A quarter of all 'youth gangs' reside in Lambeth. Now there's a statistic to make the Borough's residents sleep easy at night. According to Auntie, an unpublished report has linked 40 gangs to the area, one with over 2,500 members. That's not a gang, that's a Union.

With increasingly more depressing reports coming through every day on the nature of gang / youth violence, and increasingly more hysterical attempts to find a London shaped sticking plaster for it; we truly hope that Counsellor Lorna Campbell's comments that:

This report and this summit is about getting to the heart of those problems and finding real solutions

really do lead to someone genuinely looking at the heart of those problems, and genuinely finding real solutions. Y'know, all that difficult stuff like education, health, environment, standards of living, costs of living, hope, jobs, security, respect for authority (and that is a tough one), respect for each other, extreme disparities of wealth etc etc etc etc etc etc....

Is this really rocket science, because we're beginning to look to King Herod, Torquemada and Judge Dredd for inspiration.

One of the gangs highlighted in the report responded by saying that:

A couple of years ago, we were on 'active street duties', but that's outdated now.

We've been to prison, come out, we're grown up now. We're official businessmen now. We don't take part in any criminal activity.

Shit, we've just figured it out, they're all working for the government.

Image of Lambeth North station from ramson's Flickr photostream