The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales: Volume IV: The Politics of Law and Order 1032362510, 9781032362519

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
List of Figures and Tables
1 Introduction
PART ONE The Changing Politics of Law and Order
2 The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945-1970
3 The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970-1979
4 Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979-1992
5 British Politics of Law and Order, 1992-1997: Walking the Walk
PART TWO Explaining the Trends
6 Leaving the Past Behind
7 Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics
8 Matters of Scandal and Concern
9 Conclusion
PART THREE
10 Postscript: Law and Order Politics, 1997-2010
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales

This book is Volume IV in the Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales. Previous volumes have focused on the moral reforms of the 1960s, the changes to the criminal courts and the introduction of an independent prosecution service, and the broad shifts in penal policy that have taken place in the post-war era. This volume examines the changing politics of law and order, charting the gradual shift toward greater political conflict and dispute. Until the early 1970s law and order rarely occupied a privileged place in political debate. From that point this began to change with, initially, the Conservatives utilising crime and penal policy as a means of distinguishing themselves from their opponents. This volume charts these changes in the politics of law and order and examines the rise in the temperature of political debate around such issues as the Labour Party markedly shifted its direction in the 1990s This book will be of interest to students of British political history, criminology and sociology. David Downes is Professor Emeritus of Social Policy and a member and former director of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice at the London School of Economics, UK. Tim Newburn is Professor of Criminology and Social Policy at the London School of Economics, UK, and a former President of the British Society of Criminology.

WHITEHALL HISTORIES: GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL HISTORY SERIES ISSN: 1474–8398 The Government Official History series began in 1919 with wartime histories, and the peacetime series was inaugurated in 1966 by Harold Wilson. The aim of the series is to produce major histories in their own right, compiled by historians eminent in the field, who are afforded free access to all relevant material in the official archives. The Histories also provide a trusted secondary source for other historians and researchers while the official records are not in the public domain. The main criteria for selection of topics are that the histories should record important episodes or themes of British history while the official records can still be supplemented by the recollections of key players; and that they should be of general interest, and, preferably, involve the records of more than one government department. The Official History of the UK Strategic Nuclear Deterrent Vol. I: From the V-Bomber Era to the Arrival of Polaris, 1945–1964 Vol. II: The Labour Government and the Polaris Programme, 1964–1970 Matthew Jones The Authorised History of British Defence Economic Intelligence A Cold War in Whitehall, 1929–90 Peter Davies The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales Vol I: The ‘Liberal Hour’ Vol II: Institution-Building Paul Rock Vol III: The Rise and Fall of Penal Hope David Downes Vol IV: The Politics of Law and Order David Downes and Tim Newburn The Official History of the British Civil Service Reforming the Civil Service, Vol. I: The Fulton Years, 1966–1981 Rodney Lowe Reforming the Civil Service, Vol. II: The Thatcher and Major Revolutions, 1982–97 Rodney Lowe and Hugh Pemberton For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ Government-Official-History-Series/book-series/SE0789

The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales

Volume IV: The Politics of Law and Order David Downes and Tim Newburn

Cover image: © Getty Images First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Crown Copyright All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Downes, David M., author. | Newburn, Tim, author. Title: The official history of criminal justice in England and Wales. Volume IV, The politics of law and order / David Downes and Tim Newburn. Other titles: Politics of law and order Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Series: Government official history series | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022021245 (print) | LCCN 2022021246 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032362519 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032366531 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003330981 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Criminal justice, Administration of—England—History. | Criminal justice, Administration of—Wales—History. Classification: LCC HV9960.G7 D692 2021 (print) | LCC HV9960.G7 (ebook) | DDC 364.942—dc23/eng/20220728 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021245 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022021246 ISBN: 978-1-032-36251-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-36653-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-33098-1 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003330981 Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements List of Figures and Tables 1 Introduction PART ONE

The Changing Politics of Law and Order 2 The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

vi viii x 1

5 7

3 The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979

48

4 Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992

75

5 British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk PART TWO

Explaining the Trends

125

173

6 Leaving the Past Behind

175

7 Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics

199

8 Matters of Scandal and Concern

226

9 Conclusion

249

PART THREE

253

10 Postscript: Law and Order Politics, 1997–2010

255

Bibliography Index

297 321

Preface

It may strike some readers, coming afresh to the field of criminal justice policy, as odd to devote an entire volume in the series to the ‘politics of law and order’. Yet it would have been even odder to have treated this dimension of the subject as somehow marginal or of little account. As we hope to show, though the politics obtrudes in trends, waves and phases, and much policy-making is off or below the radar, it has inevitably been fundamental to some of the most important developments in criminal justice policy, and there have been times when it would have appeared quite perverse to have ignored it. This book began as a chapter in Vol. III of the series on penal policy. However, our intention had always been for this topic to be jointly addressed by the current authors, and that Tim Newburn would develop the chapter further. As a result of his and further joint work, it soon became the case that the result was a fresh volume in its own right. As a result, volumes III and IV in the series and, in due course, volume V on policing, complement each other to an unusual extent. Ideally, they would be read together. Currently, in late 2021, the politics of law and order seem to be entering a renewed phase of heightened intensity. In part this is due to several cases of extreme cruelty leading to the murder of women, one by a serving police officer, and others of young children by their parents or acting parents. These cases were characteristically more preventable by measures to restore or enhance seriously depleted services rather than by more severe sentencing. It is often assumed that populist punitiveness is the inevitable response to such events. Yet this view, taken literally, would have entailed the continuation of capital and corporal punishment, and the criminalisation of abortion and male homosexuality. This is not to say that the public is never wrong – far from it – but that majority views can, or should, be shaped by informed debate. In recent times the two main political parties in England and Wales have also flirted with a return to elements of the politics of law and order reminiscent of the 1990s – using aspects of this territory either to appeal to an electorate that is perceived to respond positively to tough messaging, or as a simple tactic to divert attention from what is happening elsewhere. We have seen Conservative governments seeking to burnish their credentials with references to ‘chain gangs’, ‘hi-vis jackets’ and tough new messaging on illegal drugs, and senior Labour Opposition

Preface vii figures dusting down and reworking Tony Blair’s famous mantra to accuse the Tories of being ‘soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime’. Attempting to present oneself as tough on crime now appears such a staple of contemporary politics that it can almost appear that it has always been thus. And, yet, as the volume illustrates this is a relatively recent development. Prior to the 1970s neither Conservative nor Labour governments took such an approach, nor did they disagree especially vehemently on most matters connected with crime and justice. Indeed, it is really only in the period since that so-called ‘law and order’ has become an electoral issue. Prior to that, and notwithstanding the Home Office’s position as one of the great offices of state, these were practical matters that governments sought to manage and Home Secretaries hoped to survive. We now live in times in which the Home Office is a much-diminished governmental department yet crime and justice are treated as electorally much more significant. This volume charts these changes, covering the post-war period through to 1997. Although our original commission covered only this period, we have included a sizeable postscript which considers the politics of law and order under the Labour governments which were in office from 1997–2010. We did so because we took the view that the changes that had occurred earlier in the 1990s in particular were so consequential that it would have been especially odd to have ignored what followed. Readers should be aware though that we did not have access to the official record for this later period and consequently have relied on a variety of other, more usual sources.

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, our thanks go to Professor Paul Rock without whom the commission to write the official history of criminal justice 1959–97 could not have been undertaken at all. His support, stimulus, informed criticism and patience have been essential throughout. Thanks are also due to Tessa Stirling, Sally Falk and Roger Smethurst, of the Cabinet Office official histories team, who ensured a steady supply of helpful advice and archival files. Particular thanks are also due to Professor Rod Morgan. In the first five editions of the Oxford Handbook of Criminology his work with David Downes provided the most extensive, critical and up-to-date analyses of the politics of law and order in England and Wales. As will be clear from both the text itself and the footnotes in this volume, we have drawn extensively on this work and have made very considerable use of both the detail and the arguments developed in that work. We extend our warm thanks to the staff at the National Archives at Kew, at LSE’s Library of Political and Economic Science, and at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for their help and support in accessing often obscure archival material. Professor Sir Anthony Bottoms was also exceptionally helpful, both in meetings and in providing us with both unpublished and source material gathered for his study, with Simon Stevenson, of criminal justice policy from 1945–1970. Interviews proved important to aspects of this history, in part in filling in gaps in the archival and other material and, at least as importantly, conveying some sense of the lived experience of active engagement with penal policy-making and penal politics. Given that interviews not only take time and energy, but also are something of a hostage to fortune, not least in attempting to recall events some two decades or more later, we are particularly grateful to those who agreed to be interviewed for this history: Kate Akester; Professor Andrew Ashworth; Lord Kenneth Baker, Home Secretary, 1990–92; the late Louis Blom-Cooper; Kenneth Clarke, Home Secretary, 1992–93; John Croft; the late Sir Brian Cubbon, Permanent Under-Secretary of State, Home Office, 1979–88; the late David Faulkner, Deputy Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 1982–90; John Halliday, Deputy Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 1991–2001; Lord Michael Howard, Home Secretary, 1993–1997; Lord Douglas Hurd, Home Secretary, 1985–89; Professor Roy King; Anthony Langdon; Professor Andrew Rutherford; Professor Mick Ryan; Barry Sheerman, M.P., chair of the Labour Campaign for Criminal

Acknowledgements ix Justice, 1987–92; Baroness Vivien Stern; Lord Harry Woolf; and Martin Wright. We are most grateful to Joyce Lorinstein for her prompt and efficient transcription of the interviews. Both Leon Brittan, Home Secretary, 1983–85, and Lord David Waddington, Home Secretary, 1989–90, readily agreed to be interviewed but in both cases ill-health made it impossible. Repeated requests for an interview with Roy Hattersley, shadow Home Secretary, 1987–92; with Tony Blair, shadow Home Secretary 1992–94, and Leader of the Opposition 1994–97; and Jack Straw, shadow Home Secretary 1994–97 went unanswered. John Patten, Minister of State, Home Office 1987–92 declined to be interviewed.

Figures and Tables

Figure 2.1 Figure 2.2 Figure 2.3 Figure 4.1 Figure 4.2 Figure 4.3 Figure 4.4 Figure 5.1 Figure 5.2 Figure 5.3 Figure 10.1 Figure 10.2 Figure 10.3 Figure 10.4 Figure 10.5 Figure 10.6 Figure 10.7 Figure 10.8 Figure 10.9 Table 10.1

Recorded Crime England and Wales, 1900–1960 Daily Average Prison Population, England and Wales, 1947–1959 Total Recorded Crime, 1945–1969 Recorded Crime England and Wales, 1970–1987 Average Prison Population, 1973–1988 Recorded Crime, England and Wales, 1970–1992 Annual Increases in Recorded Crime, 1980–1992 Trends in Recorded Crime, 1979–1997, Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries Average Prison Population, 1979–1997, Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries Trends in recorded Crime England and Wales during the Thatcher and Major governments, 1970–1997 Trends in Crime (Crime Survey), 1995–2005 Beliefs about changes in the national crime rates, 1996–2002/03 ‘Public Order and Safety’: Annual Average Real Increase in Spending Average Prison Population, 1990–2005: Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries Selected Sentences for Indictable Offences, 1986–2004 Out-of-Court Disposals, by Disposal, 12 months ending March 2004-March 2012 ASBOs Issued Annually, 2000–2012 Total Police Officer Numbers (all ranks), 1997–2010 Trends in Crime (Recorded crime and crime Survey) 1981–2010/11 Prison Population by Sentence Length, 1994–2004

12 12 22 92 100 107 113 152 153 160 257 258 259 274 276 280 281 282 287 275

1

Introduction

The linkage of the term ‘politics’ to the realm of law and order would have seemed distinctly odd in Britain until the seemingly incessant rise in the crime rate, illegal drug use and lethal forms of terrorism provoked, in the 1970s, and increasingly thereafter, a sharpening contestation of partisan approaches to crime control. In the twenty-first century it seems just as odd to imagine how crime and its control could ever have been other than a political issue. In this book we document and analyse the main developments in this relationship which, in our view, goes a long way to explaining the causes, character and consequences of criminal justice policy in the second half of the last century. The key players in this domain are, most obviously, the prime minister of the government of the day, and the leading ministers with Home Office responsibilities, not least the Home Secretary1 and, more recently, the Justice Secretary.2 They are confronted, both symbolically and, in the House of Commons, physically, by the respective Opposition and shadow ministerial teams. However, certainly at the beginning of the period covered by this history, it was at times the case that individual ‘backbench’ MPs shaped criminal justice policies more than those formally in ministerial roles as, for example, in the long pursuit of the abolition of capital punishment by the Labour MP Sydney Silverman.3 Until 2007, the Lord Chancellor combined senior roles as both politician and the leading judicial member of the House of Lords, heading a department that stood quite apart from the Home Office. It was merged with the Department of Constitutional Affairs in 2003 and, from 2007, became part of the Ministry of Justice. Behind the ministers are the civil servants, officials who have at times built up a virtually unrivalled expertise about different aspects of criminal justice policy.4 Within Parliament, and with changing significance over time, are the various select committees that oversee, review and sometimes influence criminal justice and penal policy.5 Outside Parliament and the civil service are the judiciary and the practitioner groups, most obviously the police, prison staff, probation officers, youth justice professionals, parole board members and criminal court staff whose senior members and professional or trade union representatives have a clear interest in monitoring or shaping criminal justice policy and debate. Leading examples of the latter are the (former) Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO); the (former) Association of Chief

DOI: 10.4324/9781003330981-1

2

Introduction

Officers of Probation (ACOP); the Police Federation; the Magistrates’ Association, and the Prison Officers’ Association (POA). Outside Parliament and the criminal justice institutions altogether are the numerous so-called ‘pressure groups’ who seek to influence the making of criminal justice and penal policy. Such bodies as the Howard League for Penal Reform, the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, and the Prison Reform Trust have tended to focus, though not exclusively, on penal policy and conditions in the prison system. Others, such as Justice, with its focus on Human Rights and law reform, range more widely. Yet others focus on one aspect of the criminal justice process. ‘Inquest’, for example, specialises, as its name suggests, on the strengths and weaknesses, especially the latter, of the inquest system, and often advises the families of those whose members have been killed in prisons or police custody. It is a formidable array of experience and expertise which can at times outdo those with professional status. The Woolf Inquiry, for example, which held public seminars devoted to different aspects of the disturbances at Strangeways and other prisons in April 1990, was attended by over 90 such groups.6 Over and above these more specialised organisations are the ‘think tanks’ that have a more general brief, and often a more explicit political position, but over the past thirty years or more have sought to influence criminal justice and penal policy, such as the Institute for Public Policy Research, Policy Exchange, the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (formerly the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency). Finally, in this particular regard, there are also those bodies linked to the victims’ needs and, increasingly, the idea of victims’ rights. The most significant of these bodies, Victim Support (originally the National Association of Victim Support Schemes), deliberately sought to position itself outside political, especially party political, debate. Nevertheless, Victim Support and other bodies working on behalf of victims of crime have become an increasingly important voice in the criminal justice arena over the past half century.7 There are, in addition, and often involved in pressure group work, the academic specialists in criminology and allied disciplines, such as the sociology of deviance and control, psychology and – not least – the law. Their teaching and research can and has shaped crucial aspects of criminal justice policy. Crime prevention, for example, owes much to academic and, at one time, in-house Home Office research on situational crime control.8 The mass media, newspapers, radio and television, generate a constant stream of information and newsgathering which can influence both the public sense of the nature and extent of crime and punishment, and the policy responses that ensue. To this huge play of forces that make for public policy debate and action must now be added the so-called social media, though their influence was much less within our time frame up to 1997.9 Blogging, tweeting and allied forms of discourse clearly now play a role of some significance in the criminal justice matrix.10 All of which combines to make the politics of law and order a formidably complex set of phenomena that cannot be ignored in a history of criminal justice policy. Moreover, throughout

Introduction 3 all periods, matters of scandal and concern can erupt quite unpredictably to blow programmes and policies off course in ways which change the nature of criminal justice practice.11 So far as the politics of crime and its control is concerned, three reasonably distinct phases can be discerned in the post-Second World War period. In the first, from 1945 until the 1970s, issues of crime control were dealt with on largely non-partisan terms, continuing the tradition which had prevailed before 1939 and during the war. Whereas other areas of public policy such as the economy, foreign affairs, defence, health, housing and education had long been subject to contested party politics, similar treatment of ‘law and order’ is of remarkably recent origin, emerging in the late 1960s, and coming decisively to the fore in the 1979 election.12 The second phase was remarkable for the growing divergence, throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, between the two major parties on law and order issues. The Conservatives, under Margaret Thatcher, laid explicit claim to being the party of law and order, branding Labour, on the whole successfully, as ‘soft’ or ‘weak’ on crime. Labour chose, for reasons we attempt to clarify later, to underplay the issue in those terms. Policy and practice in the 1980s came, however, to be surprisingly at odds with the anticipated onslaught against offenders in general.13 High hopes began to be entertained by penal reformers that a shift in a broadly liberal direction was possible. Instead of which, following the fourth successive election defeat for the Labour Party in 1992, a far more ‘punitive turn’14 transpired, a third phase which effectively dashed those hopes. The outcome was a novel bipartisanship in which both major parties came to vie for the ownership of the law and order issue with dramatic and lasting consequences for penal policy. It is to the detail of these developments that we now turn.

Notes 1 For broad historical background on the Home Office, see: Troup, E. (1925) The Home Office, London: G.P. Putnam and Sons; Newsam, Sir F. (1954) The Home Office, London: George Allen and Unwin 2 The Ministry of Justice has had little written on it to date. For an early introductory guide to its role and powers see: Gibson, B. (2008) The New Ministry of Justice, Winchester: Waterside Press, 2nd ed. 3 This is discussed in detail in the first volume of the history: Rock, P. (2019a) Official History of Criminal Justice, Volume 1: The Liberal Hour, London: Routledge, Chapters 2 and 3 4 For a brief overview and insight, see Lord Allen of Abbeydale (1983) State service: Reflections of a bureaucrat, in The Home Office: Perspectives on Policy and Administration: Bicentenary Lectures 1982, London: RIPA. For more recent experiences see Faulkner, D.E.R. (2014) Servant of the Crown: A civil servant’s story of criminal justice and public service reform, Winchester: Waterside Press 5 Benton, M. and Russell, M. (2012) Assessing the impact of parliamentary oversight committees: The select committees in the British House of Commons, Parliamentary Affairs, 1–26 6 Woolf, Lord Justice (1991) Prison Disturbances, April 1990, Cmnd. 1456, London: HMSO

4

Introduction

7 For a history of developments in this field see Rock, P. (1990) Helping Victims of Crime: The Home Office and the Rise of Victim Support in England and Wales, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Rock, P. (2004) Constructing Victims’ Rights: The Home Office, New Labour and Victims, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Rock, P. (forthcoming) The Role of Victim Advocacy in Criminal Justice Reform in England and Wales, Annual Review of Criminology 8 See, for example, Tilley, N. and Laycock, G. (2000) Joining up research, policy and practice about crime, Policy Studies, 21, 3, 213–227; also see Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit., Chapter 1 9 When the Official History was initially commissioned, we were told that the cut-off date (i.e. the end point at which the official records would be available to us) was 1997. This volume, like the others in this History, focuses mainly on that period. However, in order to tell a slightly fuller story, and to explore some of the consequences of the period up to 1997, this volume also contains a postscript looking at developments in the following decade or decade and a half (though official files were not available for that period) 10 Crump, J. (2011) What are the police doing on Twitter? Social media, the police and the public, Policy and the Internet, 3, 4, 1–27; Bonilla, Y. and Rosa, J. (2015) #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States, American Ethologist, 42, 1, 1–17; Salter, M. (2016) Crime, Justice and Social Media, London: Routledge; Gies, L. (2017) Miscarriages of justice in the age of social media: The Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito innocence campaign, British Journal of Criminology, 57, 723–40 11 Rock, P. (1995) The opening states of criminal justice policy-making, British Journal of Criminology, 35, 1, 1–16 12 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. 2002, ‘The Skeletons in the Cupboard: The Politics of Law and Order at the Turn of the Millennium’, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 3rd Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 286. In the writing of this book we have drawn extensively on this and the corresponding chapters in earlier and subsequent editions of the Handbook 13 See the chapter on ‘The Making of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act’ in Downes, D. 14 The concept became a highly problematic source of debate in the criminology field. See, for example, David Nelken (ed.) (2011), Comparative Criminal Justice and Globalization, Farnham: Ashgate

Part One

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

2

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

In 1945, in Terence Morris’s telling phrase, Britain was ‘a society both exhausted and exhilarated’.1 The overwhelming priority was post-war social and economic reconstruction, and the three main parties staked distinctive claims as how best to achieve those ends. Labour seized the opportunity offered by hard-won post-war solidarity to press for the nationalisation of key industries – the major utilities, the railways and coal mining – and the establishment of the ‘welfare state’, based on the Beveridge Report of 1942,2 which had proved so unexpected a best-seller in the midst of the war. William Beveridge,3 a leading Liberal economist and social reformer, identified as ‘five giants’ the huge problems of ignorance, want, squalor, idleness and disease.4 These hitherto intractable scourges were to be eradicated by a greatly reformed education system, based on the 1944 Education Act which raised the school leaving age to 15 and aimed to ensure ‘equality of opportunity’ by a new tripartite system of grammar, technical and secondary modern schools; secondly, by a new system of national insurance which would finance better unemployment benefits and pensions; thirdly, by a much expanded social housing system with requisite raised standards and genuinely affordable rents; fourthly, by a policy of full employment; and fifthly, by a new National Health Service for all, free at the point of access and financed out of general progressive taxation. Somewhat ironically, Labour were trusted by the electorate to accomplish this massive task, the foundations for which had been so well laid out not only by such leading Labour politicians as Clement Attlee,5 Herbert Morrison6 and Aneurin Bevan,7 but also by liberal thinkers such as Beveridge and the leading economist of the day, John Maynard Keynes.8 In the event, the Liberal Party were all but annihilated in the 1945 election, and for several decades to come, winning only a handful of seats under the British ‘first past the post’, ‘winner takes all’ system. It was, as captured by Peter Hennessey in his book’s title, Never Again,9 a unique chance, borne of the Second World War, and the determination to avoid the disappointment of failed hopes in the aftermath of the First World War, when the promised ‘homes fit for heroes’ never materialised, to build a fairer, freer and more equal society. In this context, the issues of law and order were of small consequence and of marginal political significance. But that was mainly because it was widely

DOI: 10.4324/9781003330981-3

8

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

assumed, especially by the Left, that the primary causes of crime were, in some combination or other, the five giants that Labour’s policy aimed to eradicate. It was taken for granted that crime would diminish as the state of affairs in which these evils were rampant gave way to greater prosperity, fairness, justice and common decency. The two decades after the war proved otherwise. Though crime rates stayed much the same until the mid-1950s, apart from a steep rise and fall in 1950–51, they did not fall even slightly in the first post-war decade.10 There then began the steady rise of five per cent per year on average until the mid-1990s. Grappling with that rise, and the concomitant surge in the numbers coming before the courts and onto either community penalties or into prison, came slowly to force issues of law and order onto the political agenda. Another fundamental reason for leaving well alone was the self-confident belief that British institutions of criminal justice were universally respected. An incorruptible judiciary, a police force widely lauded as the ‘best in the world’,11 a probation service held in high esteem, a tough but fair prison system and a borstal system for the rehabilitation of young offenders combined to present a reassuring image of freedom under the rule of law. Britain had given the world Habeas Corpus, the abolition of slavery, and the basis for a system of human rights.12 ‘Philosophically and in terms of public confidence, then, the English criminal justice system seemed in fundamentally good heart at the end of the Second World War’.13 As the next two decades were to demonstrate, matters would prove to be much more complicated and challenging, and would form the basis from which an entirely new, and in many ways unanticipated, politics of law and order would emerge. Gauging the significance of particular issues in national politics is, as argued above, all too complex. But one approach that lends some consistency to their analysis is the place they occupy in party manifestos, programmes set out at election time as a basis for appeals to voters about a party’s claim to government.14 Drawing on the rigorous Nuffield election studies carried out by David Butler and his colleagues,15 it is possible to discern trends and patterns of the rise and fall of particular topics and issues with some precision. The pace and character of Criminal Justice Acts also reflects the priority accorded law and order issues in the post-1945 period. For example, although penal reform was low down the Attlee government’s priorities, by November 1947 there was a Bill before Parliament.16 The 1950s lacked any such Act; the 1960s had two, in 1961 and 1967; only one occurred in the 1970s, in 1972; the 1980s saw two such Acts, in 1982 and 1988 but also the key Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985;17 the pace quickened further in the 1990s with the major Criminal Justice Act 1991, its partial reversal in that of 1993, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 which introduced mandatory sentencing for drugs, burglary and violent offences, enacted largely unchanged by the new Labour Government in 1998. The pace of legislative change accelerated even further in the new millennium.18 The expanding legislative programme was also reflected in the size of the ministerial team in the Home Office. Although it had long had junior ministers, the first Minister of State was

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

9

only appointed in 1960 reflecting, as the then Permanent Secretary put it, the fact that ‘the volume of business and the pressure for reform in various sectors was growing and that there was a felt need to give the Home Secretary some relief.’19

Post-war priorities It would seem that crime, like the weather, transcended party politics. The elections of 1945, 1950, 1951 and 1955 reflected the continuing non-partisan belief that basically all was well. Understandably the party manifestos and election campaigns in 1945, after the end of the war in Europe, but with Japan as yet undefeated, had far more significant issues than crime to consider. Domestic prosperity and creating a successful post-war society dominated the agendas. The priorities of the incoming Labour government focused on the welfare state, the National Health Service and housing. Nevertheless, the collapse of the Criminal Justice Bill – which among other matters would have abolished the use of corporal punishment for juveniles and adults20 – in the lead-up to war in 1938 meant that there was considerable unfinished business for the new Home Secretary, Chuter Ede.21 Moreover, recorded crime had risen steeply through the war years, especially among the young; the number of 17–21-year-olds convicted of a violent crime had more than doubled between 1938 and 1945.22 A 1947 report on Lawless Youth argued that a fundamental challenge lay in ‘winning back for society the children and young men and women whom war had made rebels and outlaws’23 and such concerns fed directly into the Criminal Justice Bill that was introduced in the House of Commons late that year. Considerable consensus around this subject still existed. A Conservative Party report, Youth Astray, had observed that juvenile delinquency was largely the product of social and economic conditions, as well as some hereditary factors for which the individual concerned could not be held responsible. ‘The blame’, it said, ‘rests largely upon society’.24 The 1947 Bill was largely modelled on the provisions contained in its pre-war predecessor, something that had received broad cross-party support but had fallen because of the war. It was a sizeable legislative document, containing clauses covering probation, the criminal law, the treatment of young offenders and persistent offenders. It widened the category of offenders who could be sentenced to borstal but also limited magistrates’ powers to impose prison sentences. It also provided for detention centres ‘to provide a “short, sharp, shock” to the unsophisticated hooligan’ and attendance centres for those ‘who did not need the help of probation or deserve the punishment of the detention centres’.25 Corporal punishment was identified as one of two items likely to be controversial, capital punishment being the other. The Home Secretary, Chuter Ede, in part because of the history of the Bill before the war, and also because of the unanimous backing for such a move from the Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment in 1938, felt it was right to continue to include a provision to abolish corporal punishment. There was strong resistance from the Lord Chancellor, as much on the basis of timing as on principle, but Chuter Ede held firm. Ede’s successor, Maxwell Fyfe, a Tory described on most issues as being ‘on the progressive wing of his party’,26

10

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

later voiced his opposition to the reintroduction of corporal punishment during the debates over the Criminal Justice (Amendment) Bill 1953. The other controversial matter – the abolition or suspension of capital punishment – had been the subject of amendment in the House in 1938 and Chuter Ede warned the cabinet that this was again likely. However, he recommended that any such amendment should be resisted ‘on the ground that it is inappropriate that if such far-reaching change in the law were to be effected it should be after full consideration in a separate Bill dealing solely with this subject’. Once again an amendment brought by Sydney Silverman and others which proposed suspending the death penalty for a trial period of five years was approved in the Commons but rejected by the Lords.27 Facing constitutional difficulties as a result of disagreement between the two Houses, and the possibility that further action would jeopardise the whole Criminal Justice Bill – whose provisions included the abolition of penal servitude and hard labour – reform was abandoned and the matter left to a newly formed Royal Commission on Capital Punishment. Receiving its Royal Assent in 1948, the guiding principle of the Criminal Justice Act was ‘that there must be no despair of humanity’ and it was viewed by The Times as a product of ‘a common stock of liberal thought to which men [sic] of all parties and of none have contributed’.28 The immediate post-war priority had been rebuilding in the aftermath of war, the main planks of this formative period in British politics focusing on a mixed economy, full employment, conciliation of the trade unions and, above all perhaps, the prioritisation of welfare.29 In the 1951 election the issues remained largely those that had dominated the previous parliament. As the Labour Party put it in their election manifesto, ‘[f]our major tasks face our nation: to secure peace; to maintain full employment and increase production; to bring down the cost of living; to build a just society.’30 The Conservative manifesto talked of the need for stable government and a new one ‘not biased by privilege or interest or cramped by doctrinal prejudices or inflamed by the passions of class warfare’.31 Neither party made any mention of crime. Although superficially the manifestos made the parties appear significantly divided on policy, in practice the Churchill government that assumed power in 1951 largely avoided endangering social services, welfare and full employment as Labour had warned it might.32 Once again, 1955 saw little change in political priorities. Although the Conservatives made brief mention of legal aid in 1955, law and order otherwise found no place in any of the party manifestos. The mid to late-1950s were relatively prosperous but by no means overly tranquil times.33 The rise in crime during the war years could, in the main, be thought of as a product of the disruptions of war itself. In the years since, however, despite peace and relative economic success, crime had continued to grow. According to one observer, ‘More disquieting than the actual amount of crime, which was, after all, still comparatively modest, was the undertone of senseless violence. The newspapers were full of the terror imposed by juvenile gangs – the ‘Elephant Boys’, etc. – whose moronic depredations and ‘smash ups’ seemed to be plunging us back into the dangerous street life of the early eighteenth century’.34

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970 11 For much of the early part of this period the politics of crime, across the spectrum, continued to be influenced by a Whiggish belief in generalised advancement and the growing force of reason and rationality. Writing in the 1960s and looking back on his time as Home Secretary, R.A. Butler said that the Tories’ social objective in the fifties had been ‘to ensure the sort of progress which will continue in the last decades of the twentieth century the great achievements of the last twenty years’.35 Butler talked of continued attempts to tackle crime in a ‘modern spirit’, or ‘applying methods that are most likely to get results’. Nevertheless, as the decade progressed concerns grew, about the state of modern youth, around growing indications of rising crime and, more narrowly, about the ability of the penal system to deal with crime. The increasing prosperity of the fifties, allied to a growing optimism that characterised post-war Britain, stimulated the emergence of newly vocal and visible youth cultures, and led at least one critic to describe fifties’ youth as ‘somehow more radically unintelligible to older people than at any previous time in history’.36 Whether or not this was a realistic assessment, at the same time there emerged a range of respectable fears, notably around the rise of the Teddy Boys,37 concerns about the impact of imported horror comics,38 and with the violence that occasionally accompanied showings of the film Rock Around the Clock in 1956.39 For many critics it was the perceived pernicious effect of ‘Americanisation’ that was the common denominator in many of these developments,40 and the spectre of the ‘juvenile delinquent’, so prominent at the time, was arguably at least as much a reflection of wider concerns about the state of the nation as it was specifically about youthful criminality.41 Whatever worries about crime that existed in 1957 when R.A. Butler42 took over from Gwilym Lloyd George43 in the Home Office, and documents at the time increasingly mention the crime rate, these remained insufficient to disturb the bipartisan view that crime was a matter best dealt with calmly, without too much recourse to public discussion, and with as much cross-party agreement as possible.44 This did not mean that the Home Secretary felt no pressure, but much of this was extra-parliamentary, coming from his45 own party’s rank and file rather than his opposite number. By the end of the decade generalised assumptions about prosperity and progress were increasingly being challenged by rises in crime, in all its major forms, including violent crime (see Fig. 2.1). It was not just rises in crime that concerned Butler and successive Home Secretaries, but the problem of prison under-capacity. Lord Windlesham, a Minister of State in the Home Office between 1970–72, observed that from the late 1950s onward, ‘the twin claws of the pincer that was to hold the development of penal policy fast in its grip were the remorseless increase in the incidence of crime and the overcrowding in the prisons’.46 As early as 1958, questions had been being raised in parliament about what appeared to be an increasing problem in the penal system, the prison population having reached its highest total in the twentieth century.47 Butler submitted a memorandum to cabinet on the state of the penal estate in which he noted that local prisons were now housing nearly 5,000 men sleeping three to a cell and that ‘any of my colleagues who have visited prisons,

12

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Figure 2.1 Recorded Crime England and Wales, 1900–1960 Source: Data drawn from: Home Office: A summary of recorded crime data from 1898 to 2001/02: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/historical-crime-data

Figure 2.2 Daily Average Prison Population, England and Wales, 1947–1959 Source: Data drawn from: Report of the Commissioners for Prisons 1950, London: HMSO; Report of the Commissioners for Prisons 1959, London: HMSO

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970 13 especially in the early morning, can obtain a clear Dickensian view of what this means’. He described local prisons as ‘quite unsuited to modern conceptions of penal treatment, built as they were 100 years or more ago to serve the purpose of solitary confinement, treadmill hard labour, and brutal repression. They stand as a monumental denial of the principles to which we are committed.’48 Inside and outside parliament, both capital and corporal punishment remained significant issues, albeit that the death penalty was something both Conservative and Labour endeavoured to keep outside party politics. The report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment which had successfully delayed parliamentary consideration for half a decade, reported in 1953. It satisfied few, and certainly failed to quieten the reformist campaigners. Pressure for change, and further attempts at abolition, led to compromise legislation in 1957, the Homicide Act restricting capital punishment to a very limited number of offences in future.49 The widely derided Act did little to stem reformist efforts, however, and the campaign for the abolition of capital punishment, which might reasonably be said to have dominated penal affairs for the bulk of the period since the war, was to continue for the best part of another decade.50 Increasingly, however, other matters related to law and order were themselves becoming much more pressing.51 Judicial imposition of corporal punishment, which had been ended by the Criminal Justice Act 1948, was the focus of much public concern, particularly among many worried about seeming rises in juvenile crime. Successive Conservative Home Secretaries found themselves on the receiving end of hostile motions from constituency associations during party conference season. One of these was Gwilym Lloyd George, who had been Home Secretary at the time of the passage of the Homicide Act 1957. Butler, his successor, also regularly experienced such treatment and, though he attempted a degree of sanguinity, taking the view that ‘it would be a pity if these people were taken too seriously’, it was clear he found such experiences a real trial.52 Having been saved the ordeal of the 1957 party conference by a hernia operation, the following year Butler recorded that he was faced with ‘28 bloodthirsty resolutions’. Such was the strength of the feelings that were expected to be voiced at conference that Butler was forced to postpone the publication of his long-planned reformist White Paper. In addition, and with great difficulty, Butler ‘selected one of the 28 bloodthirsty resolutions which is at least moderate. On this I can make a reasonably calming speech’.53 Nevertheless, as one commentator observed, the ‘baiting of Butler at Party Conferences became a fixed feast of the political year’ through to 1962.54 The reality for Butler and for his Conservative successors as Home Secretary was that there was a substantial strand of the party membership that both thought law and order issues to be of great importance and held hard line views on how best they should be responded to. Few Conservative Home Secretaries relished such experiences. A serious challenge to any general sense of calm and stability on the home front – the Suez crisis had dramatically affected Britain’s sense of itself on the world stage – came in the shape of significant disturbances in Nottingham and

14

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Notting Hill in late summer 1958. Trouble in the St Ann’s area in Nottingham, which at its height saw hundreds of people out on the streets, and at least six stabbed, revealed deep-seated racial tensions. The ‘riot’ in Notting Hill a few days later was even more significant. The Times reported that over 400 people had been involved in disturbances55 in which over 100 youths had been armed with ‘sticks, iron bars, and knives’, and the incidents the following day included a petrol bomb being thrown from a rooftop. Although at least one commentator has argued that the ‘race riots’ in 1958 were ‘probably less virulent’ than those in Cardiff, Liverpool and Tyneside after the First World War,56 and many spokespeople played down the racial element in the disturbances, the violence in Nottingham and Notting Hill nevertheless focused public attention on the issue of prejudice.57 The Macmillan government had relatively recently discussed the possibility of legal curbs on immigration and Hennessey suggests that a more or less direct line can be drawn from the 1958 riots to the new limits on immigration introduced by the Conservative government in the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962.58

‘A very good White Paper’ Butler had arrived in the Home Office in January 1957 and had quickly begun to make plans for substantial penal reform. In April that year he wrote to the Lord Chancellor outlining his idea that there might be a Royal Commission ‘in about 18 months’. This was necessary, he suggested, as there had been no formal overview of the penal landscape since the Gladstone Committee of 1895. The areas he felt such a Royal Commission might reasonably consider included: the available sanctions and, more particularly, whether more might be made of compensation and restitution; methods of treatment and the desirability or otherwise of the indeterminate sentence; and the organisation of the courts. Noting that this was a very large field for a Royal Commission to consider and accepting that much preparatory work needed to be undertaken, Butler said that he was setting in train a programme of research that he hoped would provide a lot of valuable material. Initially planned for spring 1958 with a view to reporting in 1961 or 1962, Butler’s proposed Royal Commission never made it past his permanent secretary, Sir Charles Cunningham, who suggested that some narrower form of inquiry, perhaps on the reorganisation of criminal courts, might be preferable. Butler eventually conceded defeat on the idea of a Royal Commission but pursued his agenda via other means. In a letter to Prime Minister Macmillan in June 1958 he set out his stall. Describing his time in the Home Office as ‘congenial’ and ‘rewarding’ he went on to say that he would only be able to fulfil his mission there if he were able to press on with a comprehensive programme of penal reform. He reassured the PM that he would not be making huge demands on the Treasury but, rather, proposed to move toward the publication of a White Paper which would set out his proposals. He closed by seeking the PM’s support for this endeavour; one which, he said, ‘successive governments have long neglected’.59 Macmillan’s response was supportive, suggesting that it would be a fine thing if

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

15

Butler could leave a legacy similar to that from his time in Education, even finding time for humour on the pressing subject of prison overcrowding: ‘No doubt it will cost money but I do not suppose the money will be spent very quickly. I take it it will be mostly building new prisons, but they will take some time to get under way, especially if the Ministry of Works has anything to do with the plans.’ The Home Office was slower than Butler would have liked and in autumn 1958 he wrote to Cunningham to impress upon his Permanent Secretary the growing urgency of the matter, not least because he had detected ‘a change in atmosphere. The public are very anxious about the increase in crime, and in one respect, namely, sexual offences, there is a mild degree of hysteria.’ Even the title of the White Paper was fought over, however, Penal Practice in a Changing Society only being agreed shortly before publication.60 As we have already seen, the party conference was often an uncomfortable experience for Conservative Home Secretaries at this time, and a bumpy ride awaited any who were perceived to be insufficiently tough on crime. Rising crime, however, provoked a more generalised presentational concern about criminal justice reform and increasingly imposed itself on discussions about penal policy. So far as Penal Practice was concerned, the then Deputy Cabinet Secretary, Burke Trend, felt RAB61 had things about right. In a memo to Macmillan he described it as ‘a very good White Paper – well written; forward-looking; and evenly balanced as between the liberal and severe approaches to this subject, without conceding so much to the former as to be merely sentimental.’62 Within the Home Office itself, a memo from a public relations officer also praised the White Paper, suggesting that it would cement the Home Secretary’s reputation as ‘an enlightened penal reformer’, but noting that it would also be likely to ‘disappoint that large body of articulate opinion who are concerned that he should take some effective steps now to deal with the current ‘crime wave’. . . To prevent this interpretation it is desirable that, simultaneously with the publication of the White Paper, the Secretary of State should announce some measure by the government to encourage higher standards of self-discipline and family responsibility.’63 The solution that Butler and Home Office officials eventually settled on was the idea of convening a conference to be held on the day of publication which was to focus on ideas of discipline and responsibility. Cabinet agreed, its minutes noting that ‘The increase in the number of young offenders was striking evidence of a decline in spiritual values among the young section of the adult population.’ The solution was that the government should convene ‘an informal conference, to be attended by representatives of churches, the educational authorities and youth services, in an endeavour to promote a greater concern for the moral and physical well-being of young people.’64 The conference was relatively small beer, but the fact that it was felt necessary was indicative of rising concerns about crime generally, about juvenile delinquency more particularly, and about the perceived moral shifts that increasingly came to coalesce around concerns over ‘permissiveness’.65 The shift signalled by Butler’s Penal Practice was a subtle movement away from traditional but somewhat negative notions of reform, largely to be achieved

16

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

through hard labour, toward rehabilitation with its greater emphasis on positive training. Much faith was invested in research and scientific developments to improve such rehabilitative efforts, and terms such as ‘treatment’ and ‘cure’ became increasingly visible. As Ryan puts it, ‘Where hard work and God had failed, group therapy and Freud were to succeed.’66 The 1948 Criminal Justice Act had made provision for regular funding of criminological research, though it wasn’t until Butler’s time that this amounted to much. A formal Home Office research unit was established in 1957, followed swiftly by the raising of funds for an established chair and an Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University.67 Butler’s White Paper captures the spirit of the time in its suggestion that ‘the institute should be able, as no existing agency is in a position to do, to survey with academic impartiality . . . the general problem of the criminal in society, its causes and its solution’.68 Again, juvenile crime was central to these developments.69 In the pre-war period the Home Office had begun, via a series of conferences and research projects, to assess both the scale and nature of the problem. The continuing, even seemingly increasing problem of ‘juvenile delinquency’ in the forties and fifties was a source of ongoing worry and, in due course, an important focus for the growth of criminological research. As David Garland observed, the ‘same governmental mentality which looked to Beveridge and Keynes to solve the social and economic problems of the nation came to recognise criminology as a form of knowledge which should be integrated into the institutions of government, though criminology’s status never came close to matching that of economics.’70 Although Butler’s interests as Home Secretary had always focused first and foremost on penal policy, events were to conspire to bring policing, at least briefly, to the forefront of Home Office concerns. The late 1950s had seen a series of small-scale scandals involving police officers, some very senior, in forces as widely dispersed as Brighton, Nottingham, Cardiganshire, and Thurso in Scotland. The nature of the cases varied, often involving misuse of force or some other form of abuse of position, many within small forces where officers were subject to relatively little oversight and control and where they had often been in post for extended periods of time. None of the cases, individually, was desperately serious, and not even their apparent regularity seemed especially to trouble ministers or civil servants. Certainly the Home Secretary was relatively unmoved and during his first two years in the Home Office Butler had made it perfectly clear that he felt that there was no need for any form of fundamental review of policing. However, in 1959, early in the life of Macmillan’s new administration, faced with yet another breaking police scandal, this time involving the Metropolitan Police, Butler’s overly hasty dismissal of parliamentary questions led to very significant criticism and to a threat of a motion of censure against him. In the event it was only Butler’s eventual promise of a Royal Commission on the Police that saved him from such a fate. Established in 1960, the Commission sat for two years, producing an interim report on police pay,71 and a Final Report in 1962.72 The commission offered a largely rose-tinted view of policing, proposed generally modest reforms, most fundamentally to the structures for police

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

17

governance, and failed to agree on perhaps the biggest question facing it, the issue of overall structure of police forces. Had it not been for his mishandling of parliament it is not at all clear that such reform, limited as it was, would have occurred during Butler’s tenure.73 Just before the 1959 election the Conservative government had ended conscription. Although some commentators on the right worried for the future of the nation’s youth as a result, the decision was otherwise a generally popular one.74 The economic situation was generally good, and ‘cumulative improvement in material comfort and opportunity . . . when allied to full employment, made the 1950s a decade of easement without previous parallel in British economic and social history’.75 The first significant mention of law and order in a campaigning context, albeit a brief one, came in the Conservative election manifesto in 1959. Whereas the matter rated no mention in the Labour manifesto, the Tories having once again raised the issue of legal aid together with potential reforms to the laws governing betting and gaming, and then signalled something of a shift, saying: ‘It will continue to be our policy to protect the citizens, irrespective of creed or colour, against lawlessness.’76 The appearance of such a general statement clearly reflected the growing consciousness of rising crime in political circles. The manifesto also signalled the possibility of the introduction of a scheme for compensating victims of violent crime and, picking up on Butler’s White Paper and related activities, said that they intended ‘to review the system of criminal justice and to undertake penal reforms which will lead offenders to abandon a life of crime.’77 The trends discernible from the manifestos are largely borne out by election campaign analysis. The Nuffield studies found no mention of ‘law and order’ topics (once industrial relations issues were excluded) in the election campaigns of 1945 to 1959. Their analyses scrutinised election broadcasts, leaders’ speeches, press coverage and constituency election addresses. Not a single reference could be found to any ‘law and order’ topic – whether crime, policing or immigration – by any of the three major parties.78 Remarkably, little was made of the death penalty, the serious ‘race riots’ in Nottingham and Notting Hill the previous year, the troubles affecting policing or the 1959 Street Offences Act in the election campaign. The Labour Party, which by this point had been out of power for eight years, was undergoing a period of ‘modernisation’,79 elements of which, especially on the moral front, were captured in Roy Jenkins’ The Labour Case.80 One of Jenkins’ targets in the penal field was what he referred to as the ‘ghastly apparatus’ of capital punishment which, despite the Homicide Act, was still used more frequently than had been expected. Britain, as he put it, despite its ‘much-vaunted social and political maturity, still stands out as one of the few advanced countries which retains this presumptuously final penalty.’81 More broadly Jenkins said that he wished to see changes that would ‘create a climate of opinion which is favourable to gaiety, tolerance and beauty and unfavourable to puritanical restriction, to petty-minded disapproval, to hypocrisy, and to a dreary, ugly pattern of life.’82 Beyond the narrow field of penal policy and more generalised moral reform, the Labour party was beginning to accept the idea of a mixed economy and Gaitskell

18

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

had led an assault on Clause IV of the party’s constitution. This election campaign, however, notwithstanding the relatively recent spectre of the Suez crisis, was dominated by economic issues and likely to be won by the party that could persuade the voters that Britain’s fairly fragile prosperity was safest in their hands. Roy Jenkins was convinced that the outcome was all too predictable: ‘There was a strong latent satisfaction with the new affluence of the past few years . . . and [it] was well exploited by the deft materialism of Mr Macmillan’s campaign. In the circumstances no radical leader could have won’.83 Macmillan was returned with a majority that had increased from 54 to 100. Much of Macmillan’s premiership would be dominated by his ‘grand design’ for forging a new relationship for Britain within Europe, and by the Cold War and the very real threat of nuclear war.84 In terms of importance, crime and penal policy hardly signified when put alongside a range of other national issues. For those tasked with thinking about such matters – Butler initially and then his successor Henry Brooke – the continuing issue of juvenile crime continued to be one of the more pressing problems, together with the ‘twin claws’ of rising crime and an increasing problem of overcrowded prisons and borstals. The Ingleby Committee, established in 1956 to look into juvenile offending, had drawn particular attention to problems within the home and to child neglect as crucial factors and supported an emphasis on housing, health and welfare for families most at risk. It recommended raising the age of criminal responsibility to 12 and introducing ‘care and protection’ proceedings for juveniles.85 Neither was to become law. A Criminal Justice Bill had first been mooted in mid-1959 with the intention of beginning to put into practice some of the principles outlined in Penal Practice, not least reducing the use of imprisonment of under-21s, in particular by preventing the courts from imposing a custodial sentence if a term of less than three years was being considered. In the penal welfarist86 spirit of the times, Butler said the more general intention was ‘to ensure such offenders can be given the amount and type of training best suited to their needs, and from which they are likely to derive most benefit’.87 Anticipating some of his critics, Butler said he was satisfied such proposals could be defended against any charges that they were ‘soft’ or ‘less severe’ than existing sentences. In part this was because of the indeterminate nature of detention centre sentences, but also a variety of other measures in the Criminal Justice Bill were designed to indicate firmness in the face of rising juvenile crime, including a reduction in the age that children could be sent to an attendance centre from 12 to 10 and, similarly, a reduction of 16 to 15 years old as the age borstal training could in future be imposed. Butler, however, faced difficulties inside and outside parliament. In addition to the problems that led to the establishment of the Royal Commission on the Police, he continued to have trouble with elements of the party membership – what he referred to as ‘Colonel Blimps of both sexes’ – who thought him ‘soft in standing out against the reintroduction of corporal punishment’.88 In a debate at the 1961 party conference, in which there was a call for the extension of the death penalty and the restoration of corporal punishment, Butler pleaded for time, asking for a chance ‘to let my campaign of reform and improvement initiated since I went to

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

19

the Home Office, and which is steadily growing in size, have its effect upon the crime wave.’ 89 He admitted that reform in the past had often been too slow and suggested it was this that had led to corporal punishment ‘becoming more or less a symbol for saying: “Do for goodness sake get on with the job and be strict in dealing with crime”’. In a covering note circulating a copy of Butler’s speech to members of the Royal Commission on the Police, Tom Critchley, its secretary, said, ‘This speech has produced a good deal of editorial comment . . . a number of newspapers seized on the reference of the question of corporal punishment to ACTO90 as evidence that the Home Secretary is wilting on this issue (this is not true).’91 Indeed, Butler remained resolute in arguing against emotive calls for the birch and defending his attempts to use ‘up-to-date statistics and other evidence’ to promote his views in the face of the annual ‘blood-curdling demands’92 he faced at conference. Though the demands were generally less extreme, from time to time Butler faced similar difficulties within parliament. Rab knew he would be put under pressure, and it was precisely this that led him to refer the issue of corporal punishment to the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders. In the event the Council’s report was helpful to him. While it acknowledged that ‘the growing increase in crime generally and in offences of hooliganism in particular’93 had understandably led many to believe that the bringing back of judicial corporal punishment was necessary, having reviewed the evidence, it came unanimously to the conclusion that there was no such case. Indeed, it went considerably further than merely finding no case for reintroduction, arguing that contemplating such a move would be particularly retrogressive, being ‘out of line with modern penal methods [and] likely to militate against the success of reformative treatment, such as probation or borstal training’.94 Nevertheless, as Butler had expected, during the Bill’s passage, a motion was put proposing the experimental introduction of the cane for those 17 and under, and the birch for those over 17, for a period of 10 years. Though it was defeated, close to 60 Conservative MPs ignored the party whip and voted for a reform that their Home Secretary, and the vast majority of MPs, clearly opposed.95 One of these rebels was Margaret Thatcher, voting against the party whip for the only time in her career.96 Having never planned a Royal Commission on policing matters, and having been cornered into appointing one, Butler showed little appetite for acting on the bulk of its recommendations when it reported in 1962. Part of the problem was the absence of clear messages from the Commission. It had failed to agree on one of its more important questions: whether the existing system of well over one hundred forces, some tiny, should be replaced by a much-reduced number of regional forces, or even a single national force. Indeed, it had even published a lengthy and widely admired dissenting note by one of its members,97 which set out a far more coherent analysis of policing and one that offered the possibility of more radical change than the Final Report had countenanced. Butler, however, was far from persuaded and at one point went significantly further in his dismissal of the idea of a national police force proposed in the dissenting note than officials felt was advisable. In the period in which a formal governmental

20

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

response to the Commission’s recommendations was being worked up, Henry Brooke replaced Butler as Home Secretary, and he appeared no more likely than his predecessor to wish to pursue radical change.98 Complacency was the order of the day and Brooke continued to promote the rose-tinted view of policing that was still generally dominant in this period. In a parliamentary debate on the Commission’s report, for example, he said that he looked ‘on the Royal Commission’s Report as opening a new chapter in the long and famous history of the police . . . The fact that the majority of the Royal Commission did not recommend any fundamental changes in the system shows that they were impressed with the basic soundness of its structure and with the operational efficiency of the police generally.’99 The combination of rising crime, difficulties of recruitment and a broadly positive view of policing, meant that of all the Commission’s recommendations it was those for increasing police pay which prompted the swiftest action. Pressing ahead with other matters had to wait, and under the circumstances it is perhaps of little surprise that the eventual outcome, the Police Act 1964, was a rather unremarkable piece of legislation. It was not insignificant, however, for it tidied up the previously existing and all too complex system of police authorities, introducing a new single system for the oversight of the provincial police in England and Wales (the Home Secretary was to remain the police authority for London) – a system of governance that was to remain largely undisturbed for the bulk of the remainder of the century. The Act set out, for the first time, the respective responsibilities of the three main actors in what became known as the ‘tripartite system’ for police governance: police authorities, the chief constable and the Home Secretary, and made some small changes to the system of police complaints. The Royal Commission’s fudge over the future structure of policing led to relative inaction for a period of years, with neither Brooke nor his successor, Labour’s Frank Soskice,100 showing any inclination to tackle the issue. Indeed, it was not until Roy Jenkins became Home Secretary in 1966 that the need to shrink the number of forces in England and Wales was taken at all seriously. Beyond policing, the other major reform mooted in this period was the potential introduction of a compensation scheme for victims of crime. Butler’s White Paper in 1959 had acknowledged that ‘the assumption that the claims of the victim are sufficiently satisfied if the offender is punished by society becomes less persuasive as society, in its dealings with offenders, increasingly emphasises the reformative aspects of punishment’.101 Providing some answer to what Butler referred to as ‘the public demand for Government action in view of the risk to which the ordinary citizen is exposed as a result of the high and increasing volume of violent crime’,102 a number of options were under consideration, primarily a weekly payment scheme on the basis of ‘loss of faculty’ akin to the existing industrial injuries scheme, and a lump-sum scheme based on an entitlement decided by the courts in the absence of out-of-court settlement.103 The report of an internal Home Office working party,104 established to consider the options, and the many problems that appeared to attach to each, was published without any indication of government preferences, as a means of opening up the debate. The campaigning group, Justice, also produced a report proposing compensation to victims of

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

21

a range of offences, as did a committee established by the Conservative Political Centre.105 Eventually, a further White Paper, published in 1964, recommended an ‘experimental and non-statutory’ scheme, payments being made ex gratia and administered by an independent board.106 Worries about rising crime were being expressed ever more frequently and clearly at this time, and the behaviour of the young was a particular focus. Growing prosperity and the independence that went with it was a source of generalised concern, the leisure activities of working-class males being a particular source of anxiety.107 Among the signal events focusing both public and political attention in the period were the seaside shenanigans of the mods and rockers, most notably over several bank holiday weekends in 1964. The Times initially reported that a number of youths had been jailed as a result of disturbances in Clacton over the Easter weekend,108 then two months later that 40 youths were to appear before magistrates in Margate, police having been drafted in to deal with the weekend’s disturbances, and that officers had dispersed a crowd of over 5,000 in Brighton that had gathered at the seafront to watch the confrontations between mods and rockers that were occurring there.109 The following day, reports suggested that a fight had occurred in Brighton involving 1,000 people, and that there had been two stabbings in fights in Margate.110 This was sufficient, it seems for the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, to propose to cabinet new measures be introduced to provide powers to magistrates to suspend the driving licences of ‘offenders who were proved to have arrived at the scene of the offence by scooter or motor-cycle (or car)’.111 Although there was support from some chief constables, and from hotel and other service interests in some of the affected towns, his cabinet colleagues were more sceptical, arguing that the likely effect would be to excite controversy and inflate the problem.112 Nevertheless, by June, Brooke had put the Malicious Damage Bill before parliament – which proposed to extend the types of vandalism case that magistrates could hear and the amount of compensation that offenders could be ordered to pay – with the aim that it would receive royal assent and be in operation before the forthcoming August bank holiday. The Opposition, despite seeing it as both a minor and a hurried piece of legislation, nevertheless considered it ‘necessary’.113 Symbolic, ritualistic legislation successfully passed, the August bank holiday brought the anticipated renewed trouble, with police making over 70 arrests after various clashes between young people.114 Our understanding of the social reaction, and legislative and penal overreaction, to the mods and rockers clashes is now firmly established, thanks to Stan Cohen’s pathbreaking study, as the quintessential example of what are now generally referred to as ‘moral panics’.115

A war against crime? Although only a few years had passed, matters had moved on since the publication of Penal Practice. According to the permanent secretary of the Home Office at the time, Sir Charles Cunningham,116 it appeared increasingly clear that neither the previous decade’s policy initiatives nor Butler’s original proposals was likely

22

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

now to be sufficient to reduce ‘the volume of crime or the numbers of persistent offenders’.117 According to the 1964 White Paper, The War Against Crime in England and Wales,118 what was needed was a ‘fundamental review of the whole of the penal system’. Published by Henry Brooke, widely considered to be a rather ineffective Home Secretary, the White Paper was a rather different beast from Butler’s wide-ranging conspectus. Nevertheless, it continued the broadly confident tone of its predecessor, talking of harnessing the ‘latest developments in crime prevention and detection . . . to the drive against crimes which are becoming more complex year by year, and against criminals who use new techniques and often a high degree of organisation’. It recognised the problem of rising crime but ‘saw no need to question the framework of action which had been gradually assembled over the past half-century.’119 It continued to extol the virtues and promise of research and concluded by announcing the establishment of a Royal Commission, something denied Butler seven years earlier. As Windlesham notes, however, this ‘present imperative to project the policies of government in a positive light masked the existence of inner doubts’.120 Not only did crime appear to be rising quite appreciably but it was no longer possible to deny either the scale of the change or the fact that it appeared to be a long-term rather than a short-term problem. Writing in 1965 Nigel Walker121 noted that there appeared to have been very significant increases in serious violence, the rate of indictable woundings, for example, being around eight times that before the war. He cast some doubt, however, on the scale of the increase arguing that both a growing willingness to report crime, and changes in police recording methods, had likely contributed to the recorded increase.122 By contrast, Walker argued that any changes in the tendency to report property offences were most unlikely to

Figure 2.3 Total Recorded Crime, 1945–1969 Source: Self-generated

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

23

explain what he described as ‘the enormous increase in the incidence of officially recorded cases’ (see Fig. 2.3).123 By 1964, despite quite positive economic news, Alec Douglas Home’s Conservative government had largely run out of steam. There were a number of quite significant internal party disputes, as well as a sizeable body of opinion that felt the wrong person was leading the party.124 Nevertheless, an early Labour Party lead in the polls started to recede as the general election campaigning developed. Crime- and justice-related issues now began more obviously to appear in party campaigning literature. In 1964, a brief section in the Conservative manifesto entitled ‘upholding law’ extended coverage to include strengthening the police, setting up a Royal Commission to review the penal system, tougher measures against hooliganism and the ‘growing problem’ of juvenile crime, and supporting family life to counteract delinquency.125 The Liberal Party ‘implicitly attacked the inadequacy of the government’s record by switching the emphasis on combating crime to prevention and rehabilitation.126 Despite increasing nervousness Wilson stuck to the modernising theme that was at the centre of the Labour campaign. Where campaigns of the 1950s had talked of the poor and dispossessed, the Labour focus now was on “the go-ahead people with a sense of national purpose”.127 By 1964, after thirteen years of continuous Conservative government, the Labour Party said nothing about crime and criminal justice, or the government’s record in the face of crime rates which had risen since the mid-1950s.’128 In an extensive manifesto, which ran to almost ten thousand words, not a single sentence was devoted to issues of criminality or penal policy. This self-denial was all the more remarkable as the Labour Party potentially had much to say. Harold Wilson,129 the leader of the Labour Party since the death of Hugh Gaitskell in 1963, had convened a study group chaired by Lord Longford, a prominent penal reformer, to report on crime and criminal justice. Its report, Crime – A Challenge To Us All, though published only as Labour was forming the new government in 1964, would undoubtedly have been made available in draft form to those preparing the manifesto.130 As Terry Morris observed, ‘Given that the strategic appeal of the Labour Party in the run-up to the 1964 election was to ‘modernise’ Britain, both its economy and society, it was consistent for [Harold] Wilson to seek advice from various experts in advance’.131 The eventual report, he suggests, ‘effectively settled much of the agenda for reform within the criminal justice system during the first Wilson government’, even though it appears that its proposals on penal reform, the treatment of juveniles and, especially, the abolition of capital punishment, were considered too risk-laden for inclusion in the party’s election manifesto.132 It was a striking case of ‘the dog that did not bark’. Though there is no suggestion that law and order matters had any significant influence on the eventual outcome, a Labour Party that at one point had a 20-point lead in the polls eventually only secured a parliamentary majority of just five seats. The Royal Commission that had been flagged up in The War Against Crime lasted less than two years during which time it ‘sapped the enthusiasm of several of its members’, ‘produced on occasions embarrassing tensions amongst them’ and eventually ‘found itself sliding into a languid cul-de-sac’.133 One of its

24

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

members, Sir Leon Radzinowicz,134 argued that the Commission’s terms of reference were ‘suicidal’,135 its business handicapped by the number and nature of the Commissioners, as well as a chairman who increasingly lost his grip on its activities.136 The Commission was also undermined by the change of government that occurred in 1964, and the incoming Labour administration’s desire to act more quickly than the pace of a sizeable Royal Commission might allow. Labour’s publication of two further White Papers,137 each of which focused on different aspects of penal reform, placed the Commission in an extremely difficult position, indicating to many that its work had simply been overtaken by events. Nevertheless, for Lord Windlesham, himself later a Conservative minister, the failure of the Royal Commission was not at heart a party political matter: ‘the situation might easily have been the same if the parties in opposition and government had been transposed’ he felt. In the circumstances, it was natural ‘that ministers should want to implement without undue delay policies for changes in the legal framework of the criminal law and for dealing with offenders they may have espoused before coming to power’.138 In the end, the Royal Commission’s only lasting impact on the criminal justice environment was the creation of the Advisory Council on the Penal System, a body designed to exercise a ‘continuous review of development in the penal field’.139 The Labour government’s two White Papers, published close together in 1965, were both discussion documents, and were designed to be read together. The first, The Child, the Family and the Young Offender, acknowledged that while it was generally appropriate to await the outcome of the Royal Commission ‘desirable reforms affecting those under 21 should wait no longer’.140 The White Paper’s title reflected the Labour Party’s view that much juvenile delinquency began in inadequacy or breakdown in the family. Such a view was far from confined to the Labour Party, however, for Butler’s 1959 Penal Practice White Paper opened by noting that it could ‘not be expected to deal with those deep-seated causes of crime which, even if they were understood, would be largely beyond the reach of government action’.141 The Child, the Family and the Young Offender built on the Longford Committee’s proposals, suggesting removing young people so far as possible from the jurisdiction of the court, giving local authorities’ children’s committees powers to appoint family councils to deal with such cases. With such recommendations, the beginnings of a clear split between Labour and Conservative thinking on how best to deal with juvenile offenders began to emerge more clearly. In response to the Longford proposals, for example, the Conservative think tank, the Bow Group,142 had argued that it was ‘easy to find excuses for children who have shown signs of anti-social behaviour, but we do feel that a child over the age of 10 is old enough to be responsible for his actions, or at least to appreciate the difference between right and wrong, and if not he should be corrected.’143 In addition to attempting to deal with under-16s outside of the criminal law, The Child, the Family and the Young Offender’s other overarching objective was to endeavour to separate arrangements for 16–21-year-olds from those applying

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970 25 to adults. It was not well-received and, compared with the relative calm that had greeted the Longford proposals, in this case there was a ‘flood of criticism’ from lawyers, magistrates and probation officers,144 much of it stemming from the perception that the likelihood of legislative enactment was much greater. There were criticisms from the Conservative Party also, including a motion tabled to note ‘with grave concern the mounting wave of crime together with the falling detection rate; [the Opposition] regrets that the Government’s actions and proposals in this sphere, particularly with regard to the police, appear inadequate to deal with this deteriorating situation, and rejects the Government’s proposal to abolish juvenile courts and to give power to the executive to release prisoners after serving only one-third of their sentences without reference to the judiciary’.145 The Adult Offender White Paper proposed the abolition of the special sentence of corrective training as well as amendments to preventive detention. In yet a further attempt to deal with continued overcrowding it also acknowledged the need for further expansion of the prison estate and changes to arrangements for early release on licence. Since 1948 prisoners had been released having served two-thirds of their sentence and the White Paper suggested that given other countries had successfully introduced parole systems the government had concluded that the time had come to introduce something similar. Its overarching ambition, it concluded, was to help implement Rule 1 of the Prison Rules of 1964: ‘The purpose of the training and treatment of convicted prisoners shall be to encourage and assist them to lead a good and useful life.’146 The timing may have appeared odd, given the Royal Commission was still sitting. From the Labour government’s perspective, with some suggesting it might be up to another two to three years before the Commission reported, there was the potential for very considerable delay to their Criminal Justice Bill,147 a risk the new Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice, was not keen to run.148 Nevertheless, with a tiny parliamentary majority, considerable resistance to the juvenile justice proposals, and the replacement of Soskice by Roy Jenkins149 in late 1965, there was little likelihood of substantial reform. The context of policymaking was also beginning to change. In the view of Sir Clive Whitmore, later to become Home Office Permanent Secretary, ‘The [civil] service was (mainly) held in high public regard and there was very strong competition to get into its higher reaches. The civil service itself, not surprisingly, felt rather pleased with itself; Ministers were generally quite content to wait for advice and accepted it when it came; journalists were respectful; criticism was fairly rare and not to be taken too seriously; and it was not necessary to stray too far from the secluded corridors of Whitehall and Westminster into what some would nowadays call the real world.150 This ‘comfortable existence’ had started to unravel in the 1960s, in part because the incoming Labour administration was suspicious of the civil service. More broadly the media were increasingly sceptical and critical, and a number of internal matters such as prison escapes and wider economic concerns meant that there was a growing perception that all was not well.

