Wednesday, July 28, 2010 

The end for ASBOs, again.

There appears, on the face of it, to be something remarkably strange going on within the Conservative party where it comes to policy on crime. Before the election it couldn't tell us often enough how broken our society was, yet since becoming part of the coalition government that consistent piece of rhetoric has all but disappeared, to be replaced by the first steps towards enabling David Cameron's beloved "Big Society". Before the election it was dedicated to keeping the prison building programme going, only for Ken Clarke almost immediately after it to start looking for alternatives. Before the election the then shadow home secretary Chris Grayling was looking for ways to implement a "21st century clip round the ear", giving police the power to take someone off the streets for "doing something stupid", and wanted to introduce "grounding orders" which would have banned youths leaving their home outside of school hours for up to a month.

Today Theresa May sounded the death knell for the anti-social behaviour order, supposedly. Giving a speech titled "Moving Beyond the ASBO" at the Coin Street community centre, she announced a review of the current orders available to police, which isn't exactly the same thing as getting rid of them altogether, and without giving any real detail as to what they would be replaced with, if anything. This also isn't exactly the first time that a home secretary or other ministers have signalled that the ABSO is reaching the end of its usefulness: Ed Balls previously said that every single one issued was a mark of failure, while Jacqui Smith (remember her?) wanted alternatives like parenting orders, acceptable behaviour orders and early-intervention to play a wider role.

Even so, getting rid of the ASBO or reviewing them didn't previously seem to be on the agenda. The Conservative manifesto, while somewhat dismissive of them, was fairly clear:

We recognise the need for criminal sanctions like ASBOs and fixed penalty notices, but they are blunt instruments that often fail their purpose of deterring people from committing more crime.

If you wanted to give the Liberal Democrats some credit they almost certainly don't deserve, you could link the apparently more enlightened stance since the election to their influence. There's been no suggestion from the ministers themselves however that this is the case, and no specific crowing from the Lib Dems either that it's thanks to them. Instead, there seems to be a much simpler explanation: it's all part of the attempt to search for savings absolutely everywhere, while outsourcing everything possible to either the voluntary or private sector, covered up by the now already wearying "Big Society", decentralising, local is always best rhetoric.

The problem with this approach when it comes to ASBOs is that it's always been local authorities that have been behind their issuing. Some have hardly used them while others embraced them. May tries to cover this up by suggesting that they were somehow imposed on councils by Whitehall:

Of course, with such an obvious problem even the last government could not ignore it.

They knew they had to do something, but as with so much they did, their top-down, bureaucratic, gimmick-laden approach just got in the way of the police, other professionals and the people themselves from taking action.

Such a centralised approach, imposed from Whitehall, can never be the best way to deal with an inherently local problem.

Rather than part of the solution, the previous government’s focus on anti-social behaviour became part of the problem.

The multitude of central government initiatives and gimmicks meant that people expected the government to deal with these issues.

Too often, the top-down approach of the past meant that the police and the other agencies involved in tackling anti-social behaviour at local level took their cue from central government rather than the people they were meant to be serving.


It also doesn't seem to concern May that she's contradicted herself within a matter of sentences. We go from "even the last government could not ignore it", as if New Labour had somehow been slow to recognise the problem of anti-social behaviour when during Tony Blair's time as prime minister it practically never shut up about it, to a "multitude of central government initiatives and gimmicks" which actively undermined the local fight against it. The government was in fact so concerned about how anti-social behaviour was dealt with differently across the country at the initiative of local authorities that it commissioned a study on it which was published last December (PDF). Noting this would however contradict May's argument that it was somehow centralisation which previously held everyone back. She even builds a straw man in the next paragraph:

For 13 years, politicians told us that the government had the answer; that the ASBO was the silver bullet that would cure all society’s ills.

It wasn’t. Life is more complex than that.


As pointed out above, not even New Labour was that shallow, and it never even began to claim that government had all the answers, even if it sometimes felt like that, or that ASBOs were a silver bullet. The speech as a whole is much like this, saying a lot while offering very little substantive. May goes from stating:

In making this case, I’m not saying that there is no role for government. We’re not going to just walk away and leave you to it.

to

Government has a role to play - sometimes that’s just by getting out of the way, simplifying the landscape, removing the bureaucratic barriers that prevent professionals from doing what works.

to

But government also has an active role to play. We need to help agencies join up more effectively, spreading good ideas like the Case Management system in Charnwood, Leicestershire, which allows agencies to pool information on anti-social behaviour incidents and victims, and manage cases collectively online.

There is then a role for government: first it gets out of the way, removing the barriers that prevent professionals from doing what works, then it needs to get involved again to ensure that agencies can join up more effectively. Confused? You shouldn't be. From not walking away and leaving you to it, it instead wants to help outside agencies do it for you, in line with so much else of current government policy. And then there's the role for communities themselves:

But crucially, we also want communities to come up with their own ideas of what they are going to do.

