It’s a very modern phenomenon, the nuisance of people on public transport using their phones for flagrantly loud things – conference calls, TV shows, music – without headphones. I remember a time when the most annoying thing you could do with a phone was play a game with an irritating beep; a time when having a loud conversation was so verboten that comedians could get whole careers out of it. So why does Andy Burnham’s campaign, “Share the carriage, not the noise,” introducing fines of up to £100 for miscreants, feel so nostalgic?
And crucially, will the fines work? Burnham is on to something, because it is insufferable. I could lose hours debating the finer points of whether it’s worse to listen to an episode of Paw Patrol, a crux point in a Pretty Little Liars plot, some really mid-80s disco or a high-level discussion about marketing strategy. (In fact, there is no hierarchy; they’re all intolerable in their own special ways.) Prime ministers have tried this kind of thing before.
Tony Blair proposed on-the-spot fines for loutish behaviour in 2000, saying he wanted to authorise police to march a drunkard or other ne’er-do-well to a cashpoint and charge them £100, which was considerably more money back then. This didn’t happen, but he did manage to introduce fixed-penalty notices for so-called “yob” offences. It led to some hilarious policing decisions: the Women’s Institute was threatened with fines for flyering, and a man was fined for dropping a tenner.
Woe betide you if you lost your cat and tried to find it by sticking its portrait on a lamp-post. However, unlike Blair, Burnham seems to have put some grownup thinking behind these new proposals. Mainly because there is already the infrastructure to implement such fines.
Public transport officials already know how to get money off passengers, and they’re good at it. Even so, do small behavioural interventions like this give the impression of a competent government firing on all cylinders, or a flailing one, tinkering round the edges? What about perpetrators – are they deterred by fines?
Geoff Mulgan, an academic at University College London, was director of policy at No 10 under Blair. And that’s always ignored by the policy elite, partly because they live in places which aren’t affected,” he says. He refers to the “broken windows theory” developed in the early 80s by American social scientists James Q Wilson and George L Kelling.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
