Tom Ellis died after being stabbed outside the Ropewalk shopping centre in Nuneaton
A friend of a man who was stabbed to death outside a shopping centre has told the BBC’s Question Time young people need to be taught the difference between right and wrong.
Steven Rose asked the panel, in Birmingham, what they would do to tackle knife crime and disagreed with suggestions socio-economic problems had caused its rise.
He described his friend Tom Ellis as “a lovely lad, a gentle giant” and said Mr Ellis and his partner had been saving up for a house at the time he was stabbed to death.
A 16-year-old boy accused of Mr Ellis’s murder has been remanded in custody to appear at Warwick Crown Court on 12 July.
Steven Rose said Tom Ellis had been a “lovely lad”
‘Blink of an eye, gone’
Mr Ellis died after being attacked outside the Ropewalk shopping centre in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, on 8 June.
Mr Rose said he first met him when he joined the local squash club and he “just fitted in straight away”.
He added: “He had a partner, they used to come up to the squash club and have a social drink on a Friday night, probably because it was a nice easy, safe place to go and have a drink I suppose.”
Mr Rose said his friend had been “loving life” and then “in the blink of an eye, gone”.
The Question Time panel in Birmingham was asked how it would address knife crime
Responding to his question Yvette Cooper, for Labour, said there needed to be a “comprehensive” solution that included more police officers on the streets, and “proper consequences for carrying knives”.
She also called for a move to stop knives being bought online and an effort to “crack down on criminal gangs that are dragging young people into crime”.
She said her party had a “mission for the country to halve knife crime over the next 10 years”.
Andrew Mitchell, for the Conservatives, said his government had “substantially” increased sentences for carrying knives.
He supported the use of stop and search, if used “more sensitively” and said there could be more use of technology and efforts to restrict the availability of knives.
“A lot more we can do within schools, making it clear to students they must never carry knives,” he added.
The Liberal Democrats’ Layla Moran said it was necessary to have “police who are embedded in their communities, who know these kids from a young age” and called stop and search a “waste of time”.
She said prevention was the key and added: “When you’ve got children and families in poverty, that is one of the causes of high areas of knife crime.”
Stephen Flynn, for the SNP, said: “What we should probably be talking about is why this is happening in the first place and it’s because the fabric within society has been broken by 14 years of austerity.”
But Mr Rose said: “I think in some respects people are trying to find excuses for what the youth generation of today are doing.”
He said he grew up during the winter of discontent “when it was hard at times” and said he believed “this comes to a fundamental people know what’s right and what’s wrong and if you go out with a knife that is wrong”.
Schools, parents, youth groups and others needed to impress that on young people, he said.
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