It’s not just the police, it’s not just social landlords, or councils - it’s the whole of society that needs to come together and work together to tackle anti-social behaviour.


From the examples she provides, there's ample evidence of this happening already.

The whole speech and change in policy, if indeed there is one, amounts to a big bag of nothing. Government might get out of the way, or it might not. It wants things to carry on as they currently are, but doesn't provide any actual examples of how will it help similar projects as there's no mention of extra funding, predictably, just that they will have the equivalent of moral support. ASBOs will be reviewed, and a "toolkit that is appropriate and effective" will be put in place, with no suggestion as to what that might amount to. There's the occasional encouraging sentence, such as "[W]here possible, they [the new sanctions] should be rehabilitating and restorative, rather than criminalising and coercive", which is more than Labour ever attempted, but there's no meat on the bones.

Whether this exactly is the Conservative "Big Society" writ large or not is open to question. Others within the party have already described it as "Blairite window dressing", but not even most Blairite thinking was this vacuous or opaque. Clearly, the government is desperate for this not to be seen as the rolling back of the state for the sake of it, yet that's what it looks like when the state wasn't even in the way in the first place. While the rhetoric is thankfully remarkably different to the strident, authoritarian tone taken by Chris Grayling, it still doesn't make clear that incidents of anti-social behaviour as measured by the British Crime Survey (PDF, page 116) have been falling for a number of years, and that the main indicators of ASB have always been teenagers hanging around and litter on the streets rather than actual recordable incidents of abuse and drug taking. It's not so much then that Conservative crime policy has gone liberal; it's more that the decisions are being made on a individual, case by case basis rather as part of a general ideological overview, even if informed by other parts of government policy. This would be an improvement if it was to stay like this, yet once the more benign atmosphere disappears, as it will, it's difficult to imagine anything other than responding to headline once again becoming the norm. One suspects that ABSOs will still be around for some time to come, and probably long after the latest home secretary herself has moved on.

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7/28/2010 10:27:00 pm | |

Tuesday, August 25, 2009 

When you walk through the garden...

In one way, you've got to give Chris Grayling some credit. In what is otherwise an entirely run of the mill speech on law and order, which offers precisely no new policies at all from what I can see, he's managed to get the attention of the entire press corp, all thanks to his mention of The Wire, which although few of the people reading the story written up in the papers may have seen, those writing it almost certainly will have. By run of the mill, I mean, in Grayling's tradition, deliberately deceptive, misleading, tenuous and predictable. There's the personal anecdote from Manchester which is then applied to the country as a whole, ringing with hyperbole of a "urban war"; there's the selective use of statistics on violence which don't even begin to give the whole picture, as he relies entirely on police figures rather than the British Crime Survey, which he then later uses when it does help his cause; the now obligatory claim to being more progressive than Labour, which isn't difficult, but which the Tories still manage to fall down on; then, despite claiming to be the new progressive alternative, he goes through all the old law and order dog whistles, benefit culture, broken society, family breakdown, how voluntary organisations and the"third sector" will solve everything, all without even beginning to explain how their proposed alternative would help.

Grayling rather let the cat out of the bag when he said he had only seen a few episodes of the first series of The Wire; I doubt he's even seen those, although those who wrote the speech for him and advise him almost certainly have. As other bloggers have pointed out already, if you can't tell that the The Wire is about the utter futility, hopelessness and disaster of the war on drugs, then you haven't been watching it closely enough, and as indeed the co-creator himself even said. I have a suggestion though: if Grayling thinks that parts of this country now reflect Baltimore as portrayed in The Wire, then let's try some of the solutions which the characters in the show themselves experimented with.

For instance, in the third series, beaten into a corner by the insanity of the pressure on him to reach targets to cut violent crime, as well as his disgust at seeing how following the demolition of the main area of the city where drugs were bought and sold the trade has spread out into neighbourhoods previously untouched, Major Howard "Bunny" Colvin finds an almost deserted part of the city and sets up a "free zone", which as long as the dealers and their underlings and the other assorted hangers-on keep to, they'll face no charges and even be helped or protected by his officers. Colvin's plan isn't of course without hitches, and soon, pressured by an old friend into also providing clean needles, free condoms and outreach workers, as well as a murder, it all inevitably falls apart as his superiors realise what he's done, with councillor Carcetti, starting his campaign to be mayor, also milking it for all its worth. Now, while I don't think many would suggest that we should set up similar style "free zones", what's stopping the Tories from thinking really radically and following the example of Portugal and decriminalising drugs almost entirely while drastically improving the facilities for treatment, detoxing and help back into work and society itself? That would be truly progressive.

