. Indeed, new gimmicks, such as the ‘community trigger’, look to be more insidious. So under this new initiative, if three or more households complain about a neighbour having noisy sex, singing Meatloaf too loudly or whatever, the complaint gets fast-tracked by authorities. It’s meant to encourage civic participation; it’s more likely, however, to cultivate a community of snitches. Encouraging neighbours to collaborate with each other to get the state to step in will weaken, not strengthen, communities – and it won’t tackle anti-social behaviour, either.

Given its ubiquity today, it is often hard to imagine there was a time when the term ‘anti-social behaviour’ did not exist. Yet it only really emerged a couple of decades ago when it was adopted as a pet phrase of Rudolph Giuliani during his ‘zero tolerance’ crackdown while mayor of New York in the mid-1990s. New Labour, then vying for power, was only too happy to jump on the bandwagon in the UK, declaring in its 1997 election manifesto: ‘We will be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime… We will tackle the unacceptable level of anti-social behaviour and crime on our streets. Our “zero tolerance” approach will ensure that petty criminality among young offenders is seriously addressed.’ Shortly after the 1997 election, the ASBO was introduced in England, Scotland and Wales under section 1 of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. It was intended to deal with behaviour that did not come under the remit of the criminal-justice system, like vandalism or nasty neighbours.

Between 2000 and 2010, over 20,000 ASBOs were issued. Authorities meddled in an unprecedented and often ludicrous and petty array of social issues, ranging from bans on wearingskimpy nightwear and being sarcastic to drinking alcohol in public, attending protests and, in the case of one 14-year-old boy, using the word ‘grass’ after neighbours complained he was calling them police informers. But that’s not to say that the introduction of ASBOs, and the resulting much-hyped ‘ASBO culture’, was solely a result of opportunistic politicians creating a problem that hitherto did not really exist. Driving politicians’ reactions to ‘anti-social behaviour’ was an instinctive recognition that increasingly alienated people and communities were no longer collectively setting standards of behaviour. In a period of social and communal disarray, communities were not self-correcting each other’s behaviour in the way they once would have done.

There are a number of reasons for this. The perception that there is more ‘anti-social behaviour’ is in part a result of the corrosion of long-standing communities, which historically developed social bonds through shared activities, interests and common places of work. In many areas, this problem has been exacerbated by attempts to put communities which have hit hard times, which previously might have moved on and regenerated elsewhere, on life support through the welfare state.

This corrosion of communities has gone hand-in-hand with a wholesale devaluation of the wisdom of older generations by the modern elite. No longer are parents and elders seen to know best, able to assume authority when it comes to setting community norms and standards. Instead, the idea of adults ‘knowing best’ has been problematised, eroded by a rise of relativism with regards to behaviour and attitudes. Adults are encouraged not to deal with community affairs except through formal channels, lest they make matters worse. Even when it comes to what were previously innocuous social activities, like coaching a kids’ football team, adults have to prove they are not a problem by getting a CRB check as a state-sanctioned stamp of approval. Young people and elders alike are encouraged to accept the idea that ‘the state knows best’, with officials, rather than the community, playing the role of arbiters of ‘social’ and ‘anti-social’ behaviour.

This leads to a situation where it is accepted that communities are unable to sort out anti-social behaviour informally and locally. Logically, initiatives like ASBOs follow, as the state takes on what was once an old important social role of moderating behaviour in a community. The upshot of this is that our social and moral resources for handling certain situations informally are drained. No longer is knocking on the door of a neighbour to tell him to turn his music down seen to be the done thing. Instead, an official intermediary is considered necessary to ensure things don’t get out of hand. No longer can good neighbours assume, as the soap theme goes, that with a ‘little understanding’, they can ‘find the perfect blend’. Understanding can now only be reached with a little help from the state. 

So when Theresa May points to ‘three million incidents of anti-social behaviour… still being reported to the police each and every year’, it isn’t that there is more anti-social behaviour than before. Rather it is that our perceived capability for dealing with it ourselves has been diminished, and so we are invited to turn to the state.

Crucially, what has bypassed May, and all the other politicians lining up to talk tough on tackling anti-social behaviour, is that ASBOs and their proposed successors will intensify an already bad situation. By further formalising and juridifying informal areas of life, ASBOs and ‘Crimbos’ encourage people to bow to external authorities, becoming ever more reliant on outside actors to fix local, social problems. That is not to say that these problems do not exist, and that solutions don’t need to be found. But while people are encouraged to ditch their own nous and forgo their authority in favour of saying ‘let’s call the ASBO police’, community divisions will only be exacerbated further. One thing is for certain: only when we sweep away the whole arsenal of ASBOs, Crimbos, community triggers and whatever new initiatives the state concocts to regulate our behaviour will good neighbours stand any chance of becoming good friends.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes.

