AC: I don't think they do understand at all. Some want to carry the knives. For some it is the badge membership of their gang. But the ones I am pointing to are the youngsters who aren't immediately part of a gang and who don't particularly want to identify with a gang but who start moving around in groups and start carrying blades for self-protection and therefore they become a gang, and become an armed gang at that. That's not where they started but that's what they drifted into because of what's happening on the street around them. I think the Government does have an idea about it but I think the Government is denying it. They want to live in a different sort of reality.
CT: If the Government is out of step with reality on the ground, how can it remedy that?
AC: The Government has got to recognise it has run out of solutions and ideas and governments by definition won't do that because they have got their eye on the next general election and think they will have some solution by then. Then we'll get some initiative by Gordon Brown who will throw a few more million at the problem and think that will solve it.
They are hopeless. They won't admit that though, because they are politicians and they think they've got to have another solution but their solution is presumably to chuck a few more million pounds at it and release a press statement but actually it's irrelevant to what's going on.
The best thing the Government can do is step back and acknowledge it has a diminished role in the whole thing and affirm and encourage those that are already out there doing good work - the faith communities. There are other communities doing good work but obviously I talk about the church and the faith community because those are the ones I know about best.
CT: So if money can't solve these problems then what can?
AC: In reality it's the churches that have got the relationships. The churches are on grassroots and the churches are already out there doing things, in your average youth club and things like that. In the east of London we've got thriving churches, out there doing good things with young people and that needs affirming and encouraging.
And we've got to affirm marriage-based families. That isn't being judgemental about single mums; my own wife is divorced. The ideal is not often met but it doesn't stop the church holding up the ideal and saying actually marriage-based family is the right route, for the children's sake, let alone the adults. That gives them a stable and loving background. Neither is that saying that single mums and single dads can't do it. Many of them doing sterling work. But on average, statistics show that marriage provides society as a whole with the best way forward.
