Take the good citizen test

Last rainy week my friend Tim had just reached the front of a long queue at our local branch of the National Westminster Bank. As he was about to move to the counter a man in his early thirties, wearing an iPod, rushed past, apologising breathlessly, “I just need to ask a quick question!” and took Tim’s place in front of the cashier. Then the man took out his bank deposit book and a number of cheques and began to transact some prolonged business, stopping after a few minutes to beam what he must have imagined was a winning smile and saying, “Sorry, it’s taking rather longer than I expected!”

As Tim got to this point in his story I was already furious by proxy. The man had lied in order to jump the queue and was now expecting Tim to take it. What had Tim done? “I told him he had lied in order to jump the queue, that he clearly considered himself better than the rest of us, but that he was, in fact, a worthless piece of feculence,” Tim replied. Suddenly the man was no longer in a terrible hurry. He now had time for squaring up, coming and standing with his face an inch away from Tim’s and making vaguely threatening noises. Tim took off his glasses and drew himself up to his full 6ft 2in. The man harrumphed and departed.

You can see how this might have been different. What if the man had been armed? What if Tim had been armed? What if the man had had some friends who would now wait outside, pretending to look at the menswear in Nicole Farhi’s window, and preparing their assault? I imagine that Tim, like me in that situation, would have done some almost unconscious weighing up of the risk from an iPod-encumbered thirtysomething in a CCTV-smothered Hampstead bank, and concluded that this was a situation unlikely to end in tragedy. But he couldn’t be sure.

It may have been that, at 6ft 9in and being an ex-professional heavyweight boxer, James Oyebola thought it was fairly safe to suggest to three young men in the rather swanky Chateau 6 nightclub in Fulham last Sunday week that they might observe the law on smoking – if not for their own sakes, then for that of his friend, the owner. Chateau 6’s decor, as one customer put it earlier in the year, was “chic”, and the staff friendly and professional. But, this customer went on, the problem was a section of the clientele who would “offer ‘in your face’ confrontation to every other man or woman that inevitably accidentally bumped into them in a packed bar.”.The smoking suggestion led to Oyebola being shot in the back: he died later in the week.

Such an outcome, of course, is extreme. But perhaps it is rare partly because the rest of us are so cowed. In any week, if you live in a town or city, you will encounter people who appear to believe that social rules are made for others and not for them.

Their dogs foul the footpaths next to primary schools, they ride their bikes fast on pavements or in parks, their cars run red lights, they chuck fast food containers on the floor, they dump their fridges at the end of the road, they swear at the tops of their voices in front of young children, they yell into their mobiles in the quiet carriages of trains, they jump queues, they behave in a way which foreshadows the end of civility, were everyone in our crowded country to behave as they do. Then, if challenged, they may well offer profanity or violence out of all proportion to the request made. So a few of us call them out on their sins, some of us look on sadly and impotently, some of us calculate the odds.

It does occur to me, though, that things may be more complicated than this “decline of civility” theory with its them-and-us model. Some problems could be due to changing etiquettes. Take, for example, feet on seats; when I was a kid it was considered shocking for someone to place their shoes on the seat of a bus or train. It was somehow both disrespectful and mildly vandalistic. Today, very few seem to share my almost organic sense of outrage. So I began to wonder, was this because of the fact that fewer of us wear (a) dirty work-boots and (b) smart working clothes than before? Or because, since so many of us now own cars, we no longer consider train seats as belonging in some way to us, as members of wider society? Last Wednesday I found something new to be aggrieved about. Sitting in a Tube train, a man who had been reading a free newspaper suddenly reached out and dropped it behind my head in the space between me and the window. But what exactly was my complaint? Littering? An invasion of personal space? I didn’t know. I still haven’t worked out whether I have any right to respond at all.

And this reaction suggests my second caveat. Which is that I have for years rather enjoyed correcting other people’s transgressions, even if it is only inside my head. I actively search for social wrongs to be righted by an admonitory word, a stern look, a rebuke, a cutting remark. I am, in some ways, a busybody, a version of Bill Pertwee’s Air Raid Warden Hodges in Dad’s Army, never happier than when advising someone else to “put that light out!” When, as has happened, a littering youth has had his sin pointed out to him and has blustered that it was none of my f’ing business, it’s possible that he was in some way right.

Such an admission could suggest that the best thing we can do, when faced with a minor social crime, is to ignore it. Ignore it because of the risk; ignore it because it isn’t in itself so very serious; ignore it because our own motivations are suspect.

The trouble is, I don’t really believe it. I am by temperament with those who argued, at the onset of the debate on zero tolerance, that permitting small crimes helps to create an atmosphere of lawlessness. I really do think that, in the cluttered, cheek-by-jowl world of the modern city, littering today means murder tomorrow, and that more correction, more widely shared, would mean fewer murders. Perhaps we should place more emphasis on rewarding and extolling good deeds than on intervening to castigate minor offenders, but castigation ought still to come into it.

Even so, a part of me, when Tim was halfway into his story of the rude man in the bank, was aching to be told that my friend had finally lost patience and, with two expert blows from hand and foot, had laid Mr iPod out on the carpet tiles of the NatWest, to the sound of applause from staff and customers. That’d learn him.

My Top Ten anti-social hates

1 Shoes on seats
2 Queue jumping
3 Red light jumping
4 Street spitting
5 White-van woman-baiting (“nice pair, luv!”)
6 Blatant littering
7 Young men and women not surrendering their seats for the old, infirm or pregnant
8 Incredibly loudly played music on car stereos
9 T-shirts with swear words on them
10 People who don’t acknowledge you when you have held the door open for them, made way for their car or in some other way shown them courtesy

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