26

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Choppy waters in the mid-sixties While the Labour administration that came to power in 1964 may not have had a huge home affairs agenda, there were nevertheless two sets of events during its short term in office that were to have huge significance for the future of penal policy. The more minor of the two involved the escape of one of the so-called ‘Great Train Robbers’, Ronald Biggs, and three other prisoners from HMP Wandsworth. When they were convicted in 1963 the robbers received very lengthy prison sentences,151 ranging from twenty to thirty years, prompting Hermann Mannheim152 to observe, ‘As is also generally well known and was duly expressed by the defence, sentences of such length are now entirely exceptional in this country and are generally disapproved.’153 Of the escape, The Guardian said, ‘Like the train robbery itself, this operation was characterised by panache and flamboyance. If it was planned by the same brains that coaxed £2 millions from the Royal Mail and, more recently, another of the robbers from Winson Green Prison, Birmingham, there was a ruthless innovation on this occasion – the introduction of firearms’.154 Three of four escapees were quite quickly recaptured, but Biggs remained free, and very much in the public eye, for many years. Although Biggs’ escape was a considerable embarrassment to the Home Office, responses to it were relatively muted and it prompted little in the way of policy reaction. All this was to change following further prison escapes relatively early in the life of the next parliament. The other much more significant event was the practical final resolution of the long-standing battle over the death penalty, a reform that Baroness Wootton described as ‘the most important change’ in the British penal system in the twentieth century.155 The reform had been a long time in the making and a number of factors had combined to make reform more likely. The 1957 Homicide Act had, entirely predictably, failed to satisfy abolitionists or retentionists and had also made any further restriction of capital punishment all but impossible. In effect, by the mid-sixties it was abolition or nothing. Shifting opinion, both within the Church of England and within parliament, meant new legislation was likely to have a smoother ride in parliament, especially in the House of Lords. Finally, cases such as that involving Timothy Evans,156 offered increased evidence that miscarriages of justice were far from impossible, and changed the minds of several important parliamentarians.157 Like so many of the moral reforms of the period158 the Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Bill was a Private Member’s Bill, nevertheless receiving considerable governmental support to ease its passage through parliament.159 This came in a number of forms – ranging from help with the drafting of the legislation through to the provision of often considerable extra parliamentary time when it appeared that opponents might be able to talk the legislation out. In the event the Bill was carried by a fairly substantial majority with only one amendment of note, by Henry Brooke, which inserted a clause ensuring that the death penalty was suspended for a trial period of five years only and that ‘unless Parliament by affirmative resolution of both Houses otherwise determines’ the Act would expire in July 1970.160

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

27

The exceptionally lengthy sentences that had been imposed on the Great Train Robbers were slowly to become less unusual, and in some ways the ending of the death penalty contributed to this process. There were features of the passage of the 1965 Act, and the form the legislation eventually took, which restructured the life sentence in such a way as to enable future expansion. The life sentence remained mandatory and indeterminate and the Act reinforced rather than mitigated executive power over the length of imprisonment to be served as part of a life sentence. Understandably the abolition of capital punishment in the mid-1960s was accompanied by concerns that the removal of this ‘deterrent’ would lead to an increase in homicides. There was considerable debate over the length of the prison terms that those convicted of homicide should serve and clear acceptance in many quarters that these could, in principle, be very extensive. Indeed, one set of influential commentators subsequently argued that the relatively straightforward substitution of the mandatory life sentence for capital punishment was ‘the Achilles heel of the campaign against the death penalty’.161 The failure to consider the consequences – unintended as well as intended – of this shift, they suggest, laid the foundations on which a highly punitive approach to the penalty for murder could be re-established. In this way, in their view, the absence of the death penalty provided the justification for the imposition of very substantial terms of imprisonment. Executive power over such terms provided the opportunity – certainly once the penal mood changed in the 1970s – for such lengthy terms to become relatively commonplace. In the aftermath of the 1964 election defeat the Conservative Party had begun to invest greater effort in thinking about criminal justice policy. The new chairman of the Party’s Advisory Committee on Policy, Edward Heath, said of the previous election that the trouble was ‘not that we failed to produce as good policies as our opponents but that we failed to produce policies for the issues the electorate was most interested in’.162 One of these was felt to be crime. A study group was established ‘to assess post-war trends in crime and their probable cause, to evaluate current and proposed new methods for the prevention of crime and the treatment of offenders and to make recommendations’.163 The group’s report, Crime Knows No Boundaries, was published in early 1966, and included support for the idea of parole and for speeding up police force amalgamation. The report did not go quite so far as to endorse the idea of a national police force, but indicated considerable sympathy for the argument.164 The working party acknowledged the growing reality that, despite earlier hopes about the positive impact of growing prosperity, much of what they had discovered was ‘not particularly comforting, since many of the goals which we as a nation set ourselves, the policies were pursue and the material objectives to which attach importance tend to increase rather than to diminish the incidence of crime’.165 Having lived dangerously for two years with a single-figure majority, Labour called another general election in 1966. Reflecting on the campaign, Richard Crossman observed how much had changed since the beginning of the decade: ‘It really is like the autumn of 1959 when Gaitskell was fighting his valiant,

28

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

hopeless campaign against Macmillan and the country had never had it so good and would have nothing said against him. All this week we have been fighting 1959 in reverse. Now it is we who are on top of the world, we who are the Government being given credit for the weather, we who are letting wages rise faster than prices. The Tories can’t find a way to break through’.166 Although it continued to be considered a matter of little consequence when it came to overall electoral fortunes, by the mid-sixties Labour began to match the Conservatives in paying at least some attention to law and order in their manifesto. In a short section entitled ‘Law Enforcement’, they said: ‘For years Britain has been confronted by a rising crime rate, overcrowded prisons and many seriously undermanned police forces.’167 It went on to argue for further strengthening of police numbers, a reduction in the number of forces, and a general bolstering of the service through a more efficient use of resources together with modern scientific and technological equipment. It also highlighted the need to deal with prison overcrowding and poor prison conditions. Any implicit criticism of the Conservatives did not, however, openly assign responsibility for the rate or character of crime to the politics or ideology of the party in government. Nor did the parties differ on most aspects of crime control policy. The Conservatives favoured a national police force, a policy which they later dropped, and Labour argued for a speeding up of the process of amalgamations that was already underway. Labour dealt with the issue of juvenile and adult offenders by referring to the proposals in their two White Papers (without spelling out what they entailed).168 In fact this was an area of potential conflict, for following the recommendation of the Longford Committee report one of the White Papers had proposed the replacement of the juvenile courts by family courts, a bone of contention with the Conservatives that was to prove persistent. At the time, however, differences were couched in terms which avoided accusations about party political responsibility for the nature of or trends in crime. Nevertheless, the language used by the two parties did differ. Where the Labour Party simply noted the rising crime rate and the need for criminal justice reform, the Conservative manifesto spoke more directly of the need for an ‘all-out attack on the rising wave of crime which today besmirches our society’.169 Indeed, using language that both had echoes of the earlier White Paper, and would become more common in future decades, it went to talk of the need to ‘place responsibility for law and order and for the war against crime on the Home Secretary and the Secretary of State for Scotland.170 Beyond this headline rhetoric, however, there was little to separate the parties’ manifestos in the fields of crime and penal policy. In the election campaigns crime barely registered except in Conservative Party addresses. The General Election study of the time suggests it was never mentioned by Labour and only in two per cent of addresses by the Liberals, whereas the Conservatives addressed the crime issue in 40 per cent of their addresses.171 Why this should have been so is far from clear, but the most plausible explanation is the substantial and continuing media coverage of youth culture, the alarm felt over what appeared to be an increasing problem of drugs, and the melodramatic roles associated with organised crime in the gangland ‘empires’ of the Krays and

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

29

the Richardsons.172 Anxieties were beginning increasingly to be voiced about the extent to which cherished values were being eroded, fears which were more readily translatable into Conservative rather than Labour or Liberal discourse.173 The Tories were beginning to assemble the elements of what would become a master narrative: the ‘permissive society’ encouraged in different ways by Labour and the Liberals, and associated above all with the figure of Roy Jenkins,174 was weakening social controls to unleash new forms of crime and deviance.

Permissiveness to parole Although reforms in the penal field picked up, particularly toward the end of the decade, it has tended to be the moral legislation of the period that has garnered greatest attention and which has, appropriately or otherwise, somehow come to symbolise the period.175 This ‘legislation of consent’176 primarily affected the spheres of sexual and social conduct and occurred under the stewardship of two Home Secretaries, one Conservative, Butler, and the other Labour, Jenkins. For many commentators, these reforms formed the centrepiece of the so-called ‘permissive society’.177 The legislative changes were varied and encompassed such matters as obscenity (the Obscene Publications Acts of 1959 and 1964) and theatre censorship (Theatres Act 1967); the decriminalisation of suicide (the Suicide Act 1961) and homosexuality (Sexual Offences Act 1967); the liberalisation of access to abortion (Abortion Act 1967) and divorce (Divorce Reform Act 1969); as well as changes to the regulation of prostitution (Street Offences Act 1959), and gambling (the Gaming Act 1968) – to which one might also add the ending of capital punishment (formally in 1965 and finally in 1969).178 The pace and nature of change in the moral sphere gave rise to considerable debate. For some commentators ‘permissiveness’ was taken to be an indicator of moral decline and the end of a ‘golden age’ in British history,179 for others it was a sign of the final throwing off of the restrictive and illiberal moral codes of the Victorian era,180 though many changes were championed not in the name of liberalism, but as increasing protection of the vulnerable. Indeed, historians of the era have come to see the nature of change as more complicated than either of these positions would suggest and as involving, in one form or another, a reorganisation of systems of regulation encompassing both the removal of extant restrictions and the creation of new forms of rule.181 This period saw the birth of Mary Whitehouse’s National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA), and a parallel campaign, the ‘Nationwide Festival of Light’. NVALA focused primarily on television, and the BBC in particular, Whitehouse182 and fellow campaigners being driven by what they felt to be falling standards of conduct, most obviously illustrated by perceived increases in ‘crime, violence, illegitimacy and venereal disease’.183 The Nationwide Festival of Light, which was both more short-lived and more explicitly evangelical in its focus, and whose luminaries included Malcolm Muggeridge,184 Lord Longford,185 Cliff Richard186 and Whitehouse herself, focused its sights on the growing commercialisation of sex and growing problems associated with modern youth. The perceived ills of permissiveness were

30

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

increasingly linked by a range of observers, including moral entrepreneurs like Whitehouse, with issues of crime and delinquency, not least via such matters as the decline of deference, and growing signs of family break-up.187 Although Jenkins’ first stay at the Home Office is largely remembered for the government-enabled back bench legislation that reformed the law in relation to matters like abortion and homosexuality, he also continued with elements of the legislative programme that had first been outlined in the two White Papers in 1965, though it was to be the end of the decade before there was any substantial reform of juvenile justice. Continued pressure on the prison population, provoked a review of short sentences and, in due course, proposals for the establishment of the suspended sentence of imprisonment for inclusion in a Criminal Justice Bill. By the time it reached parliament it was a sizeable Bill. As a consequence debate in parliament was lengthy, the bulk reported as having occurred ‘in an atmosphere virtually free from Party’, though the word virtually here should not be overlooked.188 In the House Jenkins outlined the purpose of the new suspended sentence of imprisonment as something enabling government to ‘substantially avoid sending people to prison for the first time unnecessarily’, describing it as ‘a sensible but by no means necessarily a lenient proposition’.189 Suspended sentences had been considered and rejected twice in the 1950s by the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders, which had described it as ‘wrong in principle and to a large extent impractical’.190 Whereas it had been promoted largely as a means of stiffening probation in the 1950s, now because of penal pressures it was conceived as a mandatory alternative to short sentences of imprisonment. Labour was ‘concerned to find ways of emptying the prisons, which were seen as non-reformatory, having little deterrent effect once experienced and actually likely to increase the chances of re-offending’.191 Though there was general support for the measure, on the Conservative benches there was strong opposition to the mandatory suspension of short sentences on a number of grounds, partly because of the restriction it placed on the court’s discretion, but also because of a continuing belief that they should be linked to probation, helping to strengthen existing non-custodial penalties. In the Lords, the former Home Secretary, Lord Brooke,192 even described it as a ‘blow at the maintenance of law and order’.193 Though the Labour government was not to be diverted from its view of the suspended sentence as an alternative to custody, it seems many sentencers and other legal professionals, as well as those on the Conservative benches, continued to view it as ‘an additional deterrent to imprisonment rather than a replacement for it’.194 Parole emerged late in the deliberations of the Longford Committee which in its final report argued that prison ‘should always be the last resort’ with release being the logical, and cheaper, option once offenders had ‘learned their lesson’.195 The Labour Home Secretary, Sir Frank Soskice wrote to cabinet in 1965 seeking approval for the introduction of such a scheme. An initial Criminal Justice Bill fell foul of the parliamentary timetable and the proposals next saw the light of day in The Adult Offender White Paper. The relatively slow pace of change continued and, consequently, it was under Roy Jenkins’ stewardship that the proposals

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

31

eventually appeared in draft legislation. In between times a series of events tested Jenkins’ authority and diverted attention within the Home Office. The first, coming not long after the temporary suspension of the death penalty was the shooting of three police officers in Shepherds Bush in west London. The story, coming not long after abolition, focused attention on criminal justice and prompted commentators to raise questions about the state of the nation. Jenkins resisted predictable calls for the reintroduction of capital punishment by saying that single events were never a sound basis for changing policy, but privately acknowledged that such a message ‘could hardly be expected to satisfy hard-line opinion, either in the press or amongst the public’.196 In addition to the other business he was endeavouring to deal with, Jenkins was also attempting to kick-start the process of widespread police force amalgamation, something the Royal Commission and his immediate predecessors had largely ducked. With an unhappy police service already on his hands, within days Jenkins was also dealing with the escape of the spy, George Blake, from Wormwood Scrubs prison. Jenkins’ eventual response was the creation of the Mountbatten197 Inquiry into prison security, though not before the Opposition had threatened a motion of censure.198 Once he’d navigated these choppy waters Jenkins turned his mind to his Criminal Justice Bill. Presenting it to parliament, he described it as ‘consistently liberal and rational in its approach to the difficult and emotional questions of crime and punishment’.199 For the most part there was very little political opposition to the bulk of the Bill. Both the introduction of the suspended sentence (though not its mandatory character) and the creation of the new parole system, now to be overseen as a result of an amendment to the Bill by a newly created Parole Board, were subject to considerable cross-party agreement. There was much greater Conservative opposition to the Bill’s proposal to introduce majority verdicts. Here Jenkins consulted his opposite number, Quintin Hogg, who, having secured backing himself from ‘eight or nine senior legal members’, offered Jenkins his support. Although Hogg’s legal supporters gradually melted away having found themselves overcome by ‘the superstitious public outcry’200 that occurred, Hogg remained true to his word. Indeed, although Jenkins’ skills in parliament were undoubtedly vital in his carrying the day in the end, it seems likely that Hogg’s backing was also far from unimportant.

Misuse of drugs We have observed how rising crime had been grabbing political attention since the late 1950s, and this continued through the 60s. A further emergent problem for policymakers in this decade was that of drugs. Cannabis use had become much more widespread, associated in particular with a hedonistic youth culture that emerged initially on the American west coast early in the decade and flourished more broadly as the sixties passed.201 Although they are undoubtedly a crude indicator, the arrest rate statistics for possession of cannabis – which rose from under one hundred a year in 1950 to over 3,000 by 1968202 – give a sense of the changing

32

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

landscape (in terms of enforcement as well as use). The 1960s also saw a significant increase in heroin use,203 though at a scale that was to be dwarfed in the decades to come. Where there had been little or no political concern about drugs in the 1950s,204 apparently rising drug use in the sixties combined with the emergence of a variety of subcultural styles also drew increased formal attention not just to cannabis use but also to LSD and amphetamines in particular. The decade saw a number of official reports published, culminating in significant legislation in 1971. There having been no significant scrutiny since the Rolleston Committee in the 1930s, in 1958 the Home Office decided to constitute an interdepartmental committee, chaired by the then President of the Royal College of Physicians, Sir Russell Brain, to consider general issues relating to drugs and drug addiction. The Committee did little other than reiterate the general position that had been agreed 30 years earlier and made no recommendations for serious change.205 In the early part of the sixties, an increase in the number of recorded addicts, together with some evidence of changing patterns of use, led to the Committee being reconvened in 1964. It identified a prescribing problem – a small number of doctors having become responsible for the vast majority of legal prescriptions of heroin and cocaine. Not all observers were convinced by the Brain’s Committee’s conclusion that the problem was one of doctor’s prescribing practices, others taking the view that the system was ripe for exploitation by a new breed of drug user.206 ‘Whatever the explanation, a youthful hedonistic drug-using culture became established in the UK during the 1960s – particularly in London’,207 and from this period on drug policy and penal policy became increasingly interlinked. The primary consequence of the second Brain Committee was the introduction of a new procedure for notifying the authorities of addicts and of licensing of GPs able to prescribe, implemented via the Dangerous Drugs Act 1967.208 By this point, however, illicitly imported heroin was beginning to supplant such legal sources for the first time. In between the two Brain reports, Henry Brooke raised what he believed to be the problem of the increasing misuse of amphetamines and barbiturates. In a cabinet paper, he noted that the ‘police report widespread trafficking in these drugs, which can be bought quite cheaply in jazz clubs, coffee bars, and similar places, and which are used in excessive quantities by some of the young people who frequent these places’.209 Despite misgivings within cabinet, and the prospect of more comprehensive legislation following on from a review by the Minister of Health, Brooke eventually secured the passage of the Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act 1964 which placed new restrictions on the sale and possession of amphetamines, though not without considerable criticism at Committee Stage for a general failure to have studied the problem sufficiently. Coming into operation in October, the Act contributed to the steady rise in drug-related prosecutions as police sought to crack down on ‘coffee clubs’ and other venues.210 The publication of the second Brain report is often treated as a symbolic moment in British drugs policy, marking a break from the British system that had been in operation since Rolleston in the 1920s. This can easily be overstated, however, for a disease model of drug addiction and systematic prescription for registered addicts continued long after

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

33

1965 and ‘the conceptualization of the addict as a sick person and threat to public health which emerged contemporaneously with the construction of addiction as a social problem in the nineteenth century remained the unshaken epistemological basis of policy in this area in the 1960s’.211 For all the developments that occurred, and the increasing concern that surrounded the issue of drugs, this remained a field characterised by relatively little political disagreement and contestation, at least at a parliamentary level. One illustration of this was the reception and treatment of the report of an Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence that was published in 1968212 which, in some quarters at least, caused something of an outcry. The Advisory Commission itself had been created in 1967, and Roy Jenkins established a specific sub-committee under the chairmanship of Barbara Wootton213 to review the evidence on cannabis and make recommendations. Its report challenged some of the claims made at the time about the physical dangers of cannabis use or its relative harmfulness vis-à-vis other substances. As a consequence, its recommendations included the practical downgrading of the penalties attached to both possession and possession with intent to supply. Picking up one of the core themes of the period, much of the newspaper reporting of the recommendations was critical of what it saw as the ‘permissiveness’ pervading the Committee’s attitudes, some describing it as a “junkies’ charter’, another referring to Wootton as a ‘Little old lady talking pot’.214 By the time it was published, James Callaghan had taken over as Home Secretary. A man who ‘felt attached to an older, more deferential social order’,215 he could not have been more of a contrast to his predecessor, and the Wootton Report offered him a perfect opportunity to signal a shift in approach. Indeed, so strongly critical were Callaghan’s views that he initially objected to publication completely but, seemingly, was persuaded to alter course when Wootton and several other members of the committee threatened to resign.216 In parliament Callaghan quickly made it clear that he did not accept the primary recommendations of the Report, indicating that any decision ‘to reduce the penalties for possession, sale or supply of cannabis would be bound to lead people to think that the Government take a less than serious view of the effects of drugtaking’217 and that this would be entirely contrary to government policy. Once again the Labour Home Secretary found an ally in his Conservative shadow. In his rejection of Wootton, Callaghan was backed by Quintin Hogg who argued that any diminution in penalties would lead the public and traffickers to assume that the government ‘were on their way to legalising’ use. In response, Callaghan said that so close were his and Hogg’s views that, having listened to his Shadow’s speech, ‘I feel like pronouncing the benediction’. Indeed, with considerable and enthusiastic support from the Conservative benches and many Labour trades unionists, he said he saw any suggestion of legalisation as ‘another aspect of the so-called permissive society, and I am glad if my decision has enabled the House to call a halt in the advancing tide of so-called permissiveness.218 That Callaghan was a different breed of Home Secretary from his predecessor required no further proof.219

34

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Children and young persons Debates around juvenile justice policy straddled the sixties from opening to close. The Ingleby Committee, established in the late fifties, had reported in 1960 and had focused much of its attention on the tension between the judicial and welfare functions of the juvenile court. It had proposed a raising of the age of criminal responsibility from eight to 12, with the potential for it to be raised to 13 or 14 subsequently, with only welfare proceedings being available for younger offenders. At the time the Conservative government was preoccupied with problems in the Approved Schools system and with the continuing battles over corporal punishment, and consequently offered little response to Ingleby. The Labour Party, by contrast, was more outspoken, describing its recommendations as ‘a great disappointment’.220 The Children and Young Persons Act 1963 which followed, raised the age of criminal responsibility to 10, a compromise solution but one with some later impact.221 Though the differences between the Labour and Conservative parties on the subject of juvenile justice were not huge at this point, Labour were much more welcoming of the proposals on the age of criminal responsibility. The subsequent Longford Report went further than Ingleby, recommending the abolition of the juvenile court, and the proposals that followed it, in Children in Trouble,222 took up many of its ideas, publicising the government’s intention to ‘enable juvenile offenders to be dealt with outside the courts as far as possible’ and to incorporate approved schools within the wider system of residential institutions. Given the hostility there had been in some quarters to the earlier White Paper, Children in Trouble said that it would preserve juvenile courts for under 17s, but that prosecutions should cease for 10–14-year-olds, and cases only brought before courts ‘if the parents were not providing care, protection and guidance, or if the nature of the offence indicated that the child was beyond their control’.223 For all juveniles, with certain caveats, proceedings would involve a voluntary agreement between social workers and parents. Where the reforms signalled by Longford and the 1965 White Paper had been successfully resisted, opponents were both less numerous and less successful later in the decade. Bottoms argues that the keys to the passage of the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 were a combination of a powerful Home Office Children’s Department and a Labour government keen to see at least some substantial Home Affairs legislation carried before the end of its term of office.224 The provisions in the Act made it impossible to prosecute under 14s for anything other than homicide and restricted the grounds under which civil care measures could be imposed. Any treatment was dependent on the agreement of social workers and the juvenile’s parents. Although 14–16-year-olds could be prosecuted in certain cases, voluntary agreements were to be preferred. The juvenile court, though retained, was to be both a source of welfare-provision and an agency of last resort.225 Finally, in relation to both care orders and supervision orders, the two main disposals available, supervising social workers were to have very considerable discretion. In short, it was a fairly radical piece of legislation, albeit still a compromise, which sought to restrict magistrates’ powers, reduce the criminalisation of young children and effectively abolish juvenile imprisonment.

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970

35

As such it represented ‘the high water mark of more than a decade of attempts at reform’.226 It was also a source of increasing party political dispute and there was considerable Conservative opposition in parliament to the Bill. Quintin Hogg made it clear that he much preferred the Ingleby formulation for reform and argued, strongly, that the proposed legislation was open to ‘serious objection on grounds of principle in that it is unjust as between different children in like cases, it gives insufficient recognition to the constructive role of the juvenile court, and it will interfere with the work of the police in relation to children, especially with regard to more serious offences.’227 Summing up for the Opposition, Sir Peter Rawlinson228 said that the Bill ‘offends against the major principles of fairness; it introduced unnecessary delays and cumbersome procedures, and it is the fruit of a philosophy of penology which is unacceptable to the public’.229 Nevertheless, after a fraught passage through parliament the Children and Young Person’s Act received Royal Assent in October 1969. Less than a year later another general election would be called, parliament dissolved, and the impact of the Act irrevocably altered. As always for Home Secretaries it was unpredictable ‘events’ that occupied much of their time, and Callaghan’s experience was no different. Late in his tenure, in November 1969, Callaghan was faced with a major police corruption scandal. A front page story in The Times claimed that the paper had handed ‘disturbing evidence’ to Scotland Yard proving ‘that at least three detectives are taking large sums of money in exchange for dropping charges, for being lenient with evidence offered in court, and for allowing a criminal to work unhindered’.230 The Commissioner, Sir John Waldron, who visited Callaghan, complained of the potential damage to the Met, and that the press had not given him advance warning. He was right that such scandals – more were to come – would have a lasting impact on the police service’s image, but there seemed to be a clear defence of the newspaper’s strategy of keeping its story in-house for so long. It appeared that The Times had decided to publish without warning because it was concerned that giving the Yard advance warning would simply lead to any crimes that had been committed being covered up. This at the end of a decade that had begun with a Royal Commission regularly supporting the broad suggestion that the British police remained ‘the best police in the world’. Such a view was finally becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, and as Callaghan later wrote of newspaper concerns of possible police cover-ups, ‘Events were to show that The Times was, I regret to say, only too correct in making such an assumption.’231

Conclusion This period is undoubtedly better known for what can broadly be thought of as its moral reforms than for any significant departures in penal policy. As Windlesham has observed, when there were any developments of note in criminal justice and penal policy, such as reform of parole and the introduction of financial compensation, ‘the seed-bed was usually found in the “surrounding world of penal thought”, rather than in any party political objectives’.232 Indeed, party politics were kept

36

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

largely in the background of 1960s penal policymaking, with leading figures at pains to try to minimise public differences. Few of the substantial changes in the 1960s, even in juvenile justice, caused major political controversy, certainly by the standards of subsequent decades. The values of the 1960s ‘were sustained in an unobtrusive, yet pervasive, climate of common attitudes shared by Home Office officials, special interest groups, and a respectable body of informed opinion’.233 This is not to say that there were no significant political disputes, merely that in this period it was not the differences that were ‘really striking . . . but the extent of their agreement on truly fundamental issues’, and that this was true of penal policy as much else.234 Indeed, arguably the form of consensus that existed in this period is best conceived of as ‘a set of parameters which bounded the set of policy options regarded by senior politicians and civil servants as administratively practicable, economically affordable and politically acceptable.’235 In this vein Morris has argued that Labour’s criminal justice reforms in the later 1960s should be seen as the product of a successful and pragmatic government. The Wilson administration, he suggests, ‘had genuinely sensed the temper of the times and sought to channel the prevailing currents of opinion rather than to impose its own solutions (of which it had none)’.236 The 1960s were not without their disagreements and crises – from prison escapes, challenges to the death penalty to police corruption right at the end – but notwithstanding these, and the increased pressure that successive Home Secretaries felt as a consequence of what appeared to be rapidly rising crime rates, there continued to be an adherence to a broadly shared view of crime, its causes, and the general character of appropriate responses to it. Nevertheless, as James Callaghan once observed, all Home Secretaries in the end were party political animals and that ‘on any typical subject a Labour Home Secretary was always accused of being too tough by his left wing, and a Conservative Home Secretary was always accused of being too weak by his right wing’.237 In the main at this time, the tendency was not for ministers either to see or to present themselves ‘as managing a system’ or, beyond the most general, to set particular objectives for criminal justice institutions to achieve. ‘The political parties did not make their ability to reduce or punish crime a test of their credibility or part of their appeal to the electorate’.238 This was soon to change for, as will become clear, from around 1970 and increasingly as the new decade wore on, the cross-party consensus on crime and its control began slowly to shows signs of breaking.

Notes 1 Terence Morris, op. cit., 13 2 Social Insurance and Allied Services (The Beveridge Report) 1942, London: HMSO 3 William Beveridge was an economist and a Liberal politician who made his name as a social reformer. His report Social Insurance and Allied Services (published in 1942 and still widely referred to as the Beveridge Report) is viewed as the template from which the post-war welfare state emerged under the 1945 Labour government. From 1919 to 1937 Beveridge was Director of the London School of Economics, and from 1937–45 was Master of University College, Oxford

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970  37  

-

          10 This is discussed in detail in the first volume of the history: Rock, P. (2019a) Official History of Criminal Justice, Volume 1: The Liberal Hour, London: Routledge, Chapter 1 11 For a more extended discussion, see especially Reiner, R. (1985) The Politics of the Police, Brighton: Wheatsheaf; Weinberger, B. (1995) The Best Police in the World, London: Routledge. See also Newburn, T. (forthcoming) The Official History of Criminal Justice. IV: Policing, Chapter 1 12 See, for example, H.G. Wells, 1940, The Rights of Man, Harmondsworth: Penguin, and the introduction by Ali Smith to a new edition, 2016 13 Bottoms, A.E. and Stevenson, S. (1992) ‘What Went Wrong?’: Criminal Justice Policy in England and Wales, 1945–70, in Downes, D. (ed.) Unravelling Criminal Justice: Eleven British Studies, London: Macmillan: 8–10 14 See Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit., Chapter 1 15 Sir David Butler (b. 1924) was an academic and broadcaster. The bulk of his academic career was spent at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he was a contributor to or author of 21 British Election studies. These studies, which continue, include: Butler, D. 1952: The British General Election of 1951; 1956, The British General Election of 1955; and Rose, R., 1960: The British General Election of 1959; and King, A., 1965: The British General Election of 1964; 1967, The British General Election of 1966; and Pinto-Duschinsky, M., 1971: The British General Election of 1970; and Kavanagh, D., 1975: The British General Election of February 1974; 1975, The British General Election of October 1974; 1980, The British General Election of 1979; 1984, The British General Election of 1983; 1988, The British General Election of 1987; 1992, The British General Election 1992; and 1997, The British General Election of 1997. All London: Macmillan 16 Terence Morris, op. cit., 74. The Criminal Justice Bill of 1938 was aborted by the outbreak of war the following year. The 1947 Bill became the Criminal Justice Act 1948 17 See Rock, P. (2019b) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Volume 2: InstitutionBuilding, London: Routledge, Chapters 1–5 18 A list of significant Acts is appended 19 Sir Charles Cunningham, BOAPAH, at p.25 20 CAB 23/94, 22nd June 1938 21 James Chuter Ede was a Labour MP from 1935 to 1964. He was an Education minister from 1940–45, and subsequently Home Secretary from 1945–51. In the field of Home Affairs, his views tended toward the radical, with the conspicuous exception of capital punishment on which, at least officially, he remained a retentionist. See Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit. 22 See Mair, G. (1991) Part-Time Punishment: The origins and development of senior attendance centres, London: HMSO, Chapter 2 23 Quoted in Bailey, V. (1989) Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the young offender, 1914–1948, Oxford: Clarendon Press, at p. 289

38

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

24 Bailey, V. (1989) op. cit., at p. 290 25 Hood, R. (1965) Borstal Reassessed, London: Heinemann, at pp. 72–73 26 Dutton, D.J. (2004) David Maxwell Fyfe, Earl of Kilmuir, Dictionary of National Biography. Dutton offers little support for this description of Maxwell Fyfe other than his refusal to reintroduce corporal punishment. Indeed, and by contrast, Maxwell Fyfe was a staunch supporter of hanging, refused to reprieve Derek Bentley, and also seems to have harboured very conservative views about homosexuality 27 For an extended discussion see Rock P. (2019a) op. cit., Chapters 2 and 3 28 The Times, 31st July 1948, quoted in Bailey (1989) op. cit. at pp. 302–3 29 See Kavanagh, D. and Morris, P. (1994) Consensus Politics: Attlee to Major, Oxford: Blackwell 30 http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/man/lab51.htm 31 http://www.conservativemanifesto.com/1951/1951-conservative-manifesto.shtml 32 Seldon, A. (1981) Churchill’s Indian Summer, London: Hodder and Stoughton 33 The contemporary historian, Hennessey, P. argues that the ‘most serene “having it so good” period was from autumn 1952 to autumn 1956’; Hennessey, P. (2006) Having It So Good: Britain in the fifties, London: Penguin, at p. 245 34 Hopkins, H. (1963) The New Look: A social history of the forties and fifties in Britain, London: Secker and Warburg, at pp. 207–8; see also, Pearson, G. (1983) Hooligan: A history of respectable fears, London: Macmillan 35 Butler, R.A. (1967) The Home Office in Modern Times, Law Society’s Gazette, November, at p. 598. Butler was Home Secretary from 14th January 1957–13th July 1962 36 Pearson, G. (1983) Hooligan: A history of respectable fears, London: Macmillan, at p. 15 37 See Rock, P. and Cohen, S. (1970) The Teddy Boy, in Bogdanor, V. and Skidelsky, R. (eds.) The Age of Affluence, 1951–1964, Basingstoke: Macmillan; Melly, G. (1970) Revolt into Style: The pop arts, Harmondsworth: Penguin 38 Barker, M. (1984) A Haunt of Fears: The strange history of the British horror comics campaign, London: Pluto Press 39 Mitchell, G.A.M. (2013) Reassessing ‘the Generation Gap’: Bill Haley’s 1957 Tour of Britain, inter-generational relations and attitudes to rock ‘n’ roll in the late 1950s, Twentieth Century British History, 24, 4, 573–605 40 For a discussion, see Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The meaning of style, London: New Accents 41 See, for example, Mays, J.B. (1961) Teen-Age culture in contemporary Britain and Europe, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 338, 22–32 42 Richard Austen ‘RAB’ Butler, Conservative MP whose ministerial appointment included Secretary of State for Education, Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He also held the posts of Chairman of the Conservative Party and Deputy Prime Minister 43 Elected to parliament in 1945, Lloyd George was briefly Minister of Food before his brief and largely undistinguished tenure as Home Secretary from 1954–57 44 Still influenced no doubt by what Dominic Sandbrook describes as the ‘spirit of intellectual Butskellism’ that had dominated the earlier parts of the decade; Sandbrook, D. (2006) Never Had it So Good, London: Abacus 45 We have used the masculine pronoun here as all Home Secretaries at the time were men. The first female Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, was appointed in 2007. 46 Windlesham, Lord (1993) Responses to Crime Vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, at p. 69 47 ‘Alarming increase in young offenders: Strain on borstal system causing anxiety’, The Times, 24th April 1958 48 ‘Prison reform’, Memorandum by the Secretary of State for the Home Department, C. (58) 136, 30th June 1958

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970 39 49 The history of campaigns against capital punishment, and its eventual abolition, are covered in: Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit., see also, Christoph, J.B. (1962) Capital Punishment and British Politics, London: George Allen and Unwin; Dawtry, F. (1966) The abolition of the death penalty in Britain, British Journal of Criminology, 6, 2, 183–191 50 See Rock P. (2019a) op. cit., Chapters 2 and 3 51 Rose, G. (1961) The Struggle for Penal Reform: The Howard League and its Predecessors, London: Stevens; Rose, G. (1964) The War Against Crime in England and Wales, 1959–1964, British Journal of Criminology, 4, 606–609 52 Quoted in Jarvis, M. (2003) Conservative Governments, Morality and Social Change in Affluent Britain, 1957–1964, Manchester: Manchester University Press, at p. 52 53 Quoted in Howard, A. (1987) RAB: The Life of R A Butler, London; Jonathan Cape, at p. 264 54 Quoted in Jarvis, M. (2003) op. cit. 55 Racial fights in London. Patrolling cars stoned. Midnight arrests’, The Times, 1st September 1958. These riots are discussed in more detail in Vol. 5 of the Official History: Newburn, T. (forthcoming) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Vol. 5: Policing, London: Routledge 56 Hopkins, H. (1963) The New Look: A social history of the forties and fifties in Britain, London: Secker and Warburg 57 See, for example, Glass, R. (1960) Newcomers: The West Indians in London, London: George Allen and Unwin 58 Hennessey (2006) op. cit. 59 PREM 11/4691 60 Butler had consistently argued that the best available title was the straightforward Crime and Punishment, 1958: England and Wales (HO 291/509). Other possibilities advanced were Criminal Behaviour: Problems of Prevention and Treatment (suggested by Cunningham) and Crime and the Penal System or [Some] Problems of Penal Policy. Cunningham consistently resisted Butler’s initially favoured title, describing it as ‘pretentious in that it appears to claim for the White Paper more than it contains’. In the event the new title was Butler’s choice, ‘Penal Practice in a Changing Society’ originally having been the title of Part III of the draft White Paper. Butler amended the penultimate draft by hand, moving it to the title page and adding his own subtitle ‘Aspects of Future Development (England and Wales) 61 Richard Austen Butler was often known as RAB or Rab for short 62 15th December 1958 HO 291/509 63 HO 291/509 64 HO 291/509 65 See Newburn, T. (1992) Permission and Regulation: Law and Morals in Post-war Britain, London: Routledge 66 Ryan (1983) op. cit., p. 25 67 Martin, J.P. (1988) The development of criminology in Britain, 1948–60, British Journal of Criminology, 28, 2, 35–44; Bottoms, A.E. (1987) Reflections on the criminological enterprise, Cambridge Law Journal, 46, 2, 240–63 68 Home Office (1959) Penal Practice in a Changing Society: Aspects of future development (England and Wales), London: HMSO, Cmnd. 645, at para 22, emphasis added 69 See Rock P. (2019a) op. cit., Chapter 1 70 Garland, D. (1997) Of crimes and criminals: The development of British criminology, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed, at p. 48 71 Interim Report of the Royal Commission (1960) 72 Royal Commission on the Police (1962) Final Report, Cmnd. 1728, London: HMSO 73 This is all discussed in detail in Newburn, T. (forthcoming) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Volume 5: Policing, London: Routledge, Part 1

40

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

74 Morgan, K. (1990) The People’s Peace: British History 1945–1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press 75 Hennessey, P. (2007) op. cit., p. 321 76 http://www.conservativemanifesto.com/1959/1959-conservative-manifesto.shtml, emphasis added 77 http://www.conservativemanifesto.com/1959/1959-conservative-manifesto.shtml; Conservative Party, 1959, The Next Five Years, London: Conservative Party. See also Paul Rock, 1990, Helping Victims of Crime: The Home Office and the Rise of Victim Support in England and Wales. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ch. 2 gives an inside account of the development of criminal injuries compensation 78 McCallum, R.B. and Readman, A. (1946) The British General Election of 1945, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Nicholas, H.G. (1951) The British General Election of 1950, London: Macmillan; Butler, D. (1952) The British General Election of 1951, London: Macmillan (1956) The British General Election of 1955, London: Macmillan; and Rose, R. (1960) The British General Election of 1959, London: Macmillan 79 Ryan, M. (1983) The Politics of Penal Reform, Harlow: Longman. Favretto’s summary of the Labour Party’s internal disputes at the time is as follows: ‘The mid-1950s were marked by an increasingly pronounced divergence between the doctrinal attachment to public ownership held by the Left’s personalities such as Michael Foot, Barbara Castle, Jennie Lee, and the more pragmatic approach displayed by Wilson’s Centre-Left Group (Richard Crossman, Thomas Balogh, Peter Shore, Harold Wilson), who championed a more instrumental notion of planning and state ownership strictly connected with economic efficiency arguments. The split which followed led to the emergence of a less doctrinaire and ‘modern’ Left able to pose a serious threat to the established theoretical dominance of the Right.’ Favretto, I. (2000) ‘Wilsonism’ reconsidered: Labour party revisionism 1952–64, Contemporary British History, 14, 4, 54–80, at p. 55 80 Jenkins, R. (1959) The Labour Case, Harmondsworth: Penguin 81 Jenkins, R. (1959) op. cit. at p. 136. It is true that there was a significant shift away from the use of capital punishment in the first half of the twentieth century across many parts of the world. Nevertheless, a great many so-called ‘advanced countries’ still retained the penalty on their statute books even if its usage was in sharp decline 82 Jenkins, R. (1959) op. cit., p. 135 83 Jenkins, R. (1974) Nine Men of Power, London: Hamish Hamilton, quoted in Hennessey, P. (2007) Having it so Good: Britain in the Fifties, London: Penguin, at pp. 570–71 84 Hennessey, P. (2019) Winds of Change: Britain in the early sixties, London: Allen Lane. That crime was of minor importance to the Conservative government is illustrated by the complete absence of any reference to penal policy in Hennessey’s detailed examination of the Macmillan government in those years. Indeed, the only reference to crime in his volume is a brief discussion of the Great Train Robbery 85 Ingleby Committee (1960) Report of the Committee on Children and Young Persons, Cmnd. 1191, London: HMSO 86 This term is most closely associated with the work of David Garland. In documenting the shifts that transformed Victorian systems of punishment into the modern forms that persisted for much of the twentieth century, he described the broad contours of the emergent system of punishment as ones in which, the ‘offender’ is reconstructed in the categories of the new penalty, not as a free and rational legal subject, but as an ‘individual’ with particular characteristics, an uncertain degree of rationality, and a character of a specific type, be it normal, criminal, defective or whatever. Similarly, the relationship between state and offender is no longer presented as an exercise of a contractual obligation to punish, but as a positive attempt to produce reform and normalisation for the benefit of both the individual and the state. Finally, the implicit characterisation of the state and its power – a characterisation that inheres in all penal discourse –

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970 41

87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97

98

99 100

101 102 103 104 105 106 107

undergoes a transformation. The new state relates to the individual not as an equal, but as a benefactor, an assistantial expert, intervening to relieve the conditions that detract from formal equality, rescuing its subjects from vice and crime. Its power is legitimated not in contractual terms, but in terms of a natural ascendancy marked by its resources and knowledge, its ability to care. If Victorian penality suggested the image of the ideal Liberal State, then one can trace in this new ideology the first semblances of what was later to be termed the ‘Welfare State’, Garland, D. (1985) Punishment and Welfare: A history of penal strategies, Aldershot: Gower, at p. 31; See also, Bailey, V. (2019) The rise and fall of the rehabilitative ideal, 1890–1970, London: Routledge H.A. (59) 91, 17th July 1959 Butler, R.A. (1971) The Art of the Possible, London: Constable, at p. 200 Quoted in Sparrow, G. (1965) ‘R.A.B.’ Study of a statesman, London: Odhams, at p. 163 The Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders. It was established in 1944 to provide the Home Secretary with advice. It was replaced by the Advisory Council on the Penal System in the mid-1960s 27th May 1960; HO 272/151 Butler (1971) op. cit. Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders (1960) Corporal Punishment, London: HMSO, Cmnd. 1213, at para 83 ACTO (1960) op. cit., para 88 HC Deb 11th April 1961 Vol. 638 Cc.57–152 Thatcher, M. (1995) The Path to Power, London: Harper Collins, pp. 116–17 The dissenting note, written by Dr A. L. Goodhart, recommended the establishment of regional forces. Though he had supporters on the Commission, the bulk were persuaded by a combination of the Home Office, and the Chairman and Secretary of the Commission, that it would be better to hold fire and let such changes emerge slowly and organically. This is discussed in detail in Newburn, T. (forthcoming) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Volume 5: Policing, London: Routledge, Chapter 1 Brooke was considered an efficient administrator, a person of undoubted talent but with little political flair. As Davenport-Hines (2008) put it, describing his period as Home Secretary: ‘his deliberative pragmatism was ill-suited to his new responsibilities’ and his period of slightly over two years in the Home Office proved ‘peculiarly unsuccessful’ (Davenport-Hines, 2008) HC Deb, 9th May 1963, Vol. 677, Col. 680 Reflections on Soskice’s period as Home Secretary have never been terribly positive. In fairness his performance was undoubtedly affected, possibly quite profoundly, by his ongoing ill health. His permanent secretary, Sir Charles Cunningham described him as ‘a very middle of the road Labour Minister. He had no extreme views which he wanted to carry out . . .’ BOAPAH, at pp. 36–7. See also, though, Downes, op. cit, pp. 214–5, and Guiney, 2018, op. cit, p. 78 Penal Practice in a Changing Society, at para. 24 CAB 134/1986, HA (61) 45 CAB 134/1984, 5th May 1961 Report of the Working Party on Victims of Violent Crime, London: Home Office, 1961 Justice (1961) Compensation for Victims of Crimes of Violence, London: Stevens; Conservative Political Centre (1962) A Report on Compensation for Injuries through Crimes of Violence, London: Conservative Political Centre Home Office (1964) Compensation for Victims of Crimes of Violence, Cmnd. 1406, London: HMSO: more generally on this subject, see Rock, P. (1990) Helping Victims of Crime, Oxford: Oxford University Press Mark Abrams’ (1959) The Teenage Consumer (London: Press Exchange) was one of the first surveys of the buying power of contemporary youth. The classic sociological analysis of youth culture and leisure, and their links with concerns about delinquency

42

108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135

The Changing Politics of Law and Order at the time, is Downes, D. (1966) The Delinquent Solution, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul ‘Gaol For Two Youths At Clacton,’ The Times, 28th April 1964; ‘More Youths Dealt With At Clacton.’ The Times, 30th April 1964 ‘40 Youths Arrested At Margate,’ The Times, 18th May 1964 ‘1,000 Youths In Fight At Brighton,’ The Times, 19th May 1964 CAB 134/2056 CAB 134/2054, 29th May 1964 Alice Bacon, Hansard, HC Deb, 23rd June 1964, Vol. 697, Col. 243 ‘Arrests Reach 70 After Hastings Clashes.’ The Times, 4th August 1964 Cohen, S. (2003) Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London: Routledge, 3rd ed; 1st edition 1972; 2nd ed, 1980 Sir Charles Cunningham served as Permanent Undersecretary of State in the Home Office from 1957 to 1966. Prior to that he worked in the Scottish Office from 1929–1957, rising to become its Secretary in 1948 Quoted in Windlesham (1993) op. cit. at p. 93 Home Office (1964) The War Against Crime in England and Wales, 1959–1964, London: Home Office Garland, D. (1996) The limits of the sovereign state: Strategies of crime control in contemporary society, British Journal of Criminology, 36, 4, 445–471, at p. 447 Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit., p. 92 At that point, Reader in Criminology, Oxford University, subsequently Professor of Criminology and Director of the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge Walker, N. (1965) Crime and Punishment in Britain, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Walker, N. (1965) op. cit., p.27 See Bell, S. (1998) (ed.) The Conservative Party Since 1945, Manchester: Manchester University Press Conservative Party, 1964, Prosperity with a Purpose, London: Conservative Party Liberal Party, 1964, Think for Yourself – Vote Liberal, London: Liberal Party Quoted in Sandbrook, D. (2006) White Heat: A history of Britain in the swinging sixties, London: Abacus, at p. 12 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. 1994, ‘“Hostages to Fortune”? The Politics of Law and Order in Post-War Britain’, in Maguire, Morgan and Reiner, eds., op. cit. The most comprehensive picture of Wilson’s career can be found in Pimlott, B. (1992) Harold Wilson, London: Harper Collins. See also Wilson, H. (1971) The Labour Government 1964–1970, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson Labour Party, 1964, The New Britain, London: Labour Party. See Chapters 1 and that entitled ‘The Rise and Fall of Penal Hope’ for more consideration of the report Morris (1989) op. cit., pp. 113–14 See Rock, P. Vol. 1, Ch. 3 of this History for a full analysis of this question Radzinowicz, Sir L. (1999) Adventures in Criminology, London: Routledge, at p. 333 Sir Leon Radzinowicz (1906–1999) founded the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 1959, also becoming the first holder of the Wolfson Chair in Criminology until his retirement in 1972 Its terms of reference were, ‘In the light of modern knowledge of crime and its causes and of modern penal practice here and abroad, to re-examine the concepts and purposes which should underlie the punishment and treatment of offenders in England and Wales; to report how far they are realised by the penalties and methods of treatment available to the courts, and whether any changes in these, or in the arrangements and responsibility for selecting the sentences to be imposed on particular offenders, are desirable; to review the work of the services and institutions dealing with offenders, and the responsibility for the administration; and to make recommendations’

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970 43 136 The Royal Commission was chaired by the former Conservative MP, and one-time Chancellor of the Exchequer, Derick Heathcoat-Amory (Viscount Amory) 137 The Child, the Family and the Young Offender, Cmnd. 2742, London, 1965; The Adult Offender, Cmnd. 2852, London, 1965 138 Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit., p. 103 139 Quoted in Radzinowicz, Sir L. (1999) op. cit., p. 351 140 The Child, the Family and the Young Offender, Cmnd. 2742, at para 4 141 Penal Practice in a Changing Society: Aspects of Future Development (England and Wales), London: HMSO, Cmnd. 645, at para. 1 142 A long-standing Conservative think tank 143 Quoted in Morris, A. and Giller, H. (1987) Understanding Juvenile Justice, London: Croom Helm, at p. 89 144 See inter alia, National Association of Probation Officers (1965) The Child, The Family and the Young Offender: Observations by NAPO, reprinted in Probation, 11, 83–91; Scott, P. D. (1966), The Child, The Family and The Young Offender’, British Journal of Criminology, 6, 105–111; Aubrey, M. (1965), The future of juvenile courts, Criminal Law Review, 641–50; Magistrates’ Association (1966), Memorandum submitted to the Home Office on the White Paper, The Child, The Family and the Young Offender’, 46th Annual Report 1965–1966, and Bottoms, A.E. (1974) On the decriminalisation of the English juvenile courts, in Hood, R. (ed.) Crime, Criminology and Public Policy, London: Heinemann, at p. 329 145 Hansard, HC Deb, 2nd February 1966, Vol. 723 Col. 1105 146 The Adult Offender, Cmnd. 2852, London, 1965, at para 42 147 The proposals in the putative Bill had been put before Cabinet Committee by Soskice in August 1965 148 CAB 134/1997 19th November 1965. To Cabinet ‘H’ Committee, Soskice said, ‘I am anxious to publish these proposals very soon in the form of a White Paper because I think it would be most undesirable to have to remain, as it were, mute on the subject of penal reform for adult prisoners until certainly next year, and perhaps even the year after, if it is impossible to fit the Criminal Justice Bill into the programme’. CAB 134/2001 149 A Labour MP from 1948, Jenkins held a range of positions in the Wilson and Callaghan governments including being Home Secretary (twice) and Chancellor of the Exchequer. He left parliament initially in 1977 to become President of the European Commission, and subsequently left the Labour Party to help found the Social Democratic Party (along with Shirley Williams, David Owen and Bill Rogers) in 1981. He was elected as an SDP MP in 1982 and remained in parliament until 1987 150 Whitmore, Sir C. (1991) Management of change: The Whitehall experience, Occasional Papers in Administrative Studies, London: Home Office, pp.1–2; see also Loader, I. (2006) Fall of the ‘platonic guardians’: Liberalism, criminology and political responses to crime in England and Wales, British Journal of Criminology, 46, Issue 4, 1st July 2006, Pages 561–586 151 See Rock, P. (2019b) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Volume 2: Institution Building, London: Routledge, Chapter 2 152 From 1946 until his retirement, Professor of Criminology at the London School of Economics. For detail see: http://www.lse.ac.uk/social-policy/research/Research-clusters/ Mannheim/hermann-mannheim 153 Mannheim, H. (1964) This Sentencing Business, British Journal of Criminology, 4, 608–9 154 ‘Second train robber escapes from prison’, The Guardian, 9th July 1965. The ‘firearm’ was a loaded shotgun found in one of the escape vehicles 155 Shute, S. (2004) Punishing murderers: release procedures and the ‘tariff’, 1953–2004, Criminal Law Review, 156 See Kennedy, L. (1961) 10 Rillington Place, London: Victor Gollancz

44

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

157 The history of abolition is covered in detail in Rock, P. (2019a) 158 See Newburn, T. (1991) Permission and Regulation: Law and morals in post-war Britain, London: Routledge, and Rock, P. (2019a) for accounts of other Private Member’s Bills affecting moral change in the period 159 In his account of that period the Prime Minister at the time of initial abolition, Harold Wilson (Wilson, 1971: 57), said: ‘The Labour party, in common with the other parties, did not regard [abolition] as one for a party programme or manifesto. We felt that, as with many other issues involving decisions based on conscience, there should be a free vote of the House. We had made clear throughout, however, that we would provide Government time for getting such a Bill through if it were the free will of the House’ 160 Discussed in detail in Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit. Chapters 2 and 3 161 Blom-Cooper, L.J and Morris, T. (2004) With Malice Aforethought: A study of the crime and punishment for homicide, Oxford: Hart Publishing, at p. 100 162 Conservative Party Archive, Bodleian Library, CRD 3/19/6, Heath to Jellicoe, 9th Feb 1965 163 Quoted in Windlesham (1993) op. cit., p. 114 164 ‘Police must ACT “as the Queen’s Constabulary”,’ The Times, 20th January 1966 165 Quoted in Windlesham (1993) op. cit. at p. 118 166 Quoted in Sandbrook (2006) op. cit. at pp. 277–78 167 Labour Party, 1966, Time for Decision, London: Labour Party 168 See the chapter ‘The Pursuit of Innovation’ in Downes (2021) op. cit. for details of the proposed parole system 169 Conservative Party, 1966, Action Not Words: A new Conservative Programme, London: Conservative Party 170 Phraseology that Home Office officials felt sounded ‘over-dramatic’, potentially giving a false impression of the White Paper CRI15/1/6 171 Butler, D. and King, A. 1967, The British General Election of 1966, London: Macmillan 172 Organised crime and London’s gangland became the focus of considerable media coverage in the 1960s, not least as a consequence of Ron and Reg Kray (the Kray twins), publicity-hungry brothers whose activities included protection rackets, armed robbery and involvement in enterprises such as pubs and nightclubs. The Krays were sentenced to life imprisonment in 1969 for the murders of George Cornell and Jack ‘the hat’ McVitie. Based north of the Thames, their main rivals were the south London-based Richardson family. John Pearson’s (1995) The Profession of Violence: The rise and fall of the Kray twins (4th ed., Harper Collins) offers one of the finest accounts of the period 173 See, for example, Cohen, S. 1972, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers, London: MacGibbon and Kee; and Ch. 1 above 174 In part as a consequence of his personal manifesto for liberal social reform outlined in Jenkins, R. (1959) The Labour Case, Harmondsworth: Penguin, as well as his role as Home Secretary in facilitating various pieces of so-called ‘permissive’ legislation. See Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit. 175 As is made clear in Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit. Chapters 4–7; see also, Newburn, T. (1991) op. cit. 176 Hall, S. (1980) Reformism and the Legislation of Consent, in National Deviancy Conference (ed.) Permissiveness and Control, Basingstoke: Macmillan 177 See, for example, Booker, C. (1969) The Neophiliacs, London: Paladin; Gummer, J.S. (1971) The Permissive Society, London: Cassell and Co; Davies, C. (1975) The Permissive Society, London; Pitman 178 See Richards, P. (1970) Parliament and Conscience, London: Allen and Unwin 179 Davies, C. (1975) Permissive Britain, London: Pitman; Davies, C. (2004) The Strange Death of Moral Britain, New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers; Hitchens, P. (2003) A Brief History of Crime, London: Atlantic Books

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970 45 180 Marwick, A. (1982) British Society Since 1945, Harmondsworth: Penguin; Melly, G. (1972) Revolt into Style, Harmondsworth: Penguin 181 See Hall, S. (1980) op. cit.; Newburn, T. (1991) op. cit.; Sandbrook, D. (2006) White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, London: Abacus 182 A member of the Oxford Group (‘Moral rearmament’) in the 1930s, Whitehouse was a teacher and campaigner. She became a fierce critic of a range of people and institutions, not least the BBC, which she viewed as propagandising on behalf of promiscuity and infidelity and as being responsible for what she perceived as the rapid moral decline evident in the 1960s 183 Whitehouse, M. (1982) A Most Dangerous Woman? Lion Publishing, at pp. 14–15 184 A British journalist and satirist who, in the 1960s, became increasingly critical of what he perceived to be the moral failings of the age 185 Frank Pakenham, 7th Lord Longford, a Labour who held various cabinet positions between the late 1940s and late 1960s. Heavily involved in penal reform, a devout Christian he became heavily involved in campaigns against pornography and the commercial exploitation of sex 186 A British pop star who rose to fame in the late 1950s. He became an increasingly active Christian from the mid-1960s, becoming involved in a variety of campaigns and charitable works 187 Though couched in very different language, both moral failure and the undermining of the nuclear family were significant themes in so-called ‘right realist’ views of crime that emerged in the 1980s via the likes of Murray, C. (1999) The Underclass Revisited, Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute) and still have echoes to this day via commentators such as Peter Hitchens (2003) op. cit. 188 Lord Stonham, HL Deb, 10th May 1967, Vol. 282, at Col. 1431 189 Hansard HC Deb, 738, Col. 66, 12th December 1966 190 Quoted in Hood, R. (1974) Criminology and penal change: A case study of the nature and impact of some recent advice to governments, in Hood, R. (ed.) Criminology and Penal Policy: Essays in honour of Sir Leon Radzinowicz, London: Heinemann, at p. 394 191 Hood (1974) op. cit. at pp. 396–97 192 Brooke, H., Home Secretary from 13th July 1962 to 16th October 1964 193 Quoted in Hood, R. (1974) op. cit., p. 98 194 Hood, R. (1974) op. cit., p. 98 195 Labour Party (1964) Crime: A Challenge to Us All, London: Labour Party 196 Jenkins, R. (1991) op. cit., p. 199 197 Named after its chairman, Louis Mountbatten, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma, Admiral of the Fleet and member of the British Royal Family 198 This is all covered in detail in Downes, D. (2021) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Vol. 3: The Rise and Fall of Penal Hope, London: Routledge 199 Hansard, HC Debs, 12th December 1966, Vol. 738, Col. 52 200 Quoted in Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit., p. 112 201 See Cottrell, R.C. Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The rise of America’s 1960s counterculture, Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield 202 Young, J. (1971) The Drugtakers: The social meaning of drug use, London: Paladin 203 Bean, P. (1974) The Social Control of Drugs, London: Martin Robertson 204 The ‘British system’ that was in operation at the time was described as ‘little more than masterly inactivity in the face . . . of an almost non-existent addiction problem’. Downes, D. (1987) The drug addict as folk devil, in Rock, P. (ed.) Drugs and Politics, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books; though see Spear, B. (1969) The growth of heroin addiction in the United Kingdom, British Journal of Addiction, 64, 245–55, on the beginnings of the heroin problem in the 1950s 205 Ministry of Health and the Scottish Home and Health Department (1961) Drug Addiction: Report of the Interdepartmental Committee, London: HMSO; Bewley T. H. (1970) The Drug Situation in England and Wales. International Journal of

46

206 207

208 209 210 211 212 213

214

215 216 217 218 219

220

221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228

The Changing Politics of Law and Order Offender Therapy, 14(2):72–80; Mahon, T.A. (1971) The British System, Past and Present, International Journal of the Addictions, 6:4, 627–634 Blackwell, J. (1988) The saboteurs of Britain’s opiate policy: over-prescribing physicians or American-style junkies?, International Journal of the Addictions, 23, 517–26 Strang, J., Ruben, S., Farrell, M., Witton, J., Keaney, F. and Gossop, M. (2005) The history of prescribing heroin and other injectable drugs as addiction treatment in the UK, in Strang, J. and Gossop, M. (eds.) Heroin Addiction and the British System, Vol. 2: Treatment and Policy Responses, London: Routledge, at p. 5 Ministry of Health and the Scottish Home and Health Department (1965) Drug Addiction: Second Report of the Interdepartmental Committee, London: HMSO CAB 134/1995, July 1963 Jackson, L.A. (2008) ‘The Coffee Club Menace’, Cultural and Social History, 5:3, 289–308 Smart, C. (1984) Social policy and drug addiction: A critical study of policy development, British Journal of Addiction, 79, 31–39, at p.38 Report of the Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence, Hallucinogens Subcommittee, London: HMSO Barbara Wootton, 1897–1988, was an influential criminologist-politician. She became Professor at Bedford College, University of London in 1948 and was President of the British Sociological Association from 1959 and 1964. She served on four Royal Commissions and was created Baroness Wootton of Abinger in 1958. Further detail can be found in: Oakley, A. (2015) A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century, London: Bloomsbury Quoted in Oakley, A. (2012) The strange case of the two Wootton Reports: What can we learn about the evidence-policy relationship?, Evidence and Policy, 8, 3, 267–283, at p. 274; See also the examples quoted in Young, J. (1971) The Drugtakers: The social meaning of drug use, London: Paladin, Ch. 10 Morgan, K.O. (1997) Callaghan: A Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, at p. 321 Oakley, A. (2012) op. cit. Hansard, HC Deb 23rd January 1969, Vol. 776, at Col. 662 Hansard, House of Commons, 27th January 1969, Col. 958 His biographer said of Callaghan that, ‘By background and outlook, he embodied the traditional working-class virtues of thrift, hard work, and respectable artisan industry and craftsmanship. He took pride in his public stand against permissiveness and spoke with contempt in later years of the cynical, unrepresentative, and destructive view of the bourgeois chattering classes.’ Morgan, K. (1997) Callaghan: A Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, at p. 321 Jay, P. (1962) A plan for family bureaux, in Donnison, D., Jay, P. and Stewart, M. The Ingleby Report: Three Critical Essays, London: Fabian Society; see also: Donnison, D. and Stewart, M. (1958) The Child and the Social Services, Fabian Research Series 196, London: Fabian Society Bottoms, A.E. (1974) On the decriminalisation of the English juvenile courts, in Hood, R. (ed.) Crime, Criminology and Public Policy, London: Heinemann An initial proposal that the paper be called Helping Young People in Trouble was rejected as likely to be viewed as being ‘sentimental’, CAB 134/2859 CAB 134/2859, H Committee, 5th April 1968 Bottoms, A.E. (1974) op. cit. Rutter, M. and Giller, H. (1983) Juvenile Delinquency: Trends and perspectives, Harmondsworth: Penguin Pitts, J. (1988) The Politics of Juvenile Crime, London: Sage, at p. 15 Hansard, HC Debs, March 1969, Vol. 779, at Col. 1196 Conservative MP who served as Solicitor General (1962–64) and Attorney General (1970–74). From 1968–70 he was a Shadow spokesperson with particular responsibility for the law

The Politics of Law and Order in a Changing Society, 1945–1970 47 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238

Hansard, HC Debs, March 1969, Vol. 779, at Col. 1290 ‘Tapes reveal planted evidence’, The Times, 29th November 1969 Callaghan J. (1987) op. cit., p. 254 Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit., p. 106 Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit., p. 140 Miliband, R. (1969) The State in Capitalist Society, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, at p. 69 Kavanagh, D. and Morris, P. (1989) Consensus Politics From Attlee to Major, Oxford: Blackwell, at p. 13 Morris, P. (1989) op. cit, p. 119 Callaghan, J. (1983) Cumber and variableness, in The Home Office: Perspectives on Policy and Administration: Bicentenary Lectures 1982, London: RIPA, at p. 21 Faulkner, D. (2006) Crime, State and Citizen: A field full of folk, Winchester: Waterside Press, 2nd ed, p.108

3

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979

Although occasional differences of emphasis were visible between Tories and Labour, through the bulk of the post-war period to the end of the sixties not only was there broad ideological similarity between the parties on matters of crime and punishment but, wherever possible, the Home Secretary and his shadow endeavoured to minimise public dispute. Indeed, as we have seen, from time to time cross-party support was important in keeping government business on track. Elections reflected this, with manifestos paying relatively little attention to home affairs and electoral politics generally eschewing competition around such matters. The low-key treatment of law and order, and the general avoidance of party political difference in this matter, began to change in 1970.

