The book has a first chapter as an ‘audit’ of the Government, and then 14 chapters on public policies, including one on police reform, and one on crime and anti-social behaviour, that complained that the rhetoric of a ‘fight’ against crime and being ‘tough’ had ‘immobilised progressive politics in Britain’. The chapter author condemned the political framing of criminal justice in terms of soft and tough had ‘destroyed the opportunity to float imaginative proposals for the reform of our criminal justice system for the past decade’. As for the practical effects, the chapter went on:
‘The criminal justice system is now creaking under the weight of the legislative overload …. Far from tackling crime, there is increasing evidence that this overload, coupled with an array of competing government targets and initiatives, has blunted the organisational capacity of the pillar of our criminal justice system: a Home Office dazed by the cumulative impact of legislative hyper-activity, overstretched and organisationally dysfunctional in places; a judiciary resentful of an executive determined to second-guess the work of judges; a prison service expected to pick up the pieces as tougher sentences lead to larger prison numbers but not given the resources to do so; a probation service which is the subject of almost continuous ministerial vilification; an immigration service warped by the pursuit of sometimes arbitrary government asylum targets; and a police service which, although the beneficiary of extra resources and a battery of new powers, has been pushed from pillar to post to meet short term government objectives.
‘It is no coincidence that this chronic institutional strain in the system has been accompanied by some of the highest re-offending rates in the western world, conviction rates for serious crimes such as rape, robbery and assault which have dropped sharply, a remorseless increase in violent crime, and a public perception of crime which is marked by fear rather than confidence.’
What makes that passage so depressing is not so much its content, wide-ranging though the charge is of ‘failure’ in law and order; but that the author of that chapter was Nick Clegg, and the book was titled Britain after Blair: A Liberal Agenda, published in 2006, and featuring other Liberal Democrats who took office and played parts in the Coalition Government of 2010-15. As is well known, Clegg was then deputy prime minister and left politics to join the tech firm then called Facebook, now Meta.
At least the passage gives perspective: at the time, the 2000s before the public sector austerity of the 2010s, now more or less righted by the Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak regimes, was not so much better as it may look with hindsight. Also, the passage does show that current problems are chronic: institutions working poorly both internally and with each other to deliver human outcomes. Clegg did cover this, urging ‘engagement’ so that prisoners had education to stem re-offending; offering as a principle that ‘crime cannot be understood outside its social context’, again pointing to unemployment and educational attainment; and thirdly and lastly, standing for practical and effective ‘new ideas on law and order’. Hence he argued for ‘new secure mental health treatment centres’ as part of more prison space, and (compulsory) pre-release training; ‘new, visible forms of non-custodial Public Punishment Sentences for lesser offences’, ‘aggressive use of Community Justice Panels’ as tried in Chard in Somerset; and giving young people ‘something to do’. All bright ideas, as good now and as unapplied as in 2006. We could add another: drug rehabilitation for those shoplifting to pay for an addiction, something else tried here and there by pioneers and enthusiasts who have gone beyond their day job’s remit; yet never taken up nationally, somehow.
Some of Clegg’s ‘new’ ideas aren’t taken up because they aren’t so practical. Theresa May as Home Secretary in the Coalition, and PM Rishi Sunak in his anti-social behaviour ‘action plan’, took up the idea of making offenders do community good deeds. The name does change; in Sunak’s plan, it was called ‘Immediate Justice’. Promised was a trial in ten places, then a roll-out in England and Wales in 2024; perpetrators being ‘forced to pick up litter, wash police cars or clean up graffiti within as little as 48 hours of being caught’. The catch: you can hardly expect offenders to pick up litter beside a motorway (are they trained in health and safety) or indeed anywhere (where would they go to a toilet during their shift?). As for washing police cars, presumably that would be inside a secure police facility; are you proposing to let criminals inside?! And as for graffiti, and all these ‘community pay-back’ tasks, who’s going to watch over every one of the criminals, that they don’t misuse the equipment, or indeed sit down and do nothing? Depressing, then, that the same idea gets regurgitated without ever meeting reality.
Also depressing is how the two main political parties give in to the temptation to take up crime and disorder in ways that are, to quote 2000s Labour minister Harriet Harmon from her 2017 memoir A Woman’s Work, ‘both malicious and trivial’. She tells from page 283 a story from 2008. She was due to take ‘the dreaded PMQs’ (Prime Minister’s Questions) in the House of Commons, because the new PM Gordon Brown was absent. The Monday before that Wednesday, she related, ‘I went out, as part of my usual constituency activities, with the police on a patrol through Peckham’, in south London:
‘It’s routine for a local MP to sit down with the borough commander, the head of the local police, for a meeting and then join the police at work in a police car or on foot patrol.’
