By means of comparison, London is seemingly poorly dealt with by the government and local councils, despite being home to many tourist landmarks and being pridefully rich in diversity. London remains an area with rising rates of poverty, homelessness, drug users, gang affiliations and certainly not enough of the merit goods we deem society to instead be associated with. But who do we really blame?

In every society, in every area and every country, there is always a good, always a bad and most certainly always a worse. As someone born and bred in London and closely acquainted with the realities of urban life, it’s easiest to pick out the bad and the worse – the good simply does not exist until there is no bad. Or at least until the bad no longer outweighs the good. Why is it that London is so closely affiliated with gangs and poverty in my head, rather than the illusions of perfection strewn over mainstream media?

What you fail to see about London in movies and what you don’t read about this city in the books is that behind the façade, there remains a yet to be uncovered dark side in which homelessness will perhaps reach an all time high within the next decade or so (should the government fail to intervene), children are becoming infatuated with the prospects of drug use and vaping and fall into a culture of criminality, the futile nature of postcode wars and the list goes on.

So long as the cycle of deprivation prevails, life here in London will remain static in which we cease to move beyond the horrors and faults of this society. Arguably, moving past this cycle becomes a little easier once the proper authorities implement the appropriate measures to prevent the past from continuing into the near future. Unfortunately, whilst it’s easy to blame those highest in power, there is a degree to which we as a society play in the failings of our own. After all, behaviour is learnt, and criminality is not an inherent human trait.

Ultimately, until we collectively hone a more civilised approach to social interaction, perhaps governmental intervention alone will never have any true effect in removing the spiralling effect of us a society moving towards a predominantly ‘demerit’ centred way of life, begging the question of whether criminality and the prevalence of deviancy will ever truly escape us.

So who should we choose to blame?