Then there's the fourth series, with its focus on the school system and the programme which Colvin, now outside the police and into academia attempts running which focuses on the "corner kids" and attempts to both socialise and civilise them into being able to return to their normal classes. Few schools have anything as radical or as breaking out of the mould as similar programmes, and as Colvin himself points out, these are the kids that are being left behind anyway, regardless of claims by politicians that no child will be. Or there's the overall theme which permeates all five series, which is that politicians and police don't mix, and that targets set by politicians only distract from real police work. The Tories still seem set on the idea of elected commissioners, which has to be one of the very worst ideas they've come up with. The police do of course have to be accountable locally, but electing someone who will do little more than interfere and also potentially bring out the very worst in both policing and politics is straight out of the mad house. Three ideas then for genuine, progressive reform, all of which the Conservatives would almost certainly baulk at.

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8/25/2009 08:16:00 pm | |

Monday, February 23, 2009 

Grayling's Conservatives: somehow worse than New Labour.

For those of us who are now becoming resigned to the sad fact that there is very real little difference between Labour and the Conservatives, and that even on some measures Tory policies are incredibly, conceivably to the left of Labour's, it sometimes takes a speech like today's by Chris Grayling, the latest non-entity to fill David Davis's rightful position, to bring you back to earth with a bump.

Unsurprisingly, the issue is crime/law and order. Ever since the death of James Bulger, which New Labour at the time shamelessly exploited, just as the Conservatives today equally shamelessly claim that the country is broken, there has been a devastatingly destructive war on who can be seen to be tougher. This war has delivered in Labour's approaching 12 years in power over 3,000 new offences and over 80,000 now locked up in prisons which are bursting at the seams. This has came against the backdrop of what is an unprecedented drop in crime (PDF) (with only a very few rejecting both the British Crime Survey and police's separate findings), the reasons for which are not clear, although the influence of policy itself is probably relatively minor when compared to demographic changes, especially an ageing population and an increase in general prosperity, hence the concern about a rise as we enter what looks like being a lengthy recession.

At the same time as this drop, the coverage of everyday disturbances and random, violent, vicious attacks has increased exponentially. Violent crime, for example, according to the BCS, peaked in 1995 and has been falling ever since; paradoxically, the police have recorded, since the statistics changed in 2002/03 and became incomparable with the previous ones, that violence has increased by 25%, hence the terrifying claims by politicians (including Grayling) that violent crime has risen by something like 80%, which it may have done if you're reasonably selective with the specific police figures. By any reasonable measure, Labour has lived up to its promise to be tough on crime; it has failed miserably, however, to be tough on its causes. To be fair, one is reasonably easy while the other is reasonably difficult. No prizes for guessing which is which.

Grayling is intent on being both, but if he does indeed become Home Secretary, you can be sure that it'll be the former that he'll implement and the latter which he will disregard, if indeed the Tories' policies on curing our "broken society" don't in fact make things worse. In any event, he begins with an example:

Let me tell you a story about life in Britain today. It was told me by the father of a serving soldier, who will be risking his life for us in Afghanistan this spring.

He was home on leave and was out in his local town centre when he was the victim of an unprovoked attack from behind by two youths. He was able to hold them off and the police were called.

He was left badly bruised after what was a completely unpremeditated attack.

The two young men were arrested, but then extraordinarily they were let off with a caution.

That's life in Britain today.

A nation where we appear so used to a violent assault of this kind that police only deem it fit for a caution.

And where the incidence of an attack like this is routine and not a rare exception.


Well, no, it isn't really extraordinary. You can quibble, but we don't know the exact circumstances of what happened here: this may well have been a first offence for both men; first offences invariably result in cautions, and as the only injury they seem to have inflicted was bad bruising, this doesn't really seem that outlandish or outrageous. It may be to the victim, but in all of these cases either the police or the Crown Prosecution Service will have decided whether it was in the public interest or not to bring the matter to court; they decided it wasn't. Grayling can want every such incident to be prosecuted, but he might decide otherwise when the court system becomes even further clogged up, when the prison population rises, and by the effect it has on those who find themselves with a criminal record and automatically excluded from an increasing number of jobs for what might have been a completely out of character incident influenced by alcohol or drugs. This is why prison and prosecuting need to be incredibly carefully considered: to declare across the board that everyone who does something should automatically be charged and if found guilty sent to prison, with the exception of the most serious crimes, is to ignore the nuances and multiple reasons for the original offence.

The real cause for concern comes very early on, and sets the tone for the rest:

It's time we dealt with the wrongs against society - not just the rights of their perpetrators.

Fewer rights, more wrongs.


Doubtless Grayling just intends this as a flippant, populist remark, not intended to be taken as a statement of intent. Yet a time where few deny that we are facing an unprecedented reduction of liberty and where rights are being routinely curtailed at the expense of supposed security, this is a truly dangerous statement to make, and also seems to completely miss the current mood.

Next Grayling tries to paint a picture of a country disentegrating:

Another snapshot of a broken society.

Where antisocial behaviour is endemic.

Where violence has become a norm.

Where the offenders don't seem to give a damn.