Selsdon man The meeting of the Conservative shadow cabinet at Selsdon Park1 early that year, best known for Harold Wilson’s subsequent lampooning of the free market ‘Selsdon man’, can arguably also be seen as the birthplace of ‘law and order’ in British electoral politics, albeit that its first steps were somewhat farcical. With a general election looming, a wide range of issues was discussed at the Tory strategy meeting, though it appears home affairs was not among them. Indeed, in his leader’s speech to party conference three months previously, Edward Heath’s only reference to law and order had been to the anticipated vote on capital punishment at the end of that parliamentary session. At Selsdon, a press briefing had been organised for the Saturday lunchtime but, according to a variety of sources, preoccupied with other matters Ted Heath had entirely forgotten that he was due to address journalists. Flustered, and with little or nothing to announce, he sought advice. Iain Macleod2 is said to have responded ‘It’s quite easy, Ted. Just tell them we believe in law and order, that always goes down well.’3 Heath did as advised to great if somewhat unplanned, even unwanted, success. The Sunday papers the following day all trumpeted the party’s new message and an image emerged, which Wilson later sought to capitalise on, of a political party that had lurched to the right.4 The Sunday Telegraph front page for example said, ‘Tories will campaign for law and order’.5 It went on, ‘The decision reflects the party leadership’s feeling of growing public concern about demonstrations by

DOI: 10.4324/9781003330981-4

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 49 students and disruption of sporting events.6 It also, no doubt, reflects awareness of the appeal that this issue had for American republicans in the 1968 elections’. Heath had made clear that the issue of capital punishment, the abolition of which had only recently been formalised, would not be made a political issue despite concerns among Conservative rank and file. Instead, the intention would be to concentrate public attention on crime prevention and strengthening the police. Nevertheless, the tough message on crime seemed to strike a chord. In The Economist’s eyes, though the Conservatives had achieved the primary Selsdon aim of making them look like a government-in-waiting, they did not appear to be ‘a visibly compassionate one’.7 In the aftermath of the conference, shadow Home Secretary, Quintin Hogg, who had been one of the stronger advocates of a new approach, said that he hoped ‘that the events of the past few weeks have put the issue of crime and respect for law firmly on the political map. I hope also that remarks of mine, in private and public, have helped to put it there.’8 Ten days or so later, signalling his party’s intent and its willingness to shift the tone of political debate in this field, Hogg took aim at Harold Wilson, accusing him of having ‘presided complacently over the biggest crime wave of the century’ and that he intended ‘to wipe the smile off that complacent face in the next few months’.9 The forthcoming electoral campaign, he said, would aim ‘at nothing less than the reeducation and reorientation of public opinion on this issue’. A couple of months later, a large opinion poll commissioned by the Conservatives on law and order found that a sizeable majority of adults were concerned that not enough was being done about urban crime, and that the party’s supporters felt much more strongly about this than those of other parties. Three out of ten felt a Conservative government would do most to control crime and violence compared with only one out of ten that thought similarly about a Labour government.10 Hogg’s opposite number, James Callaghan, lost little time in responding to the criticism of the Labour government. In an interview with The Sunday Times,11 he said that he was concerned with political campaigns that deliberately sought to prey on people’s fears and argued that whatever the disagreements between the two main parties on the subject of crime, ‘squabbling over it is not simply undignified, it is positively dangerous’. Though bemoaning the outcome of the Selsdon Park meeting, he reiterated the Labour Party’s position that social, especially family, circumstances were key to understanding, and therefore responding to, crime: If we are to have [a ‘law and order’] campaign – and I admit it now looks inevitable – I can only say I’m glad it’s started already. At least it gives us time to educate the public about the complex realities that underlie this slogan. So we have the opportunity to appeal to the innate good sense and caution of the British people. We can also enlarge understanding. I know I sometimes go into prisons feeling tough but I always come away feeling that 90 per cent of the people there are not evil but somehow inadequate. The roots of crime are still social deprivation, broken homes and all the rest.12

50

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Similarly, at a party reception in the week after Selsdon, Harold Wilson said, ‘Where law and order has broken down in other advanced countries, this is because the authorities have refused to accept that social grievances must have social solutions. The Tories seek to disturb our society by the creation of social grievances we all thought we had got rid of a generation ago’.13 One of Callaghan’s responses to the increasing political focus on crime was to ask the Criminal Law Revision Committee to review all offences against the person, including homicide, in what was a clear attempt to find territory that might counterbalance the more permissive image of Labour Party penal policy given by the Children and Young Persons Act. Indeed, at one point Quintin Hogg was even asked by BBC radio’s ‘World at One’ whether Callaghan’s actions were an attempt to steal the Conservatives’ clothes and whether the Labour Party was ‘now eclipsing the Tories on the law and order issue.14 Nearly three months before parliament was dissolved it seemed clear that a new era in the politics of crime was dawning. Although the Conservatives had moved into more strident law and order territory in a somewhat unplanned, slightly chaotic manner, the shadow Home Secretary in particular seemed intent on using it as a means of attacking Labour’s record in this area. For the first time, it seemed, law and order might be a significant electoral factor. Indeed, it is for this reason that the election of June 1970, rather than that in 1979, is the one that should be seen as the real ‘watershed’ moment in British politics of ‘law and order’. All three major parties devoted more space in their manifestos to these issues than ever before and the Conservatives, continuing their post-Selsdon approach, framed the issue in party political terms, albeit in somewhat restrained fashion, arguing that ‘the Labour Government cannot entirely shrug off responsibility for the present situation’.15 This allusion pointed to the ‘serious rise in crime and violence’ and increased fear of both which the Conservatives attributed to the Labour Government having restricted ‘police recruitment at a critical time’.16 This contention skated over the extent to which police recruitment had been hampered throughout the entire post-war period by full employment and its implications for police pay levels and recruitment – every Home Secretary, from at least Butler to Callaghan had struggled with the problem of police numbers.17 But the most consequential departure from previous non- or bipartisan positions over ‘law and order’ was the connection drawn by the Conservatives between crime, protest and disorders associated with industrial disputes. Hitherto, the politics of law violation had been recognised as usually quite distinct from those of order defiance, which has a much longer history, especially in the realm of industrial conflict.18 Hence, it was a clear break with taken-for-granted rules of engagement for the Conservative manifesto to proclaim that ‘the law needs modernising and clarifying, and needs to be made less slow and cumbersome, particularly for dealing with offences – forcible entry, obstruction and violent offences connected with public order – peculiar to the age of demonstration and disruption’.19 This sweeping statement conveyed a sense of anomie combining several strands of 1960s’ dissidence: not only industrial strike action, both official and unofficial,

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 51 but also student ‘revolt’, youth cultures, Mods, Rockers, hippies and their defiance of convention, rising drug use and early signs of the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland. By way of reply, Labour’s manifesto stuck steadfastly to type, devoting almost no space to law and order – just over 200 of its nearly 12,000 words – and offering no criticism of its opponent on the subject. It reasserted its commitment to upholding the first duty of government: ‘to protect the citizen against violence, intimidation and crime’, but decried the breakdown of bipartisanship. Reflecting Callaghan’s earlier statements, the manifesto said: ‘Nothing could be more cynical than the current attempts of our opponents to exploit for party political ends the issue of crime and law enforcement’.20 Indeed, the Labour manifesto sought to reassure the electorate that ‘the streets of our cities are as safe today as those in any throughout the world. They must remain so.’21 It defended its record on police numbers, highlighted measures introduced to control gambling, transform youth justice, and pursue rehabilitation despite continued prison overcrowding. In a speech to students toward the beginning of the electoral campaign, Harold Wilson described the Conservative Party’s repositioning of itself after the Selsdon Park weekend as straightforward ‘Goldwaterism’.22 Accusing them of borrowing tactics reminiscent of the failed US Presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, he said that they had ‘falsified and exaggerated the facts about law and order in Britain’ and that he deplored ‘the increasing efforts of the Conservative leadership to stir up political and social conflict in their desire to introduce into our society imported doctrines and purported solutions’. Wilson’s speech prompted Quintin Hogg to write to take to the press in response. In a wide-ranging article he drew attention to what he said was close to a threefold increase in serious crime, overcrowded prisons, ‘other indications of serious breaches of civilised behaviour’ such as the deliberate prevention of the Foreign Secretary from speaking at the Oxford Union, and on the same day the injuries to 60 police officers during a protest in Grosvenor Square. He concluded: ‘I do not believe anyone doubts the good intentions of the Home Secretary. But, despite his best efforts, things do not appear to be improving . . . an Opposition spokesman on Home Affairs who did not draw attention to these things would simply not be doing his duty.’23 Later in the campaign Callaghan responded once more, accusing the Tories of wanting law and order, but at the expense of freedom. Their ‘short-term expedients’, he said, were ‘designed to please the Selsdon man who regards everything and everyone he dislikes as something to be put down’.24 A host of developments had occurred in the period prior to the 1970 General Election which appeared to embolden the Conservatives to attack the Labour government’s record on ‘law and order’. The ‘permissive society’ debate had begun in earnest, centring on abortion and homosexual law reform but ranging much more widely.25 Mary Whitehouse was now cemented as a public figure, and her assaults on the BBC increased in regularity and intensity. Censorship of plays by the Lord Chamberlain was ended. Several prosecutions of publishers, in recent times most notably of Last Exit to Brooklyn on grounds of its obscene character, proved abortive.26 A backlash would soon see rather different results in

52

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

cases brought against the underground magazines International Times and Oz in the years to come.27 In many European universities, as well as those of the UK, and the USA, student demonstrations and occupations challenged their lack of a voice in college governance and curricular matters. In Paris, in May ’68, student protests came close to toppling the government. In 1967, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones was successfully prosecuted for possession of four amphetamine tablets but gained a succes d’estime in the process.28 Enoch Powell predicted ‘rivers of blood’ in a tirade against immigration and for immigrants’ repatriation. Anti-apartheid demonstrations against the all-white South African rugby team tour occurred during the election campaign. A spate of strikes led to a White Paper29 by the Labour government to regulate industrial action by proposing a Commission to examine disputes, a secret ballot before a strike could be called and a cooling-off period of up to two months between a strike threat and its activation. Opposition from the trade unions led to the withdrawal of the proposals, a symbolic defeat for the government which was arguably the main reason for their unexpected defeat in the 1970 election. In this somewhat unsettling context, ‘law and order’ issues, for the first time, assumed some prominence in media coverage of an election. A period of rapid social change, and no little ferment, led law and order issues to become more prominent in popular concerns, especially among that section of the electorate most likely to vote Conservative. The marked difference between the parties grew in significance, with 60 per cent of Conservative addresses compared to only 15 per cent of Labour’s mentioning ‘law and order’ topics. ‘Law and order’ rose to sixth in the Conservative ‘top ten’ of issues without figuring at all in those of Labour.30 An October election had been widely anticipated and hoping to steal a march on his opponents and believing his antiSelsdon man rhetoric was working in Labour’s favour, Wilson called it for June. In what was arguably the most important election since 1951, perhaps more so as it led to changes which reshaped British politics decisively a decade later, Heath won a clear majority of 30 on a 4.7 per cent swing, the largest recorded since 1945, though on the basis of a record low turnout in the post-war period. ‘Labour was punished for four years of economic uncertainty . . . The Conservatives’ victory was the reward for being an acceptable alternative to a government that had been through troubled times’.31

Clear blue water? The shift in law and order politics, at a rhetorical level at least, reflected broader shifts in British politics. Though it might be too much of a stretch to mark the 1970 election as some precise end to political consensus in Britain, it was nevertheless the case that there had been a sense, as Sandbrook put it, that ‘political and economic life in the 1950s and 1960s fell between universally accepted limits’.32 In Samuel Beer’s terms, these decades were ones in which the ConservativeLabour battle dealt largely with questions of ‘more’ or ‘less’ in that party differences were ‘marginal’ and quantitative rather than, in some fundamental sense, matters of high principle.33 Governments, in broad terms, tended to accept the

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 53 policies of their predecessors and, as a consequence, the fifties and sixties saw a generalised working consensus in a number of areas, including foreign policy and defence, on the running of a broadly Keynsian mixed economy, full employment, on the importance and role of trade unions, and a commitment to welfare. Though criminal justice and penal policy remained very much a behind-the-scenes area of governmental activity – until such time as there was some sort of crisis – it was also managed and organised in the same way, within broadly understood and accepted limits. One of these was that such matters were to be treated wherever possible as non-party-political matters. They were not matters of competition and electoral contestation. Unplanned or not, from the 1970 election on (indeed, from Selsdon on) this ‘consensus’ began to fracture.34 Although the new, seemingly tough, stance on crime had been something of a distinguishing feature of the election campaign, it was not to be fully reflected in the Heath government’s policymaking. Indeed, in early 1971 The Times commented that ‘one of the oddities of the politics of 1970 was the cooling down of the issue of law and order from the day that the Conservatives came back to power. Indeed, since Mr Maudling went to the Home Office, the issue has slipped back as a Conservative priority, and it can now be taken for granted that there will be no strong legislation this session and no more than a fairly routine Criminal Justice Bill next session. Once in office the Conservatives have learnt that it is one thing to hew an opportunistic plank for an election platform and another thing to draft wise law’.35 So long as one sees major Criminal Justice Bills as being the summation of governmental activity in this field36 then this picture is partially correct, though even there the description of what was to become the 1972 Criminal Justice Act as ‘fairly routine’ is perhaps open to question. Maudling was neither a reformist nor, despite his support for capital punishment, a hard-line, or even very active, Home Secretary. Indeed, one biographer suggests that his ‘rationality and reasonableness were ideal qualities for a humane, reforming Home Secretary’. However, much of his tenure was dominated by the worsening conflict in Northern Ireland and he proved ‘ill-suited’ to the situation.37 Nevertheless, so far as the first years of the Heath government are concerned, in addition to the emergent Criminal Justice Act there were two other areas in which important developments occurred: one was drugs and the passage of the Misuse of Drugs Act; the other juvenile justice and rowing back from full implementation of the Children and Young Persons Act 1969. At this point, drugs continued to be an area in which party political differences, to the extent they existed at all, were muted. Activity in the area was notable nonetheless, for this was an early occasion in which governmental concern about possibly negative public opinion led to a toughening up of legislation. A Misuse of Drugs Bill had initially been introduced in parliament by Labour in March 1970, successfully receiving its second reading. The general election caused it to lapse, but it was quickly reintroduced by Maudling soon after the Conservatives took office. Despite the broad cross-party agreement, the Bill was not without controversy. Promoted by Callaghan before the election, the original plan was to have a Bill that would include higher penalties for trafficking and lighter ones

54

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

for possession. However, according to his colleague, Richard Crossman, there was ‘an absolutely outrageous leak’38 saying that Callaghan had been planning to go soft on drugs and had consequently been overruled by cabinet. Although this appeared to be untrue it did force Callaghan back to cabinet to check that the original proposals could be pursued. There were clearly some within cabinet who were concerned, and the carefully worded cabinet minutes say: ‘Further reflection, however, has suggested that public opinion might well regard a change [of the kind originally proposed] as indicating too lenient an attitude on the part of the Government towards the potentially dangerous practice of drug-taking; and the Cabinet would wish to consider whether the political damage which the Government might suffer if this impression gained ground was sufficiently serious to justify a modification of the terms of the Bill before it was introduced.’39 There were two options according to Callaghan. They could continue with the threefold classification of drugs as originally proposed but increase the penalties for possession in the two most serious categories from three to five years in the case of cannabis, and from five to seven years in the case of heroin. Or, alternatively, they could abandon the distinctions altogether and provide single maximum penalties for possession and trafficking respectively. It was the latter option he favoured, though this would involve reducing the penalties for cannabis possession. Cabinet agreed that there was a danger in such a proposal, accepting that this ‘apparent concession to permissive tendencies in society’ would be unlikely to be offset by other, tougher measures. On the other hand, it thought an increase of the penalty to a maximum of seven years’ imprisonment was unrealistic and, in the end a compromise of five years was agreed. In Crossman’s words, ‘It became absolutely clear that the issue was really whether we should kowtow to public opinion or not’.40 The Bill was reintroduced after the election in almost identical form. Maudling, the new Home Secretary, reported that he had considered the case for legalising cannabis but, like Callaghan before him, decided that the arguments against doing so were conclusive.41 As had occurred before the election, cabinet once again discussed the wisdom of the proposed new penalties attaching to the now distinctive offences of trafficking and possession. Maudling was keen to signal the seriousness of trafficking offences with increased penalties, but there were concerns within cabinet about some of the proposed penalties for possession, not least attaching to cannabis possession, which some described as ‘unrealistically high’. In the event, the Conservative administration was no keener than its Labour predecessor to be labelled ‘permissive’, and the cabinet conclusion was that a reduction in penalties ‘would give an undesirable appearance that the Government attached less importance to the gravity of the offences than the previous Government’.42 Maudling’s other main legislative contribution while Home Secretary was the Criminal Justice Act 1972. Windlesham described the motivation behind the Act as lying ‘in the desire of ministers to be seen to be taking action in the field of criminal justice without any ideologically dominant objectives to fuel the legislation’.43 Ideological it may not have been, but it did offer an opportunity for

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 55 the Conservative government to remove the limit on the courts’ discretion that Labour had introduced five years earlier with the mandatory suspended sentence of imprisonment. The Act also reduced the maximum length of the operational period of the sentence from three years to two and introduced the suspended sentence supervision order, thus giving a role to the probation service that they had long argued for.44 Six years prior to the Act Roy Jenkins had tasked the Advisory Council on the Penal System with examining what amendments might be made to ‘non-custodial penalties, disabilities and other requirements which may be imposed on offenders’.45 With the government already devoting attention to how the Children and Young Persons Act would be implemented, a sub-committee of the Advisory Council, chaired by Barbara Wootton, focused its attentions on offenders aged 17 and above. ‘Day fines’ were considered but rejected as impractical at the time. Nevertheless, the Committee acknowledged that the fine was by far the most commonly used of all available penalties, being imposed on 95% of all offenders found guilty of non-indictable offences in 1969, and noted that it appeared ‘to be one of the most effective in relation to offenders of almost all age groups and criminal histories’.46 It considered a range of other initiatives including attendance centres, sentence deferment, probation and, most notably, community service. Wootton’s influence was central to the latter proposals, the idea emerging ‘on the common-sense basis that instead of sending people to prison it would be better to get them to do some useful work’.47 The Home Office was immediately keen, setting up an internal development group followed by pilot initiatives. In introducing the idea of the new Community Service Orders, Maudling echoed Wootton’s feelings: ‘I was attracted from the start by the idea that people who have committed minor offences would be better occupied doing a service to their fellow citizens than sitting alongside others in a crowded gaol.’48 As Roger Hood later observed, ‘the enthusiasm with which [community service] was embraced in both Houses of Parliament simply reflected its ideological appeal.’49 Community service, it was argued, would need to be done voluntarily, and if not undertaken in that spirit the alternative would continue to be prison. In short, CSOs appeared to be a straightforward idea and one that was capable of appealing to a variety of audiences. That it was intended as an alternative to custody was not made clear in the Criminal Justice Act 1972 which simply restricted its use to imprisonable offences.50 Piloted from 1971, CSOs were implemented nationally from 1978 and have been argued to be ‘one of the great success stories in penal reform’.51 The other major decisions in the penal field prior to the next general election in 1974 concerned the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 and were more about non-implementation than government action. The Conservative Party continued broadly to hold to the view that responsibility for children ought most appropriately to be dealt with by the Department of Health rather than the Home Office and that, notwithstanding the failure of the previous governments to make such a change, so far as possible policymaking in this field ought to be dealt with outside of party politics. The new government signalled support for elements of the Act,

56

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

and for elements of its general philosophy, not least keeping children away from courts, but also quickly outlined some of its criticisms and concerns. In particular, it said that there would be no increase in the age of criminal responsibility above 12 and also no statutory restriction on the prosecution of juveniles above that age. In addition, and certainly for the time being, the new government also announced that neither attendance centre nor detention centre orders would be removed. Although the Labour Party attacked the government for its slow and partial implementation,52 the change of government in 1974 would only reinforce the direction of travel.

Conflict escalates The shift in the politics of crime control that had become more visible in 1970 became more marked in the elections of 1974. The Conservative claim in the February 1974 election to some success in reducing crime, the crime rate having risen only slightly in the 1970–73 period, was of negligible, if any, impact compared with the rout of the government in terms of order-defiance. Central to this story is the 1972 miners’ strike, and its eventual conclusion with the almost complete capitulation of the Heath government. The violence involved and the strategies used by the miners were to have significant and lasting effects. Although industrial relations were relatively peaceful in the early 1970s, the 1972 strike saw both mass picketing and the appearance of the tactic of using ‘flying pickets’, and these and the violence that characterised the dispute were to become regular features of many of the major strikes in the years to come.53 The epicentre of the picketing was the Saltley coking station, with estimates suggesting that up to 3,000 miners were present at one stage. Heath called a state of emergency, and with the eventual successful closure of Saltley, it was only a short period later that a sizeable settlement was made to the mineworkers. Saltley was significant and symbolic for those on both sides.54 It led the miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill, to proclaim it a day that would ‘go down in trade union history’.55 It reinforced the Conservative government’s view that such tactics were a victory for lawbreakers and offered ‘disturbing evidence of the ease with which, by assembling large crowds, militants could flout the law with impunity because of the risk that attempts to enforce it would provoke disorder on a large scale’.56 For Margaret Thatcher, then Secretary of State for Education and a member of the cabinet, for the Conservative government ‘what happened at Saltley took on no less significance than it did for the Left’.57 The miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1973 created a fuel crisis which led the government to announce a three-day week from the end of December. With no little hubris, the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, then called a general election on the theme of ‘Who Governs?’. The result, after Heath had failed in a bid to form a coalition government with the Liberals, was a Labour minority government also in alliance with the Liberals. The tenuous position that Wilson found himself in after February 1974 could not last, and a fresh election was called in October 1974, resulting in a narrow win for Labour. Both 1974 Labour manifestos made

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 57 little mention of crime and criminal justice issues, a strategy which certainly did not seem to harm them electorally. In October 1974, however, the Conservative Party, now in Opposition, again devoted a substantial part of its manifesto to such matters. It vigorously pursued the approach of attacking the government’s record, but with a significant difference. On this occasion, it was at least as much the government’s integrity as its policies and priorities that was condemned. Its headline claim was that: ‘At a time when there are too many people prepared to take the law into their own hands, a Conservative government, backed by public opinion, will uphold the rule of law. Without law, there can be no freedom.’ More particularly, the manifesto said that recently ‘the law has been under attack and these attacks have all too often been condoned and even endorsed by members and supporters of the present Government.’58 This veiled reference to the support given by Labour MPs and key members of the then Shadow Cabinet, such as Tony Benn to the National Union of Mineworkers, and the conduct of mass picketing in 1973, gave the Conservative Party a crucial opening.59 The Clay Cross affair, in which the government had refused to initiate proceedings against local Labour councillors for refusing to enforce Conservative legislation to increase council house rents, provided further evidence of what they felt was Labour’s partial, not wholesale, support for the law. ‘Respect for the law cannot be selective . . . Without law there can be no freedom.’60 In an early echo of what was to come later in the decade, the manifesto promised to strengthen the police, described as ‘our principal defenders against internal attack’. Nevertheless, although sixty per cent of Conservative addresses mentioned ‘law and order’ compared to only two per cent of Labour and seven per cent of Liberal, it was a theme that remained fairly marginal in the October election which Labour under Harold Wilson called to gain a working majority.61 Labour won but less decisively than expected, given a succession of highly favourable opinion polls, with an overall majority of only three. Above all, the second of the two 1974 elections signified that the British people were deeply divided on which party had the capability to achieve stable industrial relations and economic prosperity. Labour in government themselves remained divided on how best to do so, the Labour Left – now animated by the conversion of Tony Benn to ‘far Left’ principles – resisting any further curbs on the strikes which were becoming increasingly prevalent, irksome at best and deeply resented at worst. In this context, it was a master-stroke of Conservative electoral strategy to conflate orderdefiance with law-breaking, industrial disorder with ‘law and order’, especially as the postponement of the next election to the last minute of a full five-year term had involved the Labour government in the travails of the ‘Winter of Discontent’, including a ‘day of action’ in which an estimated one and a half million workers took part in the largest industrial action since the 1926 General Strike,62 and in which the industrial actions involving grave-diggers and rubbish collectors gave symbolic scope aplenty to calls for order to be restored. For two and a half years from early 1974, the new Home Secretary had been Roy Jenkins, who had also been deputy leader of his party and had harboured hopes of the Foreign Office. With that and the Treasury ruled out he found himself

58

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

back in the Home Office, the only post-war Home Secretary to hold the position on two separate occasions. Whereas his first period as Home Secretary is widely admired, the second period is largely forgotten. Much time was taken up with proposed race relations legislation and also with Northern Ireland – his achievements included ending the forced-feeding of Irish hunger strikers in 1974 – as well as dealing with backbench initiatives attempting to restore capital punishment. In October 1975 Jenkins announced that the prison control units system was to be phased out, though a system of segregation would be maintained for those prisoners that had to be kept separate from the rest of the prison population ‘in the interests of good order and discipline’.63 There were those within the Home Office that favoured further reform of juvenile justice, perhaps even implementation of the remaining elements of the 1969 Act, but there was little sense of any political interest from Jenkins or his successor.64 By contrast, a Conservative Party review of juvenile justice in the 1970s led to the development of a commitment to a ‘short sharp shock’ detention centre, modelled on elements of the style and approach in military prisons, that would be available for ‘a minority of hardened young thugs, who openly laugh and thumb their noses at the whole working of the juvenile courts’.65 By the mid-1970s the parliamentary landscape had undergone hugely significant change. Edward Heath had lost the leadership of the Conservative Party to Margaret Thatcher in February 1975, and a year later Jim Callaghan replaced Harold Wilson as Prime Minister. Callaghan’s accession meant the end of Jenkins’ hopes of leading the party and he left for the European Commission, being replaced in the Home Office by Merlyn Rees. Rees was a close friend and confidante of Callaghan’s and had previously served in both Northern Ireland and the Home Office. His two and a half years as Home Secretary involved little significant legislative activity, but in a number of ways, were otherwise quite active. The major piece of parliamentary business was a Criminal Law Bill that Rees inherited from Jenkins,66 and which was something of a hotchpotch. It began life as a fairly mundane Bill but gradually acquired a large range of additional provisions as Criminal Justice Bills so often did – relating to matters as diverse as bomb hoaxes and obscenity, and with the late addition of partly suspended sentences – lending it ‘a Heath Robinson appearance’ by the time it eventually made it into law in July 1977.67 On the Labour side, the partly suspended sentence had been justified in terms that highlighted problems of prison overcrowding together with the reformative potential of the supervision requirements of the new sentence.68 A couple of years earlier in a speech to the Howard League, Roy Jenkins had noted that the current prison population was 40,000 and that should it rise to 42,000 or thereabouts ‘conditions in the system would approach the intolerable, and drastic action to relieve the position will be inescapable’.69 On the Opposition side, their spokesman focused on the potential of ‘a short, sharp and I hope nasty taste of prison’.70 Although the partly suspended sentence had a ‘short and inglorious’ life, this was one of the few occasions when the ‘language of the Conservative Right’ synchronised ‘with the tenets of the reformist Left’.71 Merlyn Rees’ other major inheritance from Jenkins was the Fisher Inquiry,72 established in response to concerns about a potential miscarriage of justice. The

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 59 case involved the murder of a mixed-race man, Maxwell Confait, in 1972, and the subsequent conviction for his manslaughter of Colin Lattimore, an 18-yearold man with very significant learning difficulties. Confait’s house had also been set on fire, and Lattimore and two other juveniles were also convicted of arson. In his report, delivered in 1977, Fisher concluded that Lattimore’s confession was unsafe – feeling that he had probably been persuaded to confess by the two juveniles – and also that the juveniles’ confessions had most likely been falsified by the police in order to incriminate Lattimore. In terms of its long-term impact, Fisher’s crucial observation was arguably that ‘the police at present do not see it as their duty to initiate enquiries which might point to the fact that they might have got the wrong man, or that for some other reason the prosecution should fail. And there is nobody outside the police who regards it as his duty to spur the police on to question the case and to follow lines of enquiry which might be inconsistent with it’.73 Before Fisher had reported, Merlyn Rees had submitted a paper to cabinet colleagues in which he had noted ‘growing concern among lawyers and legal commentators about pre-trial prosecution procedures’ and that the forthcoming Report of the Fisher Inquiry ‘would add to the pressure for a wide review’.74 In addition to these growing worries about police conduct and about the efficacy of the Judges’ Rules that governed pre-trial practices, Rees was concerned that piecemeal reform without some form of broad inquiry might be perceived as an attack on the police, and that in the absence of an inquiry the government might find it difficult to defeat some of the amendments that were being raised in the Committee Stage of the Criminal Law Bill currently before parliament. Rees proposed a Royal Commission – on Criminal Procedure – and having secured cabinet support it was announced in Parliament by Callaghan within days.75 Established by a Labour government, by the time it reported, a new Conservative administration would be long settled in power. The outcome of the Royal Commission can be left for later, but there was an aspect of its reception and early deliberations that is worthy of comment at this point as it is indicative of the shifting nature of law and order politics in this period. The police service was feeling increasingly beleaguered, and many within its ranks saw the appointment of the Royal Commission as a further attack both on its integrity and on its likely future ability to do its job. As the Superintendents’ Association put it in its evidence to the Commission: ‘In 1978 it is regrettable but true that our normal state of society is under serious threat. Crime, particularly involving violence is increased and public disorder is almost the norm in many places. This is certainly not a time for any relaxation of police powers in favour of the liberty of the individual.’76 Increasingly, the police were becoming the front line in a new political battle around law and order.

A change at the helm Heath’s defeat by miners had led to the election of a successor who would radically change the tone of the Conservative Party’s law and order politics. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher took little time in signalling the shift and, by contrast with Heath’s almost total avoidance of the subject of law and order, her first party

60

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

conference speech as leader in 1975 offered a taste of things to come. Toward the end of her speech she said: I come last to what many would put first, the rule of law. The first people to uphold the law should be governments, and it is tragic that the Socialist Government, to its lasting shame, should have lost its nerve and shed its principles over the People’s Republic of Clay Cross,77 and that a group of the Labour Party should have tried to turn the Shrewsbury pickets78 into martyrs. On both occasions the law was broken and on one violence was done. No decent society can live like that, and no responsible party should condone it. The first duty of government is to uphold the law, and if it tries to bob, weave and duck round that duty when it is inconvenient, the governed will do exactly the same thing, and then nothing will be safe, not home, not liberty, not life itself.79 The theme was picked up early in 1976 with the publication of The Right Approach: A statement of Conservative aims, in which the Labour Party was accused of condoning and encouraging ‘undemocratic challenges to the authority of Parliament’. In addition to proposals to strengthen crime prevention, to tackle persistent juvenile offenders and seek to review and amend Labour’s 1969 Children and Young Persons Act (which of course Heath’s Conservative government had anyway barely implemented) much was made of the central importance of support for the police service: A government determined to protect individual liberties and to uphold the law must recognise that one of its first priorities should be to strengthen our police forces to cope with increasing crime and terrorism. This is why we have made it clear that one of the areas where public expenditure must not be cut, indeed where spending must be increased, is on the police. . . More important than ensuring that the police have adequate resources is that there should be a positive commitment by Parliament, politicians and the people as a whole to our police service. A nation which fails to support its police will not succeed in protecting its citizens’ freedoms.80 As the Conservative Party was becoming more outspoken on law and order, so elements of the police service were themselves becoming more miIitant. In 1975, the Police Federation mounted a campaign to focus greater attention on rising crime and to encourage the ‘“silent majority” to be more assertive in support of the police and the rule of law’,81 a campaign criticised by Roy Jenkins. Behind the scenes, dissatisfaction with the Labour government’s attitude led to a meeting between the Federation, the newly elected Opposition Leader and Shadow Home Secretary, William Whitelaw. In addition to unhappiness over their general treatment, the Federation was once again particularly incensed at what were perceived as successive governmental failures on police pay. This unhappiness led to a display of such hostility toward Merlyn Rees at the Federation’s conference

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 61 in 197782 that Callaghan vowed that so long as he was Prime Minister no Labour Home Secretary would again attend the conference. That Callaghan, a former parliamentary representative of the Police Federation, and a highly successful one, would be so moved, is an indication of the level of anger the service’s treatment of Rees provoked. Nevertheless, concerned about the potentially damaging impact a hostile police service might have on a fragile government, a committee of inquiry under Lord Edmund-Davies was established to consider the issue of police remuneration. Eventually reporting in mid-1978, it recommended a huge 30% increase in a police constable’s pay, as well as substantial rises at other ranks, and urged that a settlement should be reached as early as possible. The Labour government, facing financial challenges on a number of fronts, insisted it would phase in the award over two years, with one half being paid as a first instalment. Full and immediate implementation of Edmund Davies became an easy way for the Conservative Opposition to distinguish itself in the increasingly central territory of law and order. Although it couldn’t claim to have the impact on government that Saltley had had half a decade earlier, the industrial dispute at the Grunwick Processing Laboratories in north London which began in late summer 1976 was arguably the highest profile of the decade. Beginning after a single sacking, and a later walk out of other workers, the dispute was to drag on for close to two years, involved mass picketing, a large number of arrests and injuries and, once again, the Labour Party becoming closely associated with industrial violence.83 So concerned were the government about the strike and the activities of the President of the Yorkshire NUM, Arthur Scargill, that the Prime Minister suggested privately that ‘he may have to be warned off’.84 Labour Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, was critical of the violence but continued to defend the rights of those who sought to protest outside the factory. Restricting the numbers of pickets allowed to gather outside a workplace was considered, the concern being that whatever the intention of mass picketing, it always had the potential for allowing ‘violent extremists to participate’.85 More generally, notwithstanding his adoption of a policy of ‘non-intervention’, Rees nevertheless implicitly supported a police operation which involved the controversial Special Patrol Group which saw over 500 pickets arrested.86 By the mid-1970s it had been established that law and order issues could assume as much prominence in major party election manifestos as such varied issues as housing, transport and urban renewal policies. Though accorded moderate priority, the full potential of linking failure to uphold the rule of law with lack of moral integrity and subservience to sectional interests had yet to be realised. That fusion was only achieved by the Conservative Party, under Margaret Thatcher’s leadership, and most obviously in their electoral triumph of 1979. It is worth reminding ourselves at this point that it was not as if the Labour Party had had no warning that law and order was likely to be a significant issue in any future general election. In her party conference speech in 1977 Mrs Thatcher suggested it would be a central plank in any Tory campaign because it was ‘the people of Britain who are going to make it an issue’:

62

The Changing Politics of Law and Order The old people in our city centres who are frightened to go out at night are going to make it an issue. The taxpayers and ratepayers who have to meet the bills for mindless vandalism – they are going to make it an issue. The parents, worried sick when their children go out on their own – they are going to make it an issue. Yes, law and order will be an issue, and it will be a vital issue, at the election. If anyone thinks that is Right-wing, they should talk to the workers in the factories and the women at the supermarket. The next Conservative Government will give more resources to the police. They are under-manned and poorly paid. We will bring them up to strength. We will give them the money to do the job. I do not intend to sit on the sidelines wringing my hands while London, Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham and the rest of our cities go the way of New York.87

She continued the theme in 1978, invoking the spectre of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, to conjure up a society in which there ‘is no security in the streets, families feel unsafe even in their own homes, children are at risk, criminals prosper, men of violence flourish’.88 Such a world was becoming ever closer, she argued, with a Labour Party giving the impression ‘that as between law and the lawbreakers they are at best neutral’. By contrast, one would find ‘in the new Conservative Government a remorseless and implacable opponent’.89

A new resolve Labour had effectively lost its majority in parliament, and from May 1977 was having to govern with negotiated support from other parties. Many observers felt that an early election was likely, estimating that the longer Labour held on, the worse their chances of re-election.90 For the Opposition, preparations for the general election began early. A Conservative policy paper, Law and Order: A new resolve, was discussed by the shadow cabinet in March 1978, covering such topics as police pay, corporal and capital punishment (the need to avoid a referendum on the latter), violence on television and the issue of parental responsibility. A further meeting in July considered how the ideas in the policy paper should be presented publicly. Considerable differences of view were expressed about the phrase ‘law and order’, with Whitelaw, in particular, worried that it would send the wrong signals to young people. The outcome was an agreement that other terms such as ‘safety’ and ‘security’ ought to be used as frequently as possible. In the event, four issues were selected for highlighting in press conferences, speeches, and on radio and television: support for the police given that Labour control had led to loss of manpower and poor pay; the guilty must be convicted, with prosecution processes quickened and bail reviewed; appropriate punishment – ensure prison sentences are imposed on the right offenders, that prison regimes work, and introduce glasshouse-type regimes for young offenders; and, that firm action on law and order ought to be accompanied by treatment, but compassion for the victim should precede compassion for the criminal. It was agreed that capital and corporal punishment ought not to be included as

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 63 highlighted topics.91 As a final bit of election preparation, the advertising company Saatchi & Saatchi, prepared a press advertisement under the strapline: ‘Is it safe to vote for another Labour government?’. Focusing on Labour’s crime record, it criticised the government both for what it suggested had been an almost 50% increase in crime since coming to power, and a failure to support the police, not least in terms of pay. Returning once again to the issue of respect for the law, the advert said ‘It certainly doesn’t make the police’s job any easier when some Labour ministers are seen associating themselves with potentially violent situations, as they did at Grunwick last year’. By the late 1970s, the political flavour of ‘law and order’ had moved on somewhat from the unspecific commitments of the Selsdon weekend. On top of the major industrial relations disputes earlier in the decade, public order problems, not least the clashes between the far right National Front and anti-fascist demonstrators, at the marches organised throughout 1977 and the years following, had led to considerable controversy. The Conservative MP and close ally of Thatcher, Airey Neave, was killed in the Palace of Westminster itself by a Irish National Liberation Army bomb in the months before the 1979 election. More generally, elements of the police service became increasingly and overtly politicised, the Federation taken by its leaders ‘as close as they dared to outright intervention in

Figure 3.1 Conservative Party Advert Source: Bodleian Library © Conservative Party

64

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

party politics’.92 Their campaign, beginning in 1978, sought deliberately to influence the outcome of the anticipated general election, with police spokespeople and Conservative politicians echoing each other in their declarations. In early April 1979, on the day of the publication of the Conservative election manifesto, the Federation’s chairman, Jim Jardine, called for the reintroduction of hanging, claiming the timing was entirely coincidental, and saying somewhat disingenuously that they would be writing to all MPs ‘telling them of our stand on law and order’.93 At the same time the Federation contracted a public relations and lobbying firm to help it in its campaign to have law and order at the forefront of the election. A week after Jardine’s call for the reintroduction of the death penalty, the Federation placed sizeable advertisements in the national press. Under the heading ‘Law and Order’ and written in the form of an open letter to all MPs, the advert began by highlighting the upward trends in recorded crime, especially violent crime. Saying ‘there is no excuse for crime’ it called for violent offences to ‘be met with the severest penalties’. The duty of government and politicians, it said, is ‘to uphold the rule of law and to support the police in their efforts to apply it’. Many newspapers that day also led with the latest election pledge from Mrs Thatcher, that ‘The Conservative government will enter into partnership with the law-abiding people of this land to see that the courts are respected again, police morale restored, wrong-doers punished, the law upheld, and more effective help given to victims of crime’.94 Although there were a few police critics of the campaign, there seems little doubt, as one spokesperson put it, that at this time a significant number of its members ‘saw the Conservative Party as the saviour of the police service’ and the rank and file’s representative body clearly acted as if were the case.95 Sir Robert Mark, the former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police also entered the fray. Mark had delivered the Dimbleby Lecture in 1975, an event characterised as ‘an important departure from tradition in heralding public intervention into legal and policy debates by a chief officer, as opposed to the making of private representations’.96 If his 1975 lecture signalled something of a shift in practice by chief officers, his 1979 intervention was altogether more outspoken and controversial. In an article that received widespread publicity, Mark argued that problems of public order ought now to be considered the greatest threat, and whereas with crime the police could generally count on public support, with public order they often had to stand alone. He bemoaned what he perceived to be Britain’s move to the left, the dangers of increased union power, and implied that the partnership of Labour and the unions bore comparison with the rise of the Nazis in German in the 1930s.97 Although there was criticism of Mark from all across the political spectrum,98 the timing of his article, the day before the publication of the Police Federation advertisement, helped keep law and order high on the agenda as the election approached.

The party of law and order The 1979 victory was a remarkable volte face for the Conservatives, reclaiming the mantle of being ‘the party of law and order’ only five years after they had

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 65

Figure 3.2 Police Federation Advert Source: Daily Telegraph

66

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

been defeated as clear losers in the ‘Who Governs?’ elections of 1974. This was accomplished not only by eliding law-breaking and order-defiance, particularly in the field of industrial conflict, but also by the bad timing of the 1979 election by the Labour leadership. Although there had been some significant reverses in mid-term by-elections, as well as extremely negative polling data, fortunes began to improve and by late summer 1978 it looked as though Labour had a chance of winning re-election in the autumn. Indeed, the view among some senior Conservative figures was very gloomy. Callaghan, however, ‘surprised everyone by postponing the dissolution until 1979.’99 The failure to hold the election in autumn 1978 meant that the government was at the mercy of the Labour movement, which had become increasingly turbulent over the past decade. The ‘Winter of Discontent’, so-called due to the plethora of strikes, notably in the health and utility services, produced images redolent of the ‘ungovernability’ of Britain: piles of rubbish in the major streets and squares and reports of cancer patients dying due to lack of care were among the most potent.100 To that imagery was conjoined a host of anxieties that had been burgeoning throughout the 1970s, and that now came to be laid at the door of Labour, both in government and in Opposition: lack of economic competitiveness – Britain as the ‘sick man’ of Europe; fear of crime, which was coming to be seen as much of a problem as crime itself;101 fear of urban decay; fear of black criminality;102 fears of youthful extremism, embodied both in the brief rise of the punks103 and the contentious, and often violent, far-right demonstrations that characterised the period.104 All combined to convey support for the view that Britain was in national decline and only drastic measures could halt it. In their respective pleas to the country, the Conservative and Labour parties were now poles apart on a range of issues, not least law and order. A year before the election an opinion poll conducted for Conservative Central Office had found issues connected with law and order to be the single most substantial group of local problems identified by the electorate and, on balance, found that respondents tended to believe the Tories would cope better than Labour.105 Increases in crime were believed to stem from lenient punishment and a lack of punishment, though both lack of recreation facilities and unemployment were also mentioned. Although there was support for ‘hard line’ measures such as tougher penalties and corporal and capital punishment, crime prevention was viewed as the highest priority. The polling data did not go unheard. Labour could hardly have failed to notice that the Conservatives planned to make this issue a key priority in their election campaign, yet their response in their manifesto was limited to a couple of short paragraphs under the heading of ‘Law, Rights and the Community’. Even then, characteristically, they connected crime and its control to a much wider policy context than the criminal justice system, though they sought to stress that police pay and recruitment were higher than under the Tories.106 Labour aimed to deal with crime through creating ‘one nation’ by eliminating the evils of poverty, inequality and racial bigotry. Its focus was on attacking ‘the social deprivation which allows crime to flourish’. Labour’s ‘law and order’ policy was therefore implicitly to be found elsewhere in the manifesto, in its social and economic policies, and its

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 67 attitudes toward equality and citizenship, though it gave a few specific, if low-key, undertakings, such as to provide more law centres, extend legal aid and help for victims and to consider other reforms of prosecution in the light of the recommendations of the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure.107 Labour seemed to address upholding the rule of law as just one of a long list of commitments and, implicitly, judging by the space devoted to the subject and its placing toward the end of the manifesto, as one of its lesser priorities. The contrast with the Conservative Party could hardly have been starker. The Tory manifesto gave the subject clear prominence, identifying ‘to uphold Parliament and the rule of law’ as the third of the five primary tasks that it identified. ‘The most disturbing threat to our freedom and security is the growing disrespect for the rule of law’ it said. ‘In government as in Opposition, Labour have undermined it. Yet respect for the rule of law is the basis of a free and civilised life. We will restore it, reestablishing the supremacy of Parliament and giving the right priority to the fight against crime.’108 This full-blooded assault on Labour stopped short of indicting them as the harbingers of a descent into a Hobbesian ‘war of all against all’, but that was the clear implication. The manifesto went on to specify proposals to restore freedom under the law by guaranteeing the police full implementation of the principal recommendation of the Edmund-Davies committee, set up by Labour to inquire into the reasons for recruitment difficulties, to award a substantial pay rise; and by making provision for more effective sentencing, ‘tough sentences . . . for violent criminals and thugs’ linked to a greater variety of sentences for offenders for whom ‘long prison terms are not always the best deterrent’. These ranged from experiments with the regimes of detention centres, designed to convey a ‘short, sharp shock’ more effectively, to expanding compulsory attendance centres ‘for hooligans’. A free vote on the restoration of capital punishment was promised. The substantial section on trade union reform included a proposal to revise the law on picketing to ‘prevent violence, intimidation and obstruction’ and to ban secondary picketing of related workplaces. The ‘calamitous’ rise in industrial disputes had damaged society and the economy. ‘During the industrial strife of last winter, confidence, self-respect, common sense and even our sense of common humanity was shaken. At times this society seemed on the brink of disintegration . . . We do not lay all the blame on the Labour Party: but Labour have been in power for most of the past fifteen years and cannot escape the major responsibility.’109 While it is the case that the 1979 election represented the heightening of an already well-established trend, the fusion of law-breaking and criminality with order-defiance and industrial conflict, and its attribution to Labour’s record in government, signalled a decisive shift. The Conservatives were successful in the promulgation of their law and order image, and ‘all the evidence suggests that they did so to the great detriment of Labour’.110 As ever in elections, economic issues were of great importance and the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978–9 had inflicted significant wounds on the incumbent government. However, ‘maintaining law and order’ moved from sixth to fourth in the list of ‘biggest failures of

68

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

the present government’ in the regular Gallup polls during 1975–8. Across a range of policy issues covered by MORI polls in the nine months leading up to the election, no policy placed the Conservatives as far ahead of Labour as ‘law and order’. The Conservatives enjoyed a 30-point lead on law and order compared with 11 points for ‘unemployment’ and little difference for ‘prices/ inflation’ and even ‘industrial relations/strikes’,111 the latter illustrating the longstanding impact in the public mind of the Heath-led government’s inability to achieve industrial peace, which had been entrusted to Labour to similar effect. However, the sense that Britain was becoming ‘ungovernable’, the subject of many an editorial and leader,112 was heightened during the election period by a variety of events – from the killing of Airey Neave to the death of Blair Peach113 in the Southall Riot, and Lord Denning, the Master of the Rolls and perhaps the most symbolic defender of the ‘rule of law’, declaring the trade unions to be ‘almost above the law’.114 There was also clear water between the two main parties in the electoral addresses. ‘Law and order’ was a top priority for tough measures in as many as 87 per cent of Conservative election addresses, whereas 66 per cent of those by Labour candidates did not mention the subject, and like the manifesto those that did stressed social measures as the antidote to crime. During the campaign, the Nuffield analysts concluded that the growth in Tory support on this issue was greater than on any other, and that this was something on which the Tories were trusted to deliver, unlike Labour. In the election Labour lost a ‘substantial degree of its traditional working class vote and got only half the trade unionists’ vote.’115 The outcome was a substantial Conservative victory, with an overall parliamentary majority of 43, and a government whose manifesto had made great play of supporting the police and the importance of taking measures to uphold the rule of law. It has been tempting for some commentators to present the election of the Conservatives in 1979 as a major sea change in the politics of law and order, and we acknowledge it represented a decisive shift. Nevertheless, naturally it has to be placed in its longer historical context. The election and the arguments that characterised it, represented a heightening of a trend that had been increasingly evident during the decade. The Conservatives had been sharpening their law and order tactics for the best part of this period, and had been planning their approach to the election for at least two to three years by the time it was eventually called by Callaghan. Moreover, important though it undoubtedly was, one must also avoid overstating the centrality of law and order to the Conservative victory. For many voters it was one of the most obvious distinguishing features of the two main parties, and as we have noted, all the evidence pointed to the Conservative lead on this subject being generally greater than on any other. But it was far from being the most important subject so far as voters were concerned and was never viewed by senior figures in the Conservative Party, or their advisers, as the most important. One will search in vain for references to law and order in accounts of the 1979 election written by Thatcher, Whitelaw or others. Indeed, as observed of others that have held the post of Home Secretary, for example, it is rare for Home

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 69 Affairs to rate especially highly when considering which matters of state have been crucial during a career.116 By 1979, law and order had become something of a key symbol of differences between the two main parties, and there were certainly signs of much tougher talk on law and order from the Conservative benches. But, as we shall see, to imagine that this would translate directly into punitive law and order policy is to overly simplify the very complex territory of criminal justice and penal policy in this period and, indeed, to overstate the centrality of this field to the government’s, and the Prime Minister’s, priorities.

Notes 1 The Selsdon Park Hotel, located just outside London, south of Croydon 2 A Conservative MP and at the time of the shadow cabinet meeting, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer 3 Gilmour, I. and Garnett, M. (1998) Whatever Happened to the Tories: The Conservatives since 1945, London: Fourth Estate, at p. 242 4 This incident and the reaction to it is described in: Beckett, A. (2009) When the Lights Went Out: What really happened to Britain in the seventies, London: Faber and Faber; Ramsden, J. (1996) The Prime Minister and the making of policy, in Ball, S. and Seldon, A. (eds) The Heath Government, Harlow: Longman 5 Sunday Telegraph, 1st February 1970 6 In particular, perhaps, the demonstration outside the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square in 1968, which led to controversy both about the actions of the protestors and alleged violence by the police, and prompted the Home Office to consider the possibility of establishing a specialist public order force. See Newburn, T. (forthcoming) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Vol. 5: Policing, London: Routledge; also Halloran, J.D., Elliott, P. and Murdock, G. (1970) Demonstrations and Communication: A Case Study, Harmondsworth: Penguin 7 Quoted in Gilmour, I. and Garnett, M. (1988) op. cit. 8 ‘Cooling off on law and order’, The Times, 4th January 1971 9 ‘Hogg calls for more police’, The Times, 12th February 1970 10 Opinion Research Centre, A survey of: Law and Order, Conservative Party Archive, Bodleian library, ACP 3/21 11 ‘Callaghan: The politics of fear’, Sunday Times, 22nd February 1970 12 Sunday Times, 22nd February 1970, op. cit. 13 Wilson, H, (1971) The Labour Government 1964–1970, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, at p. 759 14 Extract from World at One, 6th March 1970, PREM 13/3262 15 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. 1994, op. cit. 187 16 Conservative Party, 1970, A Better Tomorrow, London: Conservative Party 17 Bottoms, A.E. and Stevenson, S. op. cit. 17–20; see Newburn, T. (forthcoming) op. cit. 18 Elder, N.C.M., 1984, ‘Conclusion’ and Dixon, D. and Fishwick, E. ‘The Law and Order Debate in Historical Perspective’ in Norton, P. (ed.), Law and Order and British Politics, Aldershot: Gower 19 Conservative Party, 1970, op. cit. n. 25, (emphasis added) 20 Labour Party, 1970, Now Britain’s Strong – Let’s Make It Great To Live In, London: Labour Party 21 Ibid., 26. Cited in Downes, D. and Morgan, R. 1994: 188 22 ‘Wilson’s Goldwaterism jibe at Tories’, The Times, 9th May 1970; see also, for example, Finckenauer J. O. (1978) Crime as a National Political Issue: 1964–76: From Law and Order to Domestic Tranquility, Crime & Delinquency, 24(1): 13–27; Flamm, M.W.

