There were 39,818 knife crime offences in the twelve months ending in September last year. The media has been quick to put a face to this epidemic: young, black, and male, with hoods up and drill music blasting from a blacked-out Benz. This is not incidental, the African-Caribbean community has long been cast as the source of crime, driving the rationale for disproportionate policing and initiatives such as Stop and Search or Joint Enterprise that serve to legalise racial discrimination.

But, despite the narrative, knife crime is not a phenomenon that can be put down to geography — the urban centres most discussed in the press. The steepest increase in knife-related incidences during 2018 was associated with drug trafficking across county lines. The factor that unites communities suffering from knife crime is not place, but poverty.

The intimate relationship between crime and poverty is well-established, and cemented by decades of statistical analysis. Across the twentieth century, changes in crime patterns have been intimately linked with changes in the labour market: a sharp decrease in the earnings of young, unskilled workers and a rapid decline in the aggregate rate of employment in that section of the workforce.

Both of these conditions impact the knife crime epidemic. Even as youth unemployment has declined slowly after the 2009 crash, under-employment, precarity, and low wages remain the predominant working conditions of our young people. And where unemployment (which stands three times higher for young people than the population in general) does exist, it tends to be extremely concentrated in disadvantaged areas.

Labour’s war should not be with crime as an inevitable feature of society, but with the poverty that too often causes it. Even the racialisation of crime is itself intimately linked to the disproportionate economic disenfranchisement of ethnic minority communities. And it’s not only working conditions that create this — each rung down the social ladder you go, the impact of government cuts to things like children’s services, education, and youth clubs gets more severe.

The struggle for economic justice is integral to the fight for real civil and political rights. It isn’t enough to be theoretically endowed with rights in a society where so many lack the basic foundations necessary to lead decent lives. Government figures suggest a 50 per cent increase in the number of pupils being educated at schools for ‘excluded’ kids in just five years. And a recent IPPR report found that the figure was likely to be five times as high as the official figures. What use is it to be legally entitled to education until the age of 18 if so many schools don’t have the means to educate their kids, or if so many kids are excluded, and often hived off into privatised or punitive systems at such a young age?

Many of the victims and perpetrators of knife crime are incubated by these conditions. They have been systematically failed since they were children. Britain has a ‘school to prison’ pipeline, with 61 per cent of kids excluded from school spending time behind bars later in life. We refuse to deal with the realities of disadvantaged young people until they turn up in our headlines.

The solution to knife crime cannot come simply from policing. It requires investment in the infrastructure that sustains decent lives for young people. For this, we need a new political landscape willing to tackle the deep inequality that makes political and civil rights a mirage for too many, one that closes the gap between rich and poor, and tackles the conditions that drive people towards crime.

This government has only one answer to the crisis: criminalise communities further. It suits them to place a target on the hooded figures their media friends depict stalking Britain. Labour must see the people behind these caricatures, and their roots in the torn social fabric of this country, if we are to provide a real alternative.