Where carrying weapons is increasingly the norm.

Where families can be terrorised by teenage gangs.

Where pensioners are in fear of their safety from the troublemakers outside their houses.

Where too many communities are being disrupted by things that just shouldn't be happening.


On almost every one of these measures, the figures tend to suggest things are in fact improving; whether that continues during a recession is of course uncertain. This is of no concern to a politician who has a point to make, but such febrile exaggeration, which itself further scares people into imagining they will be victims of such behaviour, is unhelpful in the extreme. Grayling goes further by challenging the whole nature of what is defined as anti-social instead of criminal:

Worse still, many of the things that disrupt our society are now treated as almost a norm.

That's not good enough.

I call it crime - when somebody vandalises a bus stop - that's not anti-social it's criminal.


Indeed it is, and it's recorded as a crime.

When somebody shouts at an old person in the street and leaves them shaking and scared - that's not antisocial behaviour - that's criminal.

Err, no it isn't. As unpleasant as it might be, no crime has been committed, unless we intend to make shouting in the street an offence. What would the punishment be for committing this transgression?

When a teenager jumps on a car bonnet - that's not antisocial behaviour - it's criminal.

Not unless the jumping on the bonnet causes damage to the car - are we going to create a specific offence of jumping on a car bonnet to cover it?

This behaviour is far worse than being anti-social, it's anti-society.

And so Grayling adds even further to the Unspeak of political language. What exactly does anti-society mean? Can someone jumping on a car bonnet really be said to want to destroy society, which would be the presumed meaning of such a term?

The infuriating thing about Grayling's speech is that some of the analysis is spot-on - much of the passage about the causes of crime is accurate, although I would demure from his claim that it's a deep rooted issue affecting almost all of the country, which is bordering on being nonsense on stilts. It's just in the policy, which is of course crucial, where he falls completely down. He states that the government doesn't know what to do about it, but the truth is that no one does. He can only claim to know, without knowing what effect those policies he wants will in actuality have. He also, as previously noted, selectively uses crime figures to paint an alarming, inaccurate picture, such as here:

Violent crime is up almost 80% under Labour. Nearly 1.1 million violent crimes were recorded last year - half a million more than in 1998-99.

Robbery is up 27% under Labour.

Criminal damage is up past 1 million offences - that's nearly 3000 incidents each day.

There are over 400 serious knife crimes a week - 22,000 in one year.

Fatal stabbings up by a third.

Gun crime has nearly doubled under Labour - a gun crime was committed every hour in England and Wales in 2007-8.

Injuries from gun crime are up almost four fold.

And how has the Government responded?

By being soft on crime.


This is a page of diagrams and charts from the 2007/08 BCS which handily deals with some of these claims. The BCS, based on around 50,000 interviews, is regarded as more authoritative than the police figures which Grayling seems to be mainly relying on:

What then are Grayling's solutions? Almost uniquely a step in the wrong direction:

Letting people out of prison early - that's soft on crime

Since Gordon Brown came to power 47,000 people have been released on early release, including 9,000 convicted of violence against the person.

Nearly 1000 crimes have been committed by criminals who have been released early.


Grayling doesn't offer an alternative to letting them out on early release, presumably for the reason that there isn't one. We cannot build ourselves out of an overcrowding crisis, or at least not quickly enough. 1,000 crimes committed by over 47,000 released early in fact seems to be an incredibly low figure, going by the re-offending figures which suggest that over half re-offend. There is very little here about actual prison reform, which could have an effect on crime levels and help to increase genuine rehabilitation, but that doesn't make for as good rhetoric as being tough on crime will.

Rejects our calls for a presumption of prison for those carrying a knife.

Lets five out of six offenders convicted of knife possession off without a jail sentence.


Automatically sending thos caught carrying a knife to prison is probably the worst use of jail that could possibly be envisaged, and designed to further embitter those who carry it out of fear that just one time, who find themselves being made an example of in the very worst case of "sending a message". The less direct restrictions on a judge's personal discretion the better.

After a couple of old Blair quotes, we have something approaching Grayling's thoughts on what to do on targeting the causes of crime:

In true backstreet fashion, Gordon Brown took all four wheels off welfare reform back in the 1990s when he disagreed with Frank Field thinking the unthinkable. He left it on four piles of bricks for a decade, and only now have we persuaded them to start to be as radical as is needed. Even so, we've still only had words and not action.

Is there any evidence that Purnell's or the Tories' welfare reform will have any great impact on crime? Not much, unless you consider that it might in fact increase it when you effectively impoverish a distinct minority as may well happen, especially to the young people that Grayling previously proposed should form "chain gangs" if they couldn't find a job within 3 months or actively refused one. Prison looks attractive by comparison. Then there's a piece of evidence which directly contradicts the entire Conservative message on the "broken society":

Recent analysis suggests that around 2% of families - or 140,000 families across Britain - experience complex and multiple problems. When parents experience difficulties in their own lives, it can have a serious and lasting effect on both their and their families lives. The consequences of family breakdown can influence the rest of peoples individual lives and may also carry significant costs for public services and the wider community.