70

23 24 25 26

27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

The Changing Politics of Law and Order (2005) Law and Order: Street crime, civil unrest and the crisis of liberalism in the 1960s, New York: Columbia University Press Letters to the Editor: ‘Problems of Law and Order: Opposition’s Duty, The Times, 13th May 1970 ‘Spectre of Selsdon’, The Times, 6th June 1970 Fully dealt with in Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit. The publishers, Calder & Boyars, mounted a spirited defence, using expert witnesses along the lines pioneered by the successful defence of the publication by Penguin Books in 1960, for the first time in the UK, of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. However, whereas Lawrence’s publishers were acquitted of obscenity, Last Exit to Brooklyn only succeeded on appeal for judicial misdirection of the jury. See Newburn, T. (1992) Permission and Regulation: Law and Morals in Post-war Britain, London: Routledge, for a fuller account Nelson, E. (1989) The British Counter-Culture 1967–1973: A study of the underground press, Basingstoke: Macmillan; Sutherland, J. (1982) Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain 1960–82, Junction Books The case inspired William Rees-Mogg, editor of The Times, to write a celebrated editorial ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?’ in his defence, lambasting a sentence of three months’ imprisonment for so trivial and so technical an offence. Jagger had bought the drugs perfectly legally in Italy but imported them without a prescription into England. See: Collins, M. (2019) Permissiveness on Trial: Sex, Drugs, Rock, the Rolling Stones, and the Sixties Counterculture, Popular Music and Society, 42:2, 188–209 In Place of Strife, 1969, Cmnd. 3888 London: HMSO Butler, D. and Pinto-Duschinsky, M. 1971, The British General Election of 1970, London: Macmillan Butler, D. 1989, British General Elections Since 1945, Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 26–7 Sandbrook, D. (2010) State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974, London: Allen Lane, at p. 58; for an alternative view see Pimlott, B. (1988) The myth of consensus, in Smith, L.M. (ed.) The Making of Britain: Echoes of greatness, Oxford: Martin Robertson Beer, S. (1982) Britain Against Itself, London: Faber Skidelsky, R. (1977) The End of the Keynsian Era, London: Macmillan; Holmes, M. and Horsewood, N. (1988) The post-war consensus, Contemporary Record, 2, 2, 24–27 ‘Cooling off on law and order’, The Times, 4th January 1971 In a table entitled ‘Criminal Justice: England and Wales, substantive legislation, 1947–92’, for example, Windlesham lists only the eight Criminal Justice Acts and the single Criminal Law Act passed in the period. Windlesham (1993) op. cit. at p. 2. Clearly this ignores a very considerable body of legislation touching on criminal justice and penal matters – matters which are discussed by all commentators, including Windlesham, when building up a picture of governmental activity in this area Shepherd, R. (2004) Reginald Maudling, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: OUP Quoted in Davenport-Hines, R. (2002) The Pursuit of Oblivion: A social history of drugs, London: Phoenix Press, at p. 344 CAB 128/45, 26th February 1970 Quoted in Davenport-Hines, R. (2002) op. cit., p. 344 Maudling, R. (1978) Memoirs, London: Sidgwick and Jackson CAB 134/2866, 16th October 1970 Windlesham, Lord (1993) Responses to Crime, Vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press, at p. 123 Bottoms, A.E. (1982) The suspended sentence in England 1967–1978, British Journal of Criminology, 21, 1, 1–26 Advisory Council on the Penal System (1970) Non-Custodial and Semi-Custodial Penalties, London: HMSO

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 71 46 ACPS (1970) op. cit., para. 14 47 Quoted in Oakley (2012) op. cit., p. 271 48 Professor Roger Hood, CBE FBA, graduated from the LSE and received his doctorate from the University of Cambridge. From 1973 to 2003 he was Director of the Centre for Criminology, Oxford University. Quoted in Pease, K., Durkin, P., Earnshaw, I., Payne, D. and Thorpe, J. (1975) Community Service Orders, Home Office Research Study 29, London: HMSO 49 Hood, R. (1974) op. cit. at p. 416, emphasis in original 50 Subsequent research estimated that only approximately half of those serving CSOs would otherwise have been sentenced to custody. See Pease, K. (1980) Community service and prison: Are they alternatives? In Pease, K. and McWilliams, W. (eds.) Community Service By Order, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press 51 Bottoms, A.E., Gelsthorpe, L. and Rex, S. (2001) Introduction: The contemporary scene for community penalties, in Bottoms, A.E., Gelsthorpe, L. and Rex, S. (eds.) Community Penalties: Change and challenges, Cullompton: Willan, at p. 21 52 Hansard, HC Debs Vol. 855, Col. 732–742, 19th April 1973; and Vol. 858, Cols 367– 369, 19th June 1973 53 Geary, R. (1985) Policing Industrial Disputes 1893–1985, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Clutterbuck, R. (1978) Britain in Agony, London: Faber 54 Clutterbuck R. (1983) The Battle of Saltley, 1972, In R. Clutterbuck (ed.) The Media and Political Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, London 55 Quoted in Sandbrook (2010) op. cit., at p. 125 56 CAB 128/50/7 Conclusions, 10th February 1972. This and related events are discussed in detail in Newburn (forthcoming) op. cit. 57 Quoted in Beckett, A. (2009) When the Lights Went Out: What really happened to Britain in the Seventies, London: Faber, at p. 84 58 Conservative Party, 1974, Putting Britain First, London: Conservative Party 59 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. 1994, op. cit., 188–89 60 Conservative Party, 1974, op. cit. 61 Butler, D. and Kavanagh, D. 1975, The British General Election of February 1974; 1975, The British General Election of October 1974, London: Macmillan 62 Hay, C. (2010) Chronicles of a death foretold: The winter of discontent and the construction of the crisis of British Keynesianism, Parliamentary Affairs, 63, 3, 446–470 63 Quoted in Ryan, M. (1983) op. cit., p. 49 see also King, R.D. and McDermott, K. (1989) British Prisons 1970–1987: An ever-deepening crisis, British Journal of Criminology, 29, 2, 107–128 64 Jones, D.W. (2012) Conditions for Sustainable Decarceration Strategies for Young Offenders, Unpublished PhD thesis, London School of Economics 65 William Whitelaw, Hansard, HC Debs, Vol. 938, Col. 340, 7th November 1977 66 This is, in some ways, typical of much criminal justice legislation. Home Secretaries have often been in post for relatively short periods of time, and consequently not only regularly have to oversee or shepherd through legislation not of their own design, but are rarely in post long enough to develop much proprietorial interest in the field 67 Smith, A.T.H. (1978) The Criminal Law Act 1977, Criminal Law Review, 219 68 See also, Rock P. (2019b) op. cit., Chapter 7 69 Quoted by Mayhew, P. Hansard, HC Deb, 18th March 1977, Vol. 928, Col. 773 70 Quoted in Windlesham, Lord (1997) op. cit., p. 133 71 Windlesham, Lord (1997) op. cit., p. 134 72 Report of an inquiry by the Hon. Sir Henry Fisher into the circumstances leading to the trial of three persons on charges arising out of the death of Maxwell Confait and the fire at 27 Doggett Road, London SE6, London: HMSO, 1977; the inquiry and its aftermath are discussed in detail in Rock (2019b) op. cit. 73 Fisher inquiry, at para 2.30 74 CAB 134/4147, 22nd June 1977

72

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

75 See Rock, P. (2019b) op. cit. 76 Police Superintendents’ Association of England and Wales: Pts. II & III, Evidence No: 163, pp. 1, 3, Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure, BS 12/20; as Paul Rock (2019b) notes in the second volume of the Official History two themes were woven into the work of the Royal Commission: prosecutions, introduced by the Attorney General, Sam Silkin, and policing, introduced by Merlyn Rees 77 The Derbyshire town of Clay Cross achieved temporary notoriety for its ‘rebellion’ against the Conservative government’s Housing Finance Act 1972 and the rent rises that it brought about. It was the Labour Party’s support for the rebellion that was targeted by the Conservatives who accused them of failing to abide by the law. Jacobs, B. (1984) Labour against the centre: The Clay Cross syndrome, Local Government Studies, 10:2, 75–87 78 A case in 1973 in which three men, including Ricky Tomlinson, who went on to become a well-known actor, were convicted of conspiracy to intimidate, unlawful assembly and affray as a result of involvement in the national builders’ strike of 1972. The case is still perceived by many as a miscarriage of justice and campaigning continues to seek redress, see: https://www.shrewsbury24campaign.org.uk/2016/02/ the-story-of-the-shrewsbury-pickets/ 79 http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=121 80 Conservative Party, 1976, The Right Approach, Margaret Thatcher Foundation Archive, 1976 Oct 4 Mo, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/109439 81 Judge, T. (1994) The Force of Persuasion: The story of the Police Federation, Surbiton: Police Federation, at p. 283; Reiner, R. (1978) The police in the class structure, British Journal of Law and Society, 5, 2, 166–184; McLaughlin, E. & Murji, K. (1998) Resistance through representation: ‘Storylines’, advertising and police federation campaigns, Policing and Society, 8:4, 367–399; Clarke, A. and Taylor, I. (1980) Vandals, Pickets and Muggers: Television Coverage of Law and Order in the 1979 Election, Screen Education, 38, 99–111 82 Indeed, a report in The Times, suggested that Rees was under simultaneous attack from the probation, prison and police services at this point: ‘Unprecedented Turmoil for Home Secretary in the Police, Prison and Probation Services’, 23rd May 1977 83 Geary, R. (1985), op. cit., p.83 84 PREM 16/1941 5th July 1976 85 PREM 16/1491 86 Dromey, J. and Taylor, G. (1978) Grunwick: The workers’ story, London: Lawrence and Wishart; on wider official views of the police service at this time see Rock P. (2019b) op. cit., Chapter 7 87 http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=123 88 In reality, it is unlikely that many had first-hand experience of Burgess’ 1962 novel. Rather it was Stanley Kubrick’s filmed version, released in 1971, which was linked to a number of crime-related controversies, and eventually withdrawn from circulation in 1973, that was undoubtedly foremost in the public mind. See: Darlington, J. (2016) A Clockwork Orange: The Art of Moral Panic? The Cambridge Quarterly, 45, 2, 119–134; Kramer, P. (2011) A Clockwork Orange, London: Macmillan 89 http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=124 90 See, for example, Whitelaw, W. (1989) The Whitelaw Memoirs, London: Aurum Press; Shepherd, J. (2013) How the Callaghan government fell, in Heppell, T. and Theakston, K. (eds.) How Labour Governments Fall: From Ramsay Macdonald to Gordon Brown, London: Palgrave 91 This is discussed in greater detail in Windlesham (1993) op. cit., Ch. 3 92 Judge, T. (1994) op. cit. at p. 355 93 ‘Police call for hanging’, The Guardian, 12th April 1979

The Rise of Law and Order Politics, 1970–1979 73 94 Quoted in McLaughlin, E. and Murji, K. (1998) Resistance through representation: ‘storylines, advertising and Police Federation campaigns, Policing and Society, 8, 4, 367–399, at p. 385 95 Quoted in Loader, I. and Mulcahy, A. (2003) Policing and the Condition of England, Oxford: Clarendon Press, at p. 340 96 Reiner, R. (1980) Fuzzy thoughts: The police and law and order politics, Sociological Review, 28, 2, 377–413, at p. 391; Mark, R. (1978) In the Office of Constable, London: Collins 97 Mark likens Labour and union link with rise of Nazis, The Daily Telegraph, 20th April 1979 98 ‘Mark lies low as row breaks’, The Guardian, 20th April 1979 99 David Butler, 1989, British General Elections Since 1945, Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 32. In his memoirs William Whitelaw says of Callaghan, ‘He probably lost his best opportunity of [election] victory by his own decision not to go to the country in October 1978’. Whitelaw (1989) op. cit. at p. 159 100 The phrase of course is taken from a speech by Gloucester in Shakespeare’s Richard III: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.’ 101 See Farrell, S., Jackson, J. and Gray, E. (2009) Social Order and Fear of Crime in Contemporary Times, Oxford: Clarendon Press 102 Hall, S., Critcher, C., Clarke, J., Jefferson, T. and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order, Basingstoke: Macmillan 103 Worley, M. (2017) No Future: Punk, politics and British youth culture, 1976–1984, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Savage, J. (2004) England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and punk rock, London: Faber 104 Fielding, N. (1981) The National Front, London: Routledge 105 Public attitudes to law and order, Prepared for Conservative Central Office (Research Department), March 1978, Conservative Party archive, Bodleian Library, CCO 180/19/1/2 106 Labour Party, 1979, The Labour Way is the Better Way, London: Labour Party 107 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. op. cit., 190; Writing about the ineffectiveness of this approach for Labour, Ian Taylor uses the illustration of a BBC-TV Campaign Report interview with the then Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, on 20th April 1979. ‘The programme presented itself as an urgent investigation of the pressing problems of “law and order”, and it was unsurprising when its presenter, David Dimbleby, after a series of defensive responses by Merlyn Rees, almost dismissively posed a final and obviously entirely rhetorical question: “So you’re saying. . . we’re discussing something like trying to control the weather: it’s forces beyond the control of governments?”’ Taylor, I. (1987) Law and Order, Moral Order: The changing rhetorics of the Thatcher government, Socialist Register 108 The Conservative Party, 1979, The Conservative Manifesto, London: Conservative Party 109 Ibid. 110 Butler, D. and Kavanagh, D. 1980, The British General Election of 1979, London: Macmillan: 37–8 111 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. 1994, op. cit., 196, citing Butler, D. and Kavanagh, D. 1980: 131 112 Fletcher, R. ‘We must stop squeezing the nation into the ground’, The Times, 28th March 1977 113 Although the verdict in the inquest was ‘death by misadventure’, and no charges were ever laid, it was widely suspected at the time, and since, that Blair Peach died as a

74

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

result of injuries from blows struck by Special Patrol group police officers. Renton, D. (2014) The killing of Blair Peach, London Review of Books, 36, 10, 23–26 114 Butler, D. and Kavanagh, D. 1980: 187 115 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. 1994:196–7 116 Including, for example, by Roy Jenkins, twice Home Secretary and, on the first occasion at least, widely considered to have been one of the more impressive Home Secretaries. See Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit.

4

Talking Tough Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992

William Whitelaw approached the job of Home Secretary ‘in a mood of keen anticipation tempered by considerable anxiety’1 but ‘with clear views about [the] priorities for early action’.2 Top of the agenda was implementing the EdmundDavies recommendations on police pay immediately and in full, a matter cabinet agreed to as one of its first actions and on 9th May, six days after the election, the formal announcement was made.3 The Police Federation, delighted with the success of their pre-election law and order campaign and content to continue flexing their new-found muscle, lost no time in writing to the new Home Secretary to outline the case for the reintroduction of the death penalty. Drawing attention in particular to the ongoing Northern Ireland terrorism, and what they presented as a significant rise in homicide since the ending of capital punishment in 1965, the Federation also encouraged its members to lobby their local MPs. Although great care had been taken to avoid discussion of the death penalty during the election, Mrs Thatcher had made it known that she favoured reintroduction, and a free vote in the Commons had been promised once the Conservatives were returned to government.4 Whitelaw, by contrast, and much to the Prime Minister’s frustration, was a confirmed abolitionist by this point, having been ‘mildly in favour’ earlier in his career. Although making it clear she would vote in favour, no influence was brought to bear on any of the new intake of MPs and Whitelaw said the subject was never a matter of discussion between Home Secretary and Prime Minister. It was Eldon Griffiths, the Police Federation’s representative in parliament, who put down a motion, which attracted over 100 signatures in support, that ‘capital punishment should once again be available to the courts’.5 Whitelaw spoke first in the debate and drew on his experience in Northern Ireland to outline some of the limitations attaching to the death penalty. In the event, Griffiths’ motion was defeated by 119 votes.6 It was not a subject, however, that was going to go away in a hurry. Also under discussion in the first cabinet meeting after the 1979 election was a potential new Criminal Justice Bill. Whitelaw’s view was that sentencing and the treatment of offenders were both in need of reform, and the situation in the prisons also needed urgent action. The failure to modernise the prison estate meant ‘prison overcrowding had increased to worrying levels’.7 While expanding the number of prison places was likely to be necessary, ‘constant encouragement for imaginative, non-custodial punishment’ was equally important in Whitelaw’s

DOI: 10.4324/9781003330981-5

76 The Changing Politics of Law and Order eyes. Indeed, Whitelaw’s description of the government’s approach to sentencing is a classic illustration of what has been termed ‘bifurcation’: ‘tough deterrent action in serious cases, combined with a more flexible approach to less serious offenders’,8 and this approach survived into the eventual Criminal Justice Bill that was introduced to parliament in early 1982, with Whitelaw arguing in his opening speech that the Bill was designed to enable a more flexible and effective means of dealing with the range of offenders that came before the courts.

A short, sharp shock Any suggestion that the first Thatcher administration was driven by some form of crude law and order philosophy was quickly dispelled by Whitelaw’s approach to sentencing reform, though the process of reform itself was far from straightforward and he later confessed to ‘considerable frustration at my own failure . . . to promote successfully interest and informed discussion among my parliamentary colleagues, let alone the media and the general public’.9 Nevertheless, it is important to remind ourselves that the Conservative Party, though elected in part on a law and order ticket, had made few, and then rather limited, electoral commitments in this field, the Edmund Davies police pay award being the most significant. As Lord Windlesham rightly observed, beyond this and the detention centre reforms – what were becoming known as the ‘short, sharp shock’ reforms – any commitments that had been made were ‘of no great political import’.10 As will become clear, with one or two notable exceptions, criminal justice matters occupied relatively little of Mrs Thatcher’s energies and, by and large, for the greater part of the time her Home Secretaries had considerable freedom. The ‘short, sharp, shock’ experiment that had been signalled in advance of the election, was the most obviously ‘tough’ of the measures associated with Whitelaw’s tenure as Home Secretary. Though uncomfortable in the face of the views of some of the more strident of his party’s members, Whitelaw at least had something to offer them in his first party conference speech as Home Secretary in October 1979. In discussing the government’s proposals on juveniles and detention centres he said a Conservative government would ensure that: ‘. . . much greater emphasis will be put on hard and constructive activities, on discipline and tidiness, on self-respect and respect for those in authority. We will introduce on a regular basis drills, parades and inspections. Offenders will have to earn their limited privileges by good behaviour . . . these will be no holiday camps and I sincerely hope that those who attend them will not ever want to go back there.’ More generally, offenders could expect tough sentencing: ‘The protection of the public requires that the violent in our society should receive and serve long terms in prison. Those who commit such crimes must realise that under a Conservative government, dedicated to the protection of our citizens, there can be no question for them of an escape from very long terms of imprisonment.’11 Among expert observers, however, this particular reform was widely interpreted as something that Whitelaw had very little personal sympathy with, and as being simply an expedient allowing him to introduce other measures less likely to receive support

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 77 from the party’s right wing.12 Indeed, one insider suggests that the detention centre reforms originated in the Conservative Research Department and that Whitelaw, reluctant to embrace them, only acquiesced on the ‘pragmatic grounds that since the existing methods of dealing with young offenders had been ineffective, an open mind should be maintained toward other approaches’.13 As ever, elements of what confronted the new Home Secretary were matters inherited from his predecessor. There had been sporadic prison disturbances throughout the 1970s, from Brixton, Gartree and Albany in 1972 to Hull in 1976.14 Some resulted in very significant levels of damage and a large number of injuries to prisoners as well as allegations of brutality as order was restored. Further disturbances in Gartree in 1978 and subsequently at Wormwood Scrubs, together with a wide range of disputes involving the Prison Officers’ Association, had led Merlyn Rees to establish a committee of inquiry, under the chairmanship of a High Court Judge, Mr Justice May, to inquire into the state of the prison services in the UK. Rees had originally hoped that the inquiry could be conducted quickly with a report being delivered within six months. Predictably, given the scale of the terms of reference, this proved impossible and, though it was published within a year, by this point Whitelaw was in charge in the Home Office. Described as ‘the most comprehensive account available on the state of British prisons’,15 the May Report argued for the replacement of the extant ‘treatment and training’ model by something they referred to as ‘positive custody’. Reporting in October, many of May’s recommendations chimed with Whitelaw’s own views, not least in arguing for shorter sentences for non-violent offenders, outlining the importance of a greater variety of non-custodial options, and in the need for a major prisonbuilding programme. The other outcome of the review was a major restructuring programme, affecting both the Prison Department and the Inspectorate. One issue, and something that was to resurface under Michael Howard’s tenure as Home Secretary a decade later, was the relationship between ‘operational’ and ‘policy’ matters regarding prisons. Though in practice there were only occasional tensions between operational and policy interests, in the aftermath of the review some changes were made to the Prison Department and Prisons Board to clarify responsibilities in these areas.16 The more significant reform was the creation of an independent Chief Inspector of Prisons, something eventually incorporated into the Criminal Justice Act 1982.

Trouble on the streets The life of the Home Secretary, arguably more than any other Secretary of State, is affected by sudden crises, events that could not have been foreseen or easily planned for. Rab Butler had to contend with a series of police scandals; Roy Jenkins the Shepherds Bush murders and the George Blake prison escape. One regular form of crisis experienced by Home Secretaries is civil disorder, and although Maudling and Rees in particular had had to deal with sizeable industrial disputes, public order issues were something that arguably affected Whitelaw’s tenure in the Home Office more than any other post-war Home Secretary.17 He had been

78

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

in post less than a year when serious rioting broke out in the St Paul’s district of Bristol. So substantial was the rioting that the chief constable took the highly controversial decision to remove all officers from the vicinity for a period of hours. Though supportive of the chief constable in public, Whitelaw subsequently described the withdrawal as ‘unacceptable’.18 The primary reason for withdrawal was interpreted as being largely a consequence of the lack of available support from surrounding forces, rather than some failure on the part of the local constabulary, and the government’s response was quickly to set about establishing much more effective systems of what was to come to be known as ‘mutual aid’ within policing. Any parliamentary debate was limited to a brief exchange because of an impending recess. To the extent that Labour had anything even mildly critical to say it concerned Conservative attitudes towards immigration rather than anything to do with policing. Worse violence was to come within a year. What would turn out to be the most significant riot of the post-war period to date broke out in Brixton in south London on 10th April 1981. Over the course of roughly three days, approximately 600 people were injured – over 400 of them police officers – and close to 300 people were arrested. Over 2,500 police officers were deployed at the height of the rioting. The Commissioner of Police described the destruction during the riot as greater than anything London had seen since the days of the blitz and in his report on the disorder Lord Justice Scarman described it as ‘an experience, till then unparalleled on the mainland of the United Kingdom’.19 Again, like St Paul’s, issues of race relations were close to the surface of events. The appointment of Scarman, an independent-minded lawyer of great experience, was not well-received by the right wing of the Conservative Party, or by the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir David McNee, who suggested that he was worried that the police were likely to be made ‘political scapegoats’.20 In fact, far from seeking to focus attention on the conduct of the police prior to, and during the disorder, very quickly the Home Office made it clear to Scarman that they were keen to receive guidance on ‘the relevance of underlying social and economic factors to the style and method of policing the multi-racial communities in inner city areas’.21 In the event, Scarman’s conclusion was that the disorder ought to be understood as ‘communal disturbances arising from a complex political, social and economic situation, which is not special to Brixton’,22 that they were neither premeditated nor planned, and ‘were essentially an outburst of anger and resentment by young black people against the police’.23 Though Scarman reported quickly, in the intervening period between the Brixton riot and the publication of his report there was further disorder in Southall in west London, Toxteth in Liverpool, Moss Side in Manchester and once again in Brixton. In policing terms, perhaps the most controversial moment arose in Merseyside where in the midst of the violence there, the chief constable made the unprecedented request that CS gas be used. Ever since St Paul’s, Whitelaw had been convinced that the police were inadequately prepared to deal with large-scale violence, and in addition to significantly expanding police mutual aid

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 79 arrangements, significant effort was underway to improve both the protective and offensive equipment available to the police. The shift toward what some observers would perceive as a more paramilitarised24 form of public order policing was well underway. The government’s reaction to the riots involved significantly more than ensuring policing was more robust, however. The appointment of Scarman, and the general embracing of his conclusions, together with the appointment of Michael Heseltine to oversee regeneration efforts in Liverpool (though there was considerable distrust of his work within senior echelons of the government),25 illustrated that there was at the very least some realisation that such violence could not simply be dealt with by fulminating about morality and criminality. In his address to parliament in the aftermath of the riots, Whitelaw said, ‘It is the duty of every Government to underline, and act on, their fundamental responsibility to uphold the rule of law. I also have other and wide responsibilities, both as Home Secretary and as a member of the Government. These are simple to state but complex to carry out and achieve. Put briefly, they are to promote the conditions in which violence does not flourish but is rejected, so that a peaceful and harmonious society is a reality and seen to be a reality for all people’.26 It was a view shared by his opposite number, Roy Hattersley, who in his response went as far as to offer his congratulations to the Home Secretary. Beyond raising questions about the use of CS gas, and about the nature and effectiveness of existing mechanisms for holding the police to account, the Opposition’s comments were largely confined to a focus on the need for urban regeneration and greater investment in youth. There may have been very considerable violence on the streets, but at this stage conflict in parliament was fairly minimal. As Whitelaw himself put it, ‘I found that, although of course there were critics, my speech had been well received on all sides’.27

Further challenges for Whitelaw Once again, and not unusually for Conservative Home Secretaries, Whitelaw found that some of the trickiest moments facing him were at the party conference rather than in parliament. Predictably perhaps, the most difficult matter continued to be capital punishment, an issue on which the Prime Minister and her Home Secretary continued to hold sharply differing views. Provoked by opinions he regarded as unacceptable, emotions became so raised at one point that even as experienced a politician as Whitelaw was moved to divert from his prepared speech in order to challenge certain delegates and to call for greater tolerance from those present and those listening. Though seemingly well-received by many, Whitelaw’s extempore contribution ‘infuriated the most vocal elements in the audience’ and made his ‘handling of law and order issues more difficult in the months immediately ahead’.28 The sight of the Home Secretary receiving such difficult treatment at conference, and with little obvious support from the Prime Minister who, at one point, very conspicuously clapped one pro-capital punishment contribution from the floor of the conference, led to considerable press speculation about relations at the top of the party. Notwithstanding the gossip, there is little evidence that their

80

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

very different positions on the death penalty affected their otherwise generally very positive working relationship. Whitelaw’s approach to penal matters was fairly well captured in the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 1982. Noting that a greater number of ‘petty offenders’ were imprisoned in England and Wales than in other European countries, Whitelaw argued ‘that far too many people were going into prison who might have been better treated outside; far too many were also staying inside longer than was needed’.29 Pursuing a more flexible approach to sentencing would, he argued, bring two benefits, ‘punishment that fitted the offender as well as the crime, and fewer people in our overcrowded prisons’.30 Realising that aspects of his approach would be controversial, Whitelaw sought support from senior members of the judiciary, something he appears to have received, not least from the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane.31 The Act imposed new restrictions on the use of custody, requiring courts to justify such penalties on three grounds: the failure of non-custodial interventions; public protection; and, the seriousness of the offence. Relatively soon after the implementation of the Act the numbers of young offenders being imprisoned began to drop as, subsequently, it did for young adults also.32 The Act separated youth custody (four- to twelve-month sentences) from custody in a detention centre (a minimum of 21 days and maximum of four months). Given the background of ‘short, sharp shock’ rhetoric, much attention, rather unrealistically, was placed on this aspect of the legislation. In fact, the Act had little of detail to say about the nature of the regimes themselves, and as we have indicated it appears that Whitelaw was lukewarm at best about the proposals. However, with clear support for tough measures for juveniles from many in his own party on the one side, and ‘downright hostility’ from the Opposition on the other, Whitelaw could not afford to waver lest he undermine those elements of Act that were closer to his heart. The solution was ‘to move slowly and cautiously, taking no further action than he judged was strictly necessary’, in relation to a policy about which he ‘had increasingly come to harbour misgivings’.33 The original pilot regime, at New Hall in Yorkshire, had been expanded to two further institutions in 1981. Behind the scenes internal Home Office research offered little support for any further development of the initiative,34 though the rather damning evaluation was not published until after the 1983 general election. The final matter of substance that Whitelaw had to deal with in his period as Home Secretary was how to respond to the Report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure established under his Labour predecessor, Merlyn Rees.35 The report had been published in early 1981 and a little over a year later Whitelaw had outline legislation, broadly modelled on the Royal Commission’s report, ready for Cabinet Home Affairs Committee approval. From the outset it was clear that the legislation would court controversy and, most likely, considerable disagreement. In a briefing with Whitelaw, Sir Brian Cubbon, by now Permanent Secretary in the Home Office, said that he rather doubted that the proposed changes would be viewed as strengthening police powers and therefore as reinforcing law and order. As a consequence it was unlikely, he said, that the government could ‘be sure of total support even from the police. If the lawyers and/or the other critics attack

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 81 a particular proposal, the police will be tempted to stand back and say that they are happy with the present loose arrangements’ for overseeing practices within the police station.36 The Police and Criminal Evidence Bill was tricky for the government, not least as Cubbon’s fears were quickly realised. The Police Federation lost no time in mounting a critical campaign against the proposed new arrangements for regulating police conduct, and Whitelaw found himself on the receiving end of very hostile treatment at a London meeting attended by 2,000 police officers. In addition, the Opposition also took a fairly dim view of the Bill. Whitelaw’s Shadow, Roy Hattersley,37 objected to it on three separate grounds: that the proposals on arrest, detention and interrogation were unacceptable; that the extensions to police powers would alienate the police from the public; and, that the consequence would be a severe blow to the prevention of crime and the apprehension of criminals. Whitelaw was under pressure both from political and police critics while also needing to defend the government’s tough on crime credentials. The consequence was that slowly but surely the agreed Home Office line – that the Bill was a necessary codification and updating of existing law and practice – was gradually eclipsed by growing law and order rhetoric. Ministers increasingly presented the measures as primarily being a means of strengthening police powers, something even generally moderate Whitelaw could not resist on occasion.38 Many officials viewed this drift as contributing significantly to the Bill’s growing unpopularity. In the event, although the Bill was introduced in 1982, and was generally positively received in the press, its parliamentary progress was slow, indeed sufficiently so for it to fall when a general election was called early in 1983. Looking back on the first Thatcher administration it is important to acknowledge that Whitelaw’s approach to penal policy – and he was rarely constrained in any significant manner by the Prime Minister – was significantly more nuanced than the ‘short, sharp shock’ language associated with the detention centres initiative or the law and order rhetoric that accompanied some of the discussions of the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill. Nevertheless, the Conservative government continued to be viewed by many fairly straightforwardly as consistently hard line on penal matters, and the theme itself continued to be one that Margaret Thatcher regularly returned to. In a speech in 1982 in which she described law and order as not simply an electoral slogan but ‘the foundation of the British tradition’, Mrs Thatcher turned, as was typical, to the one field in which the evidence was reasonably straightforward, policing. Her claim was that during the past three years her government had done more to support the police than any other since the war, increasing numbers, paying them more, and improving their training and equipment. The rest of the penal landscape was carefully ignored.39 This was a government that at a rhetorical level continued successfully to present itself as straightforwardly ‘tough on crime’ and was often supported in this by an Opposition that clearly viewed it in these terms, often in the face of a reality that was significantly more complex. By 1983, party differences over law and order had become firmly entrenched, and their scope widened, at the Conservatives’ bidding, ‘to embrace not only lawviolation and order-defiance, but also present and future morality’40 and to do

82

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

so in a way that encouraged what criminologists later came to term increased ‘responsibilisation’.41 The Conservative election manifesto observed that ‘Dealing with crimes, civil disobedience, violent demonstrations and pornography are not matters for the police alone. It is teachers and parents – and television producers too – who influence the moral standards of the next generation. There must be close co-operation and understanding between the police and the community they serve.’42 In that cause they cited their achievements in office: once again focusing on having given the police ‘every possible backing’; pursuing the revision of their powers in the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill;43 giving the courts more effective sentencing powers; and embarking on a major prison-building programme. Following the 1979 election defeat, James Callaghan had resigned as Labour leader and, after a major split in the party caused by the defection of the socalled ‘Gang of Four’, had been replaced by Michael Foot, a renowned leftwing former deputy leader. The 1983 Labour manifesto,44 twice the length of the Conservatives’, devoted more space than ever before to law and order issues, though Foot had made no mention of law and order at all in his 1982 party conference speech. Termed by Gerald Kaufman, a leading Labour MP and shadow Home Affairs minister, the ‘longest suicide note in history’, the manifesto advocated, among other policies long cherished by the party’s left wing but overruled by its hitherto more centre-right leadership, such proposals as unilateral nuclear disarmament and withdrawal from the European Economic Community (EEC]. Labour, which had been critical of the provisions in the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill that had been before Parliament prior to the election being called, said that its aims would not be pursued under a Labour government. They would provide ‘the police with sufficient powers to do their job effectively whilst not infringing the civil rights of individual suspects’ (an interesting phrasing given the origins of the Bill lay in concerns about the improper interrogation of vulnerable suspects), would introduce elected police authorities and an independent police complaints process, while also removing prosecutorial responsibility from the police, and disbanding the Met’s Special Patrol Group, and its provincial equivalents, which had ‘increasingly been deployed in aggressive public order roles’. Labour also advocated expanding non-custodial measures to reduce the prison population and improve conditions, regimes and prisoners’ rights; and for far more access to legal aid and advice. Beyond its promises on non-custodial measures the manifesto resolutely avoided any mention of punishment, deterrence or how to deal with the most serious offenders. The underlying theme remained the ‘one nation’ approach to crime prevention. Though greatly at odds with the Conservative appeal to retributive and deterrent thinking, it is unlikely that the law and order issue weighed as heavily in the huge Conservative majority of 144, compared with its role in the tighter majority of 43 in 1979. Victory in the Falklands was undoubtedly the key to such electoral success, especially after a substantial rise in unemployment following a wave of factory closures in the wake of increased deindustrialisation.45 If by 1983 law and order had begun to assume a less prominent role than had been the case in the election that brought Margaret Thatcher to power, it

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 83 nevertheless remained a central card in a way in which, until the 1970s, it never had been previously. It was increasingly clear that no party could afford to cede this ground to the Opposition, and all parties felt obliged to address it in some way during the campaign. The new Conservative administration, in power from 1983–1987, had much to do in this field and would oversee a number of significant pieces of criminal justice-related legislation. Reintroducing the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill was always going to be the first and most substantial of these, but reform of the prosecution system via the Prosecution of Offences Act 1985, and controversial public order legislation in the form of the 1986 Public Order Act, quickly followed.

Brittan arrives Following the election Whitelaw left the Home Office saying that ‘The thing I am proudest of is that I managed to handle the riots in 1981 without having to take more repressive measures’.46 He was replaced by Leon Brittan, someone who while considered by some to be ill-suited to elements of the role of Home Secretary was, with ‘his keen lawyer’s mind and intellectual rigour’,47 arguably ideal for the job of steering the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill through parliament.48 Early on in his tenure, however, Brittan made one of his few significant missteps as Home Secretary and, yet again, the issue was the death penalty. Though Brittan was more of a hardliner than his predecessor, like all recent Tory Home Secretaries with the exception of Reginald Maudling, he was largely against the measure. Although it always appeared unlikely that the Commons would be persuaded to vote in favour of its reintroduction, if ever there were a time that the return of the death penalty might happen this was it. A huge Conservative parliamentary majority, a recent election in which much of the grassroots support for the Party had voiced its support for hanging, and a Prime Minister that strongly favoured capital punishment, though she recognised the splits in the party that such a move might provoke. Indeed, it was reported that at least three cabinet ministers, Peter Walker,49 Jim Prior50 and Michael Heseltine,51 said they would resign from government if capital punishment was reintroduced. Behind the scenes it seems the Prime Minister quietly acknowledged that she did not think the House would vote in favour, thereby tacitly making it easier for her MPs to enter the opposite lobby from her. On this subject, her biographer said, it ‘was more important for her to be seen to be on the “right” side . . . than to prevail.’52 In the debate, Brittan said that he would ‘vote against the general proposition that capital punishment should be reintroduced for all murders’53 but then, to the surprise of many, said that he would be voting for restoration in terrorism cases. As one of his successors put it, ‘This pleased no one, since it amazed his old abolitionist friends and failed to convince the pro-hanging lobby who recognised that the execution of terrorists would solve little . . . Leon’s political reputation never really recovered from that speech’.54 The motions to restore the death penalty were all defeated by substantial margins, something that did not surprise the Prime Minister and one she likely felt was a fairly easy outcome to live with.55

84

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Despite its complexities and the contention that surrounded it, Brittan was on much safer territory with the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill and immediately set about reviewing the draft legislation, revising it considerably before it returned to parliament. Labour continued strenuously to oppose it; indeed, at this time the party was unwavering in its general hostility to the police. The Committee Stage of the Bill lasted a then record of 59 sessions from early November 1983 to late the following March. Outside parliament the Greater London Council under the leadership of Ken Livingstone56 launched a campaign against the legislation under the deliberately provocative title ‘Kill the Bill’. In Westminster the new Shadow Home Secretary, Gerald Kaufman, was also outspoken in his criticism, arguing with more than a degree of hyperbole that it would ‘seriously undermine civil liberties in ways which again are unprecedented in modern history’.57 Arguably, this view of the Bill, shared by many critics on the left, was no more accurate a representation than the stiffening ‘law and order’ presentation of it resorted to by Conservative supporters when occasion necessitated. Politically controversial from the moment of its birth, and throughout its lengthy twofold passage through parliament, in the event the Police and Criminal Evidence Act (PACE) quite quickly became an important part of the criminal justice landscape. Though it certainly didn’t satisfy everyone, within a relatively short period of time it had ceased to be a matter of any significant political contention.58

The miners’ strike Long before PACE completed its parliamentary passage, however, the ‘law and order’ reputation of the Thatcher government was to become much more firmly established, not as a consequence of new legislation or of related policy development, but because of the government’s handling of the miner’s strike: what was to become the longest and most significant industrial dispute of the post-war period Toward the end of 1983 a significant industrial dispute in Warrington at Eddie Shah’s Messenger Newspapers offered insight of what was to come.59 Huge political differences were revealed as mass picketing on the one hand, and new, and to some at least, controversial policing tactics on the other, resulted in considerable violence.60 All of this, however, was as nothing to the miners’ strike which ran for a year from March 1984. Three years earlier the Conservative government, faced with a battle with the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) that it was ill-prepared for, took the decision to drop its proposed pit closures. That 1981 decision and, more particularly, the memory of Saltley, together with Heath’s demise having asked the country ‘Who Governs?’, led to careful planning for what for some felt like the inevitable next stand-off with the miners. The Prime Minister was determined not to be beaten by the NUM again and by 1984, thanks to massive coal stocks and a well-paid and well-prepared police service, the conditions were in place for dealing with a sustained strike. The senior players had also changed. The rather more hawkish Brittan had replaced Whitelaw as Home Secretary, the militant Arthur Scargill had succeeded the much more traditional and pragmatic Joe Gormley at the head of the NUM, and Ian MacGregor, a Scotsman with attitudes ‘rooted in the

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 85 American climate of free enterprise’,61 was in charge of the National Coal Board (NCB). Scargill and MacGregor ‘were made for each other, born to confront’.62 Scargill’s fateful decision not to call for a national ballot prior to strike action meant that the miners’ cause immediately lost a significant element of any legitimacy it might have been able to claim, not least among the miners in Nottinghamshire and other parts of the country who kept working after the strike was called. Once again, mass picketing and ‘flying pickets’ were to be among the primary tactics used by the striking miners. The governmental response was robust. The criminal law was used against secondary picketing and the police were encouraged to prevent miners travelling from one part of the country to picket in another. Indeed, the nature of the police operation during the strike led to considerable political disagreement, partly because of the scale of the operation, partly the tactics and approach used and partly because of perceived political partisanship. At the outset of the dispute the National Reporting Centre (NRC), a co-ordinating centre at Scotland Yard, was put into operation. For some, its activities were suspicious, and far from being the neutral administrative organisation that oversaw police mutual aid activities as it was generally presented by government and by the police themselves, it was viewed as an operational hub and, more importantly, an operational hub that was steered, in one way or another, by government and NCB interests. The NRC oversaw the deployment of thousands of police officers, often hundreds of miles from their home forces, in communities that often experienced them as being akin to an army of occupation. Allegations of misconduct were legion and fed into a picture of a police service that was antagonistic to the miners’ cause and was acting at the behest of its political masters. Police authorities in many of the main mining areas, usually Labour-dominated, became increasingly critical of their local constabularies, with threats to withhold funding and to disband symbolic targets such as the force dog or mounted sections. Conflict involving local police authorities also grew when some of the more outspoken chief constables also took the opportunity to enter the political debate. James Anderton in Greater Manchester, for example, compared mass picketing to violent street demonstrations, and suggested that both should be seen as ‘acts of terrorism without the bullet and the bomb.’ Democracy was under threat he opined, and it was time something was done about it.63 The miners’ strike also witnessed some of the worst violence during an industrial dispute for several decades. At one point in the dispute, the Home Secretary Leon Brittan said that the ‘challenge to the rule of law in Britain has never been so great’ and that the ‘miners’ mass pickets posed the biggest single challenge to public order policing since the War’.64 The scene of the worst violence was outside a coking plant at Orgreave, near Rotherham in Yorkshire. Five thousand police officers confronted somewhere between 5–10,000 pickets, one side attempting to stop lorries leaving the plant, while the other sought to ensure that work continued. A core police tactic was to use mounted officers to drive a wedge into the massed pickets while the remaining officers beat on their riot shields with truncheons. In the conflict that ensued hundreds were injured, close to one hundred arrests were made, and British television screens were dominated by scenes

86 The Changing Politics of Law and Order of unprecedented industrial violence. Speaking the day after what had become known as the ‘Battle of Orgreave’ Mrs Thatcher said, ‘You saw the scenes . . . on television last night. I must tell you that what we have got is an attempt to substitute the rule of the mob for the rule of the law, and it must not succeed’.65 Indeed, BBC television coverage, heavily disputed at the time, appeared to show that the worst of the police violence had occurred in the aftermath of attacks on their lines by striking miners throwing bricks, bottles and other ammunition. Only some years later was it admitted that the sequencing of the report was in fact the reverse of what had actually occurred, the miners’ actions having happened after the police decision to ride directly into the lines of pickets. In the event, ‘Orgreave was the pickets’ Waterloo’66 and ‘knocked the stuffing out of mass picketing, and perhaps out of the whole dispute’.67 It also shocked many who watched it including, it was reported, the Queen.68 By this point, however, the Labour Party was in a difficult position. The Conservative argument, rehearsed regularly for the best part of the decade, that Labour encouraged the undermining of the rule of law, meant any support for mass picketing, and any criticism of the police, was simply likely to be presented as yet more evidence that they could not be trusted on law and order. In the aftermath of the Battle of Orgreave Gerald Kaufman described the police as having ‘been pitchforked against their will into an intolerable situation’69 and Neil Kinnock,70 now Leader of the Opposition, asked the Prime Minister why she would not intervene to bring the dispute to an end. Her response, which had become something of a mantra by this point, was simply to put it to Kinnock that he should offer unequivocal condemnation of the picket line violence. She then went on to argue that she was astonished that he should suggest that ‘because one faction of the NUM adopts these disgraceful tactics, it should be given what it wants.’71 The impression at the time was of a country divided: a government versus ‘the enemy within’ as Mrs Thatcher described them. General Galtieri, the ‘enemy without’, had been vanquished in the Falklands War, and now the ‘Miners’ leaders . . . Liverpool and some local authorities [who were] just as dangerous to liberty [and a] scar across the face of the country’,72 also had to be defeated. As her biographer put it, one of the reasons she was able to be this forceful was ‘the agony of the Labour Party’.73 Caught between traditional loyalty to trades unions, and to the miners more particularly, but concerned about the legitimacy of the strike itself, Kinnock was forced to equivocate and was regularly embarrassed at the despatch box. After the collapse of the strike, both the government and the Labour Party conducted reviews: the former focused largely on police intelligence-gathering methods, the latter on police oversight and governance.74 In the end the reputation of the police suffered great and lasting damage, not least to its carefully crafted image of political neutrality. This sense was reinforced by the collapse of close to one hundred criminal cases brought against pickets for ‘riot’. Allegations of police misconduct and of falsification of evidence led to a campaign for a public inquiry that was still running well over 30 years after the end of the strike.75 The phrase ‘Maggie’s Army’ may in the main have simply been a colourful insult, but it struck a nerve, with many in the police itself concerned that the service had

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 87 become too close to government. Policing was to remain a site of political contention for some years to come, 76 initially at a local level, as some of the more radical councils, in London, Liverpool and elsewhere, continued to flex their muscles. The actions taken during the strike undoubtedly also reinforced the government’s reputation for its uncompromising position on law and order while offering it regular opportunities to launch stinging critiques of Labour politicians and the Opposition in general for ‘siding with lawbreakers’ rather than those tasked with maintaining order.

Hurd in charge The aftermath of the strike also saw a change in the Home Office, with Douglas Hurd replacing Leon Brittan. The Prime Minister felt Hurd ‘looked more the part, was immensely reassuring to the police, and, though no one could call him a natural media performer, he inspired a good deal of confidence in the Parliamentary Party.’77 Also, having served as Brittan’s number two, he knew the Home Office and was judged capable of dealing with what was likely to prove a tough job having ‘become a harder and wiser man through serving as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland’.78 Once again, all observers, including Hurd himself, report that in his time as Home Secretary he experienced little or no interference from Downing Street. That this was more to do with Thatcher’s interest in the work of the Office than with the character of the Prime Minister was evidenced by his very different experience subsequently as Foreign Secretary where he had much less of a free rein.79 With the turbulence of the miners’ strike now over a more peaceful period might have been anticipated but, as so often with the Home Office, events were to prove otherwise. Within a week of Hurd’s appointment, renewed rioting broke out, this time in the Birmingham neighbourhood of Handsworth. Sparked by an arrest following a minor traffic offence, but against a background of concerted police action against the local drugs trade, as many as two thousand people were estimated to have been on the streets at the height of the rioting. Two people died in a fire at a local post office and 40–50 buildings in all were burnt out.80 Three weeks later Brixton once again witnessed serious rioting. The police, searching for a suspect in a firearms case, raided a house where the suspect’s mother, Cherry Groce, lived. In the course of the raid Mrs Groce was shot in the chest; as it turned out her son, Michael, was not at the address. A botched police search, and the shooting of an innocent woman, resulted in what at first was a peaceful protest. Over the course of the two subsequent days, however, more than 30 police officers were injured and almost 800 crimes recorded as rioting once more broke out. Hurd met with the local police consultative group in Lambeth, with local MPs and others to try to reduce local tensions but here, as elsewhere, there continued to be deep hostility toward the police and distrust of government. A week later this was made visible again as rioting occurred once more in Liverpool 8 and, on a more minor scale, in Peckham in south London. As Hurd recalled, ‘worse soon followed’. In early October, five weeks after taking office, rioting in the Broadwater Farm estate in Haringey in north London culminated in the

88

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

murder of PC Keith Blakelock. This was not an occasion where the Prime Minister left matters entirely to her Home Secretary. Contacting Hurd early the following day, Thatcher wanted to know what could be done to support the police. Both the decision not to use plastic bullets and the unavailability of water cannon were discussed, with the PM taking the view that the events indicated a worsening of the problems of urban violence and reinforcing her sense that police equipment and personnel needed further strengthening. Particular political controversy was stoked by Bernie Grant, the leader of Haringey Council and later a local Labour MP.81 Speaking outside Tottenham Town Hall Grant was reported as saying, ‘The police were to blame for what happened on Sunday night and what they got was a bloody good hiding’.82 Unsurprisingly, given the brutality of Blakelock’s murder, condemnation of Grant’s comment came from across the political spectrum, including from Neil Kinnock the leader of the Labour Party and Roy Hattersley, his deputy.83 Labour was once again in an especially difficult position, however, for despite attempts to dissociate itself from the remarks, Grant remained the party’s choice as its parliamentary candidate for the local Tottenham constituency. Though he altered his language subsequently, Grant continued to be highly critical of the Metropolitan Police in the aftermath of the riot and called for both resignations of senior officers and for an independent inquiry. The riot, and the death of PC Blakelock more particularly, made visible once again some of the political fissures around law and order that marked much of the controversy surrounding the policing of the miners’ strike. There were those on the right of the Conservative Party that used it as a basis for calling for the reintroduction of capital punishment, the Tory MP Nicholas Winterton suggesting that it would be an appropriate penalty for those committing such grave acts of violence as well as ‘political agitators who could be proved to have incited murderers’.84 The Conservative Party annual conference was held later that week and the Prime Minister used it as an opportunity both to promise renewed support for the police and to criticise the Opposition. It was a speech which allowed her to draw together some familiar themes under the general banner of law and order. She began by recalling the Brighton bomb at the previous year’s conference,85 and condemned the violence of terrorists, before moving on to celebrate the government’s victory over the miners and what she described as their tactics of violence and intimidation. Later in her speech she attacked the Labour Party for its failure to expel those that conspired ‘through union power or local government to break, defy and subvert the law’, and for including within its ranks those that saw the police as ‘the enemy’. The government would ‘continue steadfastly to back the police. If they need more men, more equipment, different equipment, they shall have them. We don’t economise on protecting life and property.’86 Douglas Hurd, who was sitting next to the chancellor, reported that the TV cameras caught him whispering in Nigel Lawson’s ear as Thatcher made this promise. ‘A lip reader could have caught the words, “That will cost you a bob or two”. So it did, but he paid up, both in terms of numbers and relatively generous system of calculating police pay.’87

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 89 Beyond a brief criticism of the government’s record – ‘how the self-acclaimed party of law and order comes to preside over a record 40 per cent rise in crime in our country in the last six years?’88 – Neil Kinnock’s party conference speech as Leader of the Opposition had nothing to say about crime, the policing of the miners’ strike or the riots. Rather, it became one of his best-known moments as Labour leader, for his challenge to Militant Tendency and his concerted effort to rid the party of one of its ‘hostages to fortune’.89 Kinnock’s outspoken criticisms of those he described as making ‘impossible promises . . . far-fetched resolutions . . . rigid dogma . . . outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to real needs’ was one of the defining moments in the long process of repositioning the Labour Party, arguably leading to the birth of ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair close to a decade later. Within the narrow confines of the law and order field, however, it left Conservative criticisms of the Opposition unchallenged and reinforced Conservative claims to be the party that could be trusted on such matters.

Differences of view Within the Tory party itself there remained very considerable differences of view, not least between the Home Secretary and elements of the membership on the right of the party. Again, it was the party conference that became the stage where such differences were most obviously viewed and felt. Hurd likened travelling from his conference hotel to deliver his annual speech as Home Secretary as akin to being on the ‘way to the guillotine’.90 In 1986 he had a fairly smooth ride, outlining a variety of new measures – most particularly plans to deprive organised criminals of the proceeds of their crimes – and attacking the Opposition. He used the now well-rehearsed grounds that their ‘posture as the champion of law and order was a sham’ and suggested they disown their own ‘hooligans’ who wanted to hand control of the police to its enemies. As Whitelaw had done before him, Hurd argued that the solution to crime was not simply greater numbers of police officers and more prisons, but neither could poverty nor unemployment be used as ‘excuses’ for criminality. A year later he received a much rougher ride and once again the predictable focus of much rank-and-file discontent was capital punishment. Two debates in the House of Commons in the previous 18 months had seen attempts to restore the death penalty for certain classes of offence defeated, by 75 votes in 1986 and by 112 votes earlier in 1987.91 Later that year, at the annual party conference, Douglas Hurd was once again faced with the familiar problem for Tory Home Secretaries: how to keep a decidedly pro-hanging auditorium onside while sticking to his own beliefs. In his speech, and like the majority of his immediate predecessors, Hurd spoke strongly against reintroduction and his remarks on the death penalty were met by cries of ‘shame’ from the floor.92 The Prime Minister notably failed to join others who stood to applaud his speech at the end. Despite his leader’s rather public snub, Hurd’s approach appears to have been successful. His conference speech, his death penalty position notwithstanding, included a fair amount of red meat, promising ‘draconian’ measures to crack

90

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

down on the carrying of knives and introducing a power to enable the Court of Appeal to increase sentences. The Times’ front page the following day was headlined: ‘Home Secretary cracks down on street thugs: Hurd unveils package on law and order’, and went on to observe, ‘A brave speech by Mr Douglas Hurd, the Home Secretary, announcing a wide-ranging package of law and order measures and some deft conference management yesterday enabled the Conservative Party leadership to avoid embarrassment in the face of widespread Tory demands for the restoration of capital punishment’.93 Once again it appears the appeal to ‘law and order’ was very much focused on keeping the party faithful – at least those that attended conference – reasonably content, and there is little evidence that it reflected anything more fundamental in terms of an attitude toward penal policy within the Home Office at the time. On the most symbolic of issues, capital punishment, Hurd was staunchly against reintroduction as, increasingly it appeared, were the bulk of MPs. Nevertheless, behind the scenes a national campaign had been launched by the Monday Club, seeking a referendum on the reintroduction of hanging. They were proposing to contact all Conservative constituency chairmen to try to ensure that the only candidates that were selected for seats were pro-hanging, and they were also pressing to have existing MPs with more liberal views deselected. The view among ministers, it appears, was that the success of such manoeuvring was most unlikely. Despite her well-known position on capital punishment – very much in line with the views of the party conference attendees that gave Hurd such a rough ride – and her clear distancing of herself from that element of Hurd’s speech, Thatcher once again neither interfered nor sought to influence her Home Secretary. As we have seen, his predecessors’ experiences had been similar. According to Hurd, ‘She certainly did not want the pressure for a return of capital punishment to reach a point where she felt forced into action. Not once during my five years as Home Secretary did she even begin to suggest that her Government should change the law to restore hanging. Indeed, to an extent which surprised me, the Prime Minister left me alone to cope with problems of law and order.’94 That said, from early in 1986 the Prime Minister did begin to take an increased interest in home affairs, indicating that she would like to have regular informal meetings with the Home Secretary, something she had not done with his predecessors. Nevertheless, notes from these meetings confirm Hurd’s general picture, and suggest that Mrs Thatcher did little more than encourage occasional firmness and indicate her support for particular approaches or ideas. The agenda appears to have been almost entirely dictated by Hurd, though with occasional influence from the PM’s advisers. The general picture from Downing Street in this period remains one in which home affairs very much took a back seat to other issues of public policy and, by and large, was left in the hands of the Secretary of State. Within the Home Office itself policing continued to be the focus of a great deal of attention. Beyond issues of funding and equipment, there was also the question of powers. PACE having finally reached the stage of implementation, the next matter on the list was public order, a subject that had been under consideration for some time but which was by now receiving renewed attention because of the

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 91 riots in 1985 and the continuing problem of football hooliganism.95 As far back as 1980 there had been a Green Paper on the subject,96 followed by a report by the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee97 and a White Paper,98 all of which agreed that existing public order legislation was inadequate. The eventual Act, which received royal assent in 1986, introduced three new statutory offences – riot, violent disorder, and affray – introduced both the offence of incitement to racial hatred and orders enabling courts to exclude offenders from football grounds, and reformed the law relating to processions and assemblies. Most controversial, arguably, was that section of the Act that introduced a new low-level offence, which was something falling short of violence, but involving harassment, or causing alarm or distress.99 Critics were concerned that this would prove to be an intrusive power and, indeed, by the end of the decade over twentyfive thousand people a year were being convicted under this provision.100 Although Hurd’s tenure in the Home Office was to include two further Criminal Justice Acts, in 1987 and 1988, much of their policy content had a history which stretched back to his predecessors and raised little controversy. The Acts covered such matters as reform of fraud trials, confiscation of the proceeds of crime, improvements in the systems for awarding compensation to victims of crime, and amendments to the available custodial sentences for juvenile offenders. In the background, Hurd was much more preoccupied with the prison system, the continuing problems government was having with the increasingly mutinous Prison Officers’ Association, and the ever-present and seemingly never-diminishing problem of overcrowding. The POA had taken industrial action in 1986 and for a couple of days it seemed the system itself might collapse, a time Hurd felt was his worst as Home Secretary. The eventual outcome was an initiative called Fresh Start which sought to reform the extant system of overtime and to improve overall working practices, in part by reducing officers’ working hours and also by increasing staff numbers. Subsequent assessment suggested the initiative fell far short of what had been hoped for and contributed to the continuing ill feeling and tensions that existed among some prison staff and were to surface in the years to come.101 The idea of using the private sector to help reform the management of prisons was beginning to be mooted, with the British government aware that their French counterparts were researching the matter, and that a Home Office minister, Lord Glenarthur, and the chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee, John Wheeler, were visiting America to explore what was happening there. Hurd, however, remained reluctant to embrace privatisation and pinned his hopes on the fact that Fresh Start would help to bring about changes similar to those he felt were beginning to be seen within the police service.

A third successive victory Some of Hurd’s initiatives, however, had to await the aftermath of yet another general election campaign. Called in May 1987, the Conservatives were seeking a third successive victory. By this point the political mood had changed, leading to greater realism and restraint in the election claims of both major parties. The

92

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

economic situation was generally positive, and this was to play a central role in the eventual outcome as, seemingly, was the public preference for Margaret Thatcher over Neil Kinnock.102 The ascendancy of the Conservatives in opinion polls both in general and on law and order issues had been maintained despite a continuous rise in crime rates. The Labour manifesto, for the first time in a direct way, attacked the Conservative record: ‘eight years of rising crime, of greater insecurity on the streets and housing estates and in the home’.103 Indeed, at face value the recorded crime statistics made for fairly grim reading for an avowedly ‘law and order’ government. Although crime had been rising steadily in the period leading up to the 1979 general election, and over 60% since 1970, the first two Thatcher administrations had seen a further 65% increase in recorded crime (see Fig. 4.1). Although the British Crime Survey104 was a relatively recent arrival at this stage, having only begun measuring crime in 1981, it also confirmed a picture of rapidly rising crime during the decade.105 It was this that the Labour Party sought to capitalise upon. The manifesto suggested that the ‘Thatcher government has broken its promises on law and order. Last year 4,311,000 crimes were committed in Britain. The clear-up rate fell to 32 per cent. Millions of women are scared to go out at night. Many old people lock themselves into their homes. Drug trafficking is increasing. Labour will take urgent action to make people safer’.106 The Opposition assigned responsibility for the continuing steep rise in crime rates to Conservative social and economic policies rather than any particular defects in penal policy. Indeed, when it came to criminal justice the Labour Party had relatively little to offer that was either new or appeared to challenge Tory dominance – its proposals being to increase crime prevention, boost victim support, seek better inter-agency working to tackle drug abuse and, once again, to introduce elected police authorities.