Police put on their anti-stab vests, and gave one to Harman and one to her (female) constituency assistant. Harman had walked around Peckham for 20 years, ‘never once taking any security precautions’, but put on the stab-proof vest. Her assistant took a picture of Harman, just as Harman would be pictured in a hairnet in a factory. Once it went on Harman’s website, the Daily Mail rang, ‘that their front-page story was me wearing a stab vest in Peckham. The picture apparently proved how violent London had become under Labour and how unpopular I was in my own constituency’. Peckham, to recall, was the site of the murder of the boy Damilola Taylor, covered earlier in Harman’s memoir. Other high-profile murders happened during the previous, Conservative Government. At PMQs, her opposite number, the former Tory leader William Hague, duly brought up the stab vest. As Harman wrote, attack is the best form of defence; ‘I rejoined by saying that, when it came to deciding what to wear or what not to wear, the last person I’d take advice from was the man in the baseball cap. By this time, our side were cheering loudly.’ As this depressing story shows, necessary, perhaps life-saving personal protective equipment was conflated with the humorous episode while Hague was Conservative leader, when pictured indeed wearing a baseball cap. Parliament was about point-scoring for one side to best the other. Hardly the arena for raising, let alone solving, why anti-stab protection has become common issue for police, private security and others facing the public.
While it’s understandable if the Conservatives first in Coalition and then governing alone since 2015 have run out of ideas, arguably most depressing was the lack of new ideas shown by shadow Home Secretary Yvette Cooper in her speech to the Labour Party conference in October.
We’d heard it all before: ‘we will stand with USDAW, the Co-op, Tesco, small convenience stores with a new law and tougher sentences for attacks on our shop workers’ – that word tough again; except that the prisons are full. A bravery medal for police officers, firefighters and emergency service workers who lose their lives in the line of duty? Aren’t there enough medals already? New laws ‘to crack down on dangerous knife sales and to stop gangs exploiting children’; aren’t there laws against knives and exploitation of children already? Her concluding phrases of ‘police back on the beat …. respect for the rule of law’; aren’t these as hackneyed as can be?
I have heard the suggestion that Labour are keeping their ‘powder dry’; not releasing details of legal or other proposals, in case the Conservative Government attack them. Except that a sound proposal would be defensible? Is it not rather a case that there is no powder?
If the two main political parties are sterile, because everything has been aired or tried before, still some things would be more fruitful than others. If the prisons and hospitals are full, why keep drug-addicted shop thieves on the criminal justice treadmill, if they sincerely would be glad to get off drugs, rehabilitate them, through a consistent and nationwide service? That can show value by saving the retailers in stolen goods, and having to sell more to replace the loss, and the state by not having to take the same offenders through courts, police stations and prisons and back again? Yvette Cooper spoke only of ‘Respect Orders to ban repeat offenders from town centres’, which presumably would mean the offenders were displaced elsewhere (or perhaps they would no longer have to shop?).
If far more fraudsters and scammers are at work, in Britain and even more beyond the reach of the law abroad, than the police can ever tabulate, let alone collar, surely there’s value in public information campaigns, on the lines of wearing seat belts in cars in an earlier era? Of identifying where businesses can do more, whether to design out car or phone theft, or online crimes, and banging heads together?
That’s even before we consider crimes of the (near) future using artificial intelligence. The think-tank the Social Market Foundation spoke interestingly, recently, about the need for a new ‘ecosystem’ against fraud.
The King’s Speech promised several laws, including ‘tougher sentencing’, more for victims of crime …. more laws, again. In an accompaniment to the King’s Speech, PM Rishi Sunak said: “Crime is down 50 per cent since 2010, excluding fraud. And fraud fell 13pc in the last year.” That’s a statistic used by the (since sacked) Home Secretary Suella Braverman; except that fraud is the number one volume crime. To exclude fraud from crime is absurd; like saying that Arsenal came top of the Premier League in the 2022-23 season, except for Manchester City. If a politician were to play the same game about, say, hospital waiting lists and leave out the most occurring sort of operation, they’d be howled down. Even assuming the political will existed to make a new ‘ecosystem’, drawing on the private sector differently, setting up new structures to reflect the quicksilver, international nature of crimes, given such cynical disregard of fraud; what hope is there for the genuinely new to make for better outcomes in criminal justice?
