No new laws after Leicester tragedy please!

“The Government must fight the temptation of any jerk reaction to create yet more laws and powers”

The absolutely tragic circumstances around Fiona Pilkington’s suicide after killing her disabled daughter is clearly making Gordon Brown feel he needs to show the Government cares by creating yet more legislation on anti-social behaviour.

Hounded to death by youths with nobody in elected office fighting their corner

The tragedy happened after Ms Pilkington and her daughter put up with years of abuse and torment from local gangs of youths around the Barwell area of Leicestershire until it all became too much.

And there is a misconception that national Government and new laws can tackle every problem on the ground in local communities. But it can’t.

The catestrophic chain of events over a long period of time which led to these terrible deaths was the result of failings by local agencies which no law would have prevented. A break down in basic communications between statutory bodies, local councillors at all levels not pushing hard enough for tough action from the Authorities and an apparent collapse in community support for their own all contributed.

There are plenty of powers to combat this sort of crime from ASBOs to parenting orders and plenty of scope for either the local council or social housing provider to kick out difficult tenants. But those powers, extensive as they are, only work if they are used. They weren’t and a tragedy happened because of that.

We don’t need more national laws we need those in elected office locally to make sure both the policy and actions by statutory bodies reflect the public’s calls for a zero tollerance approach on low level crime and anti social behaviour.

And the media, yet again, risk fudging the issue. The calls by them for Government action on new laws serve only to take the heat off those locally who must take responsibilty to some degree for what happened whilst risking further dilution of personal responsibility through more and more legislation.

There is only any point in creating new laws if they genuinely can do a job. If they don’t, and this issue was about a failure in delivery not lack of Government policy, then more laws just create faulse hope. The other factor now is that we, as a society, have an inability to accept that terrible things happen and dreadful mistakes can be made.

No jerk reaction on new laws just a long hard look at local level what went wrong and do everything possible to learn lessons and stop it from happening again.

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