LONDON — The Marcus Lipton Youth Club is the last remaining dedicated youth center in its South London area. Every day, the center opens its steel security doors to an area of the City plagued by youth violence, where half the children live in poverty.
But the Marcus Lipton falters. Nearly half of London’s youth centers have closed in the past decade as Britain cut money for youth services, as well as welfare, schools and drug and alcohol treatment, the data shows. The Marcus Lipton used to have hundreds of thousands of pounds a year in government funds. Now, he receives almost zero.
“Just look around you,” said Ira Campbell, 55, an administrator at the club, which offers counseling, meals and sports. “This place is a safe haven.”
The Marcus Lipton lies in the shadow of the sprawling Loughborough Estate public housing project, where two of the Conservative government’s longtime priorities — fighting crime and reducing the budget deficit — collide.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is building prisons and recruiting more police as part of his pledge to be tough on crime. He has also proposed a budget that would make deep spending cuts, forcing officials to find savings in programs that have already been cut to the bone during a decade of austerity.
Budget cuts during that decade hit poorer neighborhoods in the British capital particularly hard, says the Institute for Government, a research group. Those neighborhoods are also where serious youth violence, such as homicide, has risen or remained disproportionately high after austerity, data from London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s office shows.
Annual knife violence involving teen victims in the City rose nearly 40 percent, from 3,809 in 2012, to 5,332 in 2019, before the pandemic began, police figures obtained by The New York Times show. York Times. (Subsequently, there was a drop in serious youth violence during lockdowns, most likely due to reduced social contact.)
Loughborough Estate residents say the government would rather pay to lock up young people than spend money on projects that could help struggling families.
With government funding effectively gone, the center is mostly self-financing and has been forced to reduce the number of days it is open: three days instead of five.
That leaves the youth center as one of the few places left trying to help, Campbell said. “You can’t get out of this problem with jail,” she added.
The relationship between crime and budget cuts is difficult to prove. But under austerity measures, serious youth violence in London increased, as the Mayor’s Office figures show. One analysis found that areas of England where youth budgets had been cut the most tended to have the largest increases in knife crime.
The government cut services for young people in England by more than 1.1 billion pounds, some 1.35 billion dollars, from 2010 to 2021, a decrease of 74 percent.
Mimi Asher, pastor of Word of Grace Ministries, a small evangelical church, said during a recent sermon that “we can’t keep losing these kids to jail and the grave. We need the resources as a community.”
By: Euan Ward
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6572500, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-02-15 22:20:07
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