That 2% undoubtedly affects a far larger proportion than it actually makes up, but 2% does not a broken society make. Again though, that simply wouldn't make for effective rhetoric. 2% of our society is broken doesn't have the same ring to it.

The area which stands as a totem of Labour's failures to get to grips with the causes of crime is drugs.

UK drug abuse is the worst in Europe. A report by the UK Drug Policy Commission found that the UK has the highest level of problem drug use and the second highest level of drug-related deaths in Europe.

The UK is the cocaine capital of Europe. A report by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Addiction, which compared drug use in 28 countries in Europe, revealed that the UK has the highest proportion of cocaine users amongst adults and 15 and 16 years olds.

The UK has the third highest teenage cannabis use in the OECD.

Half of prisoners are drug addicts - some prisons report up to 80% of inmates testing positive for class A drugs on reception.

Drug offences are up 68% - there were 228,958 recorded drug offences in 2007-8 - that's more than 600 per day.


He states all this, but he doesn't ask why. Why are we so dependent on drugs, in comparison to the rest of Europe? Is it something wrong with our work-life balance? And then there's the whole message which this also gives: prohibition has comprehensively failed. It's time that we tried legalisation, yet that is completely anathema to the Conservatives, more so even than it is to the evidence-ignoring New Labour. Having addressed the causes, or rather listed them rather than addressed them, he cops out completely:

But tackling the causes of crime was a key part of my last job. If I am Home Secretary after the next election, my job is very simple - to be tough on crime.

A good soundbite, but a staggering lack of aspiration and ambition, those very things that government constantly wants to inculcate, for any politician.

We are then onto supposed concrete policies. A more sorry bunch could not be dreamt up, starting with some complete nonsense:

The first is to find a 21st century alternative to what would once have been a clip around the ear from the local bobby.

Plenty of teenagers stray off the straight and narrow sometimes.

But today there are no consequences when they do.


Really? No consequences whatsoever? Even if this were the case, shouldn't we be encouraging parents to put in consequences rather than relying on the law instead?

All too often if you look at the case of a fifteen or sixteen year old who is starting to commit serious crimes, you find a story of years of minor misdemeanours that have all too often gone unpunished.

That just can't be right.

I don't want to criminalise children - but I do want our police and our society to be able firmly to say No. Before those young people get used to flouting the law.

...

Ministers are now even proposing measures to move on ten year olds if they are causing trouble in the evenings. I don't think we should be shifting ten year olds out of their home areas - I think we should be sending them home to bed.

So I will instruct our police to remove young troublemakers from our streets altogether, not just move them on to disrupt a different street.

If police find young people doing something stupid out in their communities, I think we should give them the power, sometimes, to take them back to the Police Station and make their parents come and get them. For their own safety and protection as much as anything.

We're exploring the best way of making this possible but it's got to be the right thing in some cases.


This seems to be a recipe for ridding children and the young from the streets when no crime or otherwise has been committed, on the whim of the officers themselves. "Something stupid" - I can see that looking good in the legislation.

Our police should have powers to go straight to a magistrate and get an order against that troublemaker confining them to their homes for up to a month - except for during school hours. And if they break that curfew order they should expect to find themselves in the cells.

Grayling then doesn't want to criminalise children... except he does. He's talking about potentially "grounding" troublemakers, not potentially anyone who has ever committed any crime, with those who then break that order being sent to the cells. There is not just huge potential here for abuse and casual victimisation, but also again it's riding roughshod over parental responsibilities. They should be the ones grounding the child, not the courts, if indeed there are grounds to "grind" them in the first place. This is taking ASBOs and making them even worse.

In my own constituency, I've learned two lessons on tackling antisocial
behaviour from the local police.... that's when they've got it right.

A clash between two gangs of youths a few years ago was dealt with by thirty police, dogs and a helicopter overhead. The trouble has never been repeated.


Grayling is MP for the mean streets of Epsom and Ewell. That there was no repeat doesn't mean that it was the police action which halted it; it might well have been an isolated incident which was patched up regardless of it. This is hardly evidence-based policy making.

There is now a strong case to end Labour's twenty-four hour drinking regime. It has not created a continental café culture - it has just made things worse in many town and city centres.

Except this is the opposite of the truth, as John Band noted. We do have a drinking problem, but again we have to examine why that is rather than go back to ridiculous previous laws which failed just as much.

The third thing we need to do is to stop the ridiculous system of cautions that has built up even for serious offences.

Remember that young soldier, beaten up by local hoodlums.

Why did the police choose to caution the offenders?

Because issuing a caution means case closed - a tick in the box - a crime solved for the official figures to be sent to the Home Office.