Midway through Avengers Assemble, one of the few good guys to actually snuff it faces Loki, the god Thor’s estranged half-brother, and tells him why his plan for world domination is certain to fail: ‘You lack conviction’, he declares. Rarely has a film so neatly captured its Achilles heel.

Granted, none of the millions of people attending the movie will have gone with their popcorn and 3D glasses expecting the dark forces of evil to triumph. And if box-office receipts are anything to go by – the film has taken $1 billion worldwide in just over two weeks, making it the highest-grossing debut of all time – the audience has not been deterred. This remains high-quality escapism on a scale that hasn’t been seen since Lord of the Rings.

But for much of the film, Loki’s key strategy is to play the assembling Avengers off against one another. He sits back and waits, while Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man takes on Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, before their scuffle is broken up by holier-than-thou Captain America (Chris Evans). For a good part of the rest of the film he remains locked in a Hulk-proof glass vault waiting for Tony Stark (the ‘genius billionaire playboy philanthropist’ inside Iron Man) and Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo) to quit the banter, and for Banner’s anger to get the better of him and for the big green superhuman wrecking ball to emerge in his place. 

This baddy-waiting-in-the-wings approach is doubtless as much director Joss Whedon’s strategy as it is Loki’s. After all, one of the key challenges he faced was to introduce and do justice to all of the Avengers, many of whom had been given their own movies and franchises beforehand. And given the force of personality of wise-cracking Robert Downey Jr, the film could easily have become Iron Man 3. But while it’s doubtless been many a teenager’s – and kidult’s - wet dream to see whether Iron Man’s ingenious weaponry can outmatch Thor’s hammer, there is never any question that they will all end up on the same side. Even when, like Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner), they’ve been brainwashed by a god.

As the Hulk puts it dismissively, Loki is a particularly puny god. While the Hulk takes full advantage of this, tossing him about like a ragdoll in what is one of the film’s funniest scenes, Loki’s inadequacies ultimately make the film feel lacking. The Avengers are left with nothing but a bland CGI clone army to smash. The entertainment comes more from the ingenious methods used to smash the bad guys – like watching top tennis players practice their swings – than any sense that the world is being saved from impending doom. Indeed the greatest threat comes not from the alien baddies, but from the human officials who tire of waiting for the Avengers to succeed and try to nuke Manhattan and be done with it (a sentiment which, given the film’s length, you almost, but not quite, start to sympathise with. Although the explosion could have looked pretty cool in 3D.)

Here, there is no Darth Vader to counter the rebel forces, no Magneto to take on the X-Men, not even a Sauron to give hobbits nightmares. In overindulging the clash between the collective egos of the Avengers team, Whedon leaves no space for a convincing antagonist whose intelligence and agency could thwart their ambitions - and therefore leaves very little space for any real tension. You enter a film like Avengers fully aware you need to suspend disbelief, but with such lame bad guys, it’s hard to believe that any other outcome other than the triumph of the Avengers is possible. 

But as has long been the case with Marvel comics, and is now the case with the movies, a single offering such as Avengers Assemble has to be located within the broader context of the ever-expanding Marvel universe. A sequel was not simply a possibility, but was evidently built into the core plot of the movie (and, given its box-office success, it would take far more than an attack from the deadly army of the Chitauri to prevent it from happening). Which is why Whedon’s introduction of the shadowy puppet-masters Thanos and The Other at the end appears almost as an acknowledgement that now the Avengers have assembled, it’s time for them to face a more worthy foe.

Viewed simply on its own terms, however, Avengers Assemble doesn’t quite satisfy, even on the level of escapism. While much fun can be had watching the Hulk ‘smash’, with 3D pieces of debris scattering all over the cinema, this is a film that needs more bad in it to be really good.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes.

Much of the debate surrounding the final episodes of the first season of US drama series Homeland focuses on whether actress Claire Danes has done justice to sufferers of bipolar disorder in her performance as CIA agent Carrie Anderson. But it’s important another portrayal doesn’t go unacknowledged - that of war-hero-turned-terrorist, Marine Sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis). That’s because the shared sentiments between Islamic terrorists and self-loathing Westerners have never been better portrayed on television.

(Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen the show and you are planning to, you might want to stop reading now.)

‘People will say I was broken. I was brainwashed. People will say I was turned into a terrorist, taught to hate my country. I love my country… As a marine I swore an oath to defend the United States of America against enemies both foreign and domestic. My action this day is against such domestic enemies.’

So says Brody in a self-filmed terrorist suicide video that justifies his intended plan to blow himself up alongside the vice president and assorted White House staff, who are ‘liars and war criminals, responsible for atrocities they were never held accountable for’. In the eyes of Brody, his suicide mission is about ‘justice’ for the unacknowledged bombing of 82 children in Iraq – including the young son of bin Laden-esque Abu Nazir, with whom Brody developed a strong bond while in captivity. Their deaths, according to Brody, are ‘a stain on the soul of this nation’.

In its predecessor, 24 – which key members of the Homelandproduction team worked on, before seemingly having a liberal conversion – it was all so black and white. The terrorists were almost always unsympathetic, inhuman, murderous creatures brainwashed by radical Islam and fully deserving of a gruesome interrogation and bullet in the head from US agent Jack Bauer. Even as the seasons progressed and double agents were found in the government, you always knew who was Good and who was Evil.

Not so in Homeland. The series turns all of 24’s certainties on their head, and does so with an evident relish. The all-American-hero Brody, who delivers passionate speeches to his kids about American values at the site of the Battle of Gettysburg, sees more justice in blowing up the US administration than serving it. And so obsessed is Anderson with understanding the motivations of terrorist Nazir that her dogged pursuit leads to her having a breakdown, losing her job and having to undergo electroshock therapy. Indeed, it is far easier to empathise with the suffering terrorists than it is with the senior US administration officials, who are two-dimensional, heartless political players by comparison. 

The motivations of the terrorists are revealing. The role of Islam in Homeland is slight. Brody himself seems to have mainly been converted to it for therapeutic purposes – and primarily because it was the only option available in captivity. Instead, the main driving force of the terrorists appears to be anti-imperialism, their attacks being acts of revenge for humanitarian atrocities committed by the Evil American Empire in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Which is one of the reasons why Homeland seems so convincing by comparison to 24. Much of the rhetoric spouted by terrorists post-9/11 has consisted of regurgitated ideas that were formulated by Westerners. As Brendan O’Neillobserved in 2005, it was Western commentators who provided the ideas-free bin Laden with ‘the cloak of rationality and political reasoning’. Bin Laden’s script was always ‘ghost written in the West’ and, as a result, generated a degree of sympathy among certain sections of the anti-war left. As sociologist Michael Mann put it in a Verso collection of bin Laden’s writings: ‘Bin Laden is a rational man. There is a simple reason why he attacked the US: American imperialism. As long as America seeks to control the Middle East, he and people like him will be its enemy.’ 

Given this, it’s no wonder this liberal retelling of 24 seems uncannily accurate. But Homeland looks set to take this merger of the ideas of self-loathing Westerners and terrorists to a whole other level in season two. In the final episode of season one, Brody and Nazir agree a change of tack. Rather than blowing up the future president, Brody will build upon his ever-closer relationship with him in order to ‘influence policy at the highest levels’. As Nazir said, ‘why kill a man. When you can kill an idea?’.

Exactly what the idea is that is to be killed is not really revealed – but my bet is that it is the warmongering ideology of the neo-liberal hawks in the US administration. In season two, Homeland may present us with a fictional vision of what would have happened had bin Laden been able to steer the actions of the US government rather than being shot by Navy SEALs in Abbottabad. It should come as a surprise to no one if his goals resemble more those of the anti-war left than the establishment of a global Caliphate. 

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes.

Earlier this year, Twitter announced it had over 140million users firing out one billion tweets every three days. Rather than just shouting at the telly, many thousands of people are now tweeting their thoughts about every aspect of it to the world.

For the first time, public figures can get a massive amount of public feedback on their performances in real time. Their thousands, sometimes millions, of followers tweet their thoughts to them. And they can easily do a search for their name and read about what the twitterverse makes of them to a degree that would sate the vanity of even the most narcissistic of ‘slebs. Some of it, doubtless, is very flattering. Some of it is probably food for thought. And some of it - shock horror! - can be pretty rude.

