FEAR OF CRIME CASTS AN increasingly dark shadow over modern British society. We seem to be beset by problems such as binge-drinking, drug-taking, antisocial behaviour, aggressive mugging, and gang warfare.

Many liberal commentators have argued that this perceived decline in social cohesion is an illusion, fuelled by a reactionary press and nostalgia for a mythical past. According to this argument, Britain is no more brutal than in the past. Anxiety about disorder is misplaced. The perceived rise in offending, it is claimed, has largely been caused by improved reporting of crime and a political establishment that cynically whips up moral panic to justify authoritarian measures.

This rewarding book by Francis Gilbert demolishes such complacency by showing the real misery caused by lawlessness. Gilbert’s previous books, based on his experiences as a teacher, were disturbing, often witty, accounts of the anarchic nightmare that is modern British schooling. Now he has widened his scope to look at yobbery across Britain. In a heroic odyssey, he covers street gangs in East London, drunken revellers in Glasgow, antisocial tenants in South Wales and teenage thugs in Manchester.

What makes these passages especially compelling is the direct testimony not just from victims but from the yobs themselves.

Gilbert is not content to confine his study to the usual urban low-life — he believes that yob culture now exists in every strata of society. So he condemns the ease with which new Labour has frequently resorted to abusive intimidation, especially when its propaganda machine was headed by Alastair Campbell, whom Gilbert paints as little better than a yob in a suit. Further attacks are made on ritual humiliation in the Armed Forces, bullying and harassment in the Army and semi-pornographic vulgarity in the tabloid press.

The book opens dramatically with the story of how Gilbert was attacked by a youth on a night bus in Stratford, East London. “There was a flash of blinding light and a massive spinning feeling in my head. I felt blood gushing out of my eye,” he writes. This experience, he says, is all too typical of modern urban Britain. “Today, people are scared. Fear of being severely hurt by louts is endemic.”

Gilbert follows up with an interview with two Metropolitan police officers who are in despair at the prevalence of violent gangs on the streets of inner London and who believe that the crime figures, far from being exaggerated, actually underestimate the real problem.

The two have few of the politically correct inhibitions that have so dogged the debate about urban crime and warped the performance of the Met. They are not afraid to face the reality that some of the worst thuggery is committed by Africans and Asians. “We’ve got a particular problem at the moment with Somali youths,” one says. “They don’t give a second thought about using extreme violence and they enjoy inflicting pain upon people for absolutely no reason.”

Gilbert is no hardline reactionary. Although he does not shy away from aggression by ethnic minorities, he also highlights serious racial abuse: one of his most harrowing passages is about a Turkish refugee family in Glasgow who were threatened with knives, had stones thrown at them and were spat at in the street.

The evidence that Gilbert has accumulated through his cour-ageous research builds into a depressing picture of a nihilistic country, where all sense of authority, decency and restraint is collapsing. He quotes, for instance, a doctor at a distinguished teaching hospital, who is appalled at the yobbish, ignorant behaviour of many of his medical students.

“We are no longer educating an elite but trying to socialise a pretty motley bunch of thugs,” the doctor claims, citing one incident where an attractive female patient was persuaded to give a talk to the students about her medical condition. The lecture was quickly reduced to a humiliating farce by the constant wolf-whistling of the medics.

No section of society escapes Gilbert’s censure, whether it be drunken students at the notorious Oxford University Bullingdon Club or predatory brokers in the City. But at times he casts his net too widely, particularly when dealing with the Government. He is fond of drawing a parallel between new Labour’s machismo and the belligerence on our streets.

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