After having shut down every youth club in and around Camden Town, giving teenagers no alternative but to congregate at suitable street corners, the police have now issued them with a curfew. Penalties for non-compliance include a £5,000 fine, or six months in jail!

New powers which enable police, over a far-reaching area, to disperse and expel persons they ‘suspect’ of being a ‘nuisance’ is a breach of basic civil rights. It is not a crime to be on the street after 9pm as an unsupervised teenager and it is not illegal to gather in a group, unless martial law has been surreptitiously imposed?

Inevitably, enforcing this ‘exclusion-zone’ will result in harrassment of the innocent, along with the guilty. Contrary to the hype, not all youngsters are anti-social or potential drug dealers, but they are being treated as such.