Author: Francis Gilbert
ISBN No: 9 7807 49 9510
Review date: 16/12/2025
No of pages: 292
Publisher: Piatkus
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
If you are working a door, and a stranger asks you about your life and yobbery, it could be Francis Gilbert, author of Yob Nation.
Sub-titled The truth about Britain’s yob culture, this book could so easily be a sharply-written yet worthless moan. But unlike the rent-a-mouths paid by newspapers to despair about disorder, Mr Gilbert has talked to yobs, their victims, and people paid to handle yobbery, such as Bob and Alex, described as pub and club ‘security guards’ in Bristol. You wonder about quite how much of a grasp Francis Gilbert has of the facts when he does not correct (nor does the index) a doorman for saying door staff have to be licenced by the ‘Security Industry Association’ (SIA). A couple of wider quibbles with the book: first, to quote the book jacket, ‘yobbery has become not just a problem of the young and poor’. That is, there has been a change over time. But has the Army – to quote one institution with bullying rituals for joiners – become more ‘yobbish’ since 1959, or indeed 1859? Nor does Francis Gilbert’s argument that our whole society has become coarser and more violent – Mr Gilbert blaming here New Labour, the City and the media – really wash. Yes, behind the scenes Labour politicians and PR people curse and threaten … but was the Harold Wilson government any different? John Simpson in a memoir recalls how Wilson roughed him up on a train platform for daring to ask a question. Yes, we can all remember John Prescott throwing a punch in an election campaign, but the difference was that the media reported that, and not Wilson the thug.
So Francis Gilbert is weak on history, but at his best when letting people tell their stories. For instance, from a chapter on football hooliganism there is the paradox that hooligan phrases have entered the language – ‘it all kicked off’ meaning a fight began – but football stadia have cracked down on fighting, even swearing. Quoted there are British Transport Police man Colum Price, and an unidentifed former hooligan who claims that former hooligan ‘firms’ (gangs) went into drug-selling or security for raves: “Some are even millionaires running their own security firms, or selling drugs or doing semi-legit stuff.” And Francis Gilbert is on firmer ground when showing yobbery even where you might not expect it, such as medical lecture halls, and public libraries. He is on strong ground about graffiti (marking yob gang territory) and what he calls the cycle of yobbery (anti-social behaviour and disrespect in schools and shops staking out ground on the yob’s terms). But can you really link in a ‘yob nation’, as Gilbert does, the Little Britain character Vicky Pollard, the yob earning millions in the City, and bored, drug-dealing and taking, feral youth?