Figure 4.1 Recorded Crime England and Wales, 1970–1987 Source: Self-generated

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 93 In similar vein, the Conservatives, for the first time since the 1960s and with Douglas Hurd, a Home Secretary broadly viewed as on the liberal wing of his party,107 steered clear of singling out Labour for further attack on this front. They offered a few generally defensive arguments about existing policy, including increased police numbers and powers, tougher sentencing for violence and drug trafficking, and ‘the biggest prison building and modernisation programme this century.’108 They dealt with the rising crime issue not by acknowledging any link with structural inequalities, as argued by Labour, but by extending responsibility for crime control to ‘all of us’, in effect relinquishing any claim to the effectiveness of their own ‘law and order’ policies. The problem was not just in Britain but prevalent throughout ‘most other societies too’. Its origins lay ‘deep in society’, an affirmation at odds with Margaret Thatcher’s much cited, later remark: ‘And, you know, there is no such thing as society – there are individual men and women and there are families.’109 The main source was not increasing inequalities of wealth and income but was rather to be found in poor parental and school discipline, the glamorisation of violence on the media and the erosion of traditional values.110 Communities should be encouraged to mobilise against crime by such initiatives as Neighbourhood Watch, and a proposed Criminal Justice Bill would strengthen measures against drug trafficking and violence. As in 1983, immigration control was identified as the basis for greater racial harmony. The Liberal Party, now in the fifth year of their alliance with the Social Democrats, made a more ambitious attempt to raise their game on ‘law and order’ issues.111 Their recommendations proved prescient, including four proposals which were later adopted in somewhat different form by the New Labour government over ten years later: first, a Bill of Rights incorporating the European Convention of Human Rights; secondly, a new Ministry of Justice to administer legal aid and court procedures, including, thirdly, a strengthened Judicial Studies Board to set out sentencing guidelines; and, fourthly, open government required a Freedom of Information Act and the repeal of the Official Secrets Act. They also proposed the establishment of local crime prevention units and ‘Crime Crisis Areas’. The latter, based in the highest crime areas, which would have more police on the streets, their local police stations ‘re-opened’, and ‘new housing estates designed to minimise opportunities for crime’. Two Royal Commissions were proposed, one on the Presentation of Violence in the Media, and one on Police Accountability. Notwithstanding what such a Royal Commission might propose, the manifesto committed the SDP/Liberal Alliance to a democratically elected police authority for London, and against any move toward a national police force. A number of recommendations were made to reduce the population of prisons, which were ‘bursting at the seams’, and to improve prison conditions before they erupted, which occurred three years later with the riot at and occupation of Strangeways prison.112 All in all, the SDP-Liberal proposals on ‘law and order’ were far more radical than those of the two major parties. The 1987 election, however, given the logic of the ‘first past the post’ electoral system, somewhat cruelly confirmed their marginal status.

94

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Perhaps predictably given the way the manifestos had treated the subject of law and order, there was near concordance by 1987 in the extent to which party campaign addresses mentioned the issue: 65 per cent of Labour, 74 per cent of Conservative, 74 per cent of Social Democrat and 65 per cent of Liberal. By 1987, the greater realism that had begun to characterise both major parties’ approaches to ‘law and order’ led both to modify elements of their previous stances. The Conservatives had to acknowledge that, despite their self-aggrandising rhetoric of being the party of law and order, crime had continued to rise, and rise at a higher rate than under their Labour predecessors. Again, part of their response was to redefine crime control as a task for everyone, given that its origins lay ‘deep in society’.113 Other countries were similarly embroiled in rising crime, regardless of criminal justice policies. The Conservatives continued to be resolute, however, in disconnecting crime from social and economic inequalities: the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, was keen to point out that crime rates had been stable in the 1930s (recorded rates doubled in actuality)114 when unemployment was at record levels, and yet rose steeply in the 1960s when relatively full employment prevailed. Labour also modified their hostility to Tory policies on this front, finally dropping their opposition to the Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984. The new police powers under the Bill as it stood before the 1983 election had been balanced by new rights for defendants as a result of modifications in committee after the election, arguably better reflecting the instructions given to the preceding Royal Commission which had been asked to have a view to the maintenance of balance between defendants’ rights and crime control.115 Yet significant differences persisted in the way in which the parties dealt with the issues they all felt compelled to discuss. While all paid homage to the obligatory importance of policing, crime prevention and victim support, 30 per cent of Conservative addresses called for tougher sentencing, 19 per cent for the restoration of capital punishment and 14 per cent claimed Labour was ‘anti-police’. By contrast, Labour addresses focused, as before, on linking crime to the social and economic divisions fostered by Tory policies. Reflecting their manifesto promises it was left to the Liberal Democrats in their addresses to state the more radical case for a Bill of Rights to incorporate the European Convention on Human Rights and for the creation of a Ministry of Justice to organise and co-ordinate criminal justice and crime prevention policies. A Conservative Government was returned, with another substantial majority of 102, and Douglas Hurd was reappointed as Home Secretary, enabling him to use the authority he had built up within his department to begin to tackle some of the more long-standing problems in the field, not least prison overcrowding. In his bilaterals with the Prime Minister he outlined a series of measures he felt were necessary to begin to deal with the prison problem, including using army camps to house some that could not be contained with the current prison estate, speeding up the prison building programme, reviewing parole and, arguably most controversially, considering amendments to remission procedures, in particular to facilitate the release of some prisoners on short sentences. The Chief Inspector of Prisons, in his annual report in 1986, had observed that, ‘the physical conditions in which

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 95 many prisoners had to live continued . . . in many cases, to border on the intolerable . . . Overcrowding, coupled with the lack of in-cell sanitation and the sharing of limited and inadequate facilities on the landings, represented much human misery’.116 The ‘summer of discontent’ in Britain’s prisons in 1986 had been a low point for Hurd, and he and his officials feared further disorder unless significant action was taken. A plan for some form of emergency release was leaked to The Guardian,117 causing some anxiety in Downing Street, with at least one informed observer suggesting that the Prime Minister had intervened in order to prevent any such amnesty damaging the government’s law and order reputation in the weeks leading up to the calling of the general election.118

A prisons crisis By mid-1987, and with the election over, the matter returned with force. The prison population had reached 51,000, the estate was close to 15 per cent over capacity, and the numbers of cells with two or even three prisoners in them was at an all-time high. Hurd knew that action had to be taken, but that some alternative to the idea of an amnesty would have to be found. A number of initiatives were discussed, with the use of army camps and a review of parole among them. The most immediate impact was to be achieved via an increase in early release, allowing remission earned by those serving short sentences to be increased from a third to a half. Although there were difficult meetings with backbenchers, the Prime Minister was broadly supportive and indeed, raised the additional possibility of introducing new non-custodial measures for dealing with minor crimes where violence was not involved. Hurd’s plan was once again leaked to The Guardian which, under the headline ‘Thousands of offenders to be freed from gaol’, reported that the ‘government is to announce a package of measures, including the early release of thousands of non-violent offenders, to tackle a rise of 5,000 in the number of people in prison in the past six months. Those most likely to benefit from the early release scheme are the 18,000 offenders estimated to be serving sentences of 18 months or less. These include burglars, petty thieves, shoplifters, and those convicted of forgery, handling stolen goods or motoring offences’.119 Hurd, notwithstanding her earlier support, was concerned about Thatcher’s likely response to the leak. In the event once again she ‘was not particularly concerned’, being much more worried about the cost of the prison-building programme that appeared to be necessary. In the Commons, Hurd received considerable support from his new opposite number, Roy Hattersley, but was strongly criticised from his own benches. His predecessor, Leon Brittan, welcomed the use of the army camp that Hurd had negotiated, but felt that early release was ‘wrong in principle and quite contrary to the rule of law and everything we stand for’. He felt such a move would lead to ‘considerable public disquiet’ and that opening more camps would be a far more satisfactory solution.120 With cabinet and Prime Ministerial support, and with the Opposition also in agreement, Hurd’s proposal to increase remission from one third to one half in respect of certain prisoners also received a fairly warm reception in the

96

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

broadsheet press. The tabloid press was another matter and it was they that most obviously reflected Brittan’s suggestion that such a policy would be perceived as being at odds with a government that placed so much stress on law and order.121 There were four further areas of policy development where Hurd wished to make progress: restructuring of parole, reforming the right of silence, consideration of private sector involvement in prison management, and crime prevention – a mixture that neatly illustrates the difficulty involved in presenting Hurd straightforwardly as a liberal Home Secretary. A few years earlier, in 1983, Leon Brittan had announced in the Commons that given the strength of public concern about violent crime he intended to exercise his discretion as Home Secretary ‘so that murderers of police or prison officers, terrorist murderers, sexual or sadistic murderers of children and murderers by firearm in the course of robbery can normally expect to serve at least 20 years in custody; and there will be cases where the gravity of the offence requires a still longer period.’122 It was, Lord Windlesham later suggested, ‘a classic instance of a political response to a tide of opinion that had been articulated strongly in the general election campaign that summer’ and coalesced with a general hardening of attitudes relating to the parole process.123 In the years thereafter there was a substantial decline in the rate of release, further contributing to the prison population increase that caused so many problems for Hurd and, eventually, led to a shift in the party’s stance toward parole. By July 1987 cabinet was in agreement that the ‘prison system had reached crisis point’124 with the population reaching an all-time high of over 51,000. In its 1987 election manifesto the Conservatives promised a review of the parole system and officials were put to work immediately Hurd returned to office. An official departmental review, chaired by Mark Carlisle,125 was established that July and began work two months later. Successive Thatcher administrations had tended to resist major inquiries wherever possible but were not averse to them where they were politically expedient.126 Reporting eventually in 1989 the Committee drew a series of distinctions: adult offenders serving sentences of up to twelve months should be released automatically at the halfway point of their sentence and then remain on licence for the remainder; those serving sentences of up to, and including four years, would also be released halfway, would remain under supervision until the two-thirds point and then serve the remainder on licence; and, finally, for those serving over four years’ parole would be discretionary, with eligibility beginning at the halfway stage. It also rejected Leon Brittan’s earlier restrictions on parole as ‘flawed in principle and harmful in practice’.127 The review received a lukewarm reception in some quarters, with both Labour’s Home Affairs spokesman, Barry Sheerman, and the Director of NACRO, Vivien Stern, calling on the government to go further than Carlisle had recommended. Within the Home Office progress was slow, there being concern from ministers about how the proposals would fit with broader ‘tough’ law and order policy, together with continuing fears of criticism from senior judiciary.128 Around the same time Hurd was also pursuing another controversial matter, and one that he felt strongly about: potential reform of the right of silence. The Criminal Law Review Commission had considered the matter in the early 1970s

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 97 and had recommended a change in the law.129 There was great hostility among legal and other pressure groups, however, and no further action was taken until the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure looked at it nearly a decade later. A majority of the commission were supportive of the earlier CLRC recommendation but were concerned that drawing inferences from a failure to answer questions might put innocent people at greater risk. However, with PACE now in force Hurd argued that there were greater protections for suspects and the time was consequently right to consider reform once more. He was aware that any such change would be ‘highly controversial’ but he told cabinet colleagues that he felt it ‘would be popular with our supporters and . . . with the police, and it seems to me to be worth weathering the storm of professional and other criticism to achieve it’.130 A working group was established to consider the matter but before it could report a number of cases had arisen which cast doubt, once again, on the conduct of the police. The cases of the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, among others, meant ‘no Home Secretary would have felt confident about going ahead with measures to strengthen the hands of the police and prosecution in questioning suspects’.131

Enter the private sector The continuing prisons crisis led to a change of heart by Hurd in one particular area. He was not by nature much taken with the idea of private sector involvement in the prisons system and the Home Office had also been generally disinclined to move in that direction. In 1987, however, and at least in part as a means of tempering criticism of his proposals to increase the use of executive release, Hurd announced a review of private sector involvement in prison building. However, when pressed on how extensive private sector involvement would be, he said, that while it was important to change the system by which prisons were built, he did not think there was a case ‘and I do not believe that the House would accept a case, for auctioning or privatising the prisons or handing over the business of keeping prisoners safe to anyone other than Government servants.’132 Contracting out prisons and remand centres had been mooted as early as 1984 by a free-market think tank,133 but was not taken terribly seriously in mainstream political circles. An inquiry by the Home Affairs Select Committee produced a report on the subject in 1987,134 but the Committee itself was divided along party lines, with its Labour members being strongly against any such change, and its leading Conservative members, notably Sir Edward Gardner and Sir John Wheeler, pushing strongly for reform. The Home Office minister Lord Windlesham began to lobby the prime minister in relation to experiments with private contractors in the remand sector, though even she was not initially sympathetic and government kept the whole idea at arms-length. Indeed, such scepticism was quite widespread in the Tory party at the time, with even some leading members of its right wing looking on such proposals with suspicion. Sir John Wheeler himself noted that ‘at the time even Margaret herself looked me up and down in a rather scathing way’.135

98

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

In part because of the continuing pressures of overcrowding and industrial unrest, within a relatively short period Hurd’s view appeared to change on the subject of the private sector and he became much more willing to consider some form of experimentation. Study visits to the United States brought back what some interpreted as positive evidence, and John Wheeler136 in particular played an important role in persuading Hurd of the merits of the private sector in the running of prisons.137 Hurd discussed it with the Prime Minister in one of his by now regular bilaterals and although she did not register any objection, she did highlight some limits – making it clear that private sector management should not involve people on remand for violent crimes.138 By March 1988 Hurd was telling Parliament that he was thinking imaginatively about how the prison service might be run, including ‘the possibility of involving the private sector more closely’.139 Shortly thereafter a Green Paper was published140 and Hurd also commissioned management consultants to examine the potential for private running of new remand units as well as prisoner escort. His biographer suggests his change of mind was a result of pragmatism rather than ideology.141 As Hurd himself put it, ‘If private firms, free of the burden of the POA, could deliver higher standards, that could be an advantage huge enough to overcome my earlier doubts’.142 Predictably, there were very significant political differences expressed in parliament. Roy Hattersley, for the Opposition, was scathing in his assessment of the government’s approach: Neither in his statement today, nor in the Green Paper which preceded it, has the Home Secretary even attempted a rational justification of the decision which he has just announced. Even the survey by [the management consultants] Deloitte, Haskins and Sells, on which he relied so heavily, examined only the practicality, and not the propriety, the desirability or the advantages of privatising the remand system. That company was handed an item of dogma and was asked to decide whether the government could get away with it.143 By this stage Thatcher’s views would also appear to have changed. In a meeting with Hurd in February 1990 she registered her concern that a ‘combination of opposition by the prison establishment and the downward revision of projections for the prison population would lead these ideas to fade away’.144 Her private secretary reminded her that she would want to urge the Home Secretary to keep them on the agenda. Behind the scenes Hurd was considering dropping the proposal to go ahead with privately run remand prisons. By this point, however, Thatcher wanted him to go further and, unusually in her dealings with her Home Secretaries, sought to impose her view that her ‘bottom line should be to give private sector operators the option of moving into this activity and to get the legislative powers to open up a wide field, including bail hostels’.145 The process was slow, however, and full-scale private sector involvement only came about after Hurd’s departure to the Foreign Office. His successor, David Waddington, stalled for some time and with pressure within the prisons having lessened somewhat,

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 99 decided against significant private sector involvement in the remand sector. Given the now lengthy background to the proposals, and the fact that the policy had always been accompanied by a degree of controversy, he was cautious about taking such a bold step and decided to check with the Prime Minister’s office. He was immediately advised that such inaction was unacceptable and that he should press ahead. Consequently, and late in the day, a clause was inserted in the Criminal Justice Bill that had been introduced in autumn 1990 that allowed for such contracting out. This was not the end of it, however, for amendments introduced at the committee stage, orchestrated by Conservative backbenchers and Home Office junior ministers, further extended contracting out powers, in particular to facilities for sentenced prisoners, and also to existing prisons and remand centres.146 Windlesham suggests that Thatcher’s position was based on ‘her conviction of the need for radical reform outside the prevailing consensus; not for any reasons of penological principle or administrative practice’,147 and that the decision ‘was a symbol as well as an experiment’.148 In short, her original misgivings had given way to a pragmatic sense that reform in prisons was required and that this would send the appropriate message that the government was willing to countenance radical action. In many respects the history of the beginnings of private sector involvement in the prison system is a remarkable one. The Labour Party was consistently opposed to any such reform and many senior members of the Conservative Party were cautious at best. Originally Hurd was quite strongly opposed. Even Thatcher herself was sceptical. But within a short period of time Hurd was prepared to experiment and Thatcher had become convinced some privatisation was necessary. Why? By the end of the decade it had become clear that the prison-building programme, begun under Whitelaw and continued by his successors, was failing to keep pace with the growth in prison numbers. Moreover, although the overall prison population had grown by close to 40% since the early 1970s the numbers on remand had grown by nearly 130% in the same period (see Fig. 4.2). Both the numbers on remand, and the appalling conditions in which they were often held, were sources of very considerable concern.149 Despite the scale of these difficulties it is unlikely that they would have been sufficient to move political opinion as far or as quickly as had happened. In addition to the problems of the prison population and of prison conditions, the conduct of the Prison Officers’ Association was a continuing thorn in the side of the Conservative government. Throughout the 1980s, the desire of successive Home Secretaries to effect some form of change on working practices within prisons had grown year on year. The Fresh Start initiative had had some impact but had signally failed to solve the industrial relations problems in the penal estate. Finally, there was a combination of growing evidence of the workings of private prisons elsewhere in the world, notably the US, together with lobbying, inside and outside parliament, that gradually helped in the process of persuasion.150 The Prime Minister’s policy unit, together with backbenchers such as Sir John Wheeler were particularly influential. Windlesham would appear correct in suggesting that the initial moves were pragmatic and symbolic. It was only later that the ideological case for the private sector became a more central element

100

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Figure 4.2 Average Prison Population, 1973–1988 Source: Prison Statistics (various)

in the expansion of its role, not least under Kenneth Baker, a Home Secretary who was both a stronger supporter of privatisation and much more experienced in handling such matters than any of his predecessors.

The rise of crime prevention From the very outset of his tenure, crime prevention had been one of Hurd’s key concerns. The appointment of Sir Brian Cubbon as Permanent Secretary in the Home Office in 1979 had given crime prevention a big boost, it being something that he favoured from the outset. Whitelaw did not see a major role for crime prevention and in the early 1980s, in one official’s words, ‘the Government was still inclined to think of crime prevention as being rather like “meals on wheels” – a useful service to deserving and vulnerable people, but marginal to any serious attempt to reduce crime’.151 Brittan was somewhat more receptive and a dedicated Crime Prevention Unit was established in 1983, within the Police Department, and a circular, published in 1984, offered the most substantial crime prevention policy to date.152 Nevertheless, it was under Hurd that things really began to take off, with the Home Office’s annual report in 1985 mentioning the subject for the first time, with subsequently a special seminar chaired by Margaret Thatcher being held in Downing Street. She was impressed by the discussions, remained keen on crime prevention initiatives, and offered Downing Street as a venue for future

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 101 events. This in turn led to the establishment of a Ministerial Group on Crime Prevention tasked with ‘overseeing and co-ordinating crime prevention action at the national level and helping to ensure that Government departments pursue crime prevention objectives in the implementation of their own policies’.153 The Group continued to work into the 1990s. Arguably one of Hurd’s more ambitious initiatives in this field was the establishment of Crime Concern. The 1987 manifesto had promised to ‘build on the support of the public by establishing a national organisation to promote the best practices in local crime prevention initiatives’. This was more of a political than a Home Office development154 though the eventual organisation was initially funded by the Home Office. Its early work covered youth initiatives, crime prevention panels, neighbourhood watch and business and crime programmes. According to David Faulkner, head of the Home Office’s criminal policy department at the time, other events around the time of the 1987 election led to much greater effort being placed in crime prevention efforts, not least the growing impact of the British Crime Survey.155 The survey had been launched early in the decade and it had allowed a picture of crimes not captured in police-recorded statistics to be gradually built up, confirming suspicions that a very significant amount of crime was never processed by the criminal justice system.156 Something else was clearly required. Moreover, increasing research evidence was accumulating which cast doubt on traditional approaches to dealing with crime. The Home Office had invested considerable energy in crime prevention research,157 and in mid-1987 officials spent two days at an event in Brighton in order to work up a series of proposals that could be put to ministers after the election. The outcome was ‘Safer Cities’158 and ‘Action for Youth’, the former a means by which local crime prevention initiatives could be stimulated and managed, the latter intended to help tackle what would later come to be called some of more ‘risk factors’ associated with juvenile offending.159 Beyond prisons and crime prevention the other matter that would come to dominate much of Hurd’s tenure was the growing concern that was emerging around a number of alleged, and very high profile, miscarriages of justice, and which would eventually derail his hoped-for reform of the right of silence. As early as 1986 Hurd had reviewed papers relating to the cases of what had come to be known as the ‘Birmingham Six’, the ‘Guildford Four’ and the ‘Maguire Seven’. Two former Labour Home Secretaries, Roy Jenkins and Merlyn Rees, had taken up some of the cases and there were numerous others in public life that lent their weight to the growing campaigns. Hurd made a major statement to Parliament in January 1987 in which he said he could see no ground for referring the cases of the Maguires or the Guildford Four to the Court of Appeal. The case of the Birmingham Six, which had been the subject of investigation by ITV’s World in Action programme, and at great length in a book by the Labour MP, Chris Mullin160 was, he said, a different matter, there now being fresh evidence of sufficient merit to justify the case’s referral. Although there was some disappointment in the House that the other cases had not also been referred, Hurd’s decision was nonetheless widely admired. It was also, as David Faulkner put it, ‘exceptionally difficult in

102

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

the circumstances of the time, and it was one where he saw that public duty had to override any political considerations there may be’.161 Hurd continued to be under pressure to order reviews in the other two cases and he did go so far as to order a further police investigation, conducted by an outside force, into the Guildford bombings. In January 1988 the Court of Appeal upheld the original guilty verdict in the Birmingham case. Many observers were shocked, being convinced by that stage that there was sufficient evidence already in the public domain to render the convictions unsafe. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Lane, thought differently and took Hurd to task, observing: ‘as with many cases referred by the Home Secretary to the Court of Appeal, the longer this hearing has gone on, the more convinced we were that the jury’s verdict was correct. [It was] difficult to see how the jury could have come to a conclusion other than that the appellants were lying’.162 Later in the year, and with the ‘rebuff’ from the Court of Appeal still fairly fresh, Hurd wrote to the Prime Minister to say that he had now come to the conclusion that new evidence was sufficient to refer the Guildford case also. Early 1989 saw the emergence of clear evidence of police tampering with evidence and in October the Attorney General asked the Court of Appeal to quash the original verdicts in the cases of the Guildford Four and the Maguires. The Home Secretary now felt that some form of inquiry would be necessary in order to unearth what had gone on. He and the attorney general, Patrick Mayhew, were able to persuade some reluctant cabinet colleagues that this was necessary. Luckily, Hurd says, ‘the Prime Minister was in Kuala Lumpur at a Commonwealth summit, or we might have had a bigger problem’.163 Sir John May164 was appointed to chair the inquiry, but his work eventually disappeared underneath the juggernaut of the Royal Commission that was soon to appear. Hurd’s final major contribution as Home Secretary was to oversee and steer the beginnings of the process of sentencing reform that would eventually culminate in the 1991 Criminal Justice Act. In the aftermath of the 1987 election he had held a meeting at Leeds Castle, attended by the full ministerial team and senior officials, to discuss what needed to be done in the coming parliament and to take a strategic overview of potential future directions. According to one of the officials present, though a wide range of issues was discussed, the critical ones were prisons and sentencing. A series of options were presented to ministers with the eventual choice being to ‘exert some downward pressure on the rise in the prison population, and therefore on the sentencing of those not regarded as a threat to society’.165 According to David Faulkner, this was the moment ‘when Ministers decided that there must be a better way to deal with crime than by locking people up on the present scale.’166 Initial proposals were published in a Green Paper in 1988, which included some striking views, not least on imprisonment which it described as something that ‘restricts offenders’ liberty, but . . . also reduces their responsibility; they are not required to face up to what they have done and to the effect on their victim or to make any recompense to the victim or the public’. By contrast, ‘Punishment in the community would encourage offenders to grow out of crime and to develop into responsible and law-abiding citizens’.167 A further conference, this time at Ditchley Park, and involving senior representatives from

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 103 across the criminal justice system, offered an opportunity for the proposals to be discussed and, ministers hoped, for some form of general agreement to be reached for the strategy being proposed. Certainly, they were sufficiently persuaded that this was so for a White Paper to be produced shortly thereafter. The Green and White Papers led eventually to legislation – the Criminal Justice Act 1991 – that ‘marked what has sometimes been seen as a high point of liberal criminal justice policy’.168 As David Faulkner, the Home Office official most closely associated with it, remarked, that fact ‘may be thought surprising in view of its apparent contrast with the other policies of Margaret Thatcher’s government, and an aberration from the developments in penal thinking . . . that had been taking place in the United Kingdom and other countries since the 1970s.’169 Notwithstanding this, it remains the case that the general thrust of these policy developments was part of an attempt at the development of a long-term strategy to reform sentencing and the place of imprisonment, and was led by a Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, and Minister of State, John Patten, who not only believed strongly in this strategy but had the support of the Prime Minister. It was at this point that another reshuffle took place, Hurd moving to the Foreign Office, and David Waddington replacing him as Home Secretary. Waddington, ‘a barrister and one of the few supporters of capital punishment among the ranks of senior ministers, was not cast in the mould of a penal reformer.’170 One of the consequences of his personal views was that Waddington was at the sharp end of regular questioning by the media on the subject of the death penalty. He recognised that parliamentary opinion was against him, however, and consequently felt that his job was ‘to do my best to give the public the greatest protection possible without capital punishment and do my best to ensure that those guilty of the worst types of murder stayed in prison. To counterbalance elements of the liberal sheen of the Home Office’s proposals he felt that reform of parole, along the lines of the Carlisle proposals, would be important in ensuring sentences served were closer to sentences passed in court, together with the introduction of a curfew order enforced through electronic tagging, and a ‘“victims’ charter” which recognised that those who suffered from crime also had rights’.171

The poll tax and Strangeways As we have observed throughout this book, perhaps more than any other senior office, it is that of Home Secretary that appears to be most affected by unexpected events; matters that overnight can come to dominate a minister’s concerns. For David Waddington, there were at least two such events, and they occurred almost simultaneously. The first was the so-called ‘poll tax riot’, which occurred in central London when an initially peaceful protest against the government’s unpopular tax proposals gradually descended into very considerable violence.172 Over one hundred people were injured, over 300 arrested, and the police came in for considerable criticism for both their handling of the demonstration and some of their tactics in attempting to disperse the crowds. No sooner had Waddington visited the scene of the trouble than he was informed that a riot had broken out in

104

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Strangeways Prison in Manchester. This would turn out to last three weeks and be the longest and most serious riot in British penal history. Waddington’s initial statement to Parliament on the two events produced rather different reactions. The Strangeways riot, of course, was still a major ongoing event and Waddington was largely confined to offering a brief outline of what was currently known, praising the bravery of prison staff and acknowledging that, once over, there would need to be a major inquiry into the incident. For the Opposition, Roy Hattersley used the opportunity to suggest that overcrowding had undoubtedly played a significant element in stoking tensions in the prison, noting that it was unfortunate that the government had only belatedly, in their White Paper, acknowledged the importance of reducing the use of custody and expanding community penalties. Waddington, pursuing the line so often used against Labour in connection with disorder, criticised Hattersley for his failure to condemn the rioters. Any political disagreement over Strangeways, however, paled in comparison with the exchanges over the poll tax riot. Waddington set the tone, opening by saying that it was ‘with a sense of outrage that I make this statement today and I am sure that that outrage is shared by all Hon. Members. Hon. Members will have seen on television some of the acts of criminal violence and viciousness which occurred and which no decent person could fail to condemn – condemn without reservation.’173 His account of what occurred was straightforward. The violence had been caused by ‘troublemakers’, their conduct being ‘disgraceful criminal behaviour’. The police behaved with ‘courage and restraint’ and what was witnessed ‘had nothing whatsoever to do with peaceful demonstration’. Though by this stage there was no shortage of evidence to counter Waddington’s portrayal of events, Roy Hattersley did not demur. Praising the emergency services and condemning the violence ‘without reservation or qualification’, he said he wished to support ‘those parts of the Prime Minister’s Sunday statement, echoed by the Home Secretary today, which defended the right of a free people to demonstrate peaceably. We endorse her view that a way must be found of ensuring that peaceful demonstrations are not hijacked by a lawless minority.’174 The broadly temperate, bipartisan mood was then broken by Waddington who, in answer to a question from Sir Ivan Lawrence, claimed that those Labour MPs who had been actively supporting campaigns against the poll tax were involved in encouraging some of the violence: ‘Do they expect those whom they seek to influence to draw a neat distinction between one sort of law-breaking and another? Do they expect the people whom they seek to influence to break the tax not to be encouraged to break policemen’s heads? Hon. Members – it is estimated that up to 30 of them are involved – who have been exhorting people to break the law should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.’175 The Home Secretary was subsequently accused of ‘mindless mud-slinging’, of ‘fomenting disturbances’ in the Commons with his approach, and even of attempting to smear the entire Labour Party. In circumstances, however, in which the Conservative Party was under great pressure, both at home and abroad, for some Waddington’s performance was an encouraging and successful attempt to raise Tory morale.176 His law and order credentials also led to praise in the Daily Mail for his handling of the events at Strangeways:

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 105 ‘David Waddington is the first genuinely right-wing Home Secretary we have had for years. He has no need to pay obeisance to anyone in the law and order lobby. Everything he has ever said and done shows that he is prepared to be as tough on criminals and law-breakers as any potential critic of the Tory right. Because of this he has been able to take a cool and pragmatic view of the Strangeways and copycat riots which followed.’177 It is with some irony therefore that Waddington ended feeling that his handling of the Strangeways riot and, more particularly, the failure to bring the prison disorder to an earlier end, did great damage to his reputation within the parliamentary party. In particular, he and Prison Service officials in London were accused of overruling the Deputy Governor of the prison who had wanted to retake the prison on the first day. The POA were sharply critical, as were some colleagues, and Waddington found himself in the centre of an unusual spectacle in which he, the recent darling of the Daily Mail, was forced to criticise ‘Tory right-wingers – who had called for the involvement of troops, tear gas and the SAS . . . as “Ramboesque”.’178 Away from issues of public order, and in the broader realm of penal policy, there was significantly less tension between Waddington and colleagues on the opposing benches. Indeed, with the Labour Party not presenting itself as an obvious foe for the sentencing and other proposals detailed in the Home Office’s White Paper, even though elements were undoubtedly not to his taste, Waddington appeared largely content to continue with the work that had begun under Hurd. Nevertheless, both he and his eventual successor, Kenneth Baker, seemed to officials to be less sympathetic to the proposed Criminal Justice Bill than Hurd had been.179 In presenting the draft White Paper to cabinet colleagues Waddington praised both Hurd and John Patten as its primary architects and, little knowing what was around the corner, observed that implementation would be in the hands of judges and magistrates, with legislation necessary to set the right framework. It was agreed that presentation would be key. The Cabinet Home Affairs Committee concluded: ‘Widespread support could be expected for the proposition that more serious and especially violent offenders should be treated severely and that the time spent by offenders in custody should approximate more closely to the sentence of the court. Provided that penalties in the community were seen to be demanding, the public would equally be prepared to accept that less serious offenders should be dealt with outside custody.’180 Carefully thought through, and long in the planning, the eventual legislation was to have a short life, much of which was to be clouded in controversy, little of which was foreseen. As David Faulkner, one of its primary architects, observed, ‘Neither Douglas Hurd nor I saw the reforms of sentencing as the radical new departure that was sometimes claimed afterwards. We saw them more as providing a practical legislative framework in which courts would come to make less use of imprisonment’.181 Published in November 1990 the Criminal Justice Bill that followed the Green and White Papers was perceived by many to hold great promise. Lord Windlesham said that ‘For the first time, after a long and painstaking period of gestation, Parliament was presented with what was intended to be a coherent statutory framework for sentencing, relating the severity of punishment to the seriousness

106

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

of the offence’.182 Indeed, he described the judicial and political omens as being favourable, discreet consultation with the judiciary having raised some queries but nothing that appeared especially damaging. Moreover, the shadow Home Secretary also appeared to concur with the intended approach: ‘Whilst the rhetoric of punishment continues – for a variety of political reasons – the Government finally recognises that sentencing policy must change. Therefore, although I anticipate a variety of differences over the detail, I am confident that the Labour Party will support the broad thrust of the forthcoming Criminal Justice Bill’.183 The Opposition was keen to see some form of sentencing council introduced, as were a number of academics and other bodies outside parliament, but the government was not inclined to favour such a move. Beyond this, the Opposition also objected to the lack of any consideration of a code of prison standards and voiced once again their dislike of the provisions for private sector involvement.

From Thatcher to Major Although Waddington introduced the Bill’s Second Reading, within days John Major had replaced Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister and had reshuffled the cabinet, Waddington becoming Leader of the House of Lords and Kenneth Baker replacing him in the Home Office.184 Baker had no prior experience of the Home Office, but was considered ‘nimble and skilled at presentation [and] departmentally experienced.’185 Major thought him ‘political reflex made flesh, with an attractive liberality of mind’.186 Though Baker had a number of priorities, he talked with some passion about the cause of penal reform and his desire to see the ‘creation of a more humane and, hopefully therefore, more stable prison system’.187 Taking stock of the situation, Baker said that he felt ‘we were not doing very well as a Government on the law and order issue, despite this being perceived as a Conservative strength’, in part at least because of the continuing, steep rises in crime that appeared to be occurring around this time.188 Nevertheless, despite the ‘law and order’ clothes in which the Conservative government continued to be dressed, the Home Office was once again occupied by a relatively liberal-minded Home Secretary. Indeed, looking back on his time, Baker said that he thought he ‘was the last liberal Home Secretary’.189 He was sceptical about the effectiveness of prison, felt that too many people were incarcerated unnecessarily, and that the deprivation of liberty was punishment enough. He accepted the Woolf Report on Strangeways without demur. On the classic subjects that tended to cause difficulties for Conservative Home Secretaries, Baker was adamant: ‘I was a member of Parliament for Acton. My constituency stretched right down to Wormwood Scrubs. And I had three streets right at the end, First, Second and Third Avenue, only prison warders . . . and they’d all come and see me when I was a Member of Parliament for Acton. And I was asked by one in my selection meeting, did I support flogging and hanging? I said, I supported neither . . . a great debate broke out in my selection meeting [and this] went on for half an hour . . . I got up and said, “if this is the only thing that interests you, I’m going to walk away”.’190

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 107

Figure 4.3 Recorded Crime, England and Wales, 1970–1992 Source: Self-generated

There had been a change of Prime Minister but, again, at least at the outset there appeared to be little or no interference in Home Office matters from Downing Street. Major, it seems, like his predecessor, was interested in policing and in the problems he felt existed in ‘police culture’ – manifested largely as a perceived reluctance to embrace change – but beyond that had few particular preoccupations or preconceptions about the direction of travel. Over time, however, he came to take a much keener interest in Home Office matters, particularly once pressure on the Conservatives continued to grow. Major’s bilaterals with Baker, Clarke and Howard were more frequent and often more extensive than those conducted by his predecessor, and by the time Howard became Home Secretary were scheduled every month throughout his tenure. Discussions were often quite lengthy and certainly there was no shortage of major problems to consider. Baker, rather like Waddington before him, inherited a fairly full inbox: a postprison riots inquiry and prison reform, miscarriages of justice and the potential need for another inquiry, all against a background of rapidly rising crime and a government with a small majority under almost continuous pressure from some of its own MPs over Europe. Though Baker knew that law and order would be an area surrounded by great scrutiny, all the more so given crime trends, he saw little reason to deviate substantially from his predecessor’s policy initiatives: ‘I was preceded by a liberal Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd. And he had obviously set things in train . . . and I very much went with that tide quite frankly.’ Of the immediate things awaiting Baker, it was the Criminal Justice Bill that was the most sizeable. To Baker’s eyes it potentially contained two especially controversial proposals. The first, to forbid courts to take into account the accused’s previous record, ‘amazed’ him, but he was assured by junior ministers that it ‘corresponded to best judicial practice’ and he later said that

108

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

at the time ‘there was not a squeak of objection from the judiciary,’191 though on this he would appear to be mistaken.192 The other, ‘unit fines’, which sought to reform the system so as to link the quantum to ability to pay, was something he supported and really only became truly controversial once the Act came into force. Although Baker arrived in the Home Office late in the day so far as the Criminal Justice Bill was concerned, in one small but significant matter, he did make a mark. The suicide in late 1990 of a 15-year-old boy, Phillip Knight, held on remand in Swansea prison highlighted a problem that had afflicted juvenile justice for years. Responding to widespread criticism of Knight’s treatment,193 Baker added provisions to the Bill to end juvenile remand, although to the dissatisfaction of many it was only proposed that such remands be phased out over four years.194 It was a wide-ranging and complex piece of legislation which reformed elements of the system for early release, made amendments to the ways in which juvenile offenders were handled, together with changes to a number of other aspects of the criminal justice process. Its greatest innovation was the just deserts-based statutory framework for sentencing which, with the exception of violent or sexual offences, sought to ensure that sentences were commensurate with the seriousness of the offence in question. There was considerable support for the measures when first mooted but as the Bill made its way through parliament criticism of its more controversial provisions started to grow. Then, following Royal Assent, as the complex measures in the Act became the focus of a huge programme of training and further consultation so an increasing number of critics emerged. As David Faulkner observed, ‘the breadth and depth of the mistrust and dislike many of them felt for it became more apparent. A view of Home Office officials as pinko-liberals who were obsessed by the size of the prison population and soft on crime became widespread among judges, some politicians and some parts of the media.’195

Privatisation and managerialism Although he had no background or obvious prior interest in Home Office affairs, one element of the new criminal justice legislation that fitted neatly with Baker’s agenda was privatisation. He had ‘history in this area’ having previously been involved in privatising both British Telecom and Cable and Wireless. He’d also been involved in measures seeking to privatise the Post Office, and as Environment Secretary had announced the privatisation of the water industry. As a consequence, he ‘was very keen to promote and support private prisons, warts and all – and there were difficulties.’196 The Labour Party objected strongly to contracting out in general but had very specific objections to the privatisation of punishment. By contrast, although some concerns had been voiced by some Tories in previous years by this point this had largely died away and from Baker’s point of view, ‘it never became a Party issue as far as the Conservatives were concerned.’ There was, he said, ‘a huge amount of pushback from the Prison Service . . . and a sort of ambivalence in the [Home Office].’197 As the Criminal Justice Bill went through

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 109 its committee stage it became clear that the government view was shifting. First, the Minister of State responsible, Angela Rumbold, made a statement indicating a willingness, though with no commitment, to consider contracting out on a broader scale than had previously been envisaged. This drew stinging responses from both the Labour and Liberal Democrat speakers, both criticising the idea of privatisation in principle and also on the practical grounds that it would undermine the reform agenda proposed by the recently published report by Lord Woolf in the aftermath of the Strangeways riot. Further backbench amendments, believed by opponents to have been encouraged by government, later led Rumbold to admit that the time might now be right to contract out a remand prison. It was Baker, however, who made the decisive move. In response to yet another prearranged question, this time from Sir John Wheeler,198 Baker said that in addition to the current contracting out of prisoner escort services, and the tendering of a contract for the management of the Wolds remand prison, he was now seeking approval for the contracting out of another prison, HMP Blakenhurst. Baker felt that it was the right time to extend contracting to other parts of the prisons system beyond the remand sector, arguing that the successful tendering of the Wolds showed that ‘the private sector had much to offer’ and that further initiatives in this area would help to maintain momentum.199 For critics this bordered on abuse of process, with Parliament having been persuaded that any further expansion in privatisation in this field would await the results of the Wolds experiment: ‘Carried away by the heady new wine, the Home Office, typically so cautious and thorough in the assessment of any radical departures, had laid itself open to the charge of acting first and thinking afterwards.’200 Throughout the 1980s the growing emphasis on managerial efficiency had increasingly come to affect a wide variety of criminal justice institutions. At the beginning of the decade the Cabinet Office Efficiency Unit published a report called Management in Government in which the creation of a range of ‘executive agencies’ was proposed. These would be effectively at one remove from government departments in relation to both staff and financial control and also as a means of separating ‘policy’ from ‘operations’.201 The Passport Office and the Forensic Science Service were among the first Home Office-related executive agencies created. The riots and subsequent Woolf Report, together with the continuing staffing and industrial relations problems within the prison system convinced many that significant reform was necessary. In his meetings with Baker, John Major made it clear that he attached great importance to improving prison conditions. While he entirely supported the ending of slopping out and general improvements in sanitation and living conditions, he ‘believed the solution lay more in improved management of the Prison Service than in extra money’.202 He was in favour of turning the Prison Department into what the government had come to call a ‘Next Steps Agency’.203 Baker was initially unconvinced but by late 1991 the Home Office published a White Paper on the future of the Prison Service in which it announced its commitment to reform along ‘Next Steps’ lines with the date at which this would occur to be announced at a later stage.204 Baker had appointed Sir Raymond Lygo205 to review the Prison Service’s management, and he had made it clear from

110

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

the outset that he felt the Home Office needed to relinquish responsibility for its day to day business. In March 1992, Baker made the formal announcement, bringing about what he hoped would ensure ‘the delivery of an improved service both to the public and those held in custody’.206 Also on Baker’s desk when he arrived was the matter of how best to deal with the increasing number of actual and alleged miscarriages of justice that had been appearing in recent years. The Birmingham, Guildford and other cases associated with Irish terrorism were the highest profile, but there were numerous others, not least as a result of investigations into the activities of the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad.207 In addition, one of the more significant cases arose out of the 1985 Broadwater Farm riot, the aftermath of which had seen a huge policing operation which left the estate feeling that it was under a state of siege. Beyond keeping order much police effort had been expended in attempting to identify those who had killed PC Blakelock. In early 1987 three adults and three juveniles were charged, though the cases against the young people never reached court. The three adults, Winston Silcott, Engin Raghip and Mark Braithwaite, were subsequently found guilty, with the judge recommending that Silcott serve a minimum of 30 years in prison. From the outset there were claims that a serious miscarriage of justice had taken place, the defendants’ rights having been breached in a number of ways, as well as doubt being cast on the integrity of the police written records of interviews with the three men. The cases of Silcott, Raghip and Braithwaite were among the first to cross Baker’s desk. Initially, he referred Raghip’s case to the Court of Appeal and subsequently, in mid-1991 after new evidence that suggested written testimony had been tampered with, he added Silcott and Braithwaite’s names for consideration. Just before Christmas all three convictions were set aside.208 The next steps for the Home Secretary had already been largely laid out by his predecessor. As early as July 1990 David Waddington had raised the possibility of some form of inquiry into policing with the prime minister. When it became clear that he might need to refer the Birmingham Six case to the Court of Appeal, and that this might lead to their release, he wrote that ‘we must expect great pressure to develop for a fundamental review of the causes of miscarriages of justice and in particular of the role of the police in such cases.209 Although extending the May inquiry into the Guildford and Maguire cases was one possibility, he felt this would be unsatisfactory in a number of ways210 and it seemed likely that a Royal Commission would be the only option. Baker agreed and sought the formal Downing Street support. This, it was acknowledged, ‘would be a departure from recent practice’, but ‘the Home Secretary can think of no subject more appropriate for inquiry for a Royal Commission than this’.211 Announced on the day of the acquittal of the Birmingham Six, Baker said ‘This case, together with others which have occurred, raises a number of serious issues which must be a cause of concern to us all . . . The aim of [a Royal Commission] will be to minimise so far as possible the likelihood of such events happening again.’212 Chaired by Lord Runciman,213 the inquiry’s remit was to conduct a wide-ranging review of the criminal justice system, including confessional evidence, the operation of the

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 111 right to silence – that Hurd had hoped to reform – and the system by which cases were referred to the Court of Appeal. As we have seen Home Secretaries in the 1980s had regularly had to deal with the occurrence of very significant inner-city rioting and the fall-out that followed. There were also riots during Baker’s tenure in the Home Office, but of a rather different nature from those that Whitelaw and Hurd had had to confront. In the summer of 1991 there were outbreaks of violence, but ones that were generally smaller-scale and occurred primarily in suburban estates in some of England’s smaller cities or large towns, such as Ely in Cardiff, Blackbird Leys in Oxford and later on Tyneside. The riot that occurred in the Meadowell housing estate in North Shields, Tyne and Wear was one of the more significant. It was an area where car crime had long been a problem, and where ‘ram-raiding’214 (using cars or other vehicles as battering rams in order to facilitate the theft of goods from shops etc) ‘joy-riding’215 and ‘hotting’ (stealing cars and then driving fast, often in highly public displays) were far from uncommon.216 Violence broke out in early September, in a period following steadily rising tensions between the police and local youth. There was looting, arson, attempted attacks on the police, and the destruction of a local electricity sub-station which reduced the whole area into darkness217 before order was restored. Around the same time, violence broke out in Cardiff, Birmingham and Oxford, some seemingly triggered by a police clampdown on ‘hotting’.218 In Oxford, for example, the immediate source of contention was public displays of joyriding high-performance cars and police attempts to stop something that had been a long-standing local feature on the Blackbird Leys estate. Reporting to the Prime Minister, Baker, suggested that there was little that obviously linked these disparate incidents, though different forms of auto-crime were involved in many.219 He was keen to see local social and situational crime prevention measures enhanced, and a series of meetings with key agencies held by the junior minister responsible, John Patten, led to the preliminary conclusion that ‘instituting a series of measures at local level, even at an estate level, to identify the problem families and to use all the various agencies, both state and voluntary, to help them’ was required.220 Car crime was becoming a particular concern at this period, beyond the specific problem of ‘joy-riding’, with new crime figures showing record increases. One of the other issues regularly raised by local senior officers in these, and other, areas, was the large number of young offenders, especially those who had stolen cars, who were immediately bailed, seemingly to carry on with their offending undisturbed. This ‘campaign’ was arguably an early indicator of the greater muscle and political co-ordination of the senior ranks of the police service,221 and with a general election looming Baker responded with some tough rhetoric, promising the police ‘a new statutory power to arrest people immediately if they breach conditions of police bail’.222 Although Baker had originally favoured criminalising offending while on bail as a solution to the problem of so-called ‘bail bandits’, eventually he had to settle for offending while on bail being a matter taken into account by the courts when considering sentence. Undoubtedly Baker’s most unusual, and arguably most obviously populist, move as Home Secretary was the action that culminated in the Dangerous Dogs

112

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Act 1991. Earlier in the year the press had carried a number of horrific stories in which attacks by pit bull terriers led to extremely serious injuries and in some cases even death. Although other breeds were seemingly responsible for a greater number of injuries, Baker ‘considered that pit bulls represented a quite different scale of menace’. The eventual legislation made possession of four specified breeds of dog a criminal offence, obliged the courts to order the destruction of dogs in specified circumstances, and in other conditions to impose other sanctions, including destruction orders and disqualification of owners from future dog ownership. The Act was variously criticised for being an overreaction, for its narrow focus on a small number of breeds and, in general, for its high likelihood of overall ineffectiveness. It is regularly held up as the ‘cardinal example of poor, ill-thought-out regulation’, though this has been challenged,223 and certainly there is evidence of close to 1,000 dogs being put down between 1991 and the ending of mandatory destruction six years later.224 There was broad cross-party support for Baker’s initiative – though arguably the degree of public and press support made it a difficult Bill to oppose. For Baker ‘the episode showed that the government and Parliament could act quickly to deal with an urgent situation’.225

Conclusion As we concluded at the end of the last chapter, there are a number of reasons to be cautious when considering the portrayal of the changes in criminal justice and penal policy from 1979 onward. Tempting though it is to see 1979 as marking the significant departure, in reality, in many respects it represented the heightening of trends that had been underway for much of the 1970s. Furthermore, although the 1979 Conservative Party election manifesto undoubtedly made significant play of the issue of ‘law and order’, and there were clear divisions between the Conservative and Labour parties and their supporters on these issues, it quickly became much less dominant a consideration once the 1979 election was won. The criminal justice and penal policies of the Conservative governments of the 1980s were complex in nature and reflected a range of influences. Moreover, these were administrations which, thanks to substantial majorities, felt themselves under little immediate parliamentary pressure to act in particular ways. Moreover, the general attitude and actions of the Labour Party for the bulk of this period did little to increase any sense of pressure the government might feel. Successfully portrayed for some time as a party whose commitment to the rule of law was questionable, the Labour Party continued to stick dogmatically to a line which emphasised the social and economic ‘causes’ of crime and did little to challenge the idea, regularly promoted by the Conservatives, that it neither took offending seriously nor had practical policies that would tackle crime. There is possibly some irony here for, as Labour spokespeople continually attempted to point out, this was a period in which crime rose almost without interruption, and for much of the period quite steeply (see Fig. 4.4). That successive Conservative governments were able successfully to portray themselves as the natural guardians of ‘law and order’ despite having what might have appeared to be such a poor

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 113

Figure 4.4 Annual Increases in Recorded Crime, 1980–1992 Source: Criminal Statistics England and Wales (various)

record is a further illustration of Labour’s inability or unwillingness to offer a substantive challenge in this area. So far as the process of governing was concerned it is important to recognise two further factors: first, the leeway enjoyed by successive Home Secretaries in Mrs Thatcher’s administrations;226 second, and relatedly, it is clear that the particular individuals that held the post from time to time exercised considerable influence over both the tone and direction of penal policy. For all that her own views were fairly hard line, most obviously illustrated by her unwavering support for the death penalty, Mrs Thatcher rarely sought to exert significant influence over her Home Secretaries. In most cases all testified to the fact that even when she disagreed with them, rarely was it the case that she attempted to impose her views. As Lord Windlesham noted, ‘Over her eleven year premiership the only substantial issue of penal policy in which Mrs Thatcher played a decisive part was the privatisation of prisons and remand centres, and the contracting out of certain criminal justice services’.227 Even in that field, her intervention came after very lengthy consideration, with initial misgivings having been overcome, and very much toward the end of her days as leader. The other, signal exception to her largely ‘hands-off’ approach to Home Office business concerned the 1984–5 miners’ strike. Here, from the earliest days, she was centrally involved; indeed, in many respects she was in daily control. For the bulk of the strike she had daily briefings with the relevant ministers and with others such as her advisers and also with the Chairman of the Coal Board. She made very significant demands both in terms of information and over the direction of policy. During the year of the miners’ strike she was far more directive in relation to Home Office matters – in this case policing – that at any other time in her years as Prime Minister. Though great

114

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

care was taken to ensure that the ‘advice’ given to the police came from Home Office officials, there can be little doubt than at crucial times these officials were promulgating views that had their origins in, and came more or less directly from, Downing Street.228 Mrs Thatcher’s 11 years as leader were dominated by two Home Secretaries, William Whitelaw (May 1979-June 1983) and Douglas Hurd (September 1985-October 1989). Both were opposed to the death penalty, and were broadly liberal-minded Home Secretaries that were convinced that there was much more to successful penal policy than tough measures. Whitelaw is often remembered for his espousal of ‘short, sharp, shock’ regimes for young offenders, but in private was deeply sceptical of them and used them as something sufficiently appetising to the party’s right wing and as a means of enabling him to pursue a very different tack in penal policy more generally. He was the Home Secretary who appointed Lord Scarman after Brixton and who claimed that one of his greatest achievements was handling the 1981 riots without resorting to greater repression. Hurd, similarly, dealt with numerous challenges as Home Secretary largely without having to resort to measures that would have been judged especially punitive. His most obviously controversial proposal, reform of the right of silence, was one of the things he failed to achieve. Hurd’s signal achievement, though he was not there to see it reach the statute book, was overseeing the process of policy development that eventually led to the 1991 Criminal Justice Act. In between Whitelaw and Hurd, Leon Brittan was a Home Secretary of somewhat more hard-line views, and precisely the type of robust lieutenant that Thatcher required to help her see through the controversial policy operation utilised against the striking miners. He was also, however, the Home Secretary that steered the complex reforms of the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill through Parliament, legislation which while it increased police powers also significantly enhanced the regulatory system under which the police were required to operate. Mrs Thatcher’s final Home Secretary, David Waddington, was the only one who shared her views on capital punishment, but he only survived a year before her departure brought the self-styled ‘last liberal Home Secretary’, Kenneth Baker, to office in late 1990. Arguably the greatest pressures Home Secretaries faced during the 1980s stemmed from the prison system. Whitelaw recognised early on that significant expenditure was required to fund a prison-building programme that would both enable the increasing numbers to be housed and to facilitate a move toward improved conditions. The twin problems of numbers and of overcrowding only grew worse as the decade passed, and by the late 1980s the addition of regular industrial unrest and prison riots threw the system into crisis. Building prisons and attempting to improve living conditions inside were of course two vital strategies in responding to these problems. But successive Conservative Home Secretaries also recognised that seeking to influence the numbers entering prison was also likely to be crucial. This was attempted in a number of ways, through both emergency and more planned changes to early release and reform of the parole system. Following a general approach of bifurcation there were also regular attempts made to reform the available non-custodial penalties with the aim of restricting the use of

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 115 imprisonment to violent and other more serious forms of offending. The emphasis in the 1970s was on the creation of what then tended to be referred to as ‘alternatives to prison/custody’229 whereas a decade later, with the imperatives of law and order taking on much greater import, much of the emphasis was on strengthening what was increasingly referred to as ‘punishment in the community’. Perhaps the strategy that offered the greatest potential reward, but was also controversial because of the challenge to the independence of the judiciary, was laying down general guidelines for sentencing. In this particular case it was informed by the idea of proportionality, and found form in the Criminal Justice Act 1991. Again, community penalties were promoted as tough and demanding, and as realistic options for the courts who were to be discouraged from overuse of custodial sentences. From the early 1980s Conservative administrations had become increasingly preoccupied with matters of economy and efficiency. Although the expenditure that had resulted from implementing the Edmund Davies police pay increases were thought important and necessary, there was increasing dismay in Conservative ranks that this increase was not having an obvious dividend in terms of reductions in crime. Gradually the government’s Financial Management Initiative led to a series of attempts to change the performance culture within public services, including criminal justice agencies. Reforms as varied as Fresh Start, the Next Steps initiative and, toward the end of the eighties, the gradual moves toward contracting out and privatisation, were all part of this more general trend.230 Indeed, there is a case for arguing that even the Criminal Justice Act 1991 was subject to these influences for the ‘“executive” flavour of sentencing . . . made it an obvious target for reform.’231 The managerialist dynamic which shaped elements of the 1991 Act232 were to come much more sharply into relief in the Major administration that returned to power after the 1992 general election.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

Whitelaw W. (1989) op. cit., p. 161 Whitelaw W. (1989) op. cit., p. 168 ‘Police rises speeded up’, The Daily Telegraph, 10th May 1979 Although she personally favoured reintroduction, she continued to see this as an issue of conscience, and ruled out measures such as a referendum, the deselection of MPs who continued to support abolition and the potential application of the whip in the Commons. See Vinen, R. (2009) Thatcher’s Britain: The politics and social upheaval of the 1980s, London: Pocket Books ‘MPs seek vote on hanging’, The Daily Telegraph, 28th June 1979 ‘Whitelaw votes to reject reintroduction of death penalty’, The Daily Telegraph, 20th July 1979 Whitelaw, W. (1989) op. cit., p. 169 Whitelaw, W. (1989) op. cit., p. 173; for a more general criminological discussion of the development of ‘bifurcation’ in penal policy see, Bottoms, A.E. (1977) Reflections of the renaissance of dangerousness, Howard Journal, 16, 2, 70–96 Whitelaw, W. (1989) op. cit., p. 170 Windlesham, W. (1993) op. cit., p. 154

116

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

11 Audio available at the British Universities Film and Video Council, http://bufvc.ac.uk/ tvandradio/lbc/index.php/segment/0019800034013 12 See, for example, Shaw, S. (1985) Reflections on ‘short, sharp shock’, Youth and Policy, 13, 1–5 13 Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit., p. 159 14 At the time Albany (Isle of Wight), Hull, and Gartree (Leicestershire) were all Category B prisons; see Adams, R. (1992) Prison Riots in Britain and the USA, Basingstoke: Macmillan 15 Windlesham, Lord (1987) Responses to Crime, Oxford: OUP, at p. 241 16 David Faulkner, later to be head of the Home Office Criminal Department, was the first holder of the new post of Director of Operational Policy between 1980 and 1982. See Faulkner, D. (2014) Servant of the Crown: A civil servant’s story of criminal justice and public service reform, Winchester: Waterside Press 17 In his memoirs (1989: 230) Whitelaw reflected somewhat ruefully, ‘I suppose I am bound to be associated with the 1981 riots, with difficult Tory party conference debates and perhaps, more absurdly, with [Michael] Fagan getting into Buckingham Palace’ 18 Whitelaw, W. (1989) op. cit., p.185 19 Scarman, Lord Justice (1981 The Brixton Disorders, 10th-12th April 1981, Report of an Inquiry by the Rt. Hon. The Lord Scarman OBE, Cmnd. 8427, London: HMSO at p.65; This and other riots are dealt with in detail in Newburn, T. (forthcoming) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Vol. 5: Policing, London: Routledge 20 McNee, Sir D. (1983) McNee’s Law: The memoirs of Sir David McNee, Five critical years at the Metropolitan Police, London: Collins, at p.118 21 QPE 81 141/11/28 22 Scarman (1981) at para 3.110 (1) 23 Scarman (1981) at para 3.110 (7) 24 Such a term, and the reasons behind the changing style of policing of public order has been the subject of considerable academic dispute. See in particular, Jefferson, T. (1987) Beyond paramilitarism, British Journal of Criminology, 27, 1, 47–53; Jefferson, T. (1993) Pondering paramilitarism: A question of standpoints? British Journal of Criminology, 33, 3, 374–88; Waddington, P.A.J. (1987) Towards paramilitarism? Dilemmas in the policing of public order, British Journal of Criminology, 27, 1, 37–46; Waddington, P.A.J. (1993) The case against paramilitary policing considered, British Journal of Criminology, 33, 3, 353–373 25 Parkinson, M. and Duffy, J. (1984) Government’s response to inner-city riots: The Minister for Merseyside and the task force, Parliamentary Affairs, 37, 1, 76–96; Parkinson, M. (2019) Liverpool on the Brink: The remaking of a post-industrial city, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 26 Hansard HC Deb 16th July 1981, Vol. 8, Col. 1402 27 Whitelaw, W. (1989) op. cit., p. 193 28 Whitelaw, W. (1989) op. cit., pp. 198–9 29 Whitelaw (1989) at p. 232 30 Ibid. 31 In a series of judgements (Upton [1980] 71 Cr. App. R. 102; Bibi [1980] 71 Cr. App. R. 360) Lord Chief Justice Lane highlighted the problem of prison overcrowding and the consequent need for careful scrutiny of the necessity and length of custodial sentences. See Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit., pp. 173–176 32 For details on implementation see Burney, E. (1985) Sentencing Young People: What went wrong with the Criminal Justice Act 1982, Aldershot: Gower 33 Windlesham (1993) op. cit., p. 159 34 Thornton, D., Curran, L., Grayson, D. and Holloway, V. (1983) Tougher Regimes in Detention Centres: Report of an evaluation by the Young Offender Psychology Unit, London: HMSO

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 117 35 Discussion of the Commission and, more particularly, its recommendations about the prosecutorial role of the police are dealt with in Rock P. (2019b) op. cit., Chapter 8 36 POL 83 1045/3/10, 23rd November 1983 (original submission dated 12th June 1981) 37 Several requests were made to Lord Hattersley for interview but no reply was received 38 One senior official observed, ‘Whilst Lord Whitelaw on public occasions adhered to the even-handed texts served up to him, he was not averse to realising the Bill’s more immediate political attractions.’ POL 83 1045/3/10, 10th January 1984 39 http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=128 40 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. op. cit. 191 41 See, for example, Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control, Oxford: Oxford University Press; O’Malley, P. (1992) ‘Risk, power and crime prevention’, Economy and Society, Vol. 21, No. 3, pp. 252–75 42 The Conservative Party, 1983, The Challenge of Our Times, London: Conservative Party 43 Known as PACE, the pre-election Bill was widely held by left-liberal groups to extend police powers excessively without due safeguards. After the election, the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 was extensively revised in committee and emerged as providing suspects with distinctly improved safeguards, notably the taping of interviews and the independent inspection of local police stations. See the chapters on Policing 44 Labour Party, 1983, New Hope for Britain, London: Labour Party 45 Clarke, H.D., Mishler, W. and Whiteley, P. (1990) Recapturing the Falklands: Models of Conservative popularity, 1979–1983, British Journal of Political Science, 20, 1, 63–81; Sanders, D., Ward, H., Marsh, D. and Fletcher, T. (1987) Government popularity and the Falklands: A reassessment, British Journal of Political Science, 17, 3, 281–303 46 Quoted in Garnett, M. and Aitken, I. (2003) Splendid! Splendid! The authorised biography of Willie Whitelaw, London: Pimlico, at p. 265 47 Thatcher, M. (1993) The Downing Street Years, London: Harper Collins, at. p. 308 48 According to Douglas Hurd, his junior minister and successor as Home Secretary, Brittan was unhappy with the nature of the Bill he inherited and immediately set about redrafting it clause by clause. Hurd, D. (2003) Memoirs, London: Abacus 49 Conservative MP for Worcester 1961–1992; Environment Secretary, 1970–72; Trade and Industry Secretary 1972–74; Agriculture Minister 1979–83; Energy Secretary 1983–87; Welsh Secretary 1987–90 50 Conservative MP for Waveney 1959–87; Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, 1970–72; Leader of the House of Commons, 1972–74; Secretary of State for Employment, 1979–81; Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, 1981–84 51 Conservative MP for Tavistock, 1966–74; MP for Henley, 1974–2001; Secretary of State for Environment, 1979–1983; Secretary of State for Defence, 1983–86; Secretary of State for Environment, 1990–92; Secretary of State for Trade and Industry and President of the Board of Trade, 1992–95; Deputy Prime Minister, 1995–97 52 Moore (2015) op. cit., p.79 53 Hansard, HC Deb, 13th July 1983, Vol. 45 Col. 888 54 Quoted in Baker, K. (1993) The Turbulent Years: My Life in Politics, London: Faber and Faber 55 See Windlesham (1987) op. cit. pp. 158–59 for a full list of votes on capital punishment, 1955–1987; Moore (2015) op. cit. on Thatcher’s position 56 Leader of the GLC until its abolition in 1986; subsequently a Labour MP (1987–2001) and Mayor of London (2000–2008); Livingstone, K. (2011) You Can’t Say That: Memoirs, London: Faber 57 Hansard, HC Debs, 48, 7th November 1983, Cols. 25–26 58 See Morgan, R. (1996) Custody in the police station: How do England and Wales measure up in Europe?, Policy Studies, 17, 1, 55–72

