Incivility in the dock

A young woman had to go to court the other day for putting her flip-flopped feet on a train seat. The Guardian reports.

There was a similar case some months ago, when a bloke was taken to court for 'behaving in a disorderly, indecent or offensive manner that interfered with the comfort or convenience of a person on the railway' - (yup, putting his feet on a seat). In this report, there is also mention of an attempt to prosecute someone for putting their feet on a station bench.

Personally I think Merseyrail deserve all the formalised contempt that can be mustered: they got a mild bollocking from the court for being silly, but don't seem to have heard yet that zero-tolerance doesn't work, nor thought it through.

And reading through the Guardian readers' comments is salutary for revealing the number of vehement, savagely punitive supporters the rail company seems to have found. Apart from the occasional alternative view ('What a bunch of secret fascists you lot are') the perpetrator of this not-very-hideous crime gets no mercy from the baying pack.

And I know, from having visited some of these comment blogs before, that you tend to get these kinds of aggressive shoot-from-the-hip, bring-back-the-birch reactions - even from readers of a newspaper generally regarded as liberal or even 'left-leaning'.

What hope is there for respect in the neighbourhood? If a kid plays ball near a 'No ball games' sign, better be ready for the righteous fury. I'm reduced to a state of gloom about attitudes towards behaviour and institutionalised discipline in this country. Think I'll go out and smile at somebody.

Comments

[Paulie]

Kevin, doesn't this partly depend upon your attitudes to such behaviour? I use the bus tube AND train every day (my journey to work is a bit messy) and I find public transport (particularly buses) often has a slightly hostile air to it. In Nottingham, where I'm from, on the bus-route I often use, you have brightly lit buses that are well looked after. It's fairly plain to anyone that they shouldn't put their feet on seats and you get comments if you do.

Sure, the bus companies should make the environment less grubby. But the attitude towards common spaces is not excusable - the odd example being made can't be a bad thing, can it?

I'm with you on the 'no ball games' front by the way. One bit of zero tolerance I'd like to promote is towards these signs.

[ian]

It seems to me that the sort of intolerant, aggressive reaction you describe is as much a degradation of the public space as any lout putting their feet up on a bus seat.

[Kevin Harris]

I'm just wondering where this notion that the public realm has to be all pristine and unsullied comes from; and whether it's the same source (some vaguely self-selecting middle-class socially-superior people fulfilling their destiny to clean up the world?) that insists on emphatic punishment for all transgressions.

When I was a kid there was more of the public realm and you just expected it to be a bit scruffy. In extreme circumstances that could mean unhygienic (eg dogshit) and I don't disapprove of the comparatively recent movement (if that's the phrase I'm after) to regulate dog-owners to clean up, in urban and suburban areas, as an example of society recognising that the public realm needs to remain useable.

In the story of the feet up incident, we shouldn't lose sight of the degree to which the public realm occupied by the traveller has been privatised: that does have an effect on our perceptions and experience of it as 'public'. I note in passing that the patrolling uniformed official was wearing a CCTV headcam - there's another topic for debate. Meanwhile, some of the press coverage has described people with clean shoes using a sheet of newspaper to rest their feet, and still getting into trouble with the jobsworths.

When I get on a train I don't necessarily expect the seats to be clean, because public transport, thankfully, gets well-used, and life's like that. If someone's put their feet on the seat it's still useable as far as I'm concerned. I'm not so burdened with sartorial fancies that I couldn't bear to have a bit of dust and dirt attaching itself to me. And I wonder about the evolutionary forces that have led to some people's comic fussiness in that respect.

Had I been on the Merseyrail journey in question, I hope I'd have stood up (to coin a phrase) for the young lady and suggested to the official that he got a sense of proportion. By contrast, if I'd got on and there weren't many seats available, and someone with their feet up declined to take them down and make a seat available, I'd make a point. Because that's about disrespect for people.

k

[Kevin Harris]

'Footnote' - I probably wasn't the only one to ponder as I saw 'footage' of the England rugby team on TV last night, shown travelling home by train after their mediocre performance against the USA. Several of our former heroes had their besocked size 13s on the luxury class seats. Ref-er-eeee!