And avoiding the danger that the Crown Prosecution Service will say - three young men, a fight - too difficult to prove so we won't bother.

That's just not good enough.


Some cautions are undoubtedly down to a lack of imagination or lack of belief that it's worth going through the rigmarole of a court case, but for the most part they are actually usually the right punishment. Politicians shouldn't second guess police into ordering them to not issue cautions - that's just as bad as Labour's myriad of targets. If the Conservatives want to free police to do their jobs as much as possible, then they shouldn't put other restrictions on them either.

The fourth change we desperately need is that oldest political of political chestnuts. More police on the streets. More bobbies on the beat.

May as well stop it here, as again, the evidence suggests that "bobbies on the beat" is an incredibly bad way of using police resources. Nick Davies wrote a whole series on this back in 2003 which effectively debunked the entire idea. It still though remains the simplest and easiest way to win press and popular support.

Grayling finishes with a flourish:

The Conservatives are the party of law and order - law and order based on common sense, strong families and communities and a system which places the victim above the criminal.

Labour has had eleven years and they have collectively failed - their musical chairs based system of Home Secretaries has left Britain a more dangerous, less civilised place to live in.


Two more nonsensical paragraphs would be difficult to come up with. Anyone who makes allusions to common sense should be considered suspicious, when "common sense" is often the actual inverse of it, just as how if you say the reverse of what you've just said it probably tells you it isn't worth saying. The idea though that Labour's lack of continuous Home Secretaries has somehow made the country more dangerous and less civilised is hilarious: more accurate is that they've made the country less civilised through their criminal justice policies; getting rid of the lot of them and not having one at all could have undoubted beneficial effects. One thing however is clear from this dire, dismal, predictable speech: Chris Grayling and the Conservatives have the potential to be even worse than New Labour.

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2/23/2009 09:57:00 pm | |

Monday, October 01, 2007 

The charge to the right.

For those of us who hoped, however desperately or naively that Gordon Brown really would bring a change, however small to the Labour party, last week was the evidence that showed if anything, Brown is prepared to push the political centre ground even further towards the right. However much we may loathe his motives for doing so, it was an astute political move, if nothing else. The success of last week, or at least the success as the press and the Labour party itself saw it, was to put the Conservatives into a hole: where do they go when Brown is so shamelessly stealing not just their territory, but even some of their policies?

If yesterday and today are any indication, it's the response that comes naturally: go even further right. Of all the people who you could choose to talk on foreign affairs, only the rabidly right-wing would decide on a figure as divisive or discredited as John Bolton, one of the architects not just of the Iraq war, but also of the whole neo-conservative movement. You wouldn't have known that from listening to him though, as he's now apparently embarrassed about his previous dalliances with the Project for the New American Century, to which he was a signatory to at least a couple of letters, even if he didn't sign its statement of principles. No, rather than a neo-con, he's a Goldwater conservative, and he doesn't share the "Wilsonian" views of the benefits of democracy that some of his fellow neo-cons do.

That's probably for the best, as he had either just or was about to call for the overthrow of the democratically elected president of Iran, wistful of the time when the "the US once had the capability to engineer the clandestine overthrow of governments". Nothing really new there, as after all, Donald Rumsfeld himself had previously mused on the overthrow of the Shah, who he considered to be a fine man, except for the torture, repression and all the rest, whom the CIA had maneuvered into place after Mossadegh was deposed. According to Bolton, Iran's nuclear program has gone beyond the point of no return, and "limited strikes", while not an "attractive" option, are better than the alternative. The UN, he said, to applause, is "fundamentally irrelevant", unlike for instance, a former UN ambassador with a mustache similar to a former Russian dictator's.

Away from the calls for even more bloodshed and dropping of bombs in the Middle East, this week, again according to the media, was make or break for the Conservatives, the Scum for one suggesting that David Cameron's task was close to "mission impossible". Labour's bounce, especially when the Conservatives had yet to have their own shindig was always going to be possibly overstated, and no betting man would have put down his money before at least seeing how they performed.

While we'll have to wait until Wednesday for Cameron's own attempt to galvanize both his own troops and potentially the public behind him, if Brown does call an election, he'll find it difficult to top today's naked attempt to blind the public with tax cuts that the vast majority will never actually pay. If the message of Brown's speech was at times puritanical, nationalistic or even jingoistic, then George Osborne's theme was aspiration, that most bourgeois of desires, that the vast majority of us grow out of once we realise that it's only available to the better off. Osborne's promise today to raise the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million was, however indirectly, an indication that the Conservatives have no real intention of trying to change that.

