Been stabbed yet? Give it time. The latest weapon of choice for our go-getting and imaginative young people, apparently, is the ‘cat skinner’, a thin and very sharp device properly used for removing the plastic jackets from electrical cables. But also for skinning cats, I assume. And — increasingly — stabbing, or more likely slashing, people. From the pictures I’ve seen, if you’ve bought a cat skinner with which to stab somebody, you’ve bought the wrong tool for the job. No use complaining later.
In the last year for which figures are available there were 64,000 knife crimes committed in Britain — the figures have been rising with great vigour over the last eight or nine years. Some 17 teenagers have been stabbed to death in London or its environs this year alone, and we are in high summer. Stabbing is muscling out shooting as the violent crime du jour, despite a Scotland Yard knife amnesty in 2006 and a possible four-year sentence just for being found with a knife (unless you can convince the court you were intending to use it to fillet a halibut, or slice a piece of foie gras in half prior to searing it).
If you haven’t yet been stabbed and are beginning to feel a little excluded by all this frenetic, joyous, stabbing going on around you, then I hope that this article will point you in the direction. Treat it as a public information leaflet: How To Get Stabbed, like the ones the government hands out should you wish to stop smoking. Because despite my opening comment, it’s not so easy as it sounds. Here, anyway, are the general principles to follow — there are of course exceptions to my rules.
For a start you need to be between the age of about 14 and 30 years, white and male. Your stabber will probably fit this description too. This is not to say that young black men do not stab people or are themselves stabbed — of course they do and are, from time to time. The latest stabbing, for example, of 16-year-old Ben Kinsella outside an Islington wine bar, may well have been perpetrated by a bunch of black youths. But this does not fit the recent pattern. By and large young black males are traditionalists and therefore would rather shoot you than stab you. If you get shot in one of our bust-ling cities, it is likely to be by a young black male and almost certainly because you were selling drugs in an area where he, or his boss, thought he had cornered the market. Or because you owed him money for drugs. One of the two.
Your likely assailant, though, will be white and probably lower-middle-class, rather than blue collar or untermensch. And this is useful information because it suggests certain locations which the aspirant stabbee might frequent in order to get a knife in his chest. Not so much the inner cities, more the frowsy white-flight suburbs — such as, in London, Bromley, Sidcup, Eltham, Broxbourne. Nor do you need to skulk in a dark alleyway waiting for your attacker — find somewhere nice, sit yourself down and order yourself a drink. By ‘nice’, I mean a wine bar. That — more than race or class or sex — is the one common thread which links almost all of the high-profile stabbings of young people. They all occurred just outside a wine bar where both stabbee and stabber had previously been drinking. You should pick a busy wine bar, the more raucous the better, and preferably one in which lots of young ladies are in attendance, getting rat-arsed on Bacardi Breezers and friendly with the men who buy them the Bacardi Breezers. A wine bar with lots of very visible security is best — bouncers on the door, stern notices about age limits and drug use; a place which according to a certain tranche of young people looks ‘classy’ but also ‘fun’.
And now a problem, because there is a dispute over how one should behave in order to receive a really good stabbing. The newspaper reports, quoting relatives and police officers and friends of the deceased stabbee, almost always insist that the victim was as good as gold: gentle, meek and mild. The sort of person who would duck behind a parapet at the slightest hint of trouble. And if white, they are also usually extraordinarily talented in some way — gifted. If they’re black, it is quite likely they were training to be an architect, rather than training to be a pimp or a crack seller. This is where my advice does not necessarily dovetail with what you read in your newspapers. I think the best mode of approach is to have a lot to drink and become a bit, you know, querulous. A shade argumentative. Do not let things lie; allow the alcohol to fill you with bravado. When you are asked to settle your differences outside, gladly take up the offer. And that — just about — should do it.
Please forgive the flippant tone; but these gruesome, foul and pointless deaths follow one after the other in our newspapers and on our television screens and we do not seem to be much closer to discovering how to stop them. In the year following the last knife amnesty, convictions for knife crime increased hugely. You cannot ban knives, any more than you can ban forks. Stabbings have become the urban, modern equivalent of the pub fight; our young people are even more hair-trigger sensitive than once was the case, more prone to acts of incandescent rage fuelled by alcohol, more likely to tip over the edge into lethal acts of violence. The sociological causes for this are now deep-seated — count them off: a lack of any concept of deferred gratification; bad parenting; cheap alcohol; a total and utter lack of either discipline or deterrent from those who are supposed to have domain over them, be it the law courts or their teachers or their parents; a familiarity through films, TV and games with casually excessive violence; an attitude which insists that the individual must not be gainsaid in anything he or she does; lack of moral guidance; a surfeit of materialism; base human wickedness. We can make a start addressing those issues, but it will be a generation or two before we make any headway — and there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of willpower to do so, in any case.
In the short term, mind, the police might start clobbering the bar owners and closing one or two down, so that their minds are more finely attuned to the question of who they let in, and who they should stop serving alcohol to. You would hope that there will not be another Ben Kinsella; but you know that there will, today or tomorrow.
