Greater Expectations: Intolerance and Control of Public Space Anti-social Behaviour in the Nineteenth and Twenty-first Centuries

Abstract

One hundred years and very considerable social, economic and cultural change separated the end of the Victorian era and the opening decade of the twenty-first century. Nevertheless, this chapter argues that there are clear parallels between the concerns that fuelled the intense focus on anti-social behaviour (ASB) which characterized Tony Blair’s premiership and those that existed throughout much of the nineteenth century, most notably during its middle decades. It is contended that New Labour did not so much ‘invent’ anti-social behaviour as to draw fresh attention to long-standing concerns by fusing them together under the anti-social behaviour banner or, to borrow Vic Gatrell’s (1990: 254) observation on another period, ‘Old issues still worried people. Only the language got fancier.’ This chapter argues that what particularly links the Victorian and Blair eras was the concern with the use and perceived abuse of public space. The policy solutions to this problem were era-specific, but the outcome was the same: a concerted effort to manage the usage of public space by the removal of signs and symbols of disorder through exclusion or enforcing a modification of proscribed behaviour. Both periods under consideration were noteworthy for the reframing of what constituted acceptable conduct, both in public space and everyday life. Indeed, the chapter views the attention given by policy to what we now know as anti-social behaviour as part of broader disciplinary projects concerned with maintaining order, upholding new definitions of ‘normal’ behaviour and correcting the faulty morals of what New Labour called the ‘hard to reach’,¹ but which the Victorians more commonly condemned as the ‘residuum’ or ‘undeserving poor’.