There was recently a mass public party at which all sorts of offences were committed. As innocent attendees cut loose and jived, shadier actors took advantage. There was a burglary, a robbery, 19 drug offences, 26 acts of theft and no fewer than 30 acts of violence against individuals. There were also two sexual offences – shameful. What hell was this? Where did all this moral abasement occur? Must have been at the Notting Hill Carnival, right? Actually, no – it was at Glastonbury.
Yes, at this year’s Glasto, famously the hangout of middle-class white folk who like rock, crimes were committed. In those tent cities, amid the thick haze of Mary Jane, things got stolen, people were punched, women were abused. So should we shut it down? Should we put the kibosh on this annual gathering of ageing indie kids? Of course not. The small number of offences – 121 in total – should not detract from the rush of joy felt by the 200,000 souls who swarmed Worthy Farm.
I feel the same about the Notting Hill Carnival. There is always handwringing over this Bank Holiday celebration of all things Caribbean. But this year it feels like the moral agonising is on steroids. Open social media and you’ll be exposed to ceaseless tut-tutting over this allegedly crime-infested gathering of the drunk and the degenerate. I’m here to say: calm down. A two-day festival at which a million folk are having a wild time should not be judged by the villainy of a few on the fringes.
This is not to say Notting Hill Carnival is without its problems. Some terrible things happened there yesterday. According to the Metropolitan Police, there was one act of theft, four sexual offences, 18 incidents of possession of an offensive weapon and some drug-dealing, too. Worst of all, there were three stabbings. A 32-year-old woman is in hospital in a serious condition. No doubt crimes will be committed today, too. Attendees should take care.
And yet we need some perspective, as unfashionable as perspective is these days. Notting Hill Carnival is one of the largest street festivals on earth. Since its humble beginnings as a modest ‘Caribbean Carnival’ in the mid-1960s, its audience has ballooned. It now regularly attracts a million people – sometimes more. That a few score opportunists carry out awful deeds there should not blind us to the glee of the hundreds of thousands of good citizens who go to carnival for one thing and one thing only: fun.
Yes, some of the crimes committed at Notting Hill Carnival this year were more serious than the crimes committed at Glastonbury. Though I must say I am intrigued by the fact that where there was just one public-order offence on day one of Notting Hill, there were seven at Glasto. Bad beer, lads? And yet the point stands: a public gathering should not be condemned on the basis of the delinquent antics of a handful of its outliers.
That a million people will freely associate on the streets of London this weekend – and that the vast majority of them will neither do bad things nor experience bad things – is a cause for celebration, surely? It is a testament to the liberty of the city, a liberty hard-won over centuries, that such a noisy, colourful public assembly can occur every year. There are people around the world who deeply envy a Londoner’s right to associate as he sees fit.
A real bugbear of mine is when people judge a whole section of society by the behaviour of a few of its members. Like when a beer-filled bloke at the football is filmed saying something racist or raining blows on a supporter of the opposing team, and then it goes viral as proof of the bovine prejudices of the ‘gammon’ classes. How is the smelling-salts upset over Notting Hill Carnival any different? Here, too, people feverishly share footage of a woman twerking on a police officer’s crotch or some scrote pulling out a knife in order to damn the entire thing as morally diseased and unacceptably dangerous.
I’m sure policing at the carnival could be improved. But it seems to me that much of the carnival-bashing is killjoyism masquerading as a push for law’n’order. I fear there might be a racial element, too. These fun sponges must not win. The carnival spirit must not be sacrificed at the altar of pathological risk-aversion. Public spaces are already too constricted in 21st-century Britain – watching a million people reclaim the streets for nothing more and nothing less than the cause of public joy is a wonder to behold. Long may it continue.
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