Before he came to it though, it was time for a whistle stop tour of all Gordon Brown's failures. He holds, according to a former civil servant, a "very cynical view of mankind", which according to Osborne is the "antithesis of our age". Forgive me for defending Gordon Brown, but I think he might just have something there: the current state of the world hardly suggests otherwise. Give me cynicism over "sunshine winning the day". Next he was responsible for Northern Rock, somewhat more plausibly, but wasn't this ever so slightly rich coming from the party responsible for the disaster on Black Wednesday, and only weeks after John Redwood, shortly to be praised by Osborne, suggested that all the red tape regulating mortgages be abolished, just as the disaster of the sub-prime lending in America took out a bank that had thought that the age of easily available liquidity would last forever?

That part of Redwood's report was strangely not mentioned, although his other recommendations, Thatcherite to the core and in direction contradiction to those in the quality of life review from Zac Goldsmith and John Gummer, were praised to high heaven. Osborne doesn't just believe in low taxes, he wants them every day of the year, not just December the 25th, in a vacuous soundbite to end all vacuous soundbites. Before the inevitable announcements though, it was back still to whacking Gordon Brown over the head; he doesn't just not get it, he also doesn't understand the new economy, whereas Osborne believes in the collective wisdom of free people, which is apparently how Google, Facebook and MySpace work. It seems that Tila Tequila is a Conservative too, as the people have chosen her as their representative from MySpace.

Finally, drearily, Osborne got to the meat, and you really wish he hadn't, so thin and so laughable was his argument. Rather than it being the huge rise in house prices, or the lack of housing stock, vastly depleted by err, the Tories' selling off of the council houses being chiefly responsible for young families finding it hard to get on the property ladder, it's in actual fact all down to Brown's stealth taxes, and the whopping £1,600 that those buying for the first time have to pay in stamp duty. Well, fear no more, because the Tories are going to abolish stamp duty for all first time buyers' on houses sold under £250,000. Their dream of making a tax cut look better than it actually is your dream too, or something. Aspiration, aspiration, aspiration!

That though was nothing compared to the next fiction to be served up. John Redwood's report had proposed abolishing inheritance tax, and it was widely briefed that there was going to be an announcement this week that it was going to become firm policy, and Osborne certainly wasn't going to disappoint. He was cannier than Redwood though: abolishing IHT completely could easily be portrayed as giving the ultra-rich a free tax cut, giving Labour more than enough to target. Instead, Osborne's ploy was to readdress IHT and make it only target the super-rich, as it was initially meant to. The applause as he announced that the threshold would be raised to £1 million was deafening: you almost expected him to take a couple of bows, so delighted were the Tory faithful at such wonderful news. You could almost see the pound signs reflecting in their eyes, the vast majority safe in the knowledge that they could pass down all the privilege they'd either earned or inherited themselves with no worries that the evil taxman would be taking it from them.

Too bad that the sums on how it was to be paid for simply don't add up: just how many non-domiciled Britons are going to sign up for the status when it costs £25,000 a year? Answer: not many. And wasn't there an inherent contradiction in the policy? Hadn't Osborne just moments ago said how the very rich, those it is still going to hit, already avoid inheritance tax? Where do the aspirational fit into all this? Aren't those who inherit their parents' former abode with no payments to make less likely to achieve for themselves when they have a cash cow courtesy of the luck of being born, or even due to the luck of whom their parents were born to? In reality, inheritance tax has become a bogeyman for middle England which is all too easy to take out and win major kudos for doing. Never mind that even the Tories agree that it currently only affects 6% of estates, and that Labour is already going to raise the threshold to £350,000, it's still enough to scare the journos on the Mail and Express with their well-off parents, the most likely factor behind the clamour for its abolition and resulting inching into the consciousness of the nation at large. There has always been a case for raising the threshold even further, to £500,000, or £750,000, respectively double or treble the average price of a house in south-east England, so it really does still hit the rich, but £1 million is the equivalent of abolishing it while not doing so. Paul Linford thinks Gordon might go one better and abolish it completely, but we shall see.

At the same time then as declaring themselves the party of aspiration, the Tories intend to still further rob from the ultra-rich to give to the reasonably well-off, entrenching their position while further damaging the already limited ladder of social mobility. In fact, they're not even satisfied with that: in order to destroy the iniquity of single mothers being better off alone through the tax system than if they're living with a partner, they intend to get the long-term sick on incapacity benefit on their bikes through the private sector to pay for it, and that's without even considering the blatant bribe of £2,000 a year to married couples, those weak links that are hard done by as a result of our hideous welfare state helping the unwell and out of work which thinks nothing of those that tie our society together, as Iain Duncan Smith so effortlessly identified.

It'd almost make you want to vote Labour, until you remember that new Labour in the age of change under Brown is the soft Conservative option. I used to think that those who complained about politicians being all the same weren't paying enough attention: turns out they were right.

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10/01/2007 07:55:00 pm | |

Monday, September 24, 2007 

Strength to keep Britain much the same.