118

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

59 Goodhart, D. and Wintour, P. (1986) Eddie Shah and the Newspaper Revolution, London: Coronet 60 Bunyan, T. (1985) From Saltley to Orgreave via Brixton, Journal of Law and Society, 12, 3, 293–304 61 Vinen, R. (2009) Thatcher’s Britain: The politics and social upheaval of the 1980s, London: Pocket Books, at p. 162 62 Jenkins, P. (1988) Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution, London: Jonathan Cape, at p. 226 63 Quoted in, Okojie, P. (1985) Chief constables and political interference: The case of Anderton and Greater Manchester, in Fine, B. and Millar, R. (eds) Policing the Miners’ Strike, London: Lawrence and Wishart, at pp. 55–56 64 PREM 19/1335, 10th November 1984 65 Thatcher, M. (1993) The Downing Street Years, London: Harper Collins, at p. 352 66 Jenkins (1988) op. cit., p.233 67 Beckett and Hencke, Marching to the Fault Line, p.104 68 ‘Worst day of violence’, The Daily Telegraph, 19th June 1984. The newspaper reported that this was the most shocked she had been since the inner city riots in 1981 69 Hansard, HC Deb 19th June 1984, Vol. 62 C.142 70 A Labour MP since 1970, Kinnock was leader of the Labour Party from 1983 to 1992. Westlake, M. (2001) Kinnock: The authorised biography, London: Little Brown; Smith, M.J. ((2008) Neil Kinnock and the modernisation of the Labour Party, Contemporary Record, 8, 3, 555–566; Pike, K. (2020) Mere theology? Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party’s aims and values, 1986–1988, Contemporary British History, 34, 1, 95–117 71 Hansard, HC Deb 19th June 1984, Vol. 62 C.137 72 Quoted in Moore, C. (2016) op. cit., p. 163 73 Moore, C. (2016) op. cit., p. 164 74 For details see Newburn, T. (forthcoming) Official History of Criminal Justice, Vol. 5, Policing, Chapter 4 75 See: https://otjc.org.uk/ 76 It was not just police tactics, but also some statements by senior officers that created an impression that there was an unhealthy relationship between the service and the government. The President of ACPO at the time, for example, defended police actions saying, ‘Supporting the freedom of people who want to prevent people going to work is not supporting freedom but supporting anarchy, violence, riot and damage and everything else’. Brake, M. and Hale, C. (1992) Public Order and Private Lives, London: Routledge, at p. 56 77 Thatcher (1993) op. cit., p. 419 78 Ibid., p. 419 79 Stuart, M. (1998) Douglas Hurd: The Public Servant, Edinburgh: Mainstream Press 80 Gaffney, J. (1987) Interpretations of violence: The Handsworth riots of 1985, Policy Papers in Ethnic Relations No. 10, Warwick: Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations 81 MP for Tottenham, 1987–2000. See Moore, T. (2015) The Killing of Constable Keith Blakelock: The Broadwater Farm Riot, Winchester: Waterside Press 82 ‘Police given good hiding, says Grant’, The Times, 9th October 1985, emphasis added 83 ‘Kinnock censures Grant for blaming police over rioting in Tottenham, The Times, 10th October 1985 84 The Times, 10th October 1985, op. cit. 85 An attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton by the Provisional IRA in November 1984. Five people were killed and 31 injured, with the prime minister narrowly escaping injury 86 Leader’s Speech, Conservative Party conference, Blackpool 1985. Available at: http:// www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=131. 87 Hurd, D. (2003) op. cit. at p. 379 88 Leader’s Speech, Labour Party conference, Bournemouth 1985. Available at: http:// www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=191

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 119 89 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1997) op. cit. 90 Hurd (2003) op. cit., p. 376 91 In April 1986 an attempt to insert a clause in the Armed Forces Bill to abolish capital punishment for certain military offences was defeated by 113–38 votes, and in April 1987 a clause on the death penalty introduced in the Third Reading of the Criminal Justice Bill was defeated by 342–230 votes 92 ‘Hurd jeered for opposition to death penalty.’ The Daily Telegraph, 8th October 1987 93 ‘Home Secretary cracks down on street thugs’, The Times, 8th October 1987 94 Hurd, D. (2003) op. cit., p.377 95 Dunning, E., Murphy, P. and Williams, J. (1988) The Roots of Football Hooliganism; London: Routledge; Frosdick, S. and Marsh, P. (2005) Football Hooliganism, Cullompton: Willan 96 Review of the Public Order Act 1936 and Related Legislation, Cmnd. 7891, London: HMSO 97 Report on the Law Relating to Public Order, Fifth Report, HC 756-I and II, 1980 98 Review of Public Order Law, Cmnd. 9510, London: HMSO 99 Section 5 of the Act ran: ‘A person is guilty of an offence if he – (a) uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or (b) displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

100 101

102 103 104 105 106 107

108 109 110 111 112

within the hearing or sight or a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby’. Newburn, T., Brown, D., Crisp, D. and Dewhurst, P. (1990) Policing the streets, Home Office Research Bulletin, 10 McDermott, K. and King, R.D. (1989) A fresh start: The enhancement of prison regimes, Howard Journal, 28, 3, 161–76; Thomas, J.E. (1994) Woolf and prison staff: Still looking for ‘good gaolers’, in Player, E. and Jenkins, M. (eds.) Prisons After Woolf: Reform through riot, London: Routledge Crewe, I. (1992) The 1987 General Election, in Denver, D. and Hands, G. (eds.) Issues and Controversies in British Electoral Behavior, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf Labour Party, 1987, Britain Will Win, London: Labour Party It didn’t change its name to the Crime Survey for England and Wales until 2012 See, for example, Mayhew, P., Elliott, D. and Dowds, L. (1989) The 1988 British Crime Survey, Home Office Research Study No 111, London: Home Office Labour Party (1987) Britain Will Win with Labour, London: Labour Party, available at: http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1987/1987-labour-manifesto.shtml Such broad labels are inevitably rather inaccurate. Hurd himself observed: ‘Commentators who write about past penal policies look up newspaper cuttings and without much probing describe me as a liberal Home Secretary. I am not ashamed of the label, but I doubt if it is accurate, at least during the early days of my tenure. Rather, I looked on the penal system as just one part of the wall of protection of the citizen against crime. Wherever the wall was shown to be crumbling it was my job to repair it, without spending much time considering the philosophy of the repair work.’ Hurd, D. (2003) op. cit., p. 387 Conservative Party, 1987, Our First Eight Years: The Next Moves Forward, London: Conservative Party Expressed a few months after the election, in an interview in Women’s Own magazine, October 31st. On this subject, see also Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit. Vol. 1, Ch.1, of this history SDP-Liberal Alliance, 1987, Britain United – The Time Has Come, London: SDPLiberal Parties See Downes, D. (2021) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Volume 3: The Rise and Fall of Penal Hope, London: Routledge

120

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

113 Rock, P. (2019a) Vol. 1, Ch. 1, sees this as a reversion to an earlier position 114 See Howard Taylor, 1999, ‘Forging the Job: A Crisis of ‘Modernization’ or Redundancy for the Police in England and Wales, 1900–1939’, British Journal of Criminology, January, for the view that crime rates were far more of a police construct than a reflection of reality 115 Reiner, R. 1984, ‘Is Britain turning into a police state?’ New Society, 2nd August 1984 116 Quoted in Guiney, T. (2018) Getting Out: Early release in England and Wales, 1960–1995, Oxford: Clarendon Press, at p. 151 117 ‘Crowding may free 6,000 prisoners’, The Guardian, 12th March 1987 118 Zander, M. (1988) A Matter of Justice, London: I.B. Taurus 119 ‘Thousands of offenders to be freed from gaol’, The Guardian, 13th July 1987 120 Hansard, HC Debs, 16th July 1987, Vol. 119, Col. 1300. The possibility of opening further camps in addition to that at Rolleston had been discussed in cabinet committee and, indeed, a second camp at Dettingen Barracks at Camberley in Surrey was opened in 1988 121 ‘Jails: 3500 go free’, Daily Mail, 17th July 1987; ‘Out for a good time: Champagne and kisses as prisoners find the best thing in life is being free’, Daily Mail, 14th August 1987; ‘The fatal flaw in Hurd’s plan for freedom’, The Daily Express, 18th July 1987. See Guiney, T. (2018) op. cit. 122 Hansard, HC Deb, 30th November 1983, Vol. 49, Col. 506W 123 Windlesham, Lord (1987) op. cit., p. 263 124 H (87) 11, 14th July 1987 125 A Conservative MP (Runcorn, 1964 to 1983; Warrington South until 1987). Served as Secretary of State for Education and Science, 1979–1981. Created a life peer in 1987 126 Guiney, T. (2018) op. cit. 127 Home Office (1989) The Parole System in England and Wales: Report of the Review Committee, Cmnd. 516, London: HMSO, at p. 49 128 See Guiney, T. (2018) op. cit. for discussion and detail 129 CLRC (1972) Eleventh Report: Evidence (General), Cmnd. 4991, London: HMSO; see also, Rock, P. (2019b) op. cit. Chapter 5 130 H (87) 30, 23rd September 1987 131 Windlesham (1993) op. cit., at p. 205 132 Hansard, HC Deb, 16th July 1987, Vol. 119, Col. 1303 133 Adam Smith Institute (1984) The Omega File, London: Adam Smith Institute 134 House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee (1987) Contract Provision of Prisons, Fourth Report, Session 1986–87, London: HMSO 135 Quoted in Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2007) Policy Transfer and Criminal Justice, Maidenhead: Open University Press, at p. 54 136 Sir John Wheeler was a Conservative MP from 1979–1997, and chaired the Home Affairs Select Committee from 1987–1992 137 See Stuart, M. (1998) Douglas Hurd: The Public Servant, Edinburgh: Mainstream Press 138 PREM, Home Affairs, Meetings with Home Secretary, 9th March 1988 139 Hansard, HC Deb, 30th March 1988, Vol. 130, Col. 1084 140 Home Office (1988) Private Sector Involvement in the Remand System, Cmnd. 434, London: HMSO 141 Stuart (1998) op. cit. 142 Hurd, D. (2003) op. cit., p. 386 143 Hansard, HC Deb, 1st March 1989, Vol. 148, Col. 278 144 PREM, Home Affairs, Meetings with Home Secretary, 2nd February 1990 145 PREM, Home Affairs, Meetings with Home Secretary, 16th March 1990 146 Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit.; Cavadino, M. and Dignan, J. (2002) The Penal System: An introduction, London: Sage. Indeed, it was Kenneth Baker, later to become

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 121

147 148 149 150

151 152 153 154 155 156

157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171

Home Secretary in the Major government, who introduced the clause that effectively widened the scope of the privatisation initiative. It eventually reached the statute book as clause 84 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit., pp. 421–2 Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit., p. 307 See, for example, House of Commons (1984) First Report from the Home Affairs Committee, Session 1983–84: Remands in Custody, HC 252, London: HMSO; HM Chief Inspector of Prisons (1987) Annual Report for 1986, London: HMSO Adam Smith Institute (1984) The Omega File, London: Adam Smith Institute; Home Affairs Committee (1987) Contract Provision of Private Prisons, Fourth Report 1986/87, London: HMSO; Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2005) Comparative criminal justice policy-making in the United States and United Kingdom: The case of private prisons, British Journal of Criminology, 45, 58–80 Faulkner, D. (2006) Crime, State and Citizen: A field full of folk, Winchester: Waterside Press, at p. 276 Waller, I. (1989) Current Trends in European Crime Prevention: Implications for Canada, Ottawa: Department of Justice Quoted in Koch, B.C.M. (1998) op. cit., p.41 See discussion in Jones, T. et al. (1994) Democracy and Policing, London: Policy Studies Institute Renamed the Crime Survey for England and Wales in 2012 See Mayhew, P. and Hough, J.M. (1988) British Crime Survey: Origins and Impact, in M. Maguire and J. Pointing (eds.) Victims of Crime: A new deal? Milton Keynes: Open University Press; See Mayhew, P. and Hough, J.M. (1992) The British Crime Survey: The first ten years, Market Research Society Journal, 34, 1, 1–15; Jansen, K. (undated) The British Crime Survey: Measuring crime for 25 years, London: Home Office See for example: Clarke, R.V.G. and Mayhew, P. (1980) (eds.) Designing Out Crime, London: HMSO: Clarke, R.V.G. and Hough, J.M. (1980) (eds.) The Effectiveness of Policing, Aldershot: Gower Tilley, N. (1993) Crime prevention and the Safer Cities story, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 32, 1, 40–57 There was also joint work undertaken with the Department of the Environment on the planning of new housing estates; see, for example, Hope, T. and Shaw, M. (eds.) Communities and Crime Reduction, London: HMSO Mullin, C. (1986) Error of Judgement: The Truth about the Birmingham Bombings, London: Chatto and Windus Faulkner, D.E.R. (2014) Servant of the Crown, Hampshire: Waterside Press, at p. 122 ‘Birmingham Six appeal fails’, The Guardian, 29th January 1988 Hurd D. (2003) op. cit., p. 393 A High Court Judge. Two reports were published, but the overall inquiry was superseded by the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice chaired by Lord Runciman Faulkner (2014) op. cit., p. 125 Quoted in Rutherford, A. (1986) Growing Out of Crime: Society and Young People in Trouble. Harmondsworth: Penguin, at p. 105 Home Office (1998) Punishment, Custody and the Community, Cmnd. 424, London: Home Office, at para. 1.1 The history of penal policy in this period is dealt with in detail in Downes, D. (2021) op. cit. David Faulkner, CCBH Witness Seminar: The Criminal Justice Act 1991, 2010: 3 Windlesham, Lord (2003) op. cit., p. 242 Waddington, D. (2012) Memoirs: Dispatches from Margaret Thatcher’s Last Home Secretary, London: Biteback, at p. 184

122

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

172 Dunleavy, P. (1995) Policy disasters: Explaining the UK’s record, Public Policy and Administration, 10, 2, 52–70; for an analysis of the event and its policing see Waddington, P.A.J. (1994) Liberty and Order: Public order policing in a capital city, London: UCL Press; for a social psychological analysis of the events see: Stott, C. and Drury, C. (2000) Crowds, context and identity: Dynamic categorization processes in the ‘poll tax riot’, Human Relations, 53, 2, 247–273; see also Waddington, P.A.J. (1994) Coercion and accommodation: Policing public order after the Public Order Act, British Journal of Sociology, 45, 3, 467–485 173 Hansard, HC Deb, 2nd April 1990, Vol. 170, Col. 893 174 Hansard, HC Deb, 2nd April 1990, Vol. 170, Col. 894 175 Hansard, HC Deb, 2nd April 1990, Vol. 170, Col. 896 176 ‘Waddington attacks Labour Poll Tax MPs’, The Times, 3rd April 1990 177 Quoted in Waddington, P.A.J. (2012) op. cit. at p. 199. In terms of so-called ‘copycat riots’, the disorder at Strangeways was followed by a series of other outbreaks of protest and violence at, inter alia, Dartmoor Prison, Pucklechurch youth remand centre, Glen Parva YOI and Bristol and Cardiff prisons 178 ‘Waddington calls for tough jail riot laws’ The Times, 27th April 1990 179 See David Faulkner, CCBH Witness Seminar: The Criminal Justice Act 1991, 2010 180 H (90) Minutes, 16th October 1990 181 Faulkner, D. (2014) op. cit., pp. 135–36 182 Windlesham, Lord (2003) op. cit., p. 404 183 Quoted in Windlesham, Lord (2003) op. cit., p. 405 184 Some accounts suggest that the post was initially offered to Michael Heseltine, who declined it. Kenneth Baker says that Major denied that this was the case. Baker, K. (1993) The Turbulent Years: My Life in Politics, London: Faber and Faber. Major himself says that Heseltine, fearing he was about to be offered the Home Office, declined it before any offer was made, saying ‘I don’t want it . . . It’s a graveyard’. Quoted in Major, J. (2000) John Major: The autobiography, London: Harper Collins, at p. 207 185 Windlesham, Lord (2003) op. cit., p. 408 186 Major J. (2000) op. cit, p. 208 187 ‘Baker determines to take on prison reformer’s mantle’, The Times, 8th March 1991 188 Baker K. (1993) op. cit., p. 424 189 Personal interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, February 2015 190 Personal interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, February 2015 191 Baker, K. (1993) op. cit., p. 429 192 Dunbar, I. and Langdon, A. (1998) Tough Justice: Sentencing and penal policies in the 1990s, London: Blackstone Press, Chapter 8 193 ‘Jail death prompts criticism by coroner’, The Times, 11th December 1990 194 Rutherford, A. (1993) Growing Out of Crime: The new era, Winchester: Waterside Press 195 Faulkner, D. (2010) CCBH Witness Seminar: The Criminal Justice Act 1991, 2010: 10 196 Personal interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, February 2015 197 Personal interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, February 2015 198 As by now will be clear, Wheeler was one of the foremost proponents of prison privatisation and held an influential position on the Home Affairs Select Committee. His question was ‘To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what plans he has for further private sector involvement in the prison system.’ Hansard, HC Deb, 5th December 1991, Vol. 200, Col. 219 199 James, A., Liebling, A., Bottomley, A.K. and Clare, E. (1997) Privatizing Prisons: Rhetoric and Reality, London: Sage; James, A. and Bottomley, A.K. (1998) Prison privatization and the remand population: Principle versus pragmatism? Howard Journal, 37, 3, 223–233

Talking Tough: Law and Order Politics, 1979–1992 123 200 Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit., p. 427 201 Talbot, C. (2004) Executive agencies: Have they improved management in government? Public Money and Management, April, 104–112 202 PREM, Bilateral with Home Secretary, 18th February 1991 203 A reference to the Ibbs Report that underpinned the initiative: Improving Management in Government: The Next Steps, A Report to the Prime Minister, HMSO 1988 204 Home Office (1991) Custody, Care and Justice: The way ahead for the Prison Service in England and Wales, Cmnd. 1647, London: HMSO 205 A former Vice Chief of the Naval staff, and subsequently the Chief Executive of British Aerospace 206 Hansard, HC Deb, 11th March 1992, Vol. 205, Col. 567 207 Kaye, T. (1991) Unsafe and unsatisfactory? Report of the independent inquiry into the working practices of the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad, London: Civil Liberties Trust; Walker, C. and Starmer, K. (1993) (eds.) Justice in Error, London: Blackstone Press 208 This case, and its wider context, is examined in detail in Rose, D. (1992) A Climate of Fear: The murder of PC Blakelock and the case of the Tottenham Three, London: Bloomsbury 209 PREM 1238, 1st August 1990 210 It was felt that May’s work was proceeding too slowly and also that he was unlikely ‘to be seen publicly to be high powered enough’ for such an important inquiry. PREM 1238, 1st August 1990 211 PREM 645, 15th February 1991 212 Hansard, HC Debs, 14th March 1991, Col. 1109 213 Walter Garrison (Garry) Runciman, 3rd Viscount Runciman of Doxford, CBE, FBA (10 November 1934 – 10 December 2020), was a British historical sociologist 214 Jacques, C. (2005) Ram-raiding: the history, incidence and scope for prevention, in Gill, M. (ed.) Crime at Work, Basingstoke: Macmillan 215 Parker, H. (1974) The joys of joyriding, New Society, 27, 587; Parker, H. (1984) Locking up the joyriders, Youth in Society, 96, 11–13; O’Connell, S. (2006) From Toad of Toad Hall to the ‘Death Drivers’ of Belfast: An exploratory history of joyriding, British Journal of Criminology, 46, 455–469 216 Campbell, B. (1993) Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places, London: Methuen, at p.48; Power, A. and Tunstall, R. (1997) Dangerous Disorder: Riots and violent disturbances in thirteen areas of Britain, 1991–92, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation 217 PREM 634, Chief Constable of Northumbria, 12th September 1991 218 Illegal display driving – akin to joyriding. See: Light, T., Nee, C. and Ingham, H. (1993) Car Crime: The offenders’ perspective, London: HMSO 219 PREM 634, 18th September 1991 220 PREM 634, ‘Crime Statistics: Disturbances’, 12th September 1991 221 Williams, B. (1993) Bail Bandits: The creation of a moral panic, Critical Social Policy, 13, 37, 104–112 222 ‘Baker pledges tougher line on “bail bandits”’, The Guardian, 26th February 1992; Hansard, HC Deb, 25th February 1992, Vol. 204, Cols. 813–27 223 Hood, C., Baldwin, R. and Rothstein, H. (2000) Assessing the Dangerous Dogs Act: When does a regulatory law fail? Public Law, 2000: 282–305; Lodge, M. and Hood, C. (2002) Pavlovian policy responses to media feeding frenzies? Dangerous dogs regulation in comparative perspective, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 10, 1, 1–13 224 Kaspersson, M. (2008) On treating the symptoms and not the cause: Reflections on the Dangerous Dogs Act, Papers from the British Criminology Conference, Volume 8, British Society of Criminology 225 Baker (1993) op. cit., p. 436

124

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

226 In this Mrs Thatcher was arguably not especially unusual. Few Prime Ministers in the post-war period to that point had taken much interest in Home Office matters. Harold Wilson was generally indifferent to criminal justice unless problems took on a political gloss, for example when issues of civil disorder garnered headlines. Similarly, neither Edward Heath nor James Callaghan was much concerned with home affairs when in Downing Street, even though Callaghan had considerable experience both as parliamentary adviser to the Police Federation and, later, as Home Secretary (1967–70) 227 Windlesham, Lord (1993) op. cit., p. 30 228 See Newburn T. (forthcoming), op. cit., Ch. 4 229 Bottoms, A.E. (1987) Limiting prison use: Experience in England and Wales, Howard Journal, 26, 3, 177–202 230 As Rock P. (2019b) illustrates, the newly created Crown Prosecution Service was starved of funds from the outset, see Chapter 9 231 Lacey, N. (1994) Government as manager citizen as consumer: The case of the Criminal Justice Act 1991, Modern Law Review, 57, 4, 534–554, at p. 540 232 Lacey N. (1994: 544) op. cit., argues that it was in parts a piece of technocratic legislation which treated users of services as ‘consumers’, in which the reforms to sentencing and early release provisions were ‘managerialist in the sense that [they sought] to impose a regular, to some extent measurable and hence supervisable process on certain areas of public administration’

5

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997 Walking the Walk

In the lead-up to the 1992 general election the vast majority of commentators were convinced of a Labour victory. The bulk of opinion polls pointed in that direction and even a civil service sweepstake in Downing Street anticipated the arrival of Neil Kinnock. John Major may have been confident of winning, but he admitted that to many this was ‘puzzling, even laughable’.1 The election presented Labour with an exceptional opportunity to challenge the Conservative record on ‘law and order’. The crime rate based on police figures, and largely mirrored in British Crime Survey data, had increased by almost 50 per cent between 1986 and 1992, and by an unprecedented extent of 36 per cent in 1990 and 1991 (see Fig. 4.4 above). Indeed, the increases in recorded crime in 1990 and 1991 were remarkable, even against the background of quickly rising crime in much of the previous decade, and caused great concern within Conservative ranks. Against such a background, Labour seemed poised to press home their attack on Conservative policies, which had, inter alia, included the bitterly resented ‘Poll Tax’2 and a long and deep recession. Barry Sheerman, the Chair of the Labour Campaign for Criminal Justice and Labour Home Affairs Spokesperson, had published – and Roy Hattersley had welcomed – a comprehensive criminal justice programme for reform, Seven Steps to Justice, which represented its most ambitious approach for more than two decades.3 Building on an earlier Labour White Paper on criminal justice,4 it proposed, inter alia, wide-ranging policies on crime prevention, emphasising the need to match situational measures with social crime prevention and multi-agency approaches led by local authorities, as had been recommended by the Morgan Report in 1991.5 By contrast, Conservative hostility to local authorities was well established. A Crime Prevention Council would be established to co-ordinate crime control aspects of such relevant departments as health, education, employment and the environment: in effect a cross-ministerial crime prevention audit. A Sentencing Council would bring greater consistency and lower tariffs for the more mundane offences which led to an over-use of custody. Both the White Paper and the later consultation papers amounted to a root-and-branch programme of reform. In the event Labour made no real headway on this front, partly because the 1991 Criminal Justice Act had rested on ‘just deserts’ and rejected the case for a Sentencing Council – though the two were in principle quite compatible. A Sentencing Council could have promoted ‘just deserts’, but that course was rejected,

DOI: 10.4324/9781003330981-6

126 The Changing Politics of Law and Order by both government and Home Office framers of the Act, as likely to tread too far on judicial independence. Once again Labour were mocked by the Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker, as ‘soft and flabby on crime’. In response, his Shadow, Roy Hattersley, simply reiterated Labour’s stock defence, a plea for stronger policing and social reforms. In effect, Labour disengaged from the fight. Neil Kinnock’s party conference speech in 1991, made just months before the coming general election, entirely failed to mention law and order. By contrast, John Major, who had only recently taken over as leader of the Conservative Party, against a backdrop of riots as well as rising crime, continued to use the subject as a core issue. While avoiding any direct attacks on Labour, in his conference speech he nevertheless reiterated support for the police and his government’s promise ‘to crack down on crime’.6 Six weeks before the election, the Conservative Party sought to capitalise on Labour’s failure by unveiling a poster depicting a policeman with one hand tied behind his back, set against the slogan: ‘Labour’s soft on crime’. This image was to have a lasting effect, for in the aftermath of the election, up until the next one in 1997, it was the repudiation of this label that arguably became one of the Labour Party’s central objectives. The dominant explanations for crime trends continued to reflect the core ideological division in British politics of the time. The Conservatives had no convincing explanation to account for the deeply worrying trends in crime, other than to reiterate previous insistence on weak parental and school discipline. Yet Labour, while noting that the crime rate had ‘rocketed’,7 in turn simply reiterated their earlier and rather muted reference to social and economic factors. Given that the previous four years had seen male unemployment reach 14 per cent, and that both Home Office and academic research had linked economic trends convincingly, if indirectly, with higher levels of offending and illicit heroin use,8 it was a far more restrained manifesto than the earlier document, Seven Steps to Justice, had led many penal reformers to expect. ‘Law and order’ was dealt with in two brief sections of the manifesto. The first, headed ‘We will protect people against crime’, began by stating that crime had more than doubled since 1979. Its policy to combat so unprecedentedly steep a rise in crime rates consisted of more crime prevention by the police working more closely with local councils – by ‘modernising vulnerable estates; improving street lighting; demolishing derelict buildings; and fencing off waste-land’. All of which were potentially well worth doing in their own right, but hardly amounted to a comprehensive policy of crime control, and lacked analysis of the links between crime and structural inequalities. This section then closed with a brief affirmation of Labour’s continuing commitment to elected police authorities and, more specifically, to the reforms suggested in the Woolf Report, established in the aftermath of the country’s worst prison riots, and to the promotion ‘of non-custodial sentences for non-violent crimes’. The second section, headed ‘We will see that justice is done’ promised further reform of PACE, without setting out how or why that should be done, increased support for legal aid and victims, and the establishment of a Department of Legal Administration and a Sentencing Council. Surprisingly, the latter proposal, a major alternative

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 127 route to sentencing reform to that of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, was not linked to the recommendations of the Woolf Report on Prison Disturbances. Despite Labour’s failure to mount any significant challenge on law and order, and notwithstanding the absence of any convincing riposte from Hattersley to Baker’s charge that Labour was ‘soft and flabby’, the gap between Conservative and Labour had narrowed markedly between 1987 and 1992 – from a 50/14 rating as the ‘party with the best policies on law and order’ to 40/26, still leaving a considerable distance to travel before Labour might compete effectively in that territory.9 Indeed, in the final week of campaigning before the election, with many polls putting the Labour Party up to seven points ahead, Conservative strategy was to focus on a small number of issues that they felt would highlight their comparative strengths – and again one of these was law and order.10 This was consistent with the differences in the two parties’ manifestos. By contrast with Labour’s approach in 1992, the Conservative manifesto11 devoted one-tenth of its fifty pages to ‘Freedom Under Law’, specifying a much greater number of proposals, much on the same terrain as Labour but most significantly distancing their projects for ‘community’ crime prevention from local authorities. Carefully avoiding reference to crime levels, the manifesto began by stating that they could ‘be proud of our record in supporting the police’, citing an almost three-quarters increase in spending, together with more officers and civilian staff. The next step was to be the development of local community policing and greater use of neighbourhood watch. They also claimed to have ‘reversed the Labour Party’s neglect of the prison service in the 1970s’, not only building new prisons and beginning the process of implementing the Woolf proposals, but also by introducing private sector management into the system, something it promised to increase after the election. Finally, under the heading ‘the danger of drugs’, the manifesto outlined recent government actions including the establishment of local drug prevention teams and the creation of the National Drug Intelligence Unit at New Scotland Yard. At heart, however, the message was typically punitive, claiming Britain now had ‘the toughest sanctions in Western Europe against drug traffickers’, and promising that a Conservative government would ‘not legalise any banned drugs’. The Liberal Democrats’ discussion of law and order appeared low down the list of priorities, and contained little detail, yet could still lay claim to being the most radical approach offered by one of the three main parties. Under the rubric ‘Protecting the Community’, a series of initiatives spanning existing programmes such as Safer Cities and Neighbourhood Watch appeared beneath the umbrella of local authority co-ordination. They proposed, for the first time, the promotion of ‘restorative justice’ as a means of enhancing reparation to the victim and reintegration of the offender. The proposal for a Ministry of Justice was again floated. A Prison Ombudsman post would be created. All parties proposed strengthening the police and reforming prison conditions but the Lib Dems went further by specifying the need for anti-racism training and women’s units in prisons ‘where feasible’.

128

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

To reiterate, undoubtedly the most striking feature of the campaign period was Labour’s relative disengagement from the territory of law and order. This had been the case, of course, in the two previous elections of 1983 and 1987 when, as Barry Sheerman described it: ‘We allowed the Tories to be the party of law and order . . . Thatcher and the Tories used Scargill, forced us into a defensive position . . . They had the high ground.’12 By 1992 the circumstances were much more obviously propitious for Labour. The doubling of the crime rate in the previous decade, together with a sequence of inner-city riots, terrorist bombings and at times ferocious clashes between police and strikers in the year-long miners’ strike, all offered opportunities for Labour to attack a government that after thirteen continuous years in power had few new ideas on crime and its control, and yet continued to portray Labour as ‘soft and flabby on crime’. Labour’s failure to mount any meaningful challenge left law and order as a clear case of ‘the dog that did not bark’.13

A fourth term Although the opinion polls had predicted a close finish, and much informed opinion anticipated that the Labour Party would have the largest share of the vote, in the event the Conservatives’ lead over Labour was well over seven per cent, giving them an overall majority of 21 seats. In fact, one authoritative reanalysis of the polls concluded that ‘the Conservatives were actually ahead throughout the campaign and would have won whenever the election had been held in that period. Indeed, it seems that the Labour party was never even close to winning’.14 A fourth successive election victory, and another in which law and order played a background role of some importance, eventually provoked a far-reaching retaliation from Labour, and one that meant that a new phase of the politics of law and order was on the horizon. In addition, and by comparison with the victories in the previous three elections, Major’s majority of 21 was not great. At the time, given poll predictions ‘it looked plenty [but] in the years ahead it would seem cursedly small’.15 No longer would Conservative rhetoric be sufficient to guarantee it the ‘high ground’ in this field. In future, Home Secretaries were going to have to ‘walk the walk’. Before we move on, we should re-emphasise at this point that the earlier refusal of Labour to make crime control a highly emotive battleground had the important side-effect of facilitating the quiet revolution that Home Office ministers and senior civil servants were evolving in relation to sentencing and penal policy. If Labour in the late 1980s had returned the compliment of branding the Conservatives ‘soft on crime’, it is unlikely, if not inconceivable, that Douglas Hurd in particular would have been granted the freedom he undoubtedly enjoyed to pursue policies to stabilise, let alone reduce, the prison population.16 In the reshuffle that followed the election the new Home Secretary was Kenneth Clarke, described by John Major as ‘a bruiser well able to meet the challenges of one of the toughest jobs in government. A liberal by instinct, he could be totally bloody-minded, which was ideal for the hard-headed reforms to the justice system that I wanted to implement. Beneath his often carefree air he was as impervious to

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 129 criticism as any man I ever met’.17 What Clarke then encountered was ‘the most distinctive – and old fashioned – culture of any government department in which I ever served. It was intensely hierarchical’.18 Clarke’s appointment as Home Secretary came as a surprise to him and he arrived without any pre-planned agenda. He did, however, have thoughts on priorities. He knew that in the aftermath of Strangeways and Woolf that there was still much to be done on prisons and he was convinced that changes to policing were necessary, becoming one of several Home Secretaries that would come to refer to it as ‘the last great unreformed Victorian public service’.19 An overly hierarchical structure, slow and cumbersome recruitment and promotions process, generous but complex pay structure unrelated to performance, and a huge array of forces of variable standard, all overseen by police authorities that were ‘useless’,20 were among Clarke’s targets. We noted earlier that the police service was initially spared the full force of the government’s financial management initiative in the first half of the 1980s. As the decade wore on, however, it became increasingly clear that frustrations with constabularies were growing, though successive Home Secretaries continued to shy away from radical reform. Unafraid to stamp on established sensibilities, Ken Clarke went in with both feet. Synching neatly with elements of the philosophy espoused in John Major’s Citizen’s Charter,21 and the work on policing that the Audit Commission had increasingly been undertaking,22 Clarke told parliament that he intended ‘to keep the police service subject to a process of continuous review in order to ensure that it delivers an efficient and effective service’.23 Within six weeks of taking office he told delegates at a Police Federation conference that there would be a wide-ranging inquiry into the role, responsibilities, and the pay of the police, the aim of which would be modernisation.24 The inquiry was formally announced in parliament in early July 1992, with Sir Patrick Sheehy of British American Tobacco as its chair and terms of reference requiring it to ‘examine the rank structure, remuneration, and conditions of the police service in England and Wales, in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and to recommend what changes, if any, would be sensible’.25 The business-heavy membership of the inquiry,26 together with regular leaks to the press of ideas supposedly being considered – from streamlining senior ranks to privatising non-crime activities – combined to shift the police view of the inquiry from scepticism to something closer to outright hostility. Meanwhile, in what would turn out to be one of the most consequential changes, Tony Blair had become shadow Home Secretary. As he puts it in his biography the job was not one ‘with many applicants’.27 He was interested, he says, because he was convinced Labour supporters were anxious about law and order and that the political polarisation that had characterised the field needed to change. Moreover, ‘fighting crime was a personal cause, it completely fitted a new politics beyond old right and left, and since no Labour person had ever made anything of it . . . the field was mine to play on. For once I was very confident of what I could do. And I was correct. It solidified my position in the party and the country. It achieved enormous traction. It showed leadership. I took a traditional Labour position, modernised it, made it popular and upended the Tories with it.’28

130

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Blair quickly got to grips with the job. He had quickly recognised that developing a positive relationship with the police was going to be important. As Clarke’s robust engagement with the police occasionally got him into disputes, so Blair went all out on a charm offensive. By May 1993, as police concerns about the Sheehy Inquiry and other developments that Clarke had floated were developing, Blair received a rousing reception at the annual Federation conference. By contrast, the Home Secretary was heckled and ‘drew loud laughter’ at some of his claims.29 In July that year, at a mass rally organised by the Police Federation in an attempt to resist the Sheehy reforms, and at which the government was roundly criticised, Blair made the most of the opportunity arguing that the only ‘case for reform is whether it helps to cut crime, whether it makes our communities safer, not whether it allows the Treasury to cut corners or satisfies some mistaken political dogma.’30 This was almost entirely opportunistic for as he admitted, ‘I was a bit shamefaced since I thought some of the reforms seemed entirely sensible, but I made a reasonable fist of sounding angry at the injustice of it all and was duly applauded.’31 Meanwhile, discussions about a White Paper had been underway for some time, no doubt to Clarke’s frustration. It was eventually close to a year before Clarke made his announcement in parliament. The intention behind his proposed reforms he said was to make police authorities more powerful and business-like, to give the police greater autonomy over their own finances, but to measure their performance against objectives in order to ensure value for money and, finally, to simplify the procedures for force amalgamation so such changes could be made when the time was right.32 Clarke had wanted to push ahead quickly with amalgamations, but gave way when he realised the strength of police, and possibly political, opposition. Sensing that it was better to give up on this temporarily in order not to jeopardise the other reforms, he made a series of compromises, including both to his plans for future financing of the police and on the shape of police authorities. One of Clarke’s initial ideas had been to end local authority funding of the police but when that was firmly resisted in cabinet, not least by Michael Howard,33 he followed with the suggestion that there be a radical reduction in directly elected local representation on police authorities. Warming to the managerialist theme, at an Audit Commission conference in early 1993 Clarke floated the idea of league tables in which police force performance across a range of tasks – from crime detection to numbers of complaints – would be published as the basis for a radical new form of governance. On this theme, he said: ‘The new accountability that we seek from our public services will not be achieved simply because men of good will and reasonableness wish it to be so. The new accountability is the new radicalism.’34 Much of this did little to enhance his reputation at some levels of the police service.35 The Labour Party’s response was mixed, welcoming potential changes to police funding formulas, but they were concerned about the potential for compulsory amalgamation of forces. Long having advocated such a body, they welcomed Clarke’s proposal for an elected police authority for London, though they argued for a fully rather than partly elected body. It was the idea of appointed police authority members, in London and elsewhere, that drew

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 131 Labour’s greatest criticism, arguing that such a reform no doubt presaged greater centralisation of policing. Clarke, typically, was unconcerned by such criticism, arguing: ‘Local authority members did not fight to get on to the police authority, so you were lucky if you had a good smattering of high quality councillors on the police authority, and on the poorest you had the risk of getting some real duffers who couldn’t be put on anything else’.36 One of Clarke’s first moves as Home Secretary, prompted somewhat by the campaigning activities of some senior police officers and the press, was to seek ideas for new ways of dealing with what was coming to be referred to as ‘persistent young offenders’. This most recent upsurge in concern about juvenile crime was far from new and arguably began life with the urban disturbances in 1991. Often arising out of police attempts to deal with local problems of ‘hotting’ and ‘joyriding’, these riots were followed by a slew of press stories about particular young offenders who were alleged to be an especial menace in their locality. The Daily Mail, for example, told the story of one teenager who ‘was only 11 when his life of crime began with the theft of chocolate bars from a corner shop . . . within two years he had become a one-boy crime wave’.37 The chief constable of Nottinghamshire in his annual report for 1991 offered details of a 15-year old boy who had first come to police attention aged eight, had admitted a total of 540 crimes, including 446 car thefts. In the last five years the level of youth crime, the police argued, had ‘become increasingly associated with a small hard-core of juvenile offenders who appear to be uncontrollable by current criminal justice procedures and sanctions’.38 Clarke was swift to respond and in a speech to the federated ranks of the Metropolitan Police, talked about this growing problem of persistent young offenders, and argued that there was ‘a case for increasing court powers to lock up, educate and train them for their own and everyone’s else’s interest . . . If court powers need to be strengthened or new institutions created then they will be’.39 The traditional reaction of the Labour Party would undoubtedly have been to point to poverty and social marginalisation as being the key explanatory factors in the lives of the most troublesome young offenders and to seek to link these to government policy.

The tide turns By now, however, the Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair, was taking a new line. Telling a Home Affairs Select Committee inquiry that it was ‘difficult to believe Home Office claims that offending by young people has actually gone down across the country’40 he later, in response to the government’s announcement of new ‘Secure Training Orders’ for persistent juvenile offenders, began by asking Clarke if he recognised ‘that the protection that we require is not just against the menace of persistent juvenile offences, but against all types of criminal offences, which have more than doubled under this Government in the past 14 years?’41 Although he raised a variety of questions about the nature of the regimes in which such young offenders would be held, gone was any suggestion that the Labour Party was against such forms of juvenile incarceration. He went on to

132

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

criticise Clarke for pandering to newspaper headlines and argued that what was required was ‘a coherent and thought-out policy to tackle crime and its causes, as they threaten the nation, so that people in our communities can live in their homes and walk the streets of our country free from fear and the threat of crime as they used to be able to do.’42 Beyond policing and juveniles, the other major issue Clarke had to deal with was prisons and punishment. In many respects, and certainly in this field, Clarke’s general philosophy was broadly in line with the twin track approach that had been favoured by several of his predecessors: I was in favour of reducing the prison population . . . people think that I was an ultra-liberal Home Secretary which I was not. The last ultra-liberal Home Secretary was Douglas Hurd. He made me look like a reactionary. But I was certainly one hell of a lot more liberal than all my successors and it seemed to me that my underlying policy was one I reverted to later when I became Justice Secretary,43 which was that prison is the right place for serious offenders. You know, the guys who really are pretty serious criminals who require serious punishment and that’s the most appropriate form of it. I think I used the phrase Prison Works before Michael Howard did. But I had in mind the hard core . . . criminal who proved, was set on his path. And I do not think prison is the best way of dealing with the nuisances, the inadequates, and all the other people we stick in. You’ve got to find some way which might be more successful of stopping them reoffending. So that’s my underlying view.44 The context in which he was working had shifted somewhat since Douglas Hurd had left office. Not least the critics of the 1991 Act were by this point seemingly both more numerous and more vocal. Outside parliament a head of steam was building up against elements in the Act, and in some cases, the critics were highly influential. Lord Taylor, the new Lord Chief Justice for example, observed that ‘Not only judges, but the public, will have some misgivings about a regime in which the previous record and number of offences committed are minimised to the extent to which this Act does’.45 He was particularly critical of what he saw as the legislation’s unreasonable restriction of judicial discretion ‘forcing the judges into an ill-fitting strait-jacket’.46 Also prominent was the Magistrates’ Association, critical both of the provision that restricted consideration of previous criminal history and of that which introduced unit fines. Sceptical press reporting also fanned the flames. Although the principle of linking the size of financial penalties to offenders’ ability to pay was broadly accepted, the way in which the legislation was drafted and enacted led to situations in which absurd differentials were imposed. Perhaps the most frequently cited case was one in which a fine of £1,200 (later reduced to £48 on appeal) was imposed on someone for dropping a crisp packet.47 As the Daily Mail explicitly acknowledged, this was very much a backlash against a system of penalties perceived to hit the middle-classes the hardest.48 Although by Major’s description, Clarke was ‘a liberal by instinct’, some of his inheritance when he arrived in the Home Office ‘went too far even for me’.49 Most

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 133 obviously were the two more controversial aspects of the recently enacted Criminal Justice Act that were exercising critics both inside and outside parliament, and which had also concerned Kenneth Baker. Clarke felt unit fines were acceptable in principle, but practice had quickly brought them into disrepute. Clarke was initially disposed to try to seek some form of compromise but, finding himself hamstrung by an intransigent Magistrates’ Association, ‘in a fit of pique I decided eventually to do a complete U-turn’ and scrap them entirely.50 It was not just the magistrates who were agitating however, for down the line the view within the party also hardened against these provisions and placed greater pressure on Clarke. Toward the end of his tenure the Executive of the 1922 Committee took the unanimous view that unit fines should be abolished rather than reformed and John Major, having consulted with backbenchers, asked Clarke if he could investigate the option of abolition.51 Derek Lewis, the then Director General of the Prison Service, reports a meeting with Clarke at the time, in which it became clear that Conservative backbench opinion had been crucial in driving the pace of change, particularly regarding the likely increase in the prison population that was now anticipated.52 Observing that the ‘Act is plainly not working as Parliament would have liked’, Clarke said that it was ‘clearly in the interests of justice that I should move to put matters right quickly’. Accordingly, he announced that unit fines were to be replaced by provisions that would require magistrates to consider offenders’ means, but not to fine on the basis of some mathematical formula. Second, he proposed an amendment to allow courts to take into account all the offences for which an offender was being dealt with, rather than the much more restricted situation that the 1991 Act allowed for. Finally, courts were to be given back their powers to have full regard to offenders’ criminal records when deciding on the sentence for current offences.53

Changing opposition By this stage the process of repositioning had begun in earnest in the Labour Party. Polling at the time Blair took on the home affairs brief showed that voters across the spectrum thought Labour soft on crime and that next to the party’s limited economic competence, law and order was the second most important issue dividing the parties.54 Labour’s focus now was on ensuring that they appeared ‘tough on crime’ while taking every opportunity to criticise Tory policy. Far from resisting the direction of travel signalled by Clarke therefore, Tony Blair’s reaction to the announcement was to say that he welcomed ‘the Home Secretary’s statement on the shambles of the Criminal Justice Act 1991’. Blair went on, ‘Never have we seen so quick a collapse of Government policy, even for the present Government. In dealing with the worst abuses of the Act, the Home Secretary will have much support.’ Clarke’s determination to engage in reform, and Blair’s seemingly enthusiastic support, effectively signalled the death knell for Douglas Hurd’s legislation.55 The remainder of Blair’s comments included calls for new sentencing guidelines, speeding up the courts process, and the potential to force the CPS to consult victims before charges were dropped in particular cases.

134

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

The treatment by the Opposition of both Clarke’s proposals for reform of the Criminal Justice Act and his suggestion of new custodial orders for persistent offenders were initial illustrations of what was to be a major sea-change in the politics of law and order in Britain. The Labour Party, under its new young Home Affairs spokesman was rapidly changing direction. He had been appointed in the July 1992 reshuffle by the party’s new leader, John Smith, in the aftermath of the election defeat. By early 1993 he was clearly fashioning an approach to crime and penal policy that was quite distinctive. On BBC Radio 4’s The World This Weekend in early January, in a lengthy interview in which he said it would be wrong to use social conditions as an excuse for crime, he was challenged on whether he would be prepared to see the prison population rise. His response was to say: You’ve got to be prepared to punish those that have committed criminal offences, and, where necessary, that will mean custody. But let’s be quite clear, the objective of any sensible Home Secretary is not to increase the prison population. And you see that is why I say to you that you’ve got to try to deal with both aspects of this problem . . . The Tories have given up on crime. The best they can hope for now is to get a few headlines in the newspapers. What we need is a proper national strategy for crime that’s both tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.56 Blair’s slogan, thought up by Gordon Brown,57 and described by Ken Clarke as ‘brilliantly meaningless’,58 would help change the course of law and order politics in the last decade of the century and beyond. Indeed, it would eventually help install Blair as leader of the Labour Party after John Smith’s sudden death and, subsequently lead him to Downing Street. Blair was described by Ken Clarke as ‘congenial and bright and . . . proved to be the most politically skilled Shadow minister that I ever faced. He had no interest at all in criminal justice policy or the police and prison service and he did not take much trouble to get involved in the detail. He was instead very absorbed in . . . the final transformation of the Labour Party into an electable left-of-centre organisation’. Gordon Brown described the ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ mantra as meaning that ‘For the first time in years [Labour] had a position on law and order around which the whole party could unite’.59 Blair’s profile in the law and order arena grew substantially a month after the BBC radio interview. On 12th February a two-year-old boy, James Bulger, was abducted while out with his mother in the Strand shopping centre in Bootle, Liverpool. Grainy CCTV images of a toddler holding the hands of two older boys quickly circulated, but it was two days before Bulger was found, several miles from the shopping centre, having been fatally assaulted. The shock of the murder was compounded by the age of the assailants, two local boys aged ten being arrested and charged almost a week after the body had been found.60 On 19th February, a week after the murder, but prior to the arrests of the two 10-year-olds, Blair gave a speech in Wellingborough, which was reported

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 135 as signalling Labour’s ‘abandonment of socialism’s traditional emphasis on the social causes of crime in favour of a new appeal to moral values that stress individual duties and responsibilities as well as rights’.61 Blair began, ‘The news bulletins of the last week have been like hammer blows struck against the sleeping conscience of the country, urging us to wake up and look unflinchingly at what we see . . . A solution to this disintegration doesn’t simply lie in legislation. It must come from the rediscovery of a sense of direction as a country and most of all from being unafraid to start talking once again about the values and principles we believe in and what they mean for us, not just as individuals but as a community’.62 In Peter Mandelson’s view the speech ‘was as powerful for what it did not say as for what it did. There was no traditional Labour talk about how deprivation fed crime, no calls for government to fix the environment which bred it. [Blair] used words to which non-politicians could relate, because they felt the same way’.63 Blair’s Bulger speech rather than simply focusing on the appalling crime ranged more widely to focus on a sense of a loss of community and of a failure of morality, arguments more typically deployed by those on the political right. Earlier that week the press had reported that ‘Tory backbenchers had ‘supported Labour calls for a tougher offensive to combat a surge of burglaries which has reached a peak of one break-in every 24 seconds’.64 Ten days later that backbench pressure forced the Home Secretary to speed up his promised introduction of new secure units for persistent young offenders. His avuncular manner, so often successful in parliament, was proving much less so when faced with a shadow spokesman so willing to embrace a ‘tough’ stance on crime.65 In a radio interview Clarke resorted to the familiar, and long-successful Conservative tactic of challenging his opposite number to show what he would do when faced with the government’s proposals for secure units for juveniles and for heavier sentences for those offending on bail. ‘History shows they have always . . . retreated into vague stuff about how this is all really a social problem, and it is all the result of economic success under Mrs Thatcher’.66 In fact, Blair’s response was to announce new Opposition plans for dealing with juvenile crime, calling for a co-ordinated expansion of local authority secure accommodation in place of Clarke’s proposed new facilities for persistent offenders. Once again, Blair used it as an opportunity to roll out his new soundbite.67 That week The Mail on Sunday had carried a centre-spread interview with the Prime Minister. Its opening sentences captured the situation facing Major: ‘It has been a terrible week, not just for the man himself but for the country . . . New records of unemployment had shocked the nation, while in the Commons the seemingly endless internecine strife with the Maastricht rebels68 continued, and a series of brutal crimes horrified Britain’. Faced with dark economic news and something close to outright rebellion over Europe on his backbenches, Major chose this moment to focus on crime. His take away message: ‘I feel strongly . . . that society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little less. We have been so understanding of crime, not just for juveniles but for everyone.’69 ‘Crime is the sleeping giant of worries for most of the people out

136 The Changing Politics of Law and Order in the country and I share that view’, and he went to say that he had impressed upon his Home Secretary the importance of making quick progress on new provisions for dealing with offences on bail and with persistent young offenders. There can be little doubt that Major was especially exercised about crime. He knew it to be a matter of public importance, but by early 1993 was particularly concerned that the Conservatives were very much on the back foot. A briefing note for what was to be his last bilateral with Clarke noted that he would want to satisfy himself that the Home Secretary had ‘a practical strategy for winning the debate and turning this area from a failure into a success. This has to be done against a background of: • • • • • •

Relentlessly rising crime and falling clear-up rates; Concern about the integrity and efficiency of the police . . .; Disenchantment with aspects of the Criminal Justice Act [1991] . . .; A depressing defeatism by all those responsible for running the criminal justice system about the prospects for turning the criminal tide; Endless media stories about different parts of the system (Jamie Bolger [sic], Group 4, unit fines . . .; A convincing Opposition spokesman.’70

Inspired leadership was required, the briefing argued, because the old certainties had gone, not least as a consequence of the content of the last bullet point: the Labour Party was no longer easily outgunned on crime. Paul Dacre, the then editor of The Daily Mail, detected that public attitudes were changing. ‘The Criminal Justice Act, passed by Parliament in a mood of unquestioning liberalism only a couple of years ago, has already had to be substantially repealed. This, I believe, does mark something of a turning point. The crux of the changing mood is the realisation that legislation and changes in prosecuting practice designed to ease prison overcrowding have only succeeded in deepening the exasperation of those who suffer the effects of crime’.71 Major urged Clarke to speed up the timetable for reform. Although it was thought that government managers were already concerned with the quantity of business that needed to be dealt with in that parliamentary session, not least because of the ongoing Conservative backbench revolts over the Prime Minister’s plan to implement the Maastricht Treaty,72 Major felt that pressing ahead with the criminal justice reforms would help ‘seize the initiative’ and ‘unite the Parliamentary Party and the Party in the Country around a populist issue’.73 Time was against Clarke, however, for the government’s continuing economic woes, and Norman Lamont’s problems in keeping sterling within the Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), ended with another cabinet reshuffle later that week. When appointed as Home Secretary the expectation had been that Clarke would be there for the long haul, overseeing some major reforms of the criminal justice system. Black Wednesday, the pound crashing out of the ERM, a recession, and a series of generally small-scale but cumulatively damaging press stories all served to fatally

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 137 damage Norman Lamont’s credibility as Chancellor, terminating Clarke’s time in the Home Office after only a year.

