I am moving to zurich in augaust and to be honest have been quite aprehensive. I always thought that I would miss london and the uk quite a lot. Something happend on saturday night that made me change my mind. At the moment I am based in cornwall and don't often get to come back to london.....so i was looking forward to coming back for a few days.
Reasonably late on saturday night i was sat on a crowded bus on the why back from central london. I am not from the nicest parts of london and have seen a fair share of trouble and rowdyness.....but this was just my limit. One of the girls i was sat next on the bus, some how pissed off another young girl on the bus, endless almost in audiable shouting and ranting broke out between this two groups of girls..no one really tried to intervene and i don't blame them not with what appears to be a large increase of violent crime comited by young teens. Stupidly my self and another passenger tried to calm the situation down. It looked like it could turn quite masty for the victimised girl..... The result.... the loudest and most agressive (and youngest looking) of all the girls sprayed me and a couple of the other passengers directly in the face with, what i'm guessing was pepper spray. Really painfull!!!! I know it was just one insident, but it was kind of like the icing on the cake for me. And now i can't really wait to get Zurich. Its a shame that I feel like this aboout my home town. But it has got worse in the past few years.

Thanks for reading, just needed a rant!

S

Since you're not complaining about something Swiss, I've moved your post.

That's a pretty nasty situation you were involved in.

It is extremely worrying what's happening in London with the young people - I can't recall how many stabbings and shootings have happened with teenagers this year alone.

Society in general & not just in London. That said, London does have a huge problem with teenage gangs, one of the shootings this year was just down the road from where I lived before I moved to Switzerland.

I was wondering about all these stabbings. They have made the news pretty frequently this year, but only after the government launched a drive to stamp out knife crime. From reading local news in Leeds and Nottingham in the years before coming here, there were plenty of similar incidents that never made national news.

Is this possibly part of a subtle campaign to shock people with the scale of the problem? - it is definitely shocking, but I am am not so sure that it is as sudden a development as it has been made to sound like recently.

This is only a hunch, not trying to downplay the problem or anything... I was glad years ago to leave Leeds for the Midlands only to find it wasn't a huge amount better.

I think that you may be right, there is almost no doubt that the media and government attention being paid to 'youth crime' has something to with a government initiative. I think what has made national news is the incraesingly young ages of the people involved in crime and the fact that there has been (reportedly) an increase in the amount of crime involving teens and guns. This increase in such crime or the reporting of such crime, i think, creates a highly tense and uneasy atmosphere in some parts of the city. Not that I am a politician (i think that i'd make a bloody useless one) but I doubt the attention alot of these incidents are given do their polls any good, as they seem to happen in inner-city areas which have been highly neglected by local governments, and/or where previouse government initiatives have had an adverse effect.

I must admit that perhaps all the hype has had an effect on me and without it my trip on the bus the other night may not have triggered such an eagerness to make the move to zurich. I would have just passed it off as a nasty incident.

Cheers

S

this government has a track record of building up furores over social themes to play "smoke & mirrors" with other fundamental problems. We don't seem to hear very much about the Drugs Tsar any more .... new story, time to move on ???....