This has led to a phenomenon that has been dubbed the rise of the celebrity ‘Twitter Quitter’, where increasing numbers of public figures sign off for good because they dislike what’s being said about them by so-called ‘trolls’. There is no denying some of it is nasty. Little Britain star Matt Lucas quit after a teenager tweeted a horrible joke about the death of his former partner. Football pundit Stan Collymore is said to be thinking of leaving after claiming to receive between 150 to 200 abusive messages a day. And Richard Bacon, a BBC presenter, has recently made a documentary about the experiences that led him to close down his account.

Alongside the Twitter Quitters, however, some of the Twitterati have recently started taking another approach: witness the rise of the celebrity troll-hunters. Not dissimilar to the recent cult Norwegian film The Troll Hunter, where ultraviolet lights are shone on trolls to turn them to stone, this new breed of Billy Goats Gruff has decided to try to fight back by putting the Twitter trolls under the media spotlight and exposing them.

Leading the herd is Conservative MP Louise Mensch. Last week, she became the Sun’s hero of the week for shaming trolls who tweeted ‘the most vile, misogynistic abuse’ at her following her performance as part of the select committee inquiry into phone hacking. Mensch ‘favourited’ the abusive tweets, and used BBC Radio 4’s flagship Today programme, alongside other media outlets, to discuss the abuse she’d experienced.

At the weekend, a finalist for BBC talent show The Voice, Ruth Brown, also spoke out about the abuse she’d received on Twitter. Alongside being called an ‘ugly fat cow’ and a ‘fat wasp’, she has also complained about ‘jibes of a racial nature’. Brown said in an interview that she had at first ‘cried’ about the comments but decided to speak out to ‘to encourage other people to fight out against the bullies’. 

A forerunner of these Twitter troll-hunters is the presenter of Channel 4 gameshow Deal or No Deal, Noel Edmonds, who was alerted by a company that monitors his reputation online to a ‘Just for fun’ Facebook page encouraging users to kill him. He decided, however, not to snitch to the police, but instead to track down this ‘troll’, who turned out to be a PhD student living in Kent. As Edmonds put it in a widely reported interview: ‘I could see there was someone young behind this and I didn’t want to see that person’s life ruined with a criminal record and I thought there had to be a more positive way to get a resolution than going to the police. I wanted to resolve this face-to-face.’

But even if celebrities themselves don’t call the cops on their trolls, then there are often many willing to do so on their behalf. While Mensch thought her abusers had done nothing illegal, it has been announced that police will be taking her Twitter trolls to court. And police are also looking into the ‘racist jibes’ about Brown, after having been alerted to them by BBC executives who deemed the tweets to be ‘much more serious and potentially illegal’. 

That the police are looking into such cases is hardly surprising given recent clampdowns on speech online. Most notable was the 21-year-old student, Liam Stacey, who was imprisoned for 56 days earlier in the year for writing abusive comments about Bolton footballer Fabrice Muamba who fell ill during an FA Cup match. This followed 19-year-old Azhar Ahmed beingarrested and charged for a ‘racially aggravated public-order offence’ after posting an angry rant about six British soldiers killed while on duty in Afghanistan. And last year, a number of young people were given harsh sentences simply for suggesting on Facebook that their ‘friends’ should take part in the riots that took place across England last August.

While they may not be snitching to the police themselves, in the current censorious climate, celebrities who expose trolls are often unwittingly inviting the authorities to intervene. Some of the abuse that celebrities, and others, experience online is undeniably horrid. And it is not to say it should go unchallenged or always be ignored (although in many cases, depriving trolls of attention and just getting a thicker skin is likely to be the best approach). But there are more important issues at stake than thin-skinned celebrities feeling bullied by anonymous teenagers online.

The right to be offensive needs to hold for even the most obnoxious internet trolls. Because either we all have free speech, or none of us do. If we permit the state to decide what people can or cannot say – and, in doing so, what we the public can or cannot hear – then this fundamental democratic freedom is eroded. The state’s attack on freedom of speech online is immeasurably more harmful than the abuse from internet trolls, sat on their sofas, tweeting nasty things about people on the telly.

Any celebrity who really wanted to be heroic would quit the troll hunting and make a stand for free speech instead.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes.

It began with a chance meeting, and blossomed into a lengthy affair. Could wedding bells be round the corner?