As Gordon Brown walked into the Labour conference hall in Bournemouth to the pounding, mystifying choice of Reef's Place Your Hands, it was difficult to know just who he wanted to be. Hadn't we just got rid of the first celebrity prime minister, who seemingly spent his early days more eager to glad hand washed up pop stars than he was to actually settle on any distinctive change from the 18 year reign of the Tories? This was less the dour, sulking, "shy" and plotting Scotsman than it was the equivalent of one of the more vulgar American presidential candidates rallies, some of the delegates apparently so over-joyed to see the new Dear Leader that they almost swooned after Brown shook their hands upon his entrance, grinning ear to ear. As comedians have already noted, it's a frightening sight: while Blair's smile always looked suspicious, and cartoonists soon had him as the cheshire cat in Alice in Wonderland, Brown's smile looks as if it's about to break his jaw, such is the tension created by the muscles being required to do something they haven't in years. His hair, too, had been swept back, making him look almost eerily like an older, grizzled and more rotund David Cameron.

That echo of the Conservative leader was perhaps indicative of the speech to come, but for a while the intensely personal nature of the lecture, mentioning his upbringing for the umpteenth time, talking about his (broken) moral compass and his status as a conviction politician only brought back the old jibes of Stalinism. Private Eye has been parodying his utterances as being the equivalent of old Soviet propaganda announcements, and it was difficult, with the stage itself advertising the "Strength required to change Britain" and Brown banging on about those mystical British values to get past it. He stands for this, he stands for that, but we don't really know what he doesn't stand for, apart from apparently migrants who come here and take vital work away from our homegrown drug dealers, who'll be deported back to wherever they came from, and guns, which are an unthinkable evil except when used by an army that discharges them in a ethical and difficult but certainly not illegal situation.

Speaking of which, Iraq and Afghanistan merited one mention each, with our troops apparently working for security, political reconciliation and economic reconstruction, all three of which our continued presence in Iraq is doing nothing whatsoever to help. This wasn't a day for bringing up the old inconveniences left over by the previous accursed rule of Brown's predecessor, but for making clear just how safe Middle Britain would be in the capable hands of not flash Gordon. Students previously angered by top-up fees will have new grants available, little ones will be protected from the filth and fury of the internet thanks to a psychologist recruited from shows only masochists watch on BBC3, while schools previously pumping out illiterate hoodlums will be transformed thanks to wonderfully named programmes such as "Every Child a Reader". On education tuition and tutors were the watchwords, in all their various forms, from one to one tuition to small group tuition through to personal tuition. The promise of financing not from 5 to 16 but from 5 to 21 was impressive, but in a country where class and the improbability/impossibility of rising through the class system seems to becoming even more of an issue, the idea of a class-free society being more than a slogan seems to verge on the delusional.

Which was just where the speech was really lacking. He reeled off the usual statistics of 600,000 children lifted out of poverty, even when we know that 200,000 last year fell back into it. Child benefits and maternity allowances might have doubled and trebled, and 6 million families might be claiming tax credits, but how many of them have either struggled with the scheme or had to pay money back through no fault of their own? He digged at Cameron's discriminatory policy of favouring marriage in the tax system, but the solutions sounded more or less the same, with the wonderful voluntary sector sorting out families and teenagers in trouble just like that. There was so little here directed at those struggling: the minimum wage might be going up, but it still isn't a living wage, while he praised the flexibility of the economy which has become so overbalanced in favour of the bosses that we're now the poor man of Europe when it comes to workers' rights, with a supposed Labour government unwilling to have it any other way.

There was no mention of any proposal to extend the current 28-day detention limit for "terrorist suspects", but that itself seemed to just be the odd one out that didn't get included. We were told about the human rights of those in Burma, Zimbabwe and Sudan, while our own civil liberties, chipped away over the Blair years weren't worthy of a mention. It was in line with the punitive, in places almost puritanical bent which Brown spoke of crime and anti-social behaviour in this country; the evil of drug pushers, how "drugs" will never be decriminalised, even after the moral panic on skunk has been well and truly punctured, and the three words on which "strong" communities are founded: discipline, respect and responsibility. If Brown was trying to sound like an old-fashioned headmaster, he succeeded, but the out-of-touch almost naïveté of that same character was more than evident in the laughable "call on the [drinks] industry" to advertise the dangers of teen drinking, which they more than adequately already do with those fucking WKD commercials.

It all sounded very familiar, and as a collection of policy "achievements" and of those to come it was a good summary, but this was meant to be a speech, not a recital or an actual manifesto. The best that can be said for it is that he didn't panic over today's Sun front page and change his mind instantly over the EU treaty, or pander too much to the Paul Dacre constituency which he's steadily built at the Mail over the years. If your outlook is for anything less rigid than unstinting "British values", where the dead end of "meritocracy" reigns supreme and where the status quo appears to be not just the preserve of the Conservatives but now also of Labour, you seem to have come to the wrong party. He might have pledged to stand up for you; but just who are you? Brown seems to have no inclination whatsoever to find out.

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9/24/2007 10:55:00 pm | |

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