The children who terrorised Britain’s streets as Labour revive ASBOs

They were the baby-faced troublemakers who terrorised Britain’s streets.

From the infamous ‘Asbros’ who brought mayhem to their community, to the ‘Ratboy’ burglar who received his first caution at the age of 10, the notorious ‘ASBO Kids’ became the poster boys for youth street crime.

The ASBO, or anti-social behavioural order, was introduced by Sir Tony Blair‘s Government in 1998 as a way to deter crime by putting a curfew on an individual and banning them from certain places.

Mugshots of children as young as 10 were plastered across newspapers in the hopes that a public shaming might teach them a lesson, and provide some sense of justice for the neighbourhoods they terrorised. 

But for many yobs it became a badge of honour, and more than half of those who received one would breach its conditions.

The ASBOs were scrapped in 2014 and replaced in England, Wales and Northern Ireland by civil injunctions and criminal behaviour orders.

Now Keir Starmer‘s Labour is proposing to revive the Blair-era orders if it wins the General Election. The new ASBOs would give police powers to use ‘respect orders’ against perpetrators of harassment, intimidating behaviour, drug use, littering and street drinking.

Breaching the orders would be a criminal offence and could lead to convictions being issued with anything from a community payback order to a custodial sentence. New orders would only be used against adults and persistent offenders. 

Daniel Oakley racked up 40 arrests with his brother Ricky before they became known as the ‘demons from hell’ in their neighbourhood of Park Village in Wolverhampton.

The siblings became the youngest recipients of anti-social behaviour orders in 2006, prompting them to become known as ‘Asbros’.

Their reign of terror included throwing knives, starting fires and letting down tyres, before they began carrying out robberies and burglaries. On one occasion, the duo suffered severe burns after Ricky threw a can of foam on a fire and it exploded.

Speaking to MailOnline previously, Danny recalled: ‘That was just the start of it. There was a big explosion that’s for sure, we were walking down our road with smouldering hair and no eyebrows… I’ve come a long way from where I was.’

In 2015 – his brother Ricky was in prison – while Danny, then 29, vowed to start afresh and said he planned to help steer other youngsters away from street gangs.

The five McCann brothers helped turn Greater Manchester into the ASBO capital of Britain thanks to their ‘terrorising’ antics, spearheaded by ‘psychopath’ Joseph McCann.

The siblings were said to leave neighbours cowering in their wake, but a handful kept files of evidence on the boys while council bosses set up a video camera after receiving so many complaints.

They were caught on CCTV wrecking cars, throwing bricks at workers and vandalising property, leading Manchester City Council to evict the whole family on the grounds of breach of tenancy.

Despite being shipped two miles away to Ardwick, the brothers continued to return to Beswick just to raise hell, leading to Joseph receiving an ASBO aged 14 in 1999, alongside brothers Sean, 16 and Michael, 13. 

A year after the ASBOs were issued, burglaries in Beswick had halved and takings in its shopping precinct were up. But for Joseph, at least, the orders had no impact on his criminal desires. 

In 2008, he was jailed for nine years for aggravated burglary after forcing his way into an 85-year-old man’s home in Bedford and threatening him with a knife. 

He failed to be rehabilitated and after his release he was arrested again for burglary in August 2017 and given a three-and-a-half year jail term. 

But after 18 months behind bars, he was released early by the authorities in error, allowing him to embark on a 15-day rampage of rape, violence and abduction. 

A judge described him as a ‘classic psychopath’ as he dealt him 33 life sentences in 2019 after he targeted 11 victims aged 11 to 71 in Greater Manchester, Ramsbottom and London. 

Anthony Kennedy, aka Ratboy, received his first caution at the age of 10 for terrorising the Byker Wall estate in Newcastle in the 1990s.

Between the ages of 11 and 13, he was arrested 16 times and appeared in court three times for offences including burglary, theft, taking a car without consent and other driving offences.

He earned the nickname Ratboy after being found by police hiding in a ventilation shaft.

At 14, he admitted burglary and head butting a policeman in the face during a campaign of terror against elderly women.

Sticking to his modus operandi, he was jailed at 17 for four years for robbing a pensioner, and was moved to an adult prison a year later to serve out the rest of his sentence. He was sentenced a further three times for burglary at the ages of 20, 24 and 26. 

In 2007, Kennedy claimed to have given up a life of crime after finding love and religion. He and his partner moved to Blyth, Northumberland, to have a fresh start. 

At just 10 years old, Alfie Hodgin was one of the youngest people ever to receive an anti-social behaviour order – but it appears it did little to change his behaviour.

In October 2022 he was jailed after he tried to become a drug gang boss but was stabbed 27 times with a machete in a revenge attack.

The 18-year-old was locked up after he was caught with £2,320 of heroin and crack cocaine while ‘slumped on the floor covered in blood’ in Ellesmere Port, Cheshire.

The teenager from Liscard, Merseyside, was working for an organised crime group in a bid to pay off debt he had accumulated but he instead stole the gang’s phone and drugs as he attempted to run his own operation.