Introduction

In recent years the issue of anti-social behaviour and the policies for its control, or management, have seen a rapid rise to prominence. There has been a sequence of waves of serious political investment into the problem, very much led from the centre by Tony Blair himself (for an overview, see Squires, 2006a). Beginning with ambitions to ‘strengthen communities’ and ‘nip youth crime in the bud’ and ‘enforce’ more effectively the obligations of parents in the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act (and the new youth justice system emerging from this) the anti-social behaviour agenda grew and grew, prompting at least one commentator to question whether in ‘inventing anti-social behaviour’ to draw some attention away from the wider crime problem, the government had not fashioned an even bigger rod for its own back (Tonry, 2004).

Next came the Respect and Responsibility White Paper (Home Office, 2003) reasserting the contractual model of citizenship, much beloved of New Labour, which tied the government's social inclusion agenda (SEU, 1998, 2000) to its broader ‘responsibilisation’ strategy (Levitas, 1996; Garland, 2001), leading to the 2003 Anti-Social Behaviour Act. A year later came the first Annual Report of the Home Office-sponsored campaign Together: Tackling Anti-Social Behaviour, which, on page one, confidently asserted: ‘as crime has fallen, anti-social behaviour has become a major cause of concern in communities across the country’ (Home Office, 2004a). The implication was fairly clear, crime was supposedly falling, and the lesser problems of nuisance and anti-social behaviour were now coming to preoccupy people instead. By the summer of 2004, addressing anti-social behaviour formed a central plank of the new Home Office five-year strategic plan (Home Office, 2004b).

Finally and forcibly reasserting the, at first glance, common-sense but also deeply ideological, core to the government's anti-social behaviour message, the Prime Minister launched the Respect Action Plan in January 2006 (Home Office, 2006). This document was punctuated by a series of seemingly homespun motivational slogans: