27th July 2021
Today there was a crime policy announcement.
Yet again, something or other will be ‘tougher’.
Like historians who say the middle class is always rising and the gentry always declining, crime policy is always getting ‘tougher’.
How can anybody involved in formulating and promoting this ‘policy’ keep a straight face?
Even the details of the policy are risible.
Pure ‘law and order’ theatre.
Convicts in high-vis jackets – for show.
A police officer with contact details – for show.
Stop-and-search policies without the need for suspicion – for ‘confidence’.
No thought, no substance – no thinking about rehabilitation, no thinking about a sensible and proportionate drugs policy.
And none of this new.
It is a staple for home secretaries of both main parties to want to introduce -in effect – the public humiliation of chain gangs.
As if that would have any beneficial effect for anyone.
There is already a police officer designated in charge of a case.
And indiscriminate stop-and-search creates tensions and conflicts in communities – and leads to the lack of confidence in the police.
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All shallow-showy or counter-productive stuff.
Nothing serious, even from a ‘small-c’ conservative perspective, let alone from a sensible liberal perspective.
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What we need is not a stop-and-search policy but a stop-and-think policy.
But – as this blog has previously averred – we have politicians more interested in ‘Law and Order!’ – complete with capitals and an exclamation mark – than actual law and order.
This is newspaper column material – but without even a reasonable suspicion of serious policy.
Appropriately, the best response was from cobblers:
Instead of making offenders wear high viz jackets in chain gangs, how about helping them get a real job instead? In my shops we employ lots of ex offenders and they wear a shirt and tie. Same people, different approach, a much better outcome.
— James Timpson (@JamesTCobbler) July 27, 2021
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Crime is a symptom of an unfair society, as long as the wealthy control everyone then there will be crime.
Most crime we read about is drug related and rarely affects the people who read this blog. Liberalising drugs would likely all but eliminate this type of crime overnight. I think the result, though, would not be less crime (though possibly less killings) but a huge increase in other kinds of crime (burglaries, muggings) that affect a much larger share of the population. Without tackling the socioeconomic causes of crime, we are not going to solve this problem. Life is dire for individuals out of the labour force or at the bottom of the earnings distribution.
All credit to James Timpson who has been employing ex-offenders in his Timpson shops for many years.
I agree. Showing ex-offenders some respect, give them a trade and thus a way of living within society is a much better way forward than all that ‘tough’ posturing.
But it won’t play well in ‘those’ newspapers.
Another example of Heseltine’s comment that Boris Johnson is a politician who “waits to see the way the crowd is running and then dashes in front”
It’s dog-whistle policy playing to a particular crowd – and it works. I overheard a conversation of the ‘they all get off lightly’ variety, suggesting violent revenge should be appropriate punishment.
I didn’t like to point out the main flaw – channelling my inner Hannah Glasse – “first, catch your criminal”. It’s not the chance of criminals getting off lightly that should worry them, but the chance of criminals not being caught.
The part that really galls – and I assume most people have give up already so can’t be bothered to follow it up – is: who in their right minds would take advice from this shower on the difference between right and wrong? Hell, Johnson will be giving relationship counselling soon with his customary confidence.
When the political class, the financial class and similar are subject to the law based on similar parameters, maybe then they will have a point. Maybe somebody could remind me how many people who were behind the flawed (to put it mildly) process that resulted in innocent post office staff going to prison have paid any sort of penalty.
If we could leave the dog whistles for Crufts, maybe we could start a genuine conversation about what our system of criminal law needs to do. And if we need a Royal Commission, may I put forward Mr Timpson?
This policy would surely appeal to those who voted for Brexit from Hartlepool to Henley on Thames.
In previous years you had to wait for August for the silly reporting season but times have changed.
And how are things progressing on the NI to GB bridge ? Has the concrete been ordered yet ?
If you read Edmund Burke “Reflections on the Revolution in France” he gives a damning indictment of what happens when you have fundamental political change with no planning.
He gives a reasoned critique of the failures of French political institutions the failings of the clergy and the professions ( not just the law). He has a lot to say about mediocrity and provincial self interest.
Burke wrote what he did in reply to a Frenchman seeking his views on the French Revolution. Charles 2 was beheaded in1685 but it was not until 1793 that the French caught up so Burke did have plenty to reflect upon.
It is easy to bin Burke to history but a lot of his criticisms can easily be construed to Britain in 2021 .
It is the poor who always pay the price.
Two pretty obvious points I might make
1. Nothing about Alcohol, in particular reducing its price and availability.
2. Fraud ditto, what about what has been done in the US where Spoofing (saying the call is from a number that it isnt) has been a Federal Offence for many years, making phone companied block spoofed calls and action against companies handling calls they know to be fraudulent.
