It didn’t take long for the grand theories to emerge after the shooting of Rhys Jones, the 11-year-old schoolboy gunned down outside a Liverpool pub on the way home from football training. For the Tories, the killing can be traced to ten years of Labour neglect of Britain’s “broken society” and the breakdown of the institution of marriage. Liberals point to the corrosive effect of high unemployment and low educational attainment and the fact that drugs and guns tend to accompany poverty and desperation.
Arguments have raged about the true level of gun crime. But on one matter, everyone appears to be in agreement. Guns are now so readily available in this country that certain parts of inner-city Britain have become de facto no-go areas for the police. For people living in parts of Liverpool, Manchester and London, statistics are an irrelevancy. In all the coverage of the Rhys Jones murder, the prevalence of guns in the city is taken for granted. Every reporter who has visited Liverpool says that certain areas have become so steeped in violence that carrying guns is now a fact of life, even for children
The Liverpool MP Peter Kilfoyle, who has been an outspoken opponent of the gangsters who control the guns and drug trade on Merseyside, said it was only a matter of time before such a tragedy struck. “I am sad to say that I am not surprised by what happened to Rhys Jones. I am only surprised it hasn’t happened before now.”
Kilfoyle should know. For over a decade he has been campaigning for an inquiry into the activities of two Liverpool criminals, John Haase and Peter Bennett, released on a royal pardon in 1996 when Michael Howard was home secretary. The reverberations of this catastrophic decision still resonate 11 years later.
In a sense, the easiest question of all is where these guns come from. Like the trade in any other globalised commodity, they come from all over the world. In the coverage of the Rhys Jones murder, there has been intense speculation about the origins of the weapons in Liverpool, with Northern Ireland and the Balkans being suggested as sources. After the fall of communism, eastern Europe became a ready source of weaponry but now the trade has diversified. A Customs spokesman said that most of guns the service intercepts are replicas. “They come from all over: within the EU, Russia, Argentina, Australia, North America. Smugglers vary their routes; the skills to convert the replicas exist in the UK.”
Experts estimate that there is now a gun for every three people on the planet, including women and children. And the great thing about guns, from the criminal perspective, is that they are eminently transportable. They arrive in Brit ain in bits, not as recognisable weapons.
Professor Peter Waddington, an expert on gun crime from the University of Wolverhampton, told the New Statesman: “Guns are designed to be taken to pieces. They are a series of mechanical pieces that can be put together by someone with the nous to do it.” He added that the individual parts of guns were almost impossible to identify. “You need to be a very good Customs officer to say ‘that’s a trigger mechanism’.”
Underworld roots
But ease of import and export is only part of the explanation. There also has to be a will to import guns and a demand for them when they arrive. Put simply, at the end of the 20th century small numbers of British criminals involved in the heroin trade made decisions that would change our inner cities for ever. By introducing guns, they made certain parts of urban Britain not just dangerous, but deadly.
Merseyside, with its seaport and close-knit culture of criminal families, was on the front line of this new trend. For those looking for an explanation of how a city can become flooded with weapons, a series of gun caches found by the police in Liverpool more than a decade ago invite closer examination.
In three months at the beginning of 1994, over a hundred weapons and thousands of rounds of ammunition were discovered after tip-offs from informants. According to Powder Wars, a chilling account of the Liverpool underworld in the 1990s by the Sunday Mirror‘s Graham Johnson, these were not just the handguns and sawn- off shotguns that had always been available to British small-time gangsters, but an armoury more suited to a Balkan warlord. They included Uzi sub-machine guns, AK-47 assault rifles and even an elephant gun. At the time, the police didn’t question the fact that no one was ever found at the scene of the caches: usually abandoned cars or empty houses. The seizures were hailed as a triumph in the war against violent crime.
In fact, police now believe that the arms caches were an elaborate scam carried out by Haase and Bennett to secure their early release from prison. If that is the case, far from marking a victory for the forces of law and order, the seizures reinforced Liverpool’s gun culture by allowing those involved in the scam to operate with virtual impunity in the years that followed. In August 1995, the two men had each received a long prison sentence. But the information they were now providing as “supergrasses” about the location of the arms led to their release after serving less than a year of their sentences. Following information passed to him by Customs and Excise, the trial judge wrote to the Conservative home secretary, Michael Howard, asking for a royal pardon. When this was granted in July 1996, Howard justified his decision by saying the information provided by Haase and Bennett “had proved to offer quite enormous and unique assistance to the law-enforcement agencies”.
It was probably the most ill-judged decision of Howard’s political life. In 2001, Dawn Primarolo, the minister responsible for Customs and Excise, revealed that Haase and Bennett had not given evidence in any prosecution. Their information had led to no major arrests. Meanwhile, they had been released back on to the streets of Liverpool. By now, guns had become a way of life for criminals on Merseyside.
As the NS reported at the time, in 1995 the Metropolitan Police began an investigation into claims on the street in Liverpool that Haase and Bennett had tricked everyone: Customs, the police, the trial judge and the home secretary. Many believed the inquiry would lead nowhere, but earlier this year the arrests began. In February and March, Haase and six associates were charged with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice “in relation to facilitation of a royal pardon for two serving prisoners in 1996”. Then, in June, Paul Bennett, who had been on the run since 1999, was detained on a European arrest warrant in Portugal, where he awaits extradition.
For Peter Kilfoyle, the forthcoming trial is a vindication of his long campaign for a thorough investigation into the events that led to Howard granting the royal pardon. But Kilfoyle and the people of Liverpool know that the damage has already been done.
“The problem is that violence has always been passed down from generation to generation,” said Kilfoyle. “But the introduction of guns took it to a whole different level.”
Whether you subscribe to the family values or social deprivation school of thought, there is a brute practical element to the trade in guns that defies cheap political rhetoric. Like the drugs they often accompany, guns create a market of their own and, once a community is gripped, it is near impossible to break free from the addiction.
Additional reporting by Sam Alexandroni
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