The gangs of north London

I covered another stabbing the other day, a particularly nasty one this time. An 18-year-old was repeatedly knifed in the stomach and beaten over the head with a baseball bat. Witnesses told me he’d been outside his mum’s tower-block flat in Islington, north London, when he was rushed by a group of about ten or 15 boys. He suffered serious head injuries and multiple stab wounds and was soon in hospital in a medically induced coma. By some miracle, he survived.

Who would have committed such a brutal and pointless crime? A source told me police believed the attackers to be from two London gangs: the Hoxton N1 gang, whose turf is east of Kings Cross, and the Cally Boys, named for the Caledonian Road, which runs from Kings Cross north to Holloway. These two are locked in a violent rivalry over drug turf with another gang, Easy Cash, from London’s EC1 postcode, which is where the attack took place. The victim woke up, but he wouldn’t talk. As is so often the case, he abided by the code of the streets: never grass. He refused even to give a statement to police.

I work the north London beat as a reporter and it’s now become frighteningly routine for me to write about young men being seriously injured or killed. Across the city there was an 18 per cent increase in knife crime in the last year, but in Islington, home of fancy delis and Corbynistas, this rise was 25 per cent. And it’s not just knives, by the way. I’ve reported on attacks carried out with machetes, meat cleavers and samurai swords. As ever, what happens in London is just an exaggerated form of what’s happening in other British cities. The number of assaults with blades was up 13 per cent last year in England and Wales.

The question everyone is asking is: why? At a time when violent crime is falling worldwide, why the sudden spike in stabbings? The answer given is often ‘gangs’, but the kids involved are not always gang members and, anyway, ‘gangs’ is more of a description than an explanation.