British Labour’s effort to repress knife crime
Britain has a knife crime problem. Nearly fifty thousand incidents of violence committed with sharp instruments occurred during the last year of reporting (ending in September 2023), with 282 murders in the previous year. The Labour Party, under the leadership of Keir Starmer, is calling for a “crackdown on the possession and sale of machetes, zombie knives and swords,” with a total ban on zombie knives, a policy choice that the Conservative government also supports, and a push to limit sales on websites such as Amazon. Penalties for illegal possession would be increased, and Labour would also like to put more police officers—the unarmed variety, presumably—on the streets and to go after more shoplifters and criminals who attack retail employees.
A zombie knife, I am sad to say, is a novelty gimmick whose chief characteristics involve cheap materials, often neon green in color, with a variety of serrations and odd angles in the blade, capitalizing on the recent popularity of the undead in movies and television, but whereas I am satisfied to raise a disdainful eyebrow in the direction of such objects, members of the British parliament see the need to ban them. What specifically the crackdown on machetes and swords would be in terms of the law and police enforcement is not made clear, though if the nation’s ratcheting up of laws against the possession of firearms is any guide, the future would see ever tighter restrictions eventually leading to outright bans.
The Labour Party’s proposal includes the remark that “in Britain we often pat ourselves on the back that we don’t have America’s gun violence crisis,” though it is worth noting that the homicide rate specifically in England and Wales, for which excellent data are available, has been consistently under two per hundred thousand for the entire time that the United States has existed, while weapons controls, at least for Protestants, only began to be onerous after the First World War, thanks to fears that returning soldiers might get uppity after their exposure to socialist ideas on the continent—see Joyce Lee Malcolm’s Guns and Violence: The English Experience for a detailed study of this. Nevertheless, in an island on which lethal violence is rare—outside of the jurisdictions seen to by Commander Dalgliesh or Chief Inspector Morse, naturally—the impression of criminals, armed with blades and going about slashing and stabbing people, must be shocking.
Much of that violence is being committed by youths in gangs, as the Labour proposal reflects with its focus on diverting these precocious criminals into programs designed to help them… somehow. Perhaps British teens could be encouraged to play basketball after school. Working out that Brexit was a bad idea is something that Labour is nearing, though rejoining the European Union is not something that Starmer is willing to do. Nor does the party appear to entertain the thought of returning to their leftist roots after decades of lurching to the right. But more cops on the streets and harsher penalties are appealing promises to make to nervous bourgeois voters.
I do have to wonder if strange politicians lying in parliaments confiscating swords is a sound basis for a system of government, but that is for the British people to decide sometime before the end of January 2025. They may wish to ask themselves what the effect of these proposals could be. As Matt Easton, weapons historian and former consultant to the British government about knife crimes and host of the Scholagladiatoria channel, pointed out, making life more difficult for the law-abiding owners of garden implements and antique swords is not going to improve their safety, nor has disarming British people who are not out looking for trouble, but if what Labour has said here is correct, much of the violence their nation is experiencing is committed by gangs against gangs. The perpetrators, youths engaged in crime, would not be covered by legalizing the carrying of weapons for self-defense, however much the latter policy might allow those bourgeois voters to feel secure and thereby to cease caring about “those people” getting hurt.
The solution—one that Tories and Labour, Republicans and Democrats seem congenitally incapable of choosing—is to lift people out of the hopeless inopportunity that the neo-liberal consensus has trapped them in, be those people recent immigrants and their children, the native-born working class whose jobs are free to cross borders while the workers remain behind, or the disillusioned youth who daily receive the message that success is only available to the clever criminal if one is not to the manner of the elites born.
But the answer that government after government on both sides of the pond and at all levels of late has been to repress the bloody peasants. And those peasants—having to spend all their time working two and three jobs only to fall short at the end of each month and filling out forms to get what medical care for themselves or their families is grudgingly offered—have so far accepted this state of affairs. Perhaps taking knives away from Britons and throwing people who were so armed in prison will be the alarm call there with regard to how much the leadership views ordinary people with contempt.