When the LSE sociologist Stanley Cohen revised his definitive study Folk Devils and Moral Panics for a 2002

When the LSE sociologist Stanley Cohen revised his definitive study Folk Devils and Moral Panics for a 2002 reprint, a photograph of the notorious (and now closed) Sangatte refugee camp appeared on the cover. As he notes, such panics recurrently attach themselves to a set list of causes: violent young men, drug dealers, child abusers, welfare cheats and – like today – foreigners “flooding our country, swamping our services”.Now none of this, he acknowledges, means that there is no cause for concern. In a variant on Gresham’s Law of money, bad news drives out good. A school, an estate or a hospital which fails will always generate more comment than one which triumphs.For the moment, though, the panic revolves around all those foreigners who are banging at the door. No one has yet been charged with anything after these arrests.)But there is a floating cloud of panic in many other areas of social policy.

Are all our schools on the edge of collapse? Are all council estates awash with yobs who need jumping on from a great legal height? Is the NHS a basket case? The Government has brought some of this upon itself, through its obsession with check-lists. The current upsurge focuses on migration, asylum seekers and refugees (three xs in the same equation). With the latest arrests under the Terrorism Act, fears about Islamic extremists feed into the frenzy. Have families who we thought were firmly settled begun to harbour young people ready to kill swathes of their fellow-citizens, in support of foreign ideologues? (This is about perception, not hard fact. Ever since Alfred Harmsworth invented the Fleet Street popular press in the 1890s, politicians have had to learn to swim in a world of media, like a fish in water. It’s a century too late to start blaming the pressures.Meanwhile, however, the miasma of panic remains This corrupts all debate Britain seems to be having a collective nervous breakdown. It’s about reassurance, conveying a feeling of being competent, of being in control It’s about confronting and assuaging public panic.

Policy wonks think that being in government is about “delivery” But it is also about social psychology. If immigration is at the top of voters’ agendas at the next general election, they fear that even their huge Commons majority won’t protect them This, too, would be fair, if rough, justice. The prospect of more migrants arriving from eastern Europe, by either straightforward or devious means, has spiralled off into almost uncontrolled neurosis.
Governmentally, Beverley Hughes has paid the price. But her action, or inaction, has helped to stoke the panic, not least among Tony Blair’s other ministers.

Politically, she deserved to, having been caught out in a direct denial of the truth. This has been one of them.” But sometimes in Britain it seems as if there is only one story: sheer, naked panic And this is one of those times. In the closing moments of Jules Dassin’s classic film noir The Naked City, the narrator intones the moral, in a famous pastiche of tabloid journalism: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. By hanging on to those books I keep alive the vain hope that I may yet be that person..