Editorial: Invest in services to tackle this malaise

Tony Blair's response to the gangland shootings has been to back tougher firearms offences for young offenders, lowering the sentencing age from 21 to 17. It's designed to reassure the public that his government does not intend to stand by and do nothing. It won't, however, do much to relieve the prisons crisis or address the problem of reoffending. And the danger is that it will induce gangs to thrust weapons into the hands of younger teens.

The Prime Minister has insisted that the shootings allude to "a specific problem in a specific criminal culture among specific groups of young people". His attempt to isolate the issue in this way amounts to a failure to take responsibility for a cultural malaise in British society, of which the murders of James Andre Smarrt-Ford, Michael Dosunmu and Billy Cox are a horrifying symptom. It is a malaise the Unicef report alerted us to loud and clear: the UK's young are the most miserable, lonely and frightened of any economically affluent nation.