Enter Michael Howard Clarke moved to the Treasury and was replaced as Home Secretary by Michael Howard. Reflecting on the differing dispositions of the various Home Secretaries, Kenneth Baker described Clarke as not only occupying the Home Office between him and Howard but as being ‘half-way between me and Howard, quite frankly, in his attitude.’74 According to Major, ‘Michael’s contrasting qualities made him the right candidate for the Home Office – an ambitious, able politician who knew his way around the criminal justice system and who relished an argument. With his distrust of orthodoxy he was happy with the idea that I expected him to work closely with me and with my Policy Unit to raise the profile of our fight against crime’.75 So far as crime and penal policy were concerned, Howard had little in common with Clarke and quickly pursued a very different approach from his predecessor. In Clarke’s words, Howard ‘became a law-and-order populist, concentrating on longer sentences for all criminals, more police officers, and punitive short sharp shock treatment of young offenders. He also sought to make himself a reputation as a crusader against crime and played to the gallery of right-wing tabloid journalists with considerable enthusiasm’.76 Alex Carlile, the Liberal Democrat MP, made the observation that, historically, ‘There was a sort of convention that Tory Home Secretaries went to the party conference, made vicious speeches on law and order and then allowed legislation that was determined on its merits . . . That convention of the tough speech, and then legislation quietly getting on with it, continued until Michael Howard became Home Secretary. Then suddenly we discovered there was a Home Secretary who not only said it, he believed it! And this was a shock to us all.’77 Michael Howard entered the Home Office at an unusual moment. In no small part thanks to a combination of continuing, fairly steep rises in crime, with a very significant shift in attitude and positioning by the Labour Party, the rhetoric around crime was hardening considerably. The pressure being felt by the government also meant that Howard arrived in office to find a prime minister that wished to be, and was, much more engaged in planning the general direction of travel of home affairs policy. The policy front itself had already begun to reflect this change in mood, not least through Clarke’s swift abandonment of core aspects of the 1991 Act and the proposed introduction of new carceral measures to deal with persistent young offenders. Against this, however, there had been substantial declines in the prison population. The measures initially introduced by Douglas Hurd to deal with the crisis of overcrowding had begun to bite, and from the 1988 high point of well over 50,000 the prison population had dropped to 43,000 by 1992. Indeed, 1993 has been described as ‘the one year [in that period] when the prison system was not operating under conditions of general systemic overcrowding’.78 Howard changed the manner and tenor of policymaking in the Home Office. According to

138

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Lord Windlesham, Howard ‘was generally dismissive of professional expertise, including at times advice from his own officials, sensing that the general public was looking for a greater emphasis on punishment than on the rehabilitation of offenders. All elected politicians need to keep an ear to the ground, but Howard’s was more closely attuned than most. Before long a consistent pattern could be detected of conforming to perceived public opinion, taking particular notice of the coverage of crime and editorial comment in the broadsheet and tabloid press. As an inevitable result, decisions began to be taken piecemeal, often dictated by what was thought most likely to appeal to an insecure and resentful general public’.79 As one biographer observed, ‘Blair’s challenge on crime was serious enough to dictate a hard-line policy even from a liberal-minded Home Secretary . . . [However, this] was one of those happy circumstances when the pressure of events propels a minister towards policies that chime with his personal instincts’.80 Howard was welcomed by The Sun, which announced, ‘At last we’ve got a Home Secretary who is on the public’s side’.81 He hit the ground running, officials noting that the Home Office were ‘reeling at his many urgent and detailed requests’. In a briefing for the Prime Minister for his first bilateral with Howard, officials said the ‘indications are that the Home Secretary will be reasonably hard line on law and order which he regards as crucial to your party’s chances at the next election’.82 At this time it appears Home Office officials had a fairly settled view of the nature and causes of crime and, therefore, the limits of what any Home Secretary might be able to do in response. As Kenneth Clarke had earlier explained to John Major, ‘the Home Office could only deal with the symptoms, rather than the causes’,83 a view unlikely ever to have been espoused by his successor. To say that Howard was unpersuaded by the traditional Home Office line is to put it mildly. In his very first presentation on criminal justice from officials, he was given ‘a graph which showed what had happened to crime over the last 50 years . . . and they said to me, Home Secretary, crime has gone up on an average of five per cent a year for the last 50 years. The first thing you need to understand is there’s nothing you can do about it. Your job is to manage public expectations in the face of this inexorable rise in crime, because it’s going to go up for five per cent a year for the next 50 years. Well, not advice I was inclined to take. I decided that I needed to change things across the board. I decided that I needed to try to deter people from committing crime.’84 The Home Office, in Howard’s view, was one of the last remaining bastions of an old-fashioned liberal philosophy and had successfully captured several of his predecessors, a fate he was determined to avoid. A year into his tenure, faced with the retirement of the permanent secretary, and with the civil service suggesting an internal promotion, Howard resisted. He knew that the appointment was outside his control but made it clear that he was not prepared to have someone who had spent the bulk of their career imbuing the culture of the Home Office as his most senior official. In the event, the decision was referred to John Major who came down on Howard’s side and Richard Wilson, previously permanent secretary at the Department of the Environment where he had worked with Howard, was appointed. There was one significant ministerial change as Howard took over from Clarke, and that was the

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 139 arrival of a new junior minister, David Maclean, a hard-line supporter of capital punishment, described as being ‘the type of Tory who had heckled Whitelaw at party conferences’.85 Although Clarke had been Home Secretary for little more than a year, it had been a fairly hyperactive year and consequently there was a huge inheritance for Michael Howard, much of which concerned the police. A month after taking office Howard was in the Commons to present what was now his White Paper, a set of reforms that had been widely anticipated, with much police counter-briefing in the press.86 There was only one major departure from Clarke’s proposals – the dropping of the idea of a police authority for London. There was resistance among backbenchers and concerns about potential disruption to what was likely to be a busy business schedule for the Home Secretary. Howard’s proposed compromise was an advisory board, comprising people from a variety of backgrounds, that would help him ‘oversee performance’ and ‘draw up local London objectives’.87 The other potentially controversial idea that was dropped was force amalgamations. Howard said he would proceed to enhance the Home Secretary’s powers in this area but made it clear that he didn’t favour immediate action. The White Paper itself continued the managerialist trend that was coming increasingly to the fore across the criminal justice system.88 It proposed amendments to police authorities, to reduce their overall size, reduce the elected component and to include ‘five local people appointed by the Home Secretary’. It promised key objectives for policing set by government, and greater transparency in inspection including publication of Inspectorate reports.89 The tenor of these proposed reforms was reinforced by the publication of the Sheehy Inquiry report just a few days later. It said that the police service ought to ‘be prepared to be judged by the extent to which it achieves [its objectives]’90 and argued its proposals aimed at securing ‘a maximum degree of flexibility to meet changing demands and remove anachronistic barriers to effective management.’91 Its means of achieving this included reducing the number of ranks in the police service, introducing fixed-term appointments and performance-related pay. One member of the Sheehy Inquiry, anticipating the backlash that the proposals would provoke from the service itself, said ‘it would be a foolish man who would gamble more than a very small amount on something emerging at the end which bore more than a passing resemblance to what has been proposed.’92 The Police Federation, which spent over £1 million on its campaign against the government’s police reforms, took out full-page advertisements in the press, and organised a huge indoor rally at Wembley Arena attended by 23,000 police officers. The chairman of the Federation criticised the report as ‘arrogant, hectoring and dismissive’ and, undoubtedly hoping to influence Howard, described his predecessor as a ‘vainglorious politician who decided that the police were fair game for a shakeup. We are here because a monumental blunder has thrust this service to the edge of a cliff. We will never accept this God-forsaken, deeply wounding, totally wrong analysis of our service’.93 There were critical voices within the Home Office also, the Sheehy view of policing being seen by some as naïve, but there was nevertheless a willingness to push ahead with much of what was proposed. In the interim

140

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Clarke, now Chancellor, wrote to Howard urging him to see the proposed reforms as a package and not something to be implemented piecemeal. Howard, however, had far too many problems facing him for this ever to be the likely outcome and when he eventually addressed parliament that October he said he had decided to accept the Sheehy recommendation for the removal of three police ranks, to limit fixed-term appointments to senior officers only and, similarly with performancerelated pay, though he rejected the Sheehy formula for determining this. Other elements relating to salary and pensions he would not be pursuing. ‘I looked at the Sheehy Report . . . some of the Sheehy Report was sensible, some was not. Some while arguably sensible was very provocative. I took the view that I couldn’t fight crime and fight the police at the same time. You can’t. If you’re trying to put in place radical change, you can’t do everything at once. Arguably, I was trying to do too much at once anyway . . . I decided I couldn’t really fight crime and fight the police at the same time so I implemented whatever parts of Sheehy I thought I could sensibly implement which were sensible proposals which would lead to some degree of reform . . . There were others, some of which I disagreed with, some of which I thought were too provocative which I didn’t, that was my attitude to Sheehy.’94 The Times suggested that ‘by watering down the Sheehy proposals, Mr Howard hopes to end hostilities with the force at a time when law and order is at the top of the government’s agenda’.95 Howard’s biographer described his approach as ‘an exemplary compromise’;96 Tony Blair called it a ‘retreat’. Moreover, Blair suggested that the direction of the retreat was unclear and that the outcome would be a further worsening of police morale.97 Indeed, his entire response to Howard’s announcement was designed to question the government’s commitment to the police and once again to question their law and order credentials. Howard, there can be little doubt, was under very considerable pressure. His handling of the Sheehy proposals had largely quiesced a hitherto discontented police service, though in so doing had upset some of the inquiry’s members.98 However, no sooner had his announcement on Sheehy been made than the process of steering the White Paper-inspired policing legislation through parliament began. The White Paper proposals had prompted local government associations to organise a conference under the title, ‘Control of the police: Democracy at risk’. Cleverly, the organisers had ensured that one of the speakers was Tony Blair, who took the opportunity to pronounce himself ‘deeply concerned’ about the proposals for Home Secretary-nominated members on police authorities and the cognate power to nominate the chairman of the authority. The proposals, alongside Sheehy, would lead to ‘over-centralisation’, and he suggested that the government appeared to have ‘little to offer in the fight against crime’ and seemed ‘more concerned to attack local democracy’.99 Once again compromises were going to be necessary in order to carry the day. Also on the horizon, and arguably of particular importance to Howard given the pressures facing the Conservatives, was party conference season. The Labour conference came first and, again, Blair lost no time in staking out his territory, claiming ‘Labour is the party of law and order in Britain today. Tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime’. He criticised the government’s policing proposals, saying ‘The Labour Party does not believe

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 141 in a centralised, commercialised police force’ and that ‘The Government should not be fighting the police authorities, but fighting crime’. And in a clever variant on his pithy catchphrase, he said ‘no-one but a fool would excuse crime on the basis of social conditions, but no-one but a Tory could deny the impact of the conditions in which people lived on the character they developed . . . That is why rebuilding Britain is not just in the interests of the poor, the unemployed and the dispossessed. It is in the interests of us all’.100

Twenty-seven pledges Michael Howard’s preparations for his 1993 conference speech were managed with unusual secrecy. He had a long list of announcements he proposed to make and shared these with the Prime Minister. Some, but by no means all, were shared with other cabinet colleagues, and the cabinet ‘H’ committee also only got sight of a small number. Howard wished to keep the whole package under wraps so he could reveal it on the day. Tense consultations were held with Treasury officials, with some of the latter feeling Howard was trying to ‘bounce’ them into making greater expenditure commitments than they were willing and able to agree to. So far as the Home Office itself was concerned, Howard was aware that his ideas were unlikely to receive much of a welcome there. Relations between the Home Secretary and some officials already appeared to be in decline. Earlier that year a memorandum from Howard’s private secretary had been leaked to The Observer suggesting that as ‘the Government grapples with rising crime and the loss of credibility as a party of law and order, Mr Howard is abandoning the longestablished policies of his Tory predecessors’. It went on to detail how Howard was looking for ways to bypass elements of the Woolf Report, believing that many prisons were ‘too comfortable’ and governed by regimes that were ‘too lax’.101 Although ideas in the conference speech were tested out with officials, the bulk of the drafting was done by Howard’s two special advisers, David Cameron and Patrick Rock. Howard’s recollection was that no-one in the Home Office saw a whole draft of the speech before it was delivered at conference, ‘so I think it came as quite a shock to them.’102 It was also the conference at which John Major launched his ‘back to basics’ message, of ‘sound money; free trade’ traditional teaching’ respect for the family and the law. And above all, lead a new campaign to defeat the cancer that is crime’.103 If Michael Howard was hoping to gain back some of the territory the Conservatives felt had been lost on law and order, then some of the press reporting of his speech would have come close to all he desired. Under the headline, ‘Howard’s way to combat crime: The day the right roared back on law and order’, The Daily Mail said: ‘It was trailed as the biggest and toughest crime-busting revolution announced by a Home Secretary. Yesterday Michael Howard turned his big guns on the criminals and unveiled 27 steps intended to swing the balance of justice back in their victims’ favour. Crime figures are still rising. But senior police chiefs seemed sure after hearing the Howard plan for action that the handcuffs would come off their officers and be slapped on the criminals.’104 Howard

142 The Changing Politics of Law and Order claimed his 27 pledges represented the most comprehensive programme against crime that has ever been announced by any Home Secretary. In his speech he said, ‘In the last 30 years, the balance in the criminal justice system has been tilted too far in favour of the criminal and against the protection of the public. The time has come to put that right. I want to make sure that it is criminals that are frightened, not law-abiding members of the public.’105 Alongside the announcement of a new crackdown on social security fraud by Peter Lilley, The Daily Telegraph saw Howard’s speech as signalling a ‘swing to the right’.106 Among Howard’s proposals were reforms to the defendant’s right of silence, new measures to curb squatting, new penalties for offending on bail, the introduction of a DNA database, together with the building of six new prisons. In an oft-repeated passage in his speech, Howard distanced himself from previous approaches that had seen limiting prison numbers as a priority. By contrast, he accepted his new package of measures was likely to lead to an increase: I do not flinch from that. We shall no longer judge the success of our system of justice by a fall in our prison population . . . Let us be clear. Prison works. It ensures that we are protected from murderers, muggers and rapists – and it makes many who are tempted to commit crime think twice.107 It was a pivotal moment. Howard was all too aware that he was in the unusual position of having a Labour shadow who was offering a very considerable challenge in a field the Conservatives had dominated for close to two decades – and had generally dominated without serious competition. Major knew that law and order was going to be enormously important territory for his somewhat fragile government in the coming years and, in Howard, he at least had a Home Secretary who was up for the fight. At the end of his conference speech Howard ‘sat down to rapturous applause and a number of hearty pats on the back from a beaming Prime Minister’.108 By early 1994 there were two major pieces of legislation to deal with. First up was the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill, incorporating many of the conference speech’s 27 proposals. It included provisions for the secure training orders for 12–14-year-old persistent offenders first floated by Clarke, increased grounds for refusing bail, allowing inferences to be drawn from the use of the right to silence, and a new offence of aggravated trespass. There were high hopes that the Bill would help establish once again the much-desired clear blue water on law and order between the two parties. ‘The intention was that Blair would be exposed as the criminal’s chum, resisting the will of the people by speaking and voting against the government’.109 In fact, Blair persuaded John Smith that Labour should abstain rather than be seen to vote against. The decision infuriated many on the left of the party, particularly those that had begun to campaign against the new public order provisions, but certainly worked the way Blair hoped it would by wrongfooting Howard.110 In a debate the previous year Kenneth Clarke had said that Blair ‘thinks that we are moving closer together on such matters, the proof will come when we witness his reactions to our solid

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 143 proposals’.111 Howard was now discovering first-hand how Blair would react. He went directly to Howard’s claim that this was the most comprehensive measure to fight crime ever introduced, asking him to confirm that this would therefore reduce crime. Howard’s conviction failed him for once, and he dodged the question, as a consequence not only appearing evasive but also inviting Blair to ask the question several more times. But it was the voting abstention that was the most successful tactic of all for it allowed Blair to outline his criticisms of Howards’ proposals, together with support for some elements, without leaving himself open to the charge that he opposed ‘tough on crime’ measures. When it came to his turn, Blair attacked the Bill, not for its punitive measures as some of his predecessors might have done, but for failing to include what he felt were the necessary measures to tackle crime. Under this rubric he listed ‘a proper statutory framework for crime prevention and other measures to prevent crime; the provision of a full and comprehensive range of treatment and punishment for young offenders including local authority secure accommodation; measures to introduce cautioning and bail support and enforcement programmes in all areas of the country; programmes for drug education for young people available in all local authorities with funding ring-fenced; measures to tackle the link between truancy and crime; measures to strengthen the law on racial harassment and violence; a legal right on the part of victims of crime to be consulted when the Crown Prosecution Service decides to change or drop the charges for the offence in respect of which they are the victims’.112 Although the government presented itself as tough on law and order, he said their Bill was ‘fundamentally flawed’ as it failed to deal sufficiently either with the prevention of crime or its causes. As Lord Windlesham observed, ‘The Labour banner of “tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime” was still flying at the end of proceedings’.113 With two Bills being introduced almost simultaneously the second, the Police and Magistrates’ Courts Bill, had its second reading in the Lords. Rather than an easy ride, if anything this increased the headache experienced by Howard. Some small compromises to the government’s proposals had been reached prior to the second reading, not least regarding the Home Secretary’s power to appoint independent members to police authorities, but widespread concerns were nevertheless voiced. First to do so was Lord Whitelaw, who worried that in future authority chairmen would be seen as being too close to the Home Secretary and that this ‘would surely run the risk of involving the Home Secretary directly . . . in police operations and that, if I may say so, has always been carefully avoided in the past and, I pray, will always be carefully avoided in the future.114 He also voiced scepticism about the wisdom of changing the size and balance of authorities, and was followed in this by two further former Home Secretaries, Lords Callaghan and Carr. Although by tradition second readings in the Lords are not taken to a vote, the strength of the dissenting voices from both sides of the chamber left the government in no doubt that the legislation was in for a rough ride. Although it was not by origin his legislation, and anyway Howard was at heart a pragmatist, the political circumstances of the time meant that any public

144 The Changing Politics of Law and Order abandonment of elements of the Bill was inevitably going to lead to embarrassment. The Lords debate had indicated that there was little option. Consultation with Whitelaw led to a series of concessions: including the jettisoning of the proposal that the Home Secretary appoint chairmen of police authorities; ensuring that the shortlisting of independent members would also have a greater degree of independence from the Home Office than hitherto planned; and greater responsibility for the drafting of ‘policing plans’ be given to chief constables.115 On this basis Whitelaw agreed not only to vote for the Bill but to speak in favour of it, but he warned Howard that this might be insufficient given the strength of feeling elsewhere. Howard also had an increasingly unhappy police service to deal with, and senior figures as well as representative bodies all wrote to register their dissatisfaction.116 Even The Daily Telegraph was critical, suggesting it was ‘difficult to see the general thrust of [Howard’s] proposals as anything other than an expression of the distrust of local authorities characteristic of this Government, and as evidence of the Government’s desire to exercise more control from the centre’.117 An ACPO representative went so far as to suggest that he was ‘inclined to the view that we are witnessing a move, perhaps unintended, to national control of the police by central government.’ 118 Whitelaw’s fears about the likely reaction to the amendments were correct and on its return only he and Lord Tebbitt spoke in defence of the amended Bill. So strong were the criticisms that Lord Ferrers, leading for the Home Office, had to ‘stand down’ a number of clauses in order that further discussion and possible further amendment might take place. It was going from bad to worse for Howard who was faced the following morning with newspaper headlines suggesting he had performed a ‘new U-turn’ or had been forced into a ‘new retreat on police bill’.119 It led to frantic activity behind the scenes and at one stage Howard was holding daily meetings on the Bill in an attempt to fashion something that would offer enough by way of amendment to increase the Bill’s chances of success without undermining its core aim or inflicting further damage on his or the government’s credibility.120 He didn’t succeed. Further tinkering did eventually secure the Bill’s passage through the Lords, but Earl Ferrers was at one point greeted with laughter and Lord Jenkins described the episode as ‘humiliation by instalments’. Tony Blair saw it as a ‘total and abject shambles’.121 Howard was beginning to receive personal criticism in the press, with generally supportive papers such as The Sun beginning to turn against him, and The Sunday Times suggesting his ‘days are surely numbered’ and describing him as ‘a serial bungler . . . damaged goods’.122 By June the traditional Tory lead on law and order issues appeared to have disappeared. An opinion poll, reported in The Times, suggested that 31% of voters favoured Labour on law and order, up from 26% in 1992, compared with 26% for the Tories, down from 40%.123 Although the passage of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill was smoother than the Police and Magistrates’ Courts Bill, it was far from plain sailing. There was a short interruption to its Committee Stage when a brief debate was held to consider amendments proposing the return of capital punishment for murder, and more specifically, limited to the murder of police officers only. On

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 145 this, for once, Howard and Blair were in agreement. Howard, who had previously supported limited reintroduction of the death penalty on the basis that it would act as a deterrent and that existing appeal procedures were a sufficient protective guarantee, had changed his mind: ‘Miscarriages of justice are a blot on a civilised society. For someone to spend years in prison for a crime he or she did not commit is both a terrible thing and one for which release from prison and financial recompense cannot make amends. But even that injustice cannot be compared with the icy comfort of a posthumous pardon’.124 The new clauses were defeated heavily. The following month Howard wrote to John Major, ostensibly to head off growing pressure to arm the police, saying that legislation was urgently required in order to reform the law to ensure that ‘life sentences literally mean life’ in cases where police or prison officers are murdered.125 Howard’s letter was leaked, in what Downing Street believed to be an attempt to foster support for the proposal. It was all to no avail as Howard’s cabinet colleagues, seemingly sharing the prime minister’s concerns, overruled him.126

Child’s Play That the long shadow of the Bulger murder was still evident could be seen in a further potential rather populist amendment to the Bill. One of the stories that was widely circulated in the aftermath of the arrest of the two 10-year-old offenders was that they had been watching particular violent video films, so-called ‘video nasties’. Indeed, extraordinarily, the trial judge commented that he suspected ‘that exposure to violent video films may in part be an explanation’ for the boys’ conduct. One film in particular, Child’s Play 3, had been rented by the father of one of the boys and its plot was alleged by one newspaper to have ‘chilling parallels’ to the murder and that the boys may have watched it.127 What followed had many of the hallmarks of what Stan Cohen originally termed a ‘moral panic’128 – with The Sun even going so far as to burn copies of the video in public. One Merseyside MP, the Liberal Democrat, David Alton, tabled an amendment to restrict the circulation of films judged to offer ‘inappropriate role models to a child as well as any likely to cause “psychological damage”. Although initially sceptical, the strength of the campaign that fell in behind Alton’s amendment forced Howard quickly to change his mind. Behind the scenes he had met with Blair to discuss the amendment. Blair, convinced that public opinion was in favour of greater restriction, warned Howard that Labour was prepared to support Alton’s motion if some compromise wasn’t reached.129 Alton eventually withdrew his motion, Howard having agreed to the introduction of a government amendment when the Bill reached the Lords. In his speech, Alton thanked Howard for having been ‘very obliging’ and specifically extended his gratitude to Blair for having ‘intervened in order to try to make progress on the issue of video violence’.130 Unfortunately for Howard, the somewhat eleventh-hour nature of the concession was widely reported as ‘climbdown’ and as illustrative of further weakening of his position. Indeed, The Times observed that ‘the headlines proclaiming “Howard cracks down” have turned to “Howard climbs down”’.131

146 The Changing Politics of Law and Order In July 1994 in a further populist and controversial decision Howard announced that he was using his power as Home Secretary132 to set a ‘tariff’ of 15 years for Thompson and Venables, the two boys convicted of the murder of James Bulger.133 The trial judge had originally recommended eight years, and this had already been increased to 10 by the Lord Chief Justice. In the intervening period there had been considerable public campaigning, with substantial petitions in favour of lengthy sentences, and over 20,000 items of correspondence arriving at the Home Office, the bulk as a consequence of a coupon published by The Sun which read, ‘Dear Home Secretary, I agree with Ralph and Denise Bulger that the boys who killed their son James should stay in jail for LIFE’.134 Howard’s recommendation was said to have been influenced by ‘the circumstances of the killing, public concern about the case and the need to maintain public confidence in the criminal justice system’.135 Later in the year the two boys were granted leave to appeal, but it wasn’t until May 1996 that the Divisional Court concluded that setting a tariff was unacceptable in the cases of children that might change beyond recognition in the intervening period. The Bulger case seemed to many observers to be a significant symbolic moment in the politics of criminal justice, not least in the way it enabled Blair to set out his vision of how a reformed Labour Party would approach law and order issues. In Howard’s recollection the case was of less prominence but also had an impact on how he was portrayed: ‘I think it was a fairly discrete issue . . . I don’t know how as an issue it spilled over into very many other things but it came to symbolise sort of an embattled Howard fighting the judges.’136 In under two years Blair had radically shifted both Labour’s position and its image on law and order. In doing so, he had reversed the traditional Conservative lead on the subject in the polls and had regularly made life difficult for the Home Secretary, Michael Howard. A degree of relief for Howard was at hand. The sudden death of John Smith, led to a Labour leadership contest and the realisation, very quickly, that Blair would both stand and, most likely, win. Win he did and, once elected, he installed Jack Straw as his replacement as Shadow Home Secretary. Though Straw didn’t have either Blair’s profile or charisma, and certainly initially was much less effective at the despatch box, there was to be little change in tone or strategy in Labour law and order politics for the next two years. The pressure on Howard would be relentless. Behind the scenes in the Conservative Party there were concerns that Labour had gained too much ground on crime and justice and work was undertaken to identify some means of identifying Labour weaknesses in this area. A leaked memo to the Prime Minister, written by the Conservative Party deputy chairman, suggested a variety of measures, including introducing compulsory identity cards, as a means of splitting Blair from the left wing of the Labour Party. ‘Either Blair will support our proposals and divide his party’ it said, ‘or oppose us and show he does not really mean what he says about strikes and crime.’137 Although the language used in the leaked memo caused some embarrassment it nevertheless captured a view that was quite widely shared within the Conservative Party at the time. Blair had been hugely effective and some disruption to Labour’s generally comfortable position on law and order was needed, and needed fairly urgently.

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 147 Simultaneously with all this activity Michael Howard once again experienced the way in which the life of a Home Secretary can be suddenly and dramatically disrupted by the unanticipated. On his occasion it was a prison break, one of what would turn out to be a series of escapes that eventually culminated in a complete breakdown in relations between Home Secretary and the head of the Prison Service, and something would permanently affect Howard’s reputation. When the Prison Service became a Next Steps Agency in 1993, the man selected by Ken Clarke to head it up was Derek Lewis, a private sector outsider.138 Lewis’ relationship with Michael Howard was never warm, and was certainly much less positive than that he enjoyed with Clarke. Nevertheless, his first year in the job was generally positive. The Prison Service under his leadership met 15 of its 16 performance targets – that it was assessed in that manner was a sign of the times – and Lewis received a substantial performance bonus. The first of the escape incidents was from the special secure unit at Whitemoor Prison, hitherto considered to be one of the most secure places in the prison system. Six category A prisoners, five of them members of the Provisional IRA, escaped, though all were quickly recaptured. They were armed, however, one prison officer was shot and wounded, and a subsequent search of the prisoners’ belongings found Semtex explosive, detonators and fuses. A report into the escape by Sir John Woodcock,139 published three months later, was highly critical of the security arrangements and found that many staff had been manipulated by prisoners. Its recommendations, to which Howard was very sympathetic, focused on increased surveillance and control and on the restriction of prisoners’ property rights.140 In Derek Lewis’ view, Howard was keen to accept all Woodcock’s recommendations even before they were costed. Indeed, Howard even went as far as to propose that Lewis be put on some form of probation, subject to the successful implementation of the reforms, though that idea was quickly shelved as it was hardly designed to improve relations between the Home Secretary and the head of the Prison Service. The New Year was to bring another set of prison crises. The general circumstances that the Major government found itself in at this point, together with the decline in its fortunes on law and order, prompted the Prime Minister into another attempt to garner more positive headlines. Reported as ‘trying to regain the initiative from Tony Blair’, Major gave a speech to the Social Market Foundation in which he called for tougher sentencing, for both serious and petty offending, and called for a ‘huge national partnership against the criminal’ and a national ‘anti-yob culture’. Saying that there was ‘a place for punishment and a place for prison’, he sought ‘unambiguous messages’ from the courts that offenders will be punished and victims protected’.141 Almost immediately after Major’s speech, planning began in earnest for the forthcoming party conference. Howard’s initial idea was both to talk about how his 27 measures from the previous year were coming along, together with the announcement of a further seven new measures, covering a White Paper on crime, new drugs initiatives, a Green Paper on identity cards, pilot electronic tagging measures and new CCTV funding. Behind the scenes the Minister of State, David Maclean, was working on a possible scheme to ‘put young offenders through the tough training courses

148 The Changing Politics of Law and Order undertaken by army cadets’.142 Just prior to the conference Edward Heath joined in the criticism of Howard, saying: ‘The Conservative Party has had distinguished home secretaries, among them Rab Butler and Willie Whitelaw, who have stood up at the party conference and spoken for mature and sensible policies against the hysterical screams of the extremists in the party. Last year Mr Howard took it upon himself to raise the temperature as high as he could. Disastrous results for the government and the party followed. This year let him completely change his performance, outlaw the hysteria and give us a weighty considered judgement on measures which can later prove to be effective.’143 Heath’s criticisms came hard on the heels of Tony Blair’s first conference speech as leader where he described the Labour Party as ‘now the party of law and order in Britain today, and quite right too. Only one in 50 crimes ever goes punished; sentencing is haphazard; victims are given short shrift. Meanwhile, the Home Secretary, Michael Howard, protests that he has been attacked week after week for being too tough. He is dreaming. He would love to be attacked for being too tough. He is attacked because he is long on rhetoric and short on policies that work.’144 In the opening of his address to the 1994 Conservative party conference the Prime Minister acknowledged what had been happening on the political stage. He suggested that the Labour Party had been studying Conservatives ‘instincts and attitudes’ and had market tested them and found them to reflect ‘the hopes and dreams of the typical Briton’. But the challenge was not talk but action: ‘It’s one thing for them to say what market research has told them that people would like to hear. But it’s quite another to deliver it’.145 Major then went on to rehearse the Conservative track record on employment, investment and the economy, and announced initiatives in education and health before turning his attention to crime. On coming to office, he said, he had asked for a fresh look at criminal justice. Much had subsequently happened: ‘For a whole range of crimes, then, we have toughened sentences, and judges are now using them. For the first time in years, a rising proportion of convicted criminals are being sent to prison. I take no pleasure in that, but everyone has the chance to stay within the law, and that is the point. If we are to change the climate against crime, then the offender and the offender’s chums must know they will not be able to swagger out of court, untouched, immune and boasting about getting off scot-free.’ He then went on to talk about the importance of, and developments in crime prevention, before listing a variety of places around the country where crime had been dropping. In his conclusion to his comments on law and order he came to the Home Secretary’s defence: ‘Many of the changes I’ve been talking about have come about in the last year or so, and I believe that people who have spent that time criticising my good colleague Michael Howard would have been far better off supporting him during that year.’ With rumours at the time circulating in Westminster and in the press that a reshuffle might involve Howard losing his job, he was no doubt grateful for the Prime Minister’s support. That Major felt compelled to offer it was a signal of just how far things had changed. A matter of days after Sir John Woodcock’s report was published a new series of problems hit the prison system. New Year’s Day 1995 saw the suicide of the

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 149 serial killer Fred West146 in his prison cell at Winson Green in Birmingham, and on 2nd January a riot began at Everthorpe Prison in Humberside. The following day three prisoners escaped from the dispersal prison at Dartmoor. Two were category A prisoners, one category B, and all were recaptured on 8th January. Derek Lewis considered tendering his resignation but having consulted the prisons minister, decided against. Initial inquiries into what had happened at Dartmoor led Lewis to conclude that the governor, John Marriott, could not stay in post. The Code of Discipline, he said, required that Marriott be moved to another job pending a disciplinary inquiry. Howard was of the view that Marriott should be sacked and when told of Lewis’s decision he reportedly ‘exploded’, challenged the decision, implying, Lewis suggests, that if he did not change his mind Howard would have to consider overruling him. A compromise was worked out in which Marriott was moved to another job, but this occurred immediately so that Howard could announce it in his statement in the House later that day. In his speech Howard told the Commons that Sir John Learmont’s existing inquiry into prison security and discipline would be extended to cover the Parkhurst incident and then delivered the agreed lines on Marriott, saying that he was ‘today being removed from his duties at Parkhurst. Pending the outcome of a disciplinary investigation and any subsequent proceedings, he will not run any other prison in the Prison Service. When he has completed any assistance that he needs to give to the various inquiries now in hand, he will take up non-operational duties elsewhere.’147 Howard was clearly vulnerable, but his shadow, Jack Straw’s, overly lengthy response largely failed to hit the target. Rather it was a short question from Gerald Kaufman asking ‘where does the buck stop’ that prompted Howard to outline the position that was subsequently to tie him in knots. In reply to Kaufman he said, ‘I am accountable to Parliament for all matters that are relevant to the Prison Service. I am responsible to Parliament for policy. The director general, according to the framework document, is responsible for operational matters.’148 The following day’s newspaper headlines delivered an inaccurate picture of what had occurred, but one that was undoubtedly of some immediate help to Howard, declaring ‘Parkhurst prison governor sacked’,149 ‘Howard sacks Parkhurst governor’,150 and ‘Parkhurst governor fired over breakout’.151 Nevertheless, when asked by the Home Affairs Committee a week later whose decision it had been to remove the governor, Howard replied that it had been the director general’s.152 Behind the scenes later in the year it became clear that Learmont’s report was going to be highly critical. By this point, Ann Widdecombe had replaced Michael Forsyth as prisons minister, and sought agreement to press release statistics offering positive news about progress in the Prison Service. However, it was also being rumoured within the Home Office that the Learmont Report would be used as the basis for sacking Derek Lewis, and Widdecombe was refused permission: ‘we would look silly if the Prison Service was seen to be performing well when we had sacked the man responsible.’153 The Learmont Report154 was indeed highly critical of the Prison Service, saying that the Parkhurst escapes were illustrative of ‘how far short the Service has fallen of reasonable public expectations in security matters.’155 Where the Woolf Report saw security, justice and control as

150

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

complementary functions, Learmont elevated ‘custody’ above all else. One academic commentator, and an adviser to the Woolf Inquiry, described the report as ‘a thoroughly bad one which should not command respect and will result in serious long-term damage if implemented.’156 But Learmont achieved at least one of the objectives Howard had hoped for, grounds for the dismissal of Derek Lewis.

Crisis, what crisis First of all, the Home Secretary had to negotiate that year’s party conference. All significant observers appear to agree that the decision regarding Lewis’ future was politically tricky, and that a successful conference was important in bolstering Howard’s position before any further announcement about the future leadership of the Prison Service could be made.157 Howard used the conference for another round of announcements, coated in copious amounts of tough rhetoric. He had been advised, so far as practicable, to limit the number of new proposals at conference, not simply because of the financial implications, but because it was felt his ‘27 proposals’ had offered a one-time only opportunity to garner news headlines and much had been lost as a consequence. This time around his proposals included ending early automatic release for all prisoners and new restrictions on parole; automatic, minimum sentences for adult burglars and drugs dealers on a third conviction and mandatory life sentences for rapists and other repeat violent criminals, as well as what at that time were being referred to as ‘real-time sentences’. On the latter he offered the well-worn soundbite: ‘If you don’t want the time, don’t do the crime. No half-time sentences for full-time crimes’.158 Howard said his promised Crime Bill would ‘send shock-waves through the criminal community’ and that ‘the law must never favour the villain over the victim . . . Tony Blair – tough on crime, tough on the victims of crime’.159 At the end of a speech which The Telegraph described as having ‘electrified’ the conference Howard sat down to the longest standing ovation of the week. Learmont was officially published four days later and, despite a robust defence of Lewis mounted by Widdecombe, most accounts agree that Howard had long since reached the view that the Director General would have to be replaced. Widdecombe clearly believed that he was being made a scapegoat, and other colleagues, not least Virginia Bottomley in Health, were extremely unhappy at the director general’s treatment. In advance of a meeting with Howard, John Major’s private secretary wrote to him saying, ‘Personally, I would find it hard to justify sacking [Lewis] on the basis of [Learmont]. It reports a pretty sorry tale but it is a position which Lewis inherited and, as the Home Secretary acknowledged at the time, he has made much progress against his performance targets . . . If this situation has been endemic . . . does this make the Home Secretary’s position untenable? I think not either.160 When invited to resign, Lewis refused, forcing Howard to sack him. Explaining the decision in parliament Howard described the ‘grave weaknesses’ identified by Learmont, and said he believed ‘that the service requires a change of leadership to carry forward the programme of reforms that is needed and to increase public confidence in the security of our prisons. The director general has

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 151 accordingly ceased to hold his post with effect from today.’161 There was plenty of negative comment about Howard’s actions in the following day’s press,162 but this was always likely to be of lesser concern than how he fared in parliament. The test came a few days later in an emergency Commons debate arranged by Labour. In the event, however, Straw once again failed to land a significant blow. Early in his speech, he was interrupted by a question from the government benches asking if he thought ‘the Director General of the Prison Service should have been dismissed?’.163 Straw’s failure to answer quickly drew mockery from across the floor and clearly was a mistake from which he never recovered. As he himself put it, ‘I lost the House. I struggled through the rest of my speech, to mounting uproar. In reply, Howard turned in a vintage performance.’164 Far from the anticipated crunch time for his position as Home Secretary, the debate provided a muchneeded fillip for Howard. The kinder reviews described Straw as ‘no match’ for Howard;165 others were much more cutting.166 In among the prison crises and the problems with legislation, there had been some good news for Howard earlier in the year. The publication of the most recent crime figures, all appearing to suggest that the trend was downward, had begun to raise hopes that this might become a more regular feature. Earlier in the summer John Major had pressed his Home Secretary for ‘examples of good local news coverage of the effect of falling crime figures . . . and for more detailed material once the next set of crime figures is available’. Major was also keen to have ‘anecdotal stories of police successes’.167 Indeed, from this point on discussions of crime trends became quite a fixed feature in meetings between the PM and Home Secretary, though both were often cautious about how far they could go in claiming success.168 Autumn 1995 was not one of these times for the recorded crime figures appeared at an important point for Howard and he lost no time in publicising them. Announcing what appeared the largest two-year drop in recorded crime ever, he said ‘I believe these figures mark a real turning of the tide against crime’. The year to June had seen a five per cent drop in recorded crime (see Fig. 5.1), a broad trend later confirmed by the crime survey, and Howard drew attention to improved policing practices and his belief that the courts were now getting tougher. Acknowledging that the prison population had risen by a quarter in the previous 30 months he said ‘There is no doubt that the fear of imprisonment is an extremely effective deterrent’.169 Jack Straw welcomed the news but argued that if the government wished to claim credit for what had occurred then it ought also to shoulder the blame for the doubling of recorded crime since it came to power.170 The specific mention of the police in Howard’s speech was part of an ongoing strategy. Sheehy and the Police and Magistrates’ Courts Act had left the service feeling more than a little bruised. On top, an internal Home Office review into what was being called ‘core and ancillary tasks’ also raised concern both about further reform and the spectre of privatisation. In the end the review was a damp squib171 but nevertheless the service made it clear that they would welcome reassurance.172 Although his 1995 conference speech embraced such ideas, Michael Howard was initially cool toward both the idea of minimum sentences and ‘three

152

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

6,000,000 5,000,000

Thatcher/Whitelaw Thatcher/Brittan

4,000,000

Thatcher/Hurd

3,000,000

Thatcher/Waddington

2,000,000

Major/Baker

1,000,000

Major/Clarke Major/Howard 1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

1989

1988

1987

1986

1985

1984

1983

1982

1981

1980

1979

-

Figure 5.1 Trends in Recorded Crime, 1979–1997, Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries Source: Self-generated

strikes’-style proposals.173 These ideas, and others such as ‘honesty’ or ‘truth in sentencing’, emanated from a Criminal Policy Group, on which Howard sat together with David Maclean, a number of MPs such as Sir Ivan Lawrence174 and Oliver Heald,175 together with a number of private individuals including the journalist Janet Daley. Indeed, John Major had also been sceptical about the idea of minimum sentences and felt ‘the straight transference of the American proposal of “three strikes and you’re out” would not be carried here’.176 By the eve of the party conference however, he had embraced them, an about-turn that led some to accuse him of opportunism. Whatever doubts Howard harboured about the specific measures, the overall goal was very much in line with the deterrence-informed, and populist, policies he had been pursuing for two years. A briefing for the Prime Minister at the time said, ‘The Home Secretary has a package of measures which should result in tougher/longer custodial sentences being awarded by the courts. The upside of all of them is huge popular appeal; they attach greater importance in the criminal justice system to retribution and punishment; and, if you believe in it, greater deterrence. There is also the chance, with luck, of a decent row with Labour on law and order. The downside is a probable increase in the prison population with resource implications (although not this year or next); a row with the judiciary (although that has upsides too if you really go for them as wimps); possible defeats in both Houses’.177 It was the row with the judiciary that came first. Given advance warning of Howard’s proposals the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Taylor, did not pull his punches. In the immediate aftermath of the announcement of the new approach to sentencing, Taylor said, ‘Long sentences, sometimes very long sentences, are necessary to protect the public. But I do not believe that the threat of longer and longer periods of imprisonment across the board will deter habitual criminals. What deters them is the likelihood of being caught, which at the moment is small’.178 Two former Masters of the Rolls, Lords Denning and Donaldson, also criticised Howard’s

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 153

65,000 60,000 Thatcher/Whitelaw

55,000

Thatcher/Brittan 50,000

Thatcher/Hurd Thatcher/Waddington

45,000

Major/Baker

40,000

Major/Clarke Major Howard

35,000

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

1989

1988

1987

1986

1985

1984

1983

1982

1981

1980

1979

30,000

Figure 5.2 Average Prison Population, 1979–1997, Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries Source: Self-generated

proposals for interfering with judicial discretion and the ‘mixing of penal policy with party politics’. Later in the year the Penal Affairs Consortium published a lengthy critique of the ‘honesty in sentencing’ and mandatory minimum proposals arguing that the consequences for prison numbers would be dramatic as would the implications for prisons themselves, where the likely result would be to ‘increase the risk of indiscipline, riots, violence and hostage-taking’.179 Within the Home Office the big issue was finance. Howard had struggled to get the Treasury onside prior to his conference speech, and the concern now was estimating the likely consequences for the prison population, and their timing. At least the crime figures were continuing to look positive, with a downward trend for a third year running and, in February, polls showing that Labour’s lead on law and order had been cut to only one point.180 A White Paper, Protecting the Public,181 was published in March. The sentencing proposals came at the end of what was a lengthy paper, after initiatives on crime prevention, policing, drugs, community sentencing and victims of crime. It concluded with a chapter on resource implications in which it acknowledged that the ‘proposals on sentencing are likely to result in a substantial increase in the prison population over time’,182 but that few of these were likely to occur with any speed. It anticipated that 1997 would be the earliest that implementation of the measures could begin, and 1999 the earliest they could all be in place. The proposals for automatic life sentences for serious violent and sex offenders and the mandatory minimums for drug traffickers might be implemented soon after an Act received Royal Assent – perhaps April 1997 – but the honesty in sentencing and remaining mandatory minimums would be unlikely to be implemented until at least October 1999. On this basis, it estimated that the prison population would increase by close to 11,000 by 2011–12, requiring a dozen new prisons to be built. By any margin it was a staggering estimate and, according to Ann

154

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Widdecombe, only considered feasible as a consequence of the impact of PFI and the wider private sector initiative.183

The shadow of New York By this stage, with a general election at most around a year away, the ratcheting up of law and order promises began in earnest. In a speech the previous year, following a visit to New York, Jack Straw had garnered many headlines, a good deal of them fairly negative, for his criticisms of the ‘aggressive begging of winos and addicts’ and the ‘squeegee merchants who wait at large road junctions to force on reticent motorists their windscreen cleaning service’. Reflecting elements of Wilson and Kelling’s famous ‘Broken Windows’ thesis,184 he went on, ‘Even where graffiti is not comprehensible or racialist in message, it is often violent and uncontrolled in its violent image, and correctly gives the impression of a lack of law and order on the streets.’185 The timing of Straw’s initiative was largely an attempt to divert attention from Michael Howard’s tour of the country pressing his message that crime was now coming down under the Tories. In content, it was a clear signal of Straw’s intent, and he responded to criticism of his claims by saying that he was ‘not concerned whether a policy sounded “harsh or horrible”; what mattered was whether it worked and carried community support’.186 The aggressive begging and squeegee merchant elements of Straw’s Lewisham speech were an obvious echo of elements of the approach New York’s Commissioner of Police, Bill Bratton, had utilised in his drive to sell the importance of what he was calling ‘quality of life policing’ in the crime drop in the city.187 Although everyone from political journalists to spokespeople from homeless charities, as well as MPs on all sides of the house, were quick to pour scorn on Straw’s ideas, Tony Blair remained an unwavering source of support.188 Over the course of the next year, Conservative and Labour politicians would become locked in a battle to associate themselves with the emerging ‘New York miracle’.189 The shorthand for all things tough on crime in New York was ‘zero tolerance’. The term was picked up by Tony Blair and used as a general selling point for New Labour. Late in 1995, launching proposals for improving educational standards, Blair promised to ‘sweep away the second rate and tackle head-on the half-baked and the ineffective . . . There will be zero tolerance of failure from any government I lead.’190 Michael Howard, together with a team from the Inspectorate of Constabulary, had also visited New York and had been impressed by much of what they’d seen and been told. In Howard’s case the thing that made the greatest impression was the Police Department’s Compstat programme – essentially a system which used a combination of crime data and public cross-examination to hold police managers to account.191 Undoubtedly frustrated at the limited implementation of the Sheehy reforms, Howard had long been looking for ways to make policing more efficient and effective. The Compstat idea impressed him and chimed neatly with his priorities and with the managerialist ethic sweeping criminal justice in the mid1990s.192 Labour took a somewhat different message from New York, and it was the one that Straw had highlighted in his controversial Lewisham speech. Much

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 155 of the Labour home affairs policy development at this time was focused on youth justice, and this was to prove to be a major area of activity when they reached office in 1997. In May 1996 Labour published its first major statement of intent. Under the title Tackling Youth Crime: Reforming Youth Justice (TYCRYJ) Labour outlined plans for reorganising youth justice and introducing a range of new penalties.193 At the launch, Jack Straw said: ‘The criminal justice system should work best where it could be most effective – in turning youngsters away from crime, teaching them the difference between right and wrong before it is too late. However, in England and Wales, this system is in a state of advanced decay. It does not work. It can scarcely be called a system at all. It lacks coherent objectives. It satisfies neither those whose prime concern is crime control, nor those whose principal priority is the welfare of the young offender . . . The system needs a radical overhaul . . . A Labour Government will act on youth crime and youth justice as an urgent priority . . . Our proposals represent the most significant overhaul of the youth justice system since the war.’194 The proposals in TYCRYJ sought to reform the system to increase multiagency influence, give it clearer purpose and speed up the overall process. But it was elements that related to the treatment of offenders that caused greatest debate. Among the proposals were reforms to cautioning which it was argued had lost public confidence, ‘modernising’ the principle of doli incapax,195 in effect to limit its impact; together with the introduction of a range of new court orders including parental responsibility orders and reparation orders. Beyond youth justice measures, the plan announced by Straw that brought him greatest visibility was talk of curfews for under-10s. Anticipating criticism, he said, ‘This is not chasing every kid off the street. We are talking about the under-10s possibly being off the streets by 9pm . . . We are considering giving local authorities the new power in a specific area which they could only introduce after consultation with the police.’196 Perhaps predictably the bulk of the criticism of the plan came from Labour and the Liberal Democrats.197 Straw having successfully turned the tables on Howard, who now found himself on ground that made criticism of Labour difficult without now himself being accused of being ‘soft’ on crime. A Guardian leader in June 1996 was profoundly unimpressed by Straw’s curfew plans, saying ‘whether it is applied to teenagers or limited to 10-year-olds and under, is a rightwing, law-and-order lurch too far.’ It described the proposal as ‘con-trick’ and Straw’s behaviour as ‘ridiculous posturing’ with the consequence that ‘Mr Straw is increasingly leading his party into a Dutch auction with Michael Howard.’198 Howard nevertheless felt he’d missed a trick. Looking back on his time, he said that ‘in retrospect I might have paid more attention to the kind of low-level social disruption which . . . Jack Straw started to talk about more than Tony Blair. [Perhaps] if I’d paid more attention to that because I think he was actually onto something’.199 It was clear, certainly as far as newspaper column inches were concerned, that Straw and Labour were having an impact.200 Indeed, Michael Howard’s search for solutions even led to Labour accusing him of attempting to steal their ideas. The Home Office had let it be known that proposals would be forthcoming that would seek to tackle ‘yob culture’ and petty crime, including a

156 The Changing Politics of Law and Order focus on anti-social activities such as begging and under-age drinking. According to one news report, ‘Labour is angry that [Howard] appears to be trying to seize the initiative on “yob culture”, which Jack Straw, Labour’s home affairs spokesman, has been pursuing recently with attacks against noisy neighbours, “squeegee merchants” - windscreen cleaners who prey on motorists – and young offenders. Yesterday’s spat shows the importance both parties place on gaining an advantage in the law-and-order agenda in the run up to the general election.’201 One of Howard’s more outlandish ideas was to force offenders on community service to wear distinctive ‘mark of shame’ uniforms to make them conspicuous.202 In the background to all this Howard’s Crime (Sentences) Bill was in preparation. After the publication of the White Paper, Lord Carlisle, a former Conservative colleague who had previously chaired a review of parole, was invited to discuss the Bill with the Home Secretary. In his letter to Howard, he described the sentencing proposals as ‘unjustified, illogical and ill thought through’. He said he felt they would ‘lead to injustice in individual cases and a far greater increase in the prison population than you anticipate’.203 Lord Taylor had initiated a debate in the House of Lords on the White Paper in which he said, ‘I venture to suggest that never in the history of our criminal law have such far-reaching proposals been put forward on the strength of such flimsy and dubious evidence. The shallow and untested figures in the White Paper do not describe fairly the problems the Government seek to address. Still less do they justify the radical solutions it proposes.’204 He had earlier signalled qualified support for honesty in sentencing but felt that the current proposals had not properly been thought-through, and he objected to minimum sentences on the basis that they ‘must involve a denial of justice’. Lord Donaldson, former Master of the Rolls, was scarcely less critical, suggesting the ‘problem that arises in the context of the White Paper and the pronouncements of the Home Secretary, in support of it, both before it was published and since, is that it gives a message loud and clear to the public generally, and to anybody who will listen, that the judges are not to be trusted. That is what it amounts to. I hope and believe that that is an unprecedented attitude on the part of any government. It is as deplorable as it is unprecedented.’205 By this stage, however, Howard’s greatest concern should have been getting the Bill through the Commons where reports of significant Conservative dissent were circulating. Once again, however, his practical if not political position was eased by Labour adopting its now default position of abstention. As a consequence, despite some difficult moments, and critical questioning of the Bill by Douglas Hurd and Kenneth Baker, it received a comfortable Second Reading by 149 votes to 23. Despite knowing of Labour’s intention to abstain, during the second reading debate on the Crime (Sentences) Bill Howard nevertheless attempted to goad Straw, accusing him of consistently voting against all government measures that attempted to increase the proportion of criminals being convicted. By now this was fairly straightforward for Straw,206 Labour’s consistent tactics over the previous two years having given him plenty of ammunition: ‘Since 1979 there have been 33 criminal justice measures – we are now dealing with the 34th – and we supported 23; we voted on reasoned amendments on Second Reading for four;

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 157 and we opposed five.’207 Nevertheless, there was to be one further occasion where an unwillingness to be seen to oppose Howard’s increasingly strident measures caused Straw difficulty. A Police Bill had been hastily drafted, and it included a range of measures from putting the National Criminal Intelligence Service on a statutory footing and creating a National Crime Squad through to establishing a new basis for access to criminal records for employment purposes. The controversial elements of the Bill, however, related to intrusive surveillance, giving the police sweeping new powers to enter premises, to plant listening devices and to inspect and remove files, correspondence and other materials. Predictably, such an extension of police power caused concern and gradually the range of voices pitted against the proposals extended to include senior members of the judiciary, the Bar Council,208 Lords Callaghan and Jenkins among many other peers, and newspapers from the The Guardian209 to the Daily Mail. For the bulk of its contentious passage through parliament, and following the now well-established New Labour home affairs protocol, Jack Straw refused to join such critics and failed to support amendments that sought to rein in what many viewed as its excesses. Writing in The Guardian, Hugo Young, one of the longest-standing campaigners against the surveillance elements of the Bill, said Labour’s ‘behaviour was ignominious . . . It actually proposed that the entire committee stage should be disposed of in a single day; even the Government felt obliged to volunteer two. Then it conducted itself with the discipline of a party whose high command has decided that no important damage shall be inflicted on what government wants to do . . . Tony Blair often says that while his party has changed its policies, its principles remain untouched. But its attitude to the Police Bill is devoid of principle. Over some anti-crime measures, it is understandable that Mr Blair and Mr Straw do not want to be outflanked by Howard, though it makes them party to some very bad law. When the constitution is being perverted in this way, their complicity is abject and contemptible. If the Opposition declines to defend basic liberties, who will? And if the Opposition becomes the Government, what then should we expect?’210 It was only very late in the day and then, some suggested, to avoid the potential embarrassment of a Labour revolt in the Lords,211 that support was given to seek an amendment ensuring independent authorisation of new police powers. Eventually, a private meeting between Howard and Straw resulted in a government amendment to that effect, though the outcome seemed to please few.212 The degree of opposition encountered in Parliament, and especially in the Lords, together with the tightness of the timetable – the general election was called at the last possible moment on 18th March 1997 – all conspired to limit Michael Howard’s hand over the Police Bill. He found himself in similar difficulties over the Crime (Sentences) Bill. Again, some very significant amendments were laid in the Lords and with time running out there was more than a distinct possibility that the Bill wouldn’t return to the Commons before legislative time ran out. To save it, Howard agreed to accept some of the most far-reaching changes to the Bill, in particular one that significantly widened the ‘exceptional circumstances’ in which a mandatory sentence might not be imposed. One distinguished commentator viewed this amendment as having effectively ‘emasculated’ the Bill.213

158

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

Looking back on it, Michael Howard agreed: ‘I saw exceptional circumstances as really meaning exceptional circumstances and I would have limited them . . . Now, that was made into a bloody great loophole by what Labour did in the run-up to the 1997 election . . . would I have done it differently if the election hadn’t been imminent – yes, bloody sure I would have done!’214

An election looms In the lead-up to the 1997 general election, the Labour Party continued what it had been practising since 1992/93, adopting an approach designed to ensure that it could not again be presented as ‘soft on crime’ and, crucially, as the manifesto put it, pursuing policies that were ‘different from the Labour approach of the past.215 In the year leading up to the election considerable effort had been expended in thinking through the content of its post-election criminal justice and penal policy. It was in the field of youth justice that the greatest effort was expended, and a case can be made for suggesting that it was their proposals in this field that most accurately captured the spirit of New Labour’s approach to ‘law and order’ in this period. On a broader canvas, Jack Straw and Alun Michael, the shadow Home Affairs Minister, published a discussion paper outlining Labour’s proposals for the prevention of crime and criminality. Entitled Tackling the Causes of Crime,216 it highlighted such matters as schools and truancy, drugs and alcohol misuse, unemployment and poverty, care in the community, homelessness and the need for youth services. Reinforcing the significant role that crime prevention, particularly situational crime prevention, had increasingly come to play, it also outlined Labour plans for the implementation of the Morgan Report’s recommendations,217 in particular establishing both local and national crime prevention agencies. The new, ‘second order’, bipartisan approach to crime and its control that had emerged by the mid-1990s meant that both parties now vied incessantly for the status of being the ‘natural’ party of ‘law and order’. In 1997 this rivalry was translated in the manifestos into a vying for credibility over police recruitment numbers and getting tough with persistent young offenders, a contest which the Liberals also joined. All parties also agreed on the need to ensure that parents faced up to their responsibilities for the offending behaviour of their children. Under the heading, ‘We will be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime, the ‘law and order’ section of the Labour manifesto was uncompromising in its attack on the Tories. Under the Conservatives, it said, ‘crime has doubled and many more criminals get away with their crimes: the number of people convicted has fallen by a third, with only one crime in 50 leading to a conviction. This is the worst record of any government since the Second World War – and for England and Wales the worst record of any industrialised country’.218 It reiterated the plans that had already been outlined for the reform of youth justice, promised ‘zero tolerance’ of petty criminality and the introduction of a ‘drug czar’, and said it would place responsibility on local authorities for crime prevention. The Conservative manifesto, by contrast, understandably focused on the previous

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 159 four years rather than longer-term crime trends, describing the 10% decrease since 1992 as ‘the biggest drop since records were first kept in the middle of the 19th century’.219 The manifesto promised a National Crime Squad, continued increases in closed-circuit television, more support for victims, together with measures to strengthen ‘the fight against city crime’. Overall, however, it was an unimaginative set of proposals from a party that had been outflanked by its opponent and appeared to have little to offer in return. By this time, even the Liberal Democrats seemed to have been somewhat left behind by the political developments of the previous five years. Where the Labour Party now had a range of new proposals relating to crime, policing and punishment, arguably the Liberal Democrats’ most distinctive proposal was for a Royal Commission on drugs. Beyond that, it was generally the standard fare of more bobbies on the beat, greater use of community sentences and a focus on local crime prevention.220 Labour now dominated a field in which in electoral terms it had fared badly for over two decades. In 1992 The Sun claimed that it had played the crucial role in returning Major’s Conservative government.221 On 18th March 1997 it published a front-page editorial in which they said of the Tories: ‘They are tired, divided and rudderless. They need a rest and so does the country. Blair is the breath of fresh air this great country needs.’222 Inside the paper, in a series of articles explaining why Labour was now its preference The Sun drew attention to a range of policy issues but, intriguingly, crime was barely mentioned. Bar a short news story that reported Jack Straw castigating the government for recent rises in violent crime, and a mention of an overall drop in crime levels, the remainder focused almost entirely on Blair’s style and leadership qualities compared with what were presented as his uninspired opponents. Indeed, ‘law and order’ issues were not prominent at all in the 1997 election, any Tory advantage having effectively been neutralised in the previous five years. The successful relaunch of the party as ‘New Labour’, central to which was the repudiation of the ‘soft on crime’ label, led to the opinion poll gap between the parties all but disappearing by late 1993. By May 1994, Labour had a five per cent lead on the issue, and by September a 10-point lead, a superiority they maintained throughout the bulk of the remainder of the parliament, even in the face of Michael Howard’s ‘prison works’-inspired policy barrage. Labour’s volte-face was based on a new-found eloquence in handling the issue of rising crime, a change of voice that acknowledged the reality of public fears and anxieties. Initially as Shadow Home Secretary and later as the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Blair seized the initiative on ‘law and order’, telling all who would listen that New Labour would be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’.223 This masterful political slogan dealt perfectly with the challenge facing the Labour Party in this area: the need on the one hand to be able to acknowledge, both rhetorically and through punishment, offenders’ personal responsibility for crime, while on the other keeping hold of Labour’s more traditional stance of focusing on the need to reform the adverse social and economic conditions which it believed generated such offending. In Blair’s own words, it was an attempt to move away from ‘the notion that there are only two sides to the ‘law and order’ debate – those who want to punish the criminal and those who

160

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

6,000,000 3rd Thatcher government

5,000,000

Major government

4,000,000 3,000,000

1st Thatcher government

2nd Thatcher government

2,000,000 1,000,000

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997

-

Figure 5.3 Trends in recorded Crime England and Wales during the Thatcher and Major governments, 1970–1997 Source: Self-generated

point to the poor social conditions in which crime breeds’.224 The major parties by this point presumed that ‘law and order’ was a ‘valence’ issue, one on which no party could be seen as lacking credibility without adverse electoral consequences. In Jack Straw’s view, ‘As Shadow Home Secretary, Tony took the Tories to the cleaners over crime. His promise to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, his empathetic handling of the public horror at the killing of Jamie Bulger had put the Tories on the back foot. For the first time for decades, we were ahead of them on law and order.’225 In the background to all this, and ironically given the Labour Party’s failure to challenge successive governments that had overseen massive rises in crime, the years of the Major administration saw a stabilising of the crime rate followed by several years of decline (see Fig. 5.3). New Labour’s successful challenge to the Conservatives’ claim to be the ‘natural’ party of ‘law and order’ was based in part by taking their cue on strategy from the electoral success of Bill Clinton in the US. Philip Gould, who became Labour’s chief adviser on electoral strategy over the period, had taken part in the Democrat campaign for the presidency. ‘Until 1991 the Republican advance appeared unstoppable. Walter Mondale was blitzed; Michael Dukakis was humiliated; Democrats appeared too liberal to get elected, too soft to fight.’226 Dukakis’ loss as Democrat candidate in 1988, after having been way ahead in the polls at one point, was partly a reflection of the success the Republicans had in portraying him as ‘soft on crime’, and more broadly as a ‘social liberal’. The failure on the crime front, however, was part of what was perceived by some close to his campaign as Dukakis’ typical tendency to respond technocratically rather than emotionally to core matters that concerned the electorate, his preference for seeing

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 161 ‘issues in terms of policy rather than symbol’.227 The defeat for the Democrats prompted much soul-searching, the outcome of which resulted in a dramatic repositioning of the party prior to Clinton’s successful election four years later. So far as crime was concerned three core messages were taken from the 1988 Presidential election: crime was a ‘wedge issue’ with the potential to divide voters and make or break a campaign; that avoiding being portrayed as ‘soft on crime’ was crucial to success; and, irrespective of the substance of policy, appearing ‘tough’ was all important. Bill Clinton was particularly receptive to such messages having had experience of losing an earlier gubernatorial campaign to a Republican who outsmarted him on crime.228 As Dukakis later observed, the lessons having been learned, ‘Clinton was determined that he would not be put in the same box that I’d been put in.’229 Dave Hill, the Labour Party Head of Communications was seconded to the Clinton campaign team and was accompanied by a number of other Labour Party associates such as Patricia Hewitt.230 On their return, Philip Gould, among others, wrote a series of briefing papers for John Smith, though arguably it wasn’t until Blair and Gordon Brown’s visit to meet with Clinton’s advisers in 1993 that more or less direct lessons started to be imported. One set of observers suggested that ‘Blair was particularly impressed by the way Clinton had managed to overcome the Democrats’ long-standing vulnerability to attack from the Republicans – for being “soft” on crime, welfare dependency and family values’.231 Prior to this the National Executive had seen ‘“Clintonisation” as a conspiracy to sell out the deepest values of the party’232 and traditionalists such as John Prescott233 and Clare Short234 waged a campaign against those they felt were ‘obsessed with image’.235 However, just as Dukakis’ defeat convinced many Democrats in 1988 that a new strategy was required, the experience of the last decade and a half convinced by now crucial figures in the Labour Party that the same was true for them: ‘the trauma of four successive election defeats was scorched across the soul of the Labour Party, and burnt deep into the small group who had seized its commanding heights in the name of modernisation’.236 As Peter Mandelson237 observed: ‘A major accusation against the modernisers was that we had fallen under the spell of Bill Clinton. This was true. Tony [Blair], Gordon [Brown] and I all visited Washington early in 1993. . . all three of us came back from meeting members of the Clinton team convinced, as Philip [Gould] had been, that the experience had something to teach us. From memory, it was Gordon who first seized on one Clinton campaign message, on law and order, although Tony would soon make it his own’.238 Those involved in the New Labour project believed that the party’s change of perspective on crime was as important as anything in reconnecting it with its electoral base. According to Philip Gould, ‘Most people believe in punishment, they believe in right and wrong, they believe in discipline and order. That for so long Labour denied this, that they sought to excuse the inexcusable on grounds of education, class or other disadvantages, was unacceptable to large numbers of the electorate who suffered the consequences of crime on a daily basis. Now, what Blair said seems common sense; then, it seemed, in the annals of many on the left, iconoclastic.’239 While Gould’s analysis of the previous Labour position is

162

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

undoubtedly overdrawn and, in some respects, inaccurate – explanation is not the same as ‘excuse’ – there is no doubt that Blair’s change of approach paid off both in terms of New Labour’s image as ‘tough’ on ‘law and order’, and electorally. The leadership clearly shared Gould’s view. Jack Straw, as Home Secretary after the 1997 election, enshrined it in the title of a White Paper once in office – No More Excuses240 – that was intended to neutralise any lingering belief that New Labour was ‘soft on crime’. The outcome was a ‘landslide’ (The Daily Express and The Daily Telegraph), a ‘triumph’ (The Guardian) and ‘Massacre’ (Daily Mail).241 A total of 419 Labour MPs were returned, a record high, compared with only 165 Conservative MPs, their lowest since 1906. The overall majority was 179 and for many this was a spectacular vindication of the refashioning of the party into ‘New Labour’, and its overall repositioning on a range of public policy issues, of which law and order was one of its more prominent. And yet, some caution on this subject is once again necessary for, so far as the election itself was concerned, crime and penal policy played almost no part. So far as Labour was concerned, that particular battle had already been won. In electoral terms, there were other matters that were much more prominent. Polls showed that levels of trust in the Conservatives on the economy were now lower than those for Labour, the ERM242 debacle having had lasting effects. Labour was also now ahead on tax issues and way out in front on schools and education. Major’s backfiring ‘Back to Basics’ campaign left Labour with a commanding lead among the electorate as the party trusted to deal with ‘sleaze’ and, crucially, was widely perceived to have run a much more controlled and disciplined campaign than its main adversary. As the long-standing electoral analysts, David Butler and Denis Kavanagh, put it, ‘Labour’s significant work had been done before the election was called, the old weaknesses on tax, trade unions, spending and law and order had been tackled’.243

Notes 1 Major (1999) op. cit., p. 290 2 So-called as every property was assessed for local taxation depending on the number of adults who lived there but regardless of its value as well as of its residents’ income 3 Barry Sheerman, 1992, Seven Steps to Justice: Proposals for Reforming the Criminal Justice System, London: Labour Party. Introduction by Roy Hattersley 4 A Safer Britain, January 1990, London: Labour Party 5 Standing Conference on Crime Prevention (1991) Safer Communities: The local delivery of crime prevention through the partnership approach, (The Morgan Report), London: Home Office 6 http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=137 7 Labour Party, 1992, It’s Time to Get Britain Working Again, London: Labour Party 8 See, for example, H. Parker, K. Bakx and R. Newcombe, 1988, Living with Heroin, Milton Keynes: Open University; Geoffrey Pearson, 1987, The New Heroin Users, Oxford: Blackwell; and Simon Field, 1990, Trends in Crime and their Interpretation, London: HMSO 9 IPSOS/MORI polling summary. ‘Don’t Knows’ ranged from almost a fifth to over a third of respondents, at times coming close to outdoing either party 10 ‘Labour and Tories review their tactics’, The Times, 2nd April 1992

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 163 11 Conservative Party, 1992, The Best Future for Britain, London: Conservative Party 12 In interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, December 7th, 2016. Barry Sheerman, Labour MP for Huddersfield since 1979, was a leading member of Labour’s Home Affairs team in the 1980s, Deputy Shadow Home Secretary and Chairman of the Labour Campaign for Criminal Justice from 1988 until the 1992 election 13 Downes D., and Morgan, R. op. cit. 194 14 Jowell, R., Hedges, B., Lynn, P., Farrant, G., and Heath, A. (1993) The 1992 British Election: The failure of the polls, Public Opinion Quarterly, 57, 2, 238–263 15 Major J. (1999) op. cit., p. 307 16 For elaboration on this point see Downes D. (2021) op. cit. 17 Major J. (1999) op. cit., p. 308 18 Clarke, K. (2016) Kind of Blue: A political memoir, London: Pan, at p.286 19 Personal interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, March 2015 20 Personal interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, March 2015 21 Prime Minister (1992) The Citizen’s Charter: First Report 1992, Cmnd. 2101, London: HMSO 22 For example: Audit Commission (1990) Footing the Bill: Financing Provincial Police Forces, Police paper No. 6, London: Audit Commission; Audit Commission (1990) Taking Care of the Coppers: Income generation by provincial police forces, Police paper No. 7, London: Audit Commission; Audit Commission (1990) Effective Policing: Performance Review in Police Forces, Police paper, No. 8, London: Audit Commission 23 Hansard, HC Deb, 14th May 1992, Vol. 207, Col.738 24 ‘Clarke to modernise police role’, The Guardian, 21st May 1992 25 Hansard, HC Deb, 6th July 1992, Vol. 211, Col.42 26 John Bullock (Joint Senior Partner, Coopers Lybrand), Professor Colin Campbell (Vice Chancellor, Nottingham University), Eric Caines (Director of Personnel, NHS) and Sir Paul Fox (former Managing Director, BBC Television) 27 Blair, T. (2011) A Journey, London: Arrow, at p. 55 28 Ibid. 29 ‘Police hecklers mock Clarke’, The Times, 20th May 1993 30 ‘Protesting police put on an overflowing show of force against Sheehy report at Wembley’, Independent, 21 July 1993 31 Blair, T. (2011) op. cit., p. 121 32 HC Deb 23rd March 1993, Vol. 221, C.765 33 Many of the accounts of the period suggest that, with Norman Lamont’s reputation taking a bruising, Howard and Clarke were the two primary candidates to succeed him. The disputes that suddenly appeared in the press, generally it appeared from unattributable briefings, are thought to relate to possible competition for the Chancellorship. See, for example, Malcolm Balen’s unauthorised biography of Ken Clarke. Balen, M. (1994) Kenneth Clarke, London: Fourth Estate 34 Quoted in Balen, M. (1994) Kenneth Clarke, London: Fourth Estate, at p. 237 35 A different politician might have seen the opportunity for trialling the then-controversial American side-handled police baton as an easy win with the police. Clarke ruled it out because of its ‘extremely aggressive appearance’. By contrast, one of Michael Howard’s first actions as Home Secretary was to allow the trials to go ahead. See Balen M. (1994) op. cit. at p.238 36 Quoted in Jones, T. and Newburn T. (1997) at p. 22 37 ‘One-boy crime wave’, Daily Mail, 10th September 1992; See also: ‘Mini-gangster is beyond our control’, The Daily Express, 9th September 1992; ‘Rat Boy slips the lock; There’s nowhere secure, so teenage tearaway is sent to house, Daily Mail, 25th March 1993 38 Evidence submitted by ACPO and the Police Superintendents’Association, Home Affairs Select Committee, Juvenile Offenders, Memoranda of Evidence, Session 1992–93, 444-I, London: HMSO, at p. 74

164

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

39 Quoted in Hagell, A. and Newburn, T. (1994) Persistent Young Offenders, London: Policy Studies Institute, at p. 19 40 Home Affairs Committee, Juvenile Offenders, Volume I, Session 1992–93, 441-I, at Para. 7 41 Hansard, HC Debs, 2nd March 1993, Vol. 200, Col. 142 42 Several requests were made to Tony Blair for interview but no reply was received 43 In the coalition government, 12th May 2010 to 4th September 2012 44 Personal interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, March 2015 45 ‘Taylor fear judges will be seen as “going soft”’, The Times, 30th September 1992 46 Quoted in Raine, J. and Willson, M.J. (1993) Managing Criminal Justice, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, at p. 90 47 ‘Clarke ends courts farce: fines system is scrapped’, Daily Mail, 14th May 1993. Though unit fines were very different from mandatory minimum sentences of course, this type of egregious sentence was in some respects redolent of the highly publicised case in California in which a defendant received a prison sentence of 25 years to life under the State’s three strikes law having been convicted of stealing a slice of pizza. See Stolzenburg, L. and D’Alessio, S.J. (1997) ‘Three strikes and you’re out’: The impact of California’s new mandatory sentencing law on serious crime rates, Crime and Delinquency, 43, 4, 457–469 48 Justice for the middle classes; Clarke responds to public outrage with a fairer system of fines, Daily Mail, 4th May 1993 49 Clarke K. (2016) op. cit. at p. 292 50 Personal interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, March 2015 51 PREM, John Major, bilaterals with Home Secretary, ‘Points from the 1922 Executive Committee Meeting, 4th May 1993; PREM, John Major, Prime Minister’s bilateral with the Home Secretary, 11th May 1993 52 Lewis, D. (1997) Hidden Agendas: Politics, law and disorder, London: Hamish Hamilton, at p. 95 53 The statement can be read in full, together with the ensuing debate in Hansard, HC Deb, 13th May 1993, Vol. 224, Cols. 939–52 54 See Anderson, P. and Mann, N. (1997) Safety First: The making of New Labour, London: Granta, Chap. 7 55 In fact Blair opened his response by asking for governmental reaction to recent revelations about bugging of the royal family. He was rounded on by Clarke for his ‘utterly absurd’ choice of priorities, and later admitted that he considered his speech that day as one of his worst. Hansard, HC Deb, 13th May 1993, Vol. 224, Col. 940 56 10th January 1993, quoted in Rentoul, J. (1995) Tony Blair, London: Little Brown, at p. 285, emphasis added 57 Brown, G. (2018) My Life, Our Times, London: Vintage, at p. 89 58 Clarke K. (2016) op. cit. at p. 291 59 Brown G. (2018) op. cit., at p. 89 60 Considerable detail on the case, and the police investigation and subsequent trial, can be found in Smith, D.J. (1994) The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case, London: Century; Hay C. (1995) Mobilization Through Interpellation: James Bulger, Juvenile Crime and the Construction of a Moral Panic. Social & Legal Studies, 4, 2:197–223; Franklin, B. and Petley, J. (1996) Killing the age of innocence: Newspaper reporting of the death of James Bulger, in J. Pilcher and S. Wagg (eds.) Thatcher’s Children: Politics, childhood and society in the 1980s and 1990s, London: Falmer 61 ‘Blair adopts moral values line on crime’, The Guardian, 20th February 1993 62 Quoted in Rentoul, J. (1995) op. cit, p. 291 63 Mandelson, P. (2011) The Third Man, London: Harper Collins, at p. 152 64 ‘Labour calls for crime offensive’, The Times, 12th February 1993 65 ‘Tories grill Clarke on youth crime’, The Times, 23rd February 1993

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 165 66 BBC Radio 4, The World This Weekend, 21st February 1993, quoted in Rentoul, J. (1995) op. cit., p. 299 67 ‘Blair calls for more lock-up council homes to be built’, The Times, 23rd February 1993 68 As part of the Conservative Party’s long-standing problems over Europe, a series of Conservative MPs refused to support the Major government’s attempts to implement the Maastricht Treaty. There were over 20 potential rebels, and with Major’s majority at the time only 18, they had considerable leverage and came close to bringing the government down on at least three occasions 69 ‘Major on Criminals: “We should condemn a little more, understand a little less”; (1) Exclusive: The Prime Minister sets outs his values for the nineties’, The Mail on Sunday, 21st February 1993 70 PREM, John Major, bilateral with the Home Secretary, 10th May 1993 71 Letter to Lord Windlesham, 14th September 1993. Quoted in Windlesham, Lord, (1996) Responses to Crime, Vol. 3: Legislating with the tide, Oxford: Oxford University Press, at p. 47 72 Part of the Conservative Party’s long-standing internal conflict over the UK’s relationship the European Union. The Treaty itself forms the constitutional basis of the EU 73 PREM, John Major, Meeting with Home Secretary, 10th May 1993 74 Personal interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, February 2015 75 Major (1999) op. cit., p. 389 76 Clarke (2016) op. cit., p. 301 77 Quoted in Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2007) Policy Transfer and Criminal Justice, Maidenhead: Open University Press, at p. 90 78 Quoted in Dunbar and Langdon (1998) op. cit., p. 114 79 Windlesham, Lord (1996) Responses to Crime volume 3: Legislating with the tide, Oxford: Oxford University Press, at p. 41 80 Crick, M. (2005) In Search of Michael Howard, London: Simon and Schuster, at p. 269 81 17th June 1993 82 PREM, John Major, Bilateral with the Home Secretary: 5.30pm, 14th June 1993 83 PREM, John Major, Prime Minister’s meeting with Home Office ministers, 19th November 1992 84 In interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, 11th December 2014. That this was the general approach taken in the Home Office is confirmed by Lord Windlesham whose view, he suggested, was that the ‘most that could be expected of policies . . . was to moderate the worst effects of criminal offending’. Windlesham (1993) op. cit., p. 28. Despite Michael Howard’s challenge to the embedded Home Office view in the coming years, it appears that civil servants were slow to change. In his diaries for 1999, for example, Alistair Campbell reports on a meeting that Lord Falconer [then Minister of State in the Cabinet Office] had had in the Home Office as part of his review of civil service ‘delivery capacity’. Of the Home Office, Campbell reports that Falconer ‘found them pretty down about things. They said the best that could be done was to slow the rise in crime. They couldn’t cut it, he was told. It had nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with the number and nature of young men. TB [Tony Blair] just sat and shook his head’. Campbell, A. (2012) Power and Responsibility, 1999–2001, London: Arrow, at p. 24 85 Crick, M. (2005) op. cit., p. 272 86 See, for example, ‘Police dismay over ‘panic’ changes’, The Guardian, 13th January 1993; ‘Merit only’ pay plan for the police’, The Daily Telegraph, 22nd Jan 1993; ‘Police to be tempted back on the beat by bonus pay scheme’, The Times, 1st Feb 1993; ‘Pay enquiry considers £20,000 bonuses for chief constables’, The Times, 8th February 1993; ‘Home Office confirms it is considering police “sell-off”’, The Guardian, 8th April 1993 87 HC Deb 28th June 1993, Vol. 227, C. 666

166

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

88 Dunleavy, P. and Hood, C. (1994) From public administration to new public management, Public Money and Management, 14, 3, 9–16; Raine, J. and Willson, M.J. (1995) New public management and criminal justice, Public Money and Management, 15, 1, 35–40 89 Home Office (1993) Police Reform White Paper, Cmnd. 2281, London: HMSO 90 Inquiry into Police Responsibilities and Rewards, London: HMSO, Final Report, Vol. 1, Para 2.32 91 Ibid., Para 2.35 92 Eric Caines, ‘Stop money with menaces’, The Guardian, 2nd July 1993 93 Judge, T. (1994) op. cit. at p. 487 94 Personal interview with Downes, D. and Newburn, T. 11th December 2014 95 ‘Howard deal sweetens pill for police’, The Times, 29th October 1993 96 Crick, M. (2005) op. cit., p. 275 97 HC Deb 28th October 1993 Vol. 230 C. 978 98 ‘Howard throws the book back at Sheehy’, The Guardian 29th October 1993 99 Speech to joint AMA/ACC conference, 21st July 1993, quoted in Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (1997) op. cit. at p. 27. 100 ‘We are the party of law and order, says Blair’, The Guardian, 1st October 101 ‘Howard plans harsher prisons’, The Observer, 22nd August 1993 102 In interview with Downes, D. and Newburn, T. 11th December 2014 103 Major, J. (1999) op. cit., p. 554 104 ‘Howard’s way to combat crime: The day the right roared back on law and order’, Daily Mail, 7th October 1993 105 ‘Howard seeks to placate ‘angry majority’, The Independent, 7th October 1993 106 ‘Tories take a swing to the right’, The Daily Telegraph, 7th October 1993 107 Quoted in Newburn, T. (2003) Crime and Criminal Justice Policy, 2nd Ed, Harlow: Longman, at p. 263, emphasis added 108 ‘It is time for the criminals to live in fear’, The Daily Telegraph, 7th October 1993 109 Crick, M. (2005) op. cit., p. 280 110 Blair made an early intervention in Howard’s speech to alert him to the fact that Labour would be abstaining, and said to his opposite number later in the debate that he wished ‘that Conservative Back Benchers could have seen the right hon. And learned Gentleman’s face drop about six inches when we told him that we did not intend to oppose the Second Reading’. Hansard, HC Debs, 11th January 1994, Vol. 235, Col. 21 111 Hansard, HC Debs, 2nd March 1993, Vol. 220, Col. 143 112 Hansard, HC Debs, 11th January 1994, Vol. 235, Cols. 34–5 113 Windlesham, Lord (2006) op. cit., p. 59 114 HL Deb 18 January 1994, Vol. 551, Cc. 479–80 115 PSR 93 31/31/1, 21st January 1994, Police and Magistrates’ Courts Bill: Next Steps 116 POL 94 20/34/4, 7th February 1994, Lord Ferrers’ meeting with Sir John Smith; POL 94 20/34/3, 28th January 1994, Police Superintendents’Association to the Home Secretary; PF 93 157/231/11, 7th February 1994, Police Federation to the Earl Ferrers 117 ‘The trials of a lawman’, The Daily Telegraph, 4th February 1994 118 ‘Police leader fears coercive national force’, The Guardian, 5th February 1994 119 ‘Howard in new U-turn on police bill’, The Guardian, 16th February 1994; ‘Peers force ministers into new retreat on police bill’, The Times, 16th February 1994 120 Howard was forced into a series of concessions on the selection procedures for independent members of police authorities, and on reform of the rank structure of the police service. Such was the concern about the media portrayal of the concessions that discussions were arranged with the editors of The Telegraph and Daily Mail, and also with ACPO, and Howard’s special adviser, David Cameron, was also tasked with checking the likely parliamentary reaction to the proposed changes 121 ‘Howard abandons plans to end local police control’, The Times, 2nd March 1994

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 167 122 Quoted in Crick, M. (2005) op. cit. at p. 287. In the aftermath of this, officials in Downing Street suggested to the Prime Minister that he might ‘want to find an opportunity to show your appreciation of what he is doing’. PREM, John Major, Bilateral with the Home Secretary, 19th April 1994 123 ‘Voters back Labour over economy and law and order’, The Times, 1st June 1994 124 Hansard, HC Debs, 21st February 1994, Vol. 238, Col. 45 125 ‘Howard plans life inside for police killers’, The Guardian, 28th March 1994 126 ‘Life sentence plan rebuffed by cabinet’, The Guardian, 30th March 1994 127 ‘Violent videos may have led them to commit this terrible crime, says judge’, Daily Mail, 25th Nov 1993; ‘The videos and the nightmares’, Daily Mail, 26th November 1993 128 Indeed, Cohen talks in some detail about this series of events in the introduction to the 3rd edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Routledge, 2002. Many of the key elements of moral panic theory were evident in the furore that surrounded video nasties in the period 1982–1984, including the activities of moral entrepreneurs such as Mary Whitehouse, deviance amplification and a signification spiral as the media turned focused attention on the issue, a clear ‘folk devil’ against which action needed to be taken and, eventually, governmental action via the Video Recordings Act (1984) to ‘deal’ with the problem and which, in effect, brought the ‘panic’ to a close. Barker, M. and Petley, J. (2002) Ill Effects: The Media Violence Debate, 2nd ed., London: Routledge; Petley, J. (2011) Film and Video Censorship on Modern Britain, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; Petley, J. (1994) In defence of ‘video nasties’, British Journalism Review, 5, 3, 52–57 129 Windlesham, Lord (1996) op. cit. pp. 70–77 130 Hansard, HC Debs, 12th April 1994, Vol. 231, Col. 130 131 ‘Video climbdown further weakens Howard support’, The Times, 13th April 1994 132 Pursuant to his discretion under section 35 of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 133 A useful analysis of, and comparison with the very different treatment of a cognate offence in Norway, can be found in: Green, D.A. (2012) When Children Kill Children: Penal populism and political culture, Oxford: Clarendon Press 134 Haydon, D. and Scraton, P. (2000) ‘Understand a Little Less; Condemn a Little More’: The political context and rights implications of domestic and European rulings in the Thompson-Venables case, Journal of Law and Society, 27, 3, 416–48, at p. 433 135 ‘James Bulger killers have to serve at least 15 years’, The Times, 23rd July 1994 136 In interview with Downes, D. and Newburn, T. 11th December 2014 137 Quoted in ‘Let the yobbos knock Blair about a bit’ ‘Unfinished draft’ of campaign plan moots anti-strikes bill and identity cards to lure Labour leader into split with left wing’, The Guardian, 22nd September 1995 138 This is Lewis’ own description of himself: Lewis, D. (1997) Hidden Agendas: Politics, law and disorder, London: Hamish Hamilton 139 Formerly Chief Constable of South Wales and HM Chief Inspector of Constabulary 140 Woodcock, Sir John (1994) Report of the Enquiry into the Escape of Six prisoners from the Special Security Unit at Whitemoor Prison, Cambridgeshire, on Friday 9th September 1994, Cmnd. 2741, London: HMSO. For a lengthier discussion of these issues see Ch. 5 (Woolf and After) of Downes, D. (2021) op. cit. 141 ‘Major declares war on Britain’s “yob culture”’, The Times, 10th September 1994 142 PREM, John Major, Bilateral with Home Secretary, 26th September 1994. The scheme had echoes of the ‘short, sharp, shock’ initiative that had won Whitelaw headlines and support from the party faithful but had otherwise been rather unsuccessful 143 The Sunday Times, 9th October 1994 144 4th October 1994, available at: http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive. htm?speech=200 145 Leader’s speech, Bournemouth 1994, available at: http://www.britishpoliticalspeech. org/speech-archive.htm?speech=140

168

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

146 Fred West, 1941–1995, one of the UK’s most notorious serial killers in the post-war period. Thought to have murdered at least a dozen people, the majority with his wife, Rose. He committed suicide while in prison awaiting trial. Rose West was subsequently convicted of 10 murders. See Canter, D. (2007) Mapping Murder: The secrets of geographical profiling, London: Virgin Books; Wilson, D. (2007) Serial Killers: Hunting Britons and their Victims, 1960–2006, Winchester: Waterside Press 147 Hansard, HC Debs, 10th January 1995, Vol. 252, Col. 33 148 Hansard, HC Debs, 10th January 1995, Vol. 252, Col. 40 149 The Daily Telegraph, 11th January 1995 150 The Independent, 11th January 1995 151 The Daily Mail, 11th January 1995 152 Home Affairs Select Committee (1995) Criminal Justice Matters, Minutes of Evidence, 25th January 1995, 175-i 153 Widdecombe, A. (2013) Strictly Ann, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, at p. 283 154 Learmont, General Sir John (1995) Review of Prison Service Security in England and Wales and the Escape from Parkhurst Prison on Tuesday 3rd January 1995, London: HMSO, Cmnd. 3020 155 Learmont, General Sir John (1995) op. cit., Para. 6.4 156 Morgan, R (1996) Learmont: Dangerously unbalanced, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 35, 4, 346–353, at p. 347 157 See, for example, Lewis (1997) op. cit., p. 197; Widdecombe (2013) op. cit. at pp.291–2; Crick, M. (2005) op. cit. at pp. 305–6 158 ‘Fury as Howard plays jail card. “If you don’t want the time, don’t do the crime”’, The Guardian, 13th October 1995 159 ‘No hiding place for criminals, pledges Howard’, The Daily Telegraph, 13th October 1995 160 PREM, John Major, Bilateral with the Home Secretary, 29th September 1995 161 Hansard, HC Debs, 16th October 1995, Vol. 264, Col. 32 162 Andrew Marr, ‘The buck wanders round and round; Yesterday, at last, Michael Howard took some responsibility for the bad prisons news – but not enough’, The Independent, 17th October 1995; ‘Real guilt lies with Howard’, The Daily Mirror, 17th October 1995; Simon Jenkins, ‘Another fine mess of porridge’, The Times, 18th October 1995 163 HC Deb, 19th October 1995 Vol. 264, C. 504 164 Straw (2012) op. cit., p. 198 165 ‘Heat but no light in the Commons’, The Independent, 20th October 1995 166 ‘Man of Straw is blown to the wind’, The Daily Telegraph, 20th October 1995 167 PREM, John Major, Letter from Private Secretary to the Home Office, 20th August 1995 168 In early 1996, for example, Howard told Major that he was concerned that the next figures might show some rise in crime and he advised the Prime Minister against staking too much political capital on the current trend. PREM, John Major, Bilateral with the Home Secretary, 19th January 1996 169 ‘We have turned the tide on crime, says Howard’, The Times, 28th September 1995 170 ‘Recorded crime hailed as turning point by Howard’, The Daily Telegraph, 28th September 1995 171 See Newburn, T. (forthcoming), op. cit., Chapter 5 172 A note by an official to John Major in July 1995 noted that ‘the Police Federation say that a speech by you reassuring the police that we still love them would go down extremely well’. PREM, John Major, Bilateral with the Home Secretary, 18th July 1995 173 A baseball term attached to a particular style of mandatory minimum sentencing which became widespread, though variable in its impact, in the U.S. during the

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 169

174 175 176 177 178 179

180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187

188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195

escalating ‘war on crime’. See, for example, Zimring, F., Hawkins, G. and Kamin, S. (2001) Punishment and Democracy: Three Strikes and You’re Out in California, New York: Oxford University Press; Schichor, D. and Sechrest, D. (1996) Three Strikes and You’re Out: Vengeance as Public Policy, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage; Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2006) Three strikes and you’re out: Exploring symbol and substance in American and British crime control politics, British Journal of Criminology, 46, 781–802 Conservative MP from 1974 to 1997 and Chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee from 1992 to 1997 Conservative MP from 1992, Solicitor General 2012–14, and Minister of State for Courts and Justice 2016–17 PREM, John Major, Bilateral with the Home Secretary, 15th May 1995 PREM, John Major, Bilateral with the Home Secretary, 29th September 1995 ‘Howard’s jail plan rejected by Lord Justice Taylor, The Times, 13th October 1995 ‘Protecting the Public: Comments on the White Paper’, Penal Affairs Consortium news release, 19th July 1996; More generally: Penal Affairs Consortium (1995) Sentencing and Early Release: The Home Secretary’s proposals, Penal Affairs Consortium, December ‘Tories cut Labour lead on law and order to one point as crime figures fall’, The Guardian, 8th February 1996 Home Office (1996) Protecting the Public: The Government’s strategy on crime in England and Wales, London: HMSO, Cmnd. 3190 Home Office (1996) op. cit. at Para. 13.3 See Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2007) Policy Transfer and Criminal Justice, Maidenhead: Open University Press, Ch. 4 Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G. (1982) Broken Windows: The police and neighbourhood safety, The Atlantic, March; Newburn, T. and Jones, T. (2007) Symbolising control: Reflections on zero tolerance, Theoretical Criminology, 11, 2, 221–243 Quoted in Newburn, T. (1998) Tackling youth crime and reforming youth justice: The origins and nature of New Labour policy, Policy Studies, 19:3–4, 199–212, at p. 201; see also, ‘Straw takes on addicts and winos’, The Guardian, 5th September 1995 ‘Straw takes on addicts and winos’, The Guardian, 5th September 1995 Bratton, W. (1998) Turnaround: How America’s top cop reversed the crime epidemic, New York: Random House; Kelling, G.L., Bratton, W.J. (1998) Declining Crime Rates: Insiders’ Views of the New York City Story, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 88, 4, 1217–1231; Karmen, A. (2000) New York Murder Mystery: The true story behind the crime crash of the 1990s, New York: New York University Press See Anderson, P. and Mann, N. (1997) op. cit. Karmen, A. (2000) New York Murder Mystery: The true story behind the crime crash of the 1990s, New York: New York University Press ‘Teachers savage Blair school plan’, The Guardian, 6th December 1995 See, for example, Bratton, W. and Andrews, W. (1998) ‘What We’ve Learned about Policing’, City Journal, available at www.city-journal.org; Maple, J. (2000) The Crime Fighter: Putting the Bad Guys Out of Business, New York: Random House ‘Howard seeks US inspiration for crime clampdown’, The Times, 29th January 1996 Labour Party (1996) Tackling Youth Crime, Reforming Youth Justice, London: Labour Party Jack Straw speaking at the launch of Tackling Youth Crime: Reforming Youth Justice, 20th May 1996 The presumption, rebuttable in court, that juveniles aged 10–13 were incapable of committing a criminal offence. Smith, A.T.H. (1994) Doli incapax under threat, Cambridge Law Journal, 53, 3, 426–428; Bandalli, S. (1998) Abolition of the presumption of doli incapax and the criminalisation of children, Howard Journal, 37, 2, 114–123

170

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

196 ‘Labour “under-10s curfew” plan ignites row,’ The Guardian, 3rd June 1996 197 One unnamed member of the Shadow Cabinet was quoted as saying it was ‘shameless authoritarianism’, ‘Straw tries to put the boot in on crime’, The Financial Times, 4th June 1996 198 ‘A curfew on common-sense: Jack Straw’s rightward lurch’, The Guardian, 3rd June 1996 199 In interview with David Downes and Tim Newburn, 11th December 2014 200 Straw, however, hadn’t convinced everyone with these tough proposals. The Sun, for example, remained sceptical: ‘Jack Straw calls for a curfew on children – just like the one President Clinton advocates. This is Straw all over: if it looks like it might be popular, latch on to it regardless of the consequences. He clearly hasn’t thought out the implications of a curfew. How would the over-stretched police cope with rounding up thousands of youngsters? And where would they put them if their parents were out? Perhaps they could go to Straw’s house, where he could read them all his bright ideas. After all, kids like a fairy story at bedtime.’ ‘Man of Straw’, The Sun, 3rd June 1996 201 ‘Howard’s “yob” plan meets zero tolerance’, The Independent, 29th May; See also, ‘Tories launch plan to end “yob culture.” Politicians have begun taking a leaf out of the “zero tolerance” book of the NYPD’ The Guardian, 29th May 1996 202 ‘Labour “under-10s curfew” plan ignites row,’ The Guardian, 3rd June 1996 203 Quoted in Windlesham, Lord (2001) op. cit., p. 23 204 Hansard, HL Debs, 23rd May 1996, Vol. 572, Col. 1025 205 Hansard, HL Debs, 23rd May 1996, Vol. 572, Col. 1049 206 Although Straw’s experience in the Commons against Howard was generally improving, it was still the view in Conservative circles that if push came to shove Howard would come out on top. A note to Major’s principal private secretary from a duty clerk at No. 10 giving details of part of a telephone conversation he had missed between Major and Howard was revealing on this. It noted: ‘The PM said that he would back [Howard] every time against Straw. Even if found at the scene of the crime with a smoking gun and blood on his hands he would be able to talk his way out of it against Straw’. PREM, John Major, Bilateral with the Home Secretary, Telephone conversation between the PM and Home Secretary, 24th October 1996 207 Hansard, HC Debs, 4th November 1996, Vol. 284, Col. 923 208 ‘Labour under fire over Police Bill’, The Independent, 13th December 1996 209 Hugo Young, ‘The Police Bill fiasco is worse than I thought’, The Guardian, 23rd January 1997 210 ‘Contemptible fallout of Blair’s power bid Lawyers’ offices will be bugged, their telephones tapped, in Britain as in Cuba or Iraq or any other police state’, The Guardian, 28th November 1996 211 See Anderson, P. and Mann, N. (1997) op. cit., Chapter 7 212 ‘Howard bows to demand for prior approval of bugging’, The Times, 10th February 1997 213 Ashworth, A. (2001) The decline of English sentencing and other stories, in Tonry, M. and Frase, R. (eds.) Sentencing and Sanctions in Western Countries, New York: Oxford University Press 214 Personal interview with Tim Newburn, quoted in Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2007) op. cit., p. 103 215 Labour Party, 1997, New Labour – Because Britain Deserves Better, London: Labour Party: 2–3 216 Straw, J. and Michael, A. (1996) Tackling the Causes of Crime: Labour’s proposals to prevent crime and criminality, October 1996, London: Labour Party 217 Morgan, J. (1991) Safer Communities: The Local Delivery of Crime Prevention Through the Partnership Approach. Home Office, Standing Conference of Crime

British Politics of Law and Order, 1992–1997: Walking the Walk 171

218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228

229 230

231 232 233 234 235

236 237

Prevention, August; Gilling, D.J. (1994) Multi-agency crime prevention: Some barriers to collaboration, Howard Journal, 33, 3, 246–257; Crawford A. (1997) The Partnership Approach To Community Crime Prevention: Corporatism At the Local Level? Social & Legal Studies, 3, 4, 497–519 Labour Party (1997) New Labour – Because Britain Deserves Better, London: Labour Party: 22 Conservative Party (1997) You Can Only Be Sure with the Conservatives, London: Conservative Party, p.35 Liberal Democrat Party (1997) Make the Difference, London: Liberal Democrat Party Famously, its banner front page headline on 11th April 1992 was ‘It’s the Sun Wot Won It’. On election day, its front page headline had been, ‘If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights’ ‘The Sun backs Blair’, The Sun, 18th March 1997 The phrase was first aired in an article by him for the New Statesman, 29th January 1993 Blair, T. (1993) Why crime is a socialist issue, New Statesman, 29th January Straw, J. 2012, Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor, London: Macmillan: 196 Gould, P. (1998) The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party, London: Little Brown: 172 Estrich, S. (1988) Getting Away With Murder: How politics is destroying the criminal justice system, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, at p. 66. Susan Estrich had been Dukakis’ campaign manager in 1988 Anderson, D. (1995) Crime and the Politics of Hysteria: How the Willie Horton story changed American justice, New York: Random House; Brady, J. (1997) Bad Boy: The life and politics of Lee Atwater, New York: Addison Wesley; Lerman, A.E. and Weaver, V.M. (2014) Race and Crime in American Politics: From law and order to Willie Horton and beyond, in Bucerius, S. and Tonry, M. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Ethnicity, Crime and Immigration, New York: Oxford University Press Personal interview with Tim Newburn, quoted in Newburn, T. and Jones, T. (2005) Symbolic politics and crime control: The long shadow of Willie Horton, Crime, Media, Culture, 1, 1, 72–87, at p. 79 Dolowitz, D., Greenwold, S. and Marsh, D. (1999) Policy Transfer: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, But Why Red, White and Blue?, Parliamentary Affairs, 52: 719–30. At the time Patricia Hewitt was Deputy Chair of Labour’s Commission on Social Justice and a Deputy Director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, having previously been an adviser to Neil Kinnock Anderson, P. and Mann, N.N. (1997) op. cit., p. 22 Rentoul, J. (1995) op. cit., p. 274 Later to become Deputy Prime Minister under Blair Labour MP 1983–2010 and Secretary of State for International Development 1997–2003 Peter Mandelson reports Prescott ringing him after having heard of a visit by Blair and Brown to Washington to say: ‘I know what your game is . . . I can tell we don’t need any of this fucking Clinton stuff over here. They’re just drawing attention to themselves, and rocking the boat’. Mandelson, P. (2011) The Third Man, London: Harper Collins, at p. 151 Rawnsley, A. (2000) Servants of the People: The inside story of New Labour, London: Penguin, at p. 3 At the time the Labour MP for Hartlepool. Previously Director of Communications for the Labour Party under Neil Kinnock and subsequently Secretary of State for Trade and Industry (1998; 2008–10); Secretary of State for Northern Ireland (1999–2001); and European Commissioner for Trade (2004–2008)

172

The Changing Politics of Law and Order

238 Mandelson, P. (2011) op. cit., p. 151 239 Gould, P. (1998) op. cit., pp. 188–89 240 Home Office, 1997, No More Excuses: A New Approach to Tackling Youth Crime in England and Wales, London: Stationery Office 241 All quoted in Butler, D. and Kavanagh, D. (1997) The British General Election of 1997, Basingstoke: Macmillan 242 The European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Britain had entered the ERM in 1990 only to be forced out two years later (on ‘Black Wednesday’) as a result of a run on the pound. John Major (2000: 312) described it as ‘a political and economic calamity. It unleashed havoc in the Conservative Party and it changed the political landscape of Britain. On that day, a fifth consecutive Conservative election victory, which always looked unlikely unless the opposition were to self-destruct, became remote, if not impossible’ 243 Butler, D. and Kavanagh, D. (1997) op. cit., p. 232

Part Two

Explaining the Trends

6

Leaving the Past Behind

1

The sociologist Frank Parkin argued half a century ago, but in an analysis that is still highly relevant, that the major strength of the Conservative Party was its ability to claim oneness with the bastions of traditional British sovereignty: the monarchy, the aristocracy, property ownership, the armed forces, the ancient universities, the land, and the law.2 The Labour Party, as the representative of the working-class labour movement and its trade unions, was the only countervailing force to this ruling-class ideology. ‘Yet this constituency was always deviant in relation to the core values and most cherished allegiances of British traditionalism. The Labour Party could flourish only in direct relation to movement away from their sites, most typically in a single-occupation, one-class urban area like a mining town. Against the Tory Party’s keystone value of what Macpherson termed “possessive individualism”,3 the Labour Party rests on an appeal to the alternative morality of redistributive social justice and community.’4 In the post-war period since 1945, these ideological differences translated relatively distinctly into clear policy alternatives in the realms of health, housing and taxation: Labour preferred public sector provision in the face of gross market failures, and progressive taxation on wealth and income to pay for it. The Conservatives preferred residual welfare provision and minimal taxation of the better off. In practice, once the ‘welfare state’ had been constructed in the immediate aftermath of war, both parties compromised in what was termed ‘Butskellism’,5 the working consensus based on the acceptance of that achievement. ‘Law and order’ did not lend itself to such clarity, though both major parties, as we have seen, shared a broad acceptance of a rehabilitative ‘penal welfarism’6 as the ideal working philosophy for the criminal justice system until the 1970s. Standard explanations of the causes of crime were, however, distinctively different. For Conservatives, these tended to inhere in the realms of individual pathology and/or lax authority by parents or teachers. For Labour, they arose from harsh social and economic realities: poverty, inequality, racism, and other forms of marginalisation. Labour’s problem was how to make connections at all convincingly between trends in crime and these diverse causes. For Conservatives, the problem was how to disconnect them, indeed to contest the very process of making such connections as inimical to law and order maintenance.7 In Conservative terms, ‘explanation’ amounts to

DOI: 10.4324/9781003330981-8

176

Explaining the Trends

‘excuse’, an equation Labour regularly failed to challenge at all effectively. More than that, in redesigning itself in the 1990s, New Labour came to appropriate such rhetoric in the arguments that underpinned proposals as varied as parenting and antisocial behaviour orders, the renaming of cautions as Final Warnings and, most explicitly, in the title of their 1997 White Paper No More Excuses.8 Throughout the 1980s Conservative politicians from the Prime Minister down used the rhetoric of moral outrage to deploy this philosophically unacceptable elision as a means of undermining Labour criticisms of government law and order policy. Thus, her claim that rioting can never be ‘justified by unemployment’9 (or poverty, or racism, or police malpractices) always overrode the logical objection – rarely voiced – that nevertheless such realities may help to explain it.10 The constant use of such tactics to present Labour as appearing ‘soft’ on crime never prompted a successful challenge but, rather, stimulated the Opposition to seek to occupy similar territory, opting instead to claim equal, if not greater, toughness than the Tories. As Tony Blair, the person most closely associated with the Labour Party’s change of position on law and order put it, ‘The success of the right’s strategy depends on the left living up to its caricature’.11 We must stress again that, despite the tough rhetoric, the period of Mrs. Thatcher’s administrations proved open to liberal, reformist ideas on criminal justice policy – for many observers unexpectedly so – and the decade of her premiership actually ended with a prison population that was little higher than that with which it began. This outcome was due to a number of factors. The Tories were comfortably ahead of Labour both electorally and in opinion polls throughout the decade after victory in the Falklands War of 1982–3. North Sea oil coming fully on stream helped to finance the welfare costs of deindustrialisation and, after the defeat of the miners’ strike of 1984–5, the government were in a position of assured supremacy over a divided opposition, despite the resultant rise in unemployment to levels higher than any in the 1930s. The Labour opposition throughout the decade, for reasons we examine in greater detail below, disengaged from attacking the government at all forcefully on ‘law and order’ policies, seeking rather to neutralise their appeal on this front, but only very belatedly accusing them of being ‘soft’ on crime. As we have seen, for the most part Mrs. Thatcher gave her Home Secretaries, several of whom were from the liberal flank of the party, considerable leeway simply to ‘get on with it’. Under these circumstances and in conjunction with ministers, senior Home Office civil servants were able to pursue a strategy of maintaining the prison population within certain limits, and also to give much greater priority to crime prevention, which succeeded for a few years from 1987 to 1992 in formulating a policy for lasting criminal justice reform.12 The greater realism that came to prevail in the governments led by Mrs. Thatcher throughout the 1980s did not extend to any hint of acknowledgment that their social and economic policies may have contributed to the causes of the steepening increase in the crime rate. Yet those policies harboured major implications for rising crime. First, although deindustrialisation was a trend of long standing since the late 1960s, due to post-war economic recovery by major competitors,

Leaving the Past Behind 177 especially those not saddled with large-scale defence commitments such as Germany and Japan, it was gravely accelerated in the 1980s by monetarist economic policies gaining favour over Keynesian measures, and by the irony of oil production strengthening sterling at the expense of industrial exports. Levels of unemployment rose as control of the money supply and the prevention of inflation became the overriding economic imperatives.13 By 1983–4, the unemployment rate rose to over 11 per cent, or 14 per cent in the case of male unemployment. Monetarism was largely abandoned in favour of privatisation and financial deregulation. The ‘Big Bang’ for financial services in 1985–6 favoured the City of London and investment in property and short-term corporate deals rather than longer-term investment in manufacturing industry.14 While unemployment fell back to seven per cent by the late 1980s, that was mainly due to a credit boom. Inflationary pressures led the UK to seek salvation by locking the exchange rate onto the European Rate Mechanism (ERM). The speculative rout that followed led to the debacle of ‘Black Wednesday’ and the recurrence of high unemployment to 10 per cent in 1992–3. This second phase was markedly criminogenic. Rising unemployment and growing inequality are both linked with rates of offending by a host of studies, some of which have been carried out by government researchers.15 ‘In sum, then, the consequences of Thatcher’s economic radicalism were a profound increase in levels of unemployment, economic inequality and social polarisation that were reflected in a steep increase in rates of crime, and reinforcement of the unemploymentcrime link.16 These developments were compounded by changes in the housing market following the introduction of ‘right to buy’ legislation for council tenants in the Housing Act 1980. Hailed as a major step towards a property-owning democracy, and which for a time, in part due to favourable discounts to encourage buyers, increased home ownership by some two million, its longer-term effects were to substantially diminish the size of the housing stock at affordable rents. Housing estates became polarised as the best stock was sold off, often to shortterm lets, fostering a transience which destabilised communities. ‘The right to buy one’s own council house, coupled with the Housing Act’s requirement (1985) that local councils house homeless people and the impacts of the Social Security Act 1988 (which were aimed at reducing the costs of social security in general), created a situation in which disadvantaged members of society were corralled together in areas that became known as ‘sink estates’ and in which low-level anti-social behaviour and crime became commonplace.’17 This was to become an important element of the context in which crime and criminal justice policy would eventually be radicalised.18 This onslaught on council housing was reinforced by the accompanying requirement that local councils were prevented from using the funds released by ‘right to buy’ sales to build new public sector accommodation. ‘Cumulative capital receipts under this policy proved greater than under any other privatisation policy.19 However, from the outset there were restrictions on local authorities’ use of receipts which largely reverted to the Treasury. Crucially, there was no commitment to use capital receipts for housing and no policy to replace sold dwellings.’20 The demunicipalisation of housing and policies for deregulating

178

Explaining the Trends

private sector renting combined to revive the crumbling rentier sector of housing ownership, a substantial factor in growing economic inequality. Social security and education were two fields in which Thatcherite policies in the 1980s may inadvertently have promoted the growth in crime. Examples include reducing the level of benefits which were felt to have become too generous under Labour. Thus, the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) froze board and lodgings benefits for those in need and then introduced a cut and a restriction on payment of benefits to unemployed people under the age of 25. New constraints forced them to move every few weeks to remain eligible for payments – ‘thereby increasing the number of young, homeless people21 who, in turn, were trapped in situations in which they were more likely to become involved in crime.’22 In education, attempts to improve performance without increased resourcing led to tighter managerial control over the content of education, in the 1988 Education Act, and the development of league tables in relation to exam results from 1992. The effect of this ethos was to encourage schools to exclude, either temporarily or permanently, unruly pupils who would detract from the school’s performance. Exclusion too often left children dumped on the street, with obvious side-effects of behaviour deemed anti-social, the grounds for the subsequent creation of ASBOs and associated preventive measures. In sum, the social and economic policies of the Thatcher premierships all too often combined to create a recipe for anomie,23 reflected in the steepest rise in crime rates in 1990–91 of over 30 per cent. Counter-intuitively, it was at this point that penal policies assumed their most liberal form in the Criminal Justice Bill of 1990, the product of both ministerial and Home Office groundwork throughout the 1980s.24 Far from being the punitive onslaught that the 1979 manifesto seemed to harbour, the thought that had gone into research on non-custodial penalties and crime prevention, not least by the Home Office’s own Research Unit, had crystallised into a coherent programme for criminal justice reforms aimed at reducing the resort to imprisonment. The fact that the Labour Opposition had in key respects urged the government along this path was a crucial element in its development. That Labour held back from a much more full-blooded assault on the government’s crime control record stands in need of explanation. It would appear that, despite the similarity or even superiority of Labour by comparison with the Conservative record on law and order, Labour nevertheless proved vulnerable on this front due to what Downes and Morgan referred to as their various ‘hostages to fortune’ and their association with, and need to defend, several key constituencies: the Trade Unions and the Labour Movement; the ‘rough’ working class; proponents of civil disobedience; and libertarian law reform.

The Labour Party and trade union movement The history of the Labour Party has from the outset been formed by the often uneasy alliance between the labour movement and Fabian-style intellectuals, each involving the party in distinctive concerns on the ‘law and order’ front and which, as we have detailed, have exposed it to accusations from the right of undermining

Leaving the Past Behind 179 the ‘rule of law’. Indeed, the struggle to win basic labour rights, from assembly to picketing to the very process of unionization itself, all generally now viewed as legitimate, often involved order-defiance and law-violation that was far from insignificant.25 By mid-century, however, the most fundamental rights had been secured in law and, with the Labour Party having won the 1945 election by a large majority, trade unionism gained a new respectability. Strikes were few and far between, and the Labour leadership contained several senior members with union backgrounds. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s the more right-leaning in Labour terms were in the ascendancy. By the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, however, the labour movement, which had launched and proved the main ballast for the Labour Party, almost sank it through a combination of militancy and strike action that culminated in its own defeat in the miners’ dispute of 1984–5. Arguably there were two pivotal developments which led to the situation whereby trade unionism could be identified with hooliganism and violence. First, Britain’s involvement in the Korean War 1950–53 made a huge difference to the pace of economic recovery. The costs of the build-up of forces postponed for a crucial period the end of rationing and other forms of austerity born of war-time privation. In Peter Hennessey’s analysis: ‘The dramatic turnaround, from a payments surplus of £307 million in 1950 to a deficit of £369 million in 1951 was especially tragic as this was the golden opportunity in the entire postwar period for a sustained export-led boom which, with luck, might have put the British economy on to a higher and sustainable trajectory before Germany, in particular, recovered to the point where our export markets were once more highly vulnerable.’26 This postponement of recovery combined with Labour’s defeat in the 1951 election brought about an “electoral sequence that linked the Labour Party . . . with austerity, rationing and an egalitarian ‘levelling down’ whilst, by contrast, the Conservative or Tory Party became associated not, as in the 1930s, with the far greater miseries of the Depression, but with the ‘Never Had It So Good’ ‘affluent society’ that burgeoned from the mid-1950s throughout Western Europe in general . . . A crucial difference is that only in Britain was the party of the Left in power for the most exhausting period of post-war reconstruction, whilst the Party of the Right came into power just as the post-war ‘Golden Age’ of the economic ‘miracle’ was about to be launched.”27 This species of windfall assisted the reinstatement of the Conservatives as the ‘natural party of government’, a domain assumption to which Labour was perpetually in thrall, even when in government themselves. The Labour Party’s main counter-narrative was that they could work in closer harmony with the unions, an asset which diminished as union, or rank-and-file militancy grew during Labour’s tenure of office. In the late 1960s and again in the late 1970s, this oppositional character came to dog Labour’s chances of re-election. The second pivotal factor was the form of socialist programme that evolved from the Fabian strand in party history. The Fabian Society was founded in 1889 by Sidney and Beatrice Webb and Bernard Shaw. They espoused a non-revolutionary route to a socialist society, based on ‘gradualism’, the doctrine that tireless research and informed debate would achieve the Marxian goal of socialism by democratic

180

Explaining the Trends

parliamentary process.28 One offshoot of this approach was the foundation of the London School of Economics and Political Science in 1895.29 Clement Attlee, Prime Minister of Great Britain 1945–51, was a Lecturer in Social Work at the School, and author of a book The Social Worker published in 1920. But it was Sidney Webb who wrote the Labour Party’s constitution in 1921, which contained the celebrated, or notorious Clause 4, extolling the ultimate aim of public ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, a goal which seemed within reach in the post-1945 period, when major industries were nationalised, the National Health Service was created and an immense programme of municipal housing was undertaken. However, just as the key Marxian fallacy was to assume that, after the revolution and a brief period of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, the State would ‘wither away’, so the key Fabian fallacy was that, after a few decades of socialist reforms, the capitalist market would ‘wither away’. But what had seemed an appealing utopia in the economic abyss of the ‘Great Crash’ and the subsequent Depression of the 1930s, and the immediate post-war period of austerity, soon gave way to electoral unpopularity in the ‘affluent society’ of the late 1950s and 1960s. It was also the case that the Conservatives opposed too great an expansion of state ownership and control, and sought to reduce it wherever possible, while pragmatically accepting the mixed economy and the welfare state, as long as the core institutions of the City of London were left unscathed. Needless to say, this socialist nirvana was never achieved and Clause 4 proved a growing anomaly to cloud the electoral prospects of Labour in an increasingly marketised society.30 It was finally dispatched by Tony Blair as one of his first acts in the rebranding of New Labour.31 But Clause 4 had the effect also of disinclining Labour governments from tackling the relatively unreconstructed capitalist character of both company law and banking. After all, if both were ultimately to be subsumed under public ownership, why bother reforming them beforehand? As a result, a key difference between British and some highly successful continental systems was the supremacy of shareholder interests over and above those of employees and local communities, unlike the case in, for example, Germany, where all three constituencies have a role in corporate governance.32 In this context, British trade unions steadfastly refused to cede the unconditional right to strike. The unions’ rejection of proposals for pre-strike secret ballots, rather than the traditional ‘show of hands’, and a ‘cooling-off period’ before strikes could begin, in the 1969 White Paper, In Place of Strife, was a prime reason for Labour’s defeat in the 1970 election.33 That election proved a watershed in post-war politics, setting in train the heightening of industrial conflict which, a decade later, ushered in the New Right policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative governments. Matters were made worse in the 1970s as the Labour Left drew exactly the wrong conclusions from the election defeat in 1970, which they saw as due to the Labour programme being insufficiently left-wing. In reality, people were becoming increasingly disaffected by the worsening record of strike action, much of it due to ‘wildcat’ strikes which gave little opportunity for mediation or conflict resolution by conciliation. The pursuit of ‘free collective bargaining’ at any cost to the industrial base, full employment and inflation was in sharp contrast to the

Leaving the Past Behind 181 constraints against strike action accepted by several Western European labour movements, notably the West German and Scandinavian.34 Nor could Keynesian demand management, a crucial basis for post-war prosperity, withstand the endless pressures of industrial conflict on this scale. When the Tory government under Edward Heath fell in 1974, having proved even more incapable of devising a means of achieving the industrial harmony for which the electorate longed – dramatised by the confrontation with the miners and the ensuing three-day week – Labour were returned twice in the same year, first with an overly narrow, next with a workable but slender majority that came to entail alliance with the Liberals. Labour was re-elected in the hope that they could now establish effective relations with the unions, the Tories having failed that test. But in 1975 the trade unions dealt the Labour government, and themselves in the long run, a devastating blow. In Will Hutton’s words: ‘I was working in the City in the mid-1970s, and could scarcely believe British trade unionists protesting against the Bullock Committee’s proposals to create a statutory obligation for trade unions to be represented on company boards. Couldn’t they see that the City believed the proposal the work of the devil? But the City could relax. Trade unions thought to sit on boards would represent collaboration, castrate them in their fight against capitalism and undermine free collective bargaining. Their resistance was an act of supreme folly that would contribute to the decline and fall of meaningful trade unionism while the stock market jumped in unexpected delight at their mulish opposition – but it is rare even today to find a leading trade unionist who will recognise the craziness of that decision.’35 Union refusal of such representation meant that industrial conflict remained the main weapon in the union armoury and within a few of years the 1978–79 ‘Winter of Discontent’ pitched union strength against a minority Labour government struggling to survive. Callaghan’s failure to call a general election in 1978 contributed to Labour’s eventual defeat in 1979, and helped bring in a Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher, a Prime Minister committed to breaking with the social democratic consensus that had held sway since 1945.36 The economic and social policies of the Thatcher and Major governments, sustained and in some ways intensified under New Labour, changed the political economy, including that of crime and its control though the politicisation of the law and order issue, ‘though it was not until the 1990s that the full logic of that position was actualised’.37 The stage had been set for a confrontation with the trade unions by the Conservative manifesto 1979, which had equated the tactics involved in strike activity with hooliganism and criminality. At times the unions colluded in the process of casting them the villains of the piece. The actions of the print unions that presided over the notorious Fleet Street ghost worker scandal, so-called ‘Spanish practices’ whereby workers who were already relatively secure and well paid also drew wages for imaginary employees being one egregious example.38 But the one with the most tragic consequences was the decision by the National Union of Mineworkers who, under the leadership of Arthur Scargill, embarked in 1984 on a national strike without the legally prescribed secret ballot of members,

182

Explaining the Trends

a requirement under the Trade Union Act 1984, introduced in the expectation of an all-out conflict. This refusal – Mick McGahey, Vice-President of the NUM declared he would ‘not be constitutionalised out of a strike’ – split the miners’ otherwise largely united front, legitimised the government’s pursuit of the union’s funds by sequestration, and neutralised the likelihood of open Labour Party and other union support for the strike. These factors, combined with the NUM leaders’ failure to recognise the extent to which the government had planned ahead to build up coal stocks, led to the NUM’s defeat in 1985 after eighteen months of bitter strike action, in which the union was hauled through the courts, hundreds of miners were unwarrantedly harassed or victimised by the police, miners who continued to work were vilified as ‘scabs’, and the strikers’ cause was occasionally marred by acts of outright criminality and, in one case, manslaughter. The fact that the dire predictions of the NUM leadership of pit closures and mass redundancies, were cruelly vindicated by events, with a labour force of 220,000 in 1983 reduced to 41,000 in 1992, and the end of mining in Britain as a major industry, did not nullify the intensified association of ideas between trade unionism and law violation that resulted.39 Trade unions and the labour movement remained far too central to the Labour Party’s identity and image for any lasting breach to be countenanced, but after the industrial defeat of the miners’ strike, there was a distancing of the leadership from the more militant wing of the unions and a cultivation of links with more moderate union leaders. Neil Kinnock, who replaced Michael Foot as Leader after Labour’s heavy defeat in the 1983 election, also brought about the expulsion of Derek Hatton, the influential deputy leader of Liverpool Council, for membership of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, a proscribed organisation. Hatton had also engineered an illegal ‘deficit budget’ in 1985 as a challenge to the rate-capping policies of the Conservative government. Given this dissociation from far-left militants, the resignation of Margaret Thatcher following the poll tax debacle, and the steep rise in unemployment due to the deep and lasting recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was widely expected that Labour would win the 1992 election. When Labour experienced their fourth successive election defeat, the result was widely ascribed to the success with which the Conservatives and the right-wing tabloid press revived fears of the ‘hostages to fortune’. 40 Labour was derided as the party of ‘tax and spend’, renewed union powers, immigrants ‘flooding’ into the country, and even more unemployment.41 The consequence was that Labour further redefined its relations with the trade unions. In 1993, John Smith, then party leader, succeeded in extending the franchise within the party, giving majority voting rights to constituency members and MPs, and reducing the blockvoting powers of the unions, a long-standing target for the criticism that Labour were overly ‘in the pockets’ of the trade unions, on whom they relied for substantial funding. When Tony Blair succeeded to the leadership after the unexpected death of John Smith in 1994 he instigated a series of changes, abolishing Clause 4, allowing secret ballots and the ban on secondary picketing to remain, and ending the sponsorship of MPs by trade unions, the process transforming ‘Old’ to ‘New Labour’.42 No commitment was made to restoring to public ownership the

Leaving the Past Behind 183 industries and utilities privatised since 1979. On the other hand, Labour committed to restoring or strengthening workers’ rights and legal protections either by legislating or joining the EU Social Chapter. The aim was a careful balancing act; diminishing union influence and distancing the party further from any lingering association with union militancy on the one hand, without losing union support or funding in the process on the other.43 Much as the tabloid press strove to preserve so well-worn a ‘hostage to fortune’, the trade unions had by 1997 come to play a much more muted role in the evolving ‘New Labour’ framework.44

Labour, welfare and crime The term ‘underclass’ to describe the largely working-class casualties of deindustrialisation, globalisation, neo-liberal economic policies and rapid technological change may have fallen into disuse, but in the 1980s and 1990s it became almost standard in analyses of crime and allied social problems.45 The term was strongly contested by those who argued that it would be appropriated in rightwing commentary to direct blame for their plight onto the poor themselves.46 Such had been the case with the variant ‘culture of poverty’ thesis47 that had emerged as a counter to President Lyndon Johnson’s ‘War on Poverty’ in the mid-1960s. A more radical version surfaced in the 1980s which saw welfare as the problem, not the solution, to the deprivation and deviance of a new ‘underclass’ which increasingly stemmed from the rising volume of illegitimate births.48 This form of ‘underclass’ thesis represented a reversal of the original ‘culture of poverty’ concept proposed by the celebrated anthropologist Oscar Lewis who, in The Children of Sanchez49 and other works of the 1950s and 60s, propounded the view that such a ‘culture’ was the product of lasting poverty that then became a barrier to taking advantage of opportunities for betterment. He was clear that tackling poverty had to precede provision of such opportunities if they were to be grasped. Two decades later, Charles Murray’s new ‘underclass’ thesis was seized upon by the ‘New Right’ who saw it as confirmation of the view that welfare spending needed to be reduced, not least because it helped to foster the very problems of welfare dependency it was intended to solve. There was, nevertheless, little disagreement that deindustrialisation in the 1980s had increased sharply and fractured the links between steady manual work and the stable communities it had once sustained. To the decaying traditional working class, the core of the new ‘underclass’, could be added to Murray’s bête noir, singleparent families, as well as discriminated-against minority groups, long-term unemployed, the never-have-been-employed youths of the poorer ‘sink’ estates, and those who, as Henry Mayhew put it in 1862, ‘will not work’.50 Growing inequality and joblessness became associated with a wide range of social ills, from urban riots in Brixton and beyond51 to the heroin epidemics that blighted many parts of the urban landscape.52 The underlying issues, so far as many criminological commentators were concerned, lay in the economic marginalisation and political exclusion of disadvantaged youths in particular, whether black, white or both.53

184

Explaining the Trends

The Labour Party had long made the same case, but the problem it faced was how to do so effectively while preventing their opponents from accusing them of offering excuses rather than explanations. Arguably the most spectacular failure to achieve this end occurred in the wake of the lethal riot in October 1985 on the Broadwater Farm Estate in North London, in which Keith Blakelock, a police officer, was murdered.54 As we noted earlier, asked for his comments on the riot, Bernie Grant, the Labour leader of the local council, remarked in a widely reported phrase that ‘the police got a bloody good hiding’. Despite vociferous criticism from senior Labour figures, the majority of whom quickly sought to distance themselves from Grant, this was perhaps the biggest single hostage to fortune handed to the Conservatives by a left-wing source. The 1987 Labour election strategy on policing was subsequently watered down from a policy of local accountability, which the police strongly opposed, to one of local consultation – much the same as the Conservative position – due to fears that this and other ‘antipolice’ remarks by left-wing sources would be quoted endlessly by the Conservatives in their campaigning. In the event, the riot had been precipitated by aggressive policing in pursuit of evidence against a black male suspect in a minor case which was later dismissed, in which Cynthia Jarrett, the suspect’s mother, suffered a fatal heart attack during the house search. This fatality occurred only a week after the shooting by police of Mrs. Cherry Groce, the West Indian mother of a young male suspect during a house search in Brixton, which led to her hospitalisation with severe injuries. In 2014, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe, apologised ‘unreservedly’ for police responsibility for her injuries and the suffering caused to her and her family, following an inquest held three decades after it occurred. The explosion of anger by the African-Caribbean community at the time and after is all too understandable in such fraught circumstances.55 That Mr. Grant got it so resoundingly wrong is in part a reflection of the immense difficulties in transcending sheer condemnation and moving on to explanation and constructive action. The difficulties faced by Labour in representing and translating into policy terms such inchoate protests as may be inferred from riotous behaviour and street crime came to be magnified with the defeat of the more articulate labour movement. Such problems came to be dramatised in the ‘poll tax’56 riots in 1990, when a hugely unpopular and regressive form of local taxation was introduced by the Conservative government, despite the unease of many senior Cabinet members.57 The Labour Opposition was faced by a ‘particularly nasty version of the ‘law and order’ paradox, whereby the iniquitous character of the law would only be changed by strong public reaction, including non-compliance (since compliance would be taken by the government as confirming public acquiescence).58 However, for the Opposition to support non-compliance would have been denounced as inciting people to violate the law, an accusation that was regularly directed at the Labour Party and, indeed, was levelled against several Labour MPs who advocated it on this occasion despite official Labour policy on the issue. Noncompliance would also have deprived Labour-controlled local authorities of

Leaving the Past Behind 185 essential income.’59 However, in this instance the riots were clearly connected to the much-publicised iniquities of the ‘poll tax’. The ‘rioters’ could not be stereotyped as the ‘usual suspects’ and hailed from a broader base in terms of age and class.60 The protests strengthened ministers’ doubts about her judgement that contributed to Mrs. Thatcher’s eventual resignation a few months later. Despite this setback, a high rate of unemployment and soaring crime rates, the Conservatives under John Major unexpectedly won the 1992 election. Though, as we have seen, ‘law and order’ did not figure prominently in the campaigning, Labour was still highly vulnerable to the charge that they were ‘soft on crime’. Tony Blair, as shadow Home Secretary, and before attaining party leadership after the death of John Smith in 1994, responded by undertaking two shifts on this front which were to prove decisive in ending the brief period of penal moderