Simon Winlow

Professor David Downes has chosen to discuss Dick Hobbs et al’s Bouncers: Violence and Governance in the Night-time Economy on FiveBooks as one of the top five on his subject -Crime and Punishment, saying that:



“…Deindustrialisation is the context for this ‘state of the art’ study of the emergent career of the bouncer in the burgeoning night-time economy of those towns and cities hard-pressed to maintain their revenue base in the wake of the loss of manufacturing infrastructure. Hobbs and his co-authors not only accomplished a first-rate ethnography of the ‘informal’ social control of clubbing and bars by those equipped for one of the few growth areas in urban employment. ‘Manchester City Centre now attracts crowds of up to 100,000 people on Friday and Saturday evenings. A liberal estimate is that approximately 30 to 40 police officers are engaged on public order duties at these times, whilst the crowds are simultaneously controlled by an estimated 1,000 bouncers.’ If you’ve got 100,000 people fuelled with alcohol something’s going to happen. They also analyse the political economy which makes clubbing so vital a part of post-industrial Britain. Facilitating this strategy became a political priority, and licensing laws and procedures were transformed in the late 1990s, replacing the judicial criterion of demonstrable ‘need/demand’ for new licences to set up bars and clubs with basically a ‘whatever the market will bear’ principle. No harm in a fun night out, but ‘in the night-time economy, locations that are “bad” for crime and disorder are invariably “good” for business’. The local authorities now control licensing.



This book is written from the frontline of vomit-filled streets and shows how all this has come about. The regulation of gambling moved in the same direction over the past 15 years, ie, away from the British system of ‘unstimulated demand’ to a greater openness, to marketisation.



My father was actually a licensing magistrate and, when I asked him what he did, he said he looked at the place someone wanted to open a pub and whether there was a need for it, where the other pubs in the area were and granted the licence on that basis. That was all thrown out in 1999. You can now have a whole row of clubs and bars. Of course, people are drinking less now because of the recession. .…”



The full interview is available here: http://fivebooks.com/interviews/david-downes… (mais)