Rundle’s UK: the life and crimes of Liverpool

David Calvert was not a happy man when interviewed by BBC Merseyside.

“My life’s been hell — I can’t see anyway out of it unless Jon Venables hangs himself in prison, right?”

Venables is one of the two people — then boys, now men — who murdered toddler James Bulger nearly 17 years ago.

Now nearly 30 and living under a new identity, he was returned to prison last week (he is effectively on lifetime parole), facing “very serious charges”, according to the government. The news has created a frenzy in the UK, with the tabloid media, Bulger’s mother and innumerable talkback callers crying for Venables to be unmasked and for the details of his alleged crimes to be made public.

David Calvert is a Merseysider like Venables, but there any significant resemblance ends. However, five years ago, his neighbour began spreading the rumour that Calvert was Venables. Calvert and his family eventually had to move towns. When Venables was returned to prison, the whole thing was revived with, of course, a Facebook page saying “David Calvert is Jon Venables and Lives in Fleetwood Let’s Kill The C—“. The campaign forced the Calverts to move again.

The idea of going to Fleetwood to kill someone whose return to prison had just been announced was of a piece with everything else about the tragic story. The original Bulger case in 1994 had been the occasion for then shadow justice spokesperson Tony Blair to say that the event was an example of the social breakdown of Britain and that Labour would be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” a phrase given to him by the generally acknowledged next Labour PM Gordon Brown.

It wasn’t — a single hideous crime doesn’t signify anything, and child killings happen in all circumstances. But the way in which it was treated and the public and media reaction was something unique to Britain. Tried in a courtroom in a full adult process, despite the fact that the two killers were only months above the age at which criminal liability can even be applied, the bizarre application of the most austere judicial process was accompanied by the wrath of a crowd, who would bang on the police van as it arrived each morning, a baying lynch mob.

Other countries looked on in horror, at a process akin to the medieval trials of ducks accused of witchcraft. The fury of the crowd, their simultaneous determination that the children were hell’s spawn (and therefore presumably evil by nature) and should nevertheless be held to account (and therefore presumably evil by choice), together with the surreal coldness of the trial itself, seemed, towards the end of the Thatcher/Major period to be an agonised outburst of the country itself, simultaneously fed by the Iron Lady’s prattling about Victorian values, as she destroyed the industrial society the Victorians had built, and the great cities founded upon it.

The Bulger trial and its aftermath could only have come out of a place such as Liverpool, a place that was once a world entire of itself, a place that needed to change, but did not need to die, as it did in the ’80s and ’90s. By the time of the Bulger trial, adding in the ’70s slump, many families had had intermittent work for more than 20 years, and a whole generation had grown up in a dying place, with no means of improvement or escape.

That immense social change ran a trench between the generations, created a mood of cynical desocialisation. Maggie T had assumed that re-introducing individualism to British life would generate a little kingdom of Isambard Brunels, striving and eager to progress. But that protestant abstemious individualism had occurred before the rise of a consumer culture. To reapply it at that stage was to … well, watch any rap video to get an idea. Such a culture becomes one of consumption rather than production, of public emotionality rather than rational continence, of private neediness rather than public citizenship occupying the civic stage.

Thus, as the case re-enters the public arena in a new time, one in which Thatcher’s work has been supplemented and taken to a higher synthesis by new Labour — a total evacuation of social life, in favour of the twin powers of the market and the CCTV camera, of consumption and individualism bounded only by surveillance and social engineering — such forces gather to a fury. The prelude to James Bulger’s murder — the toddler being led away by the two boys — was one of the first captured on the now familiar low grade B&W security image, a photo that’s still difficult to look at. Fifteen years later, everyone has learnt to perform for the flux of images that has largely replaced British social life.

Thus the mother of Jamie Bulger wants to give her opinion and demand to know the nature of Venables’ new crimes, if he has committed any. That’s understandable, but the granting of endless attention to her, as if she had a proprietorial right over Venables’ punishment and supervision, was not.

The Sun‘s spurious campaign that Venables — who is by most accounts a wreck — presented some unique danger to the public by his continued existence under a new identity, epitomised the bloody sanctimony of the well-named “red-top” newspapers. On the BBC, former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie declared that he was utterly indifferent to the conditions that Venables lived under, that his crime was essentially one that he should pay for with his entire existence.

That, it must be said, is evil in its essence — not Venables, but Mackenzie, the sadistic, cramped, pinched, spirit of a certain type of Briton perfectly expressed. Where other nations have treated child killers as aberrant individuals with a propensity for violence, to be treated with a mixture of intense treatment and resocialisation, many Brits of this era need such “devil children” as a place to put their immense rage, their frustration, their displaced and depoliticised anger.

What could better exemplify that than David Calvert, whose story initially attracted sympathy, until it became clear that the man he blamed for the mob attack was Venables himself. What could be a better expression of the mirrored nature of ideology and groupthink than a man whose main objection to being a persecuted by a mob is that it makes him, by definition, the one person who cannot, by definition, join it?

By morning I fully expect to find that Calvert is a media punking, created by Chris Morris and Steve Coogan. But in the absence of that, one can only watch events such as this and marvel at the strength of hidden forces that can prompt a man to hope that someone else might end their life, at the end of a rope, in a holding cell. So that one can safely return to, of all places, Liverpool?