Merseyside Police imposed a second consecutive weekend dispersal zone on the village of Rainhill on October 16, after reports of young people setting off fireworks in the street and launching them at vehicles. The order, in force from 4pm on Friday until 4pm on Sunday, October 18, follows weeks of incidents including eggs thrown at houses, abuse directed at shop staff, criminal damage, and fighting, according to the Liverpool Echo.
The police response has arrived just as Mischief Night and Bonfire Night approach, the seasonal flashpoint when fireworks-related disorder spikes across Britain. But Rainhill's two independent councillors, who have spent years working in the village's youth services, are pushing back against the framing of the problem as one of criminality. Their diagnosis is structural: young people with nowhere to go.
What happened in Rainhill?
According to the Liverpool Echo, Merseyside Police cited misuse of fireworks by youths on two consecutive weekends in introducing the dispersal zones. The most alarming incident came on Sunday, October 11, when a group pushed several large bins down the stairs of Rainhill Station. The bins blocked the stairwell but did not fall onto the tracks.
Inspector Barry Scraggs of Merseyside Police defended the measure in a statement to the Echo.
It is not about bothering people going about their lawful business - it is about removing those who cause issues in the community.
That language deserves scrutiny. A dispersal order does not remove a problem; it relocates it. Cllr James Dunn, who works at the youth centre Reach Rainhill, made exactly this point. The zone, he said, simply pushes young people into St Helens town centre, displacing the behaviour rather than addressing why it happens.
Dispersal zones displace, they do not resolve
This is the core tension abolitionist campaigners have long identified in how the state responds to youth nuisance: enforcement is cheap, visible, and politically expedient, while the conditions producing the behaviour go untouched. Dunn noted that before the dispersal zone was introduced, police had not asked residents or youth workers what could be done together.
Before the dispersal zone was introduced, we would have loved the police to say, 'what can we do?'
The pattern is not unique to Merseyside. The Glasgow Times reported on October 16 that Patricia Ferguson, MP for Glasgow West, told Parliament her office was receiving a great many representations about the anti-social use of fireworks, particularly in Knightswood. The Clydebank Post has similarly reported on significantly more powerful fireworks reaching young people through unlawful sales, alongside the abuse emergency services face on the frontline.
What links these stories is a regulatory framework that treats fireworks as an ordinary consumer product, sold in the weeks before Bonfire Night, then policed through dispersal orders when the predictable consequences arrive. The