Reducing the price of alcohol?
But we get what you mean. (I hope…) It’s rather like health where Governments focus on clearing up the mess rather than preventing the problem.
Chain gangs? Jesus wept. What next: the stocks? A whipping post?
This may sound radical, but how about funding the police, the CPS, the courts, and related services, adequately to catch suspects, take them to court, and have them tried with reasonable promptness. And then funding the prison service, probation service, etc., sufficiently to rehabilitate as many as possible of those who are convicted.
No, no; that is far too radical. What we need is another Three Word Slogan. Oh, er … yes: Beating Crime Plan. For this government, to say is to do. Thus, crime is beaten already. Simples. Or at least, simpletons.
The strategy is simples right enough, but they are not simpletons. Once on a car radio I heard of, I think a Hebrew philosophy, that folk are not so much divided between good and bad as enlightened and ignorant. That Johnson is neither ignorant or stupid, but choses to push the buttons of the ignorant cohort says enough about him and his so-called government.
Plenty more scope here for KS once he gets his act together and the wind turns. We will need to stare down the ignorant cohort sooner or later, till they see they are a minority that needs educating. Then Johnson can sell his bon mots ailleurs.
his bons mots ailleurs.
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I suppose Priti needed some profile. This looks like the usual cycle of spend on police, press down on crime, sit back and enjoy very little, cut budgets and wait for crime to rise again.
Obvious drugs are a driving factor as is ‘the economy’ and housing. Probably we have entered another dystopian era wherein an underclass is permanently excluded from any real participation in the shiny new world of influencers and magical e-services. No-one seems to want to face the consequences.
A suggested ‘cure’. Free heroin, free housing, basic income, fast food by bike and free widescreen telly. All in a gated banlieue with added tagging and contraception and free art and creative writing classes. Not an easy sell for Home Office Services Incorporated and not cheap. A ‘cure’ that may appeal to some. No-one seems to want to face the consequences of the way our society develops.
But there is no cure. So keep paying the police and Priti until the day humans are perfect. Until then ride the policeman’s economic cycle.
With respect I think that your approach to policy making is woefully out of date.
Johnson does not undertake policy making. He has a much more simplistic approach to life.
Identify an issue which bothers the focus groups. In this case crime – but it can be any other issue of the moment.
Cobble together a few “ideas”. Feed the juicy ones to the Mail, Express or Telegraph as an “exclusive”.
Get lots of fawning headlines. (See yesterday’s editions of the above mentioned papers).
Do a carefully controlled media event (either with Johnson having used his dressing up box or with people in “uniform”) to make the announcement.
Get out the “to do list” and tick the box next to “Crime”. Job done.
No coherence, no long term strategy, no meaningful measurable outcomes.
The pattern is the same whatever the policy topic. The focus groups read the papers and the feedback is positive.
It’s a “winning formula” and with Johnson and the current cabinet it will not change one iota.
(And I decided to consciously try to adopt your preferred style of writing!)
We have a PM with so called ‘libertarian instincts’ proposing ‘hi viz chain gangs’ and yet more stop and search. And people fall for this rubbish.
Johnson may have a degree in classics, but he clearly has no grasp of recent history.
He hasn’t learned the lessons regarding the breakdown of social order which increased stop and search inevitably provokes.
Not to worry, he will don his olympics kit over his suit before long to create more distraction.
Dog whistle ‘justice’ by use of showy public punishments is motivated by nothing less than assauging the base desire of the public for revenge and for engendering fear is nothing new.
The Georgian and early Victorian era in the UK was a time of unparalleled upheaval and inequality and it’s no coincidence that English justice then was at its most ferocious with public execution for such things as stealing a sheep or loaf of bread.
This begs the question of what conditions lead to imposition such an auto da fe type of ‘justice’.
In my opinion it’s the response of a insecure corrupt government of an entrenched elite fearing for their privilege in what for the many is a failed state.
The elite very deliberately play off the fear of the man who has a little security that his lot will be taken by the man who has nothing.
William L Shirer the US journalist who lived in 1930’s Germany a chaotic insecure place described Nazism as a ‘bar room philosophy’ and painted a word picture of a group of men in the local bar angry at their lot and blaming others and saying things like ‘if I were in power then I’d lock them all up, no trials’, and as Schirer points out what happened was that all over Germany it was men like these who came to absolute power and what is forgotten is that the very reason the National Socialists won elections early on was their ferocious law and order platform. It’s a little known fact that they hugely extended the list of capital crimes to rival that Georgian England had seen and this alone was immensely popular with the middle class.