When the authorities prevented Occupy protesters from occupying the London Stock Exchange, the occupiers set up camp in the grounds of St Paul’s Cathedral instead. But far from condemning what rapidly became a smelly, middle-class shantytown and, later, what has been aptly described as a holding camp for the mentally ill, many in the church chose to embrace the protesters. One of the most prominent clergymen to join the love-in was Reverend Giles Fraser, who resigned from his post at St Paul’s rather than take action to move the campers on. In a front page Guardian article, he gushed: ‘I could imagine Jesus being born in the [Occupy] camp.’

Occupy protesters, not known for their modesty, also ran with the Biblical imagery. One protester dressed up as Jesus, with a banner declaring, ‘I threw the moneylenders out for a reason’. Another wrote poetry about how Jesus was a protester (‘He wasn’t always popular / He’d help a stranger / I think Jesus was a protester’). A prominent banner displayed at Occupy London asked: ‘What would Jesus do?’ The same question was also written on tents with marker pens.

One Occupy protester took
the Jesus comparisons to
a whole other level.

This bizarre alliance between the remnants of the left that formed Occupy and the church has proven to be one of the most remarkable things about the fleeting UK Occupy movement. Utterly cut off from their historical constituencies, and bereft of ideas, both Occupy and the church tried to cling to each other in desperation, like two sailors trying to ride out a storm.

But as became very clear last week at a meeting entitled ‘After Occupy, what next?’, held in the main hall of St Bride’s Church in Fleet Street, London, there was more uniting this rag-bag of lefties and aging church-types than the fact their movements were in their death throes. The event was intended, as the reverend at St Bride’s wrote in the Daily Mail, for the church to begin to ‘re-engage with its role to be a healing ground between those who suffer and those with the power and means to provide economic solutions’. What the event revealed was that the church and Occupy actually shared much the same values.

So contributor after contributor agreed with panellist Giles Fraser’s alternative vision for economics, one where growth isn’t paramount and where much could be learnt from the Old Testament story of manna in the desert. In Fraser’s words, we live on a finite planet and there’s finite resources, so we must accept ‘there has to be such a thing as having enough’. We should heed Moses’ advice and try not to horde more manna than we need, lest it go rotten.

Such an attitude was echoed in performance poet Catherine Brogan’s recital of her poem Occupy, which begins ‘I buy therefore I am is the corporate psalm, our democracy – consumerism, we’re caught in a prism, of shiny colours, sparkle, so we can all marvel at Kate Middleton’s shoes pretending we choose. But it leaves you empty, this pursuit of plenty…’

The debate at St Bride’s Church revealed that both Occupy and the church shared much the same values.

The pious idea that the 99 per cent was caught in a mindless ‘pursuit of plenty’ was echoed by Occupy spokesperson Naomi Colvin, who spoke of the destructive impact of consumerism and how it ‘makes people passive’. Another protester ranted about how people’s hearts and minds were becoming disoriented as they attempted to ‘fill the unfillable hole’. Similar rationalisations for the failure of Occupy to attain any longstanding traction with the public were discussed (alongside a humourous digression from a wacky feminist who claimed that Occupy’s downfall was because it had internalised masculine values from society at large, intimidating too many women).

If there’s one thing more embarrassing than a vicar dancing at a disco, it’s over-keen clergymen attempting ‘jazz hands’ to signify their agreement with scruffy Occupy protesters. But their rationale for doing so is clear. What many in the church must have thought it had found with Occupy was a readymade youthful congregation, one which could start to breathe life into the rapidly aging and declining church-going public.

Except that Occupy London, as was more than evident during the meeting, is now little more than a few grubby individuals trying to keep the dwindling memory of the ‘movement’ alive. Assertions that Occupy is ‘part of a global workers’ strategy’ sounded more than a little mad. And it’s a safe bet that planned stunts to ‘Occupy the Tube’ during rush hour won’t ingratiate protesters with the 99 per cent. Even Colvin, who has become Occupy London’s most prominent spokesperson, seemed to admit the game is up when she claimed ‘it doesn’t matter if [future protests are] called Occupy’. The movement that took pride in never having any recognisable demands now looks set to dismiss the importance of a recognisable name, too.

What appeared to be an unlikely alliance between church and Occupy proved, in fact, to be a neat fit. Both groups lack any purchase in wider society, share the same disdain for the consumerist masses and just love to preach about being meek, grateful for your lot and not committing the terrible sin of aspiring for more. Far from revitalising one another, this union marks the funeral rites for two desperate groups.

Patrick Hayes is a reporter for spiked. Visit his personal website here. Follow him on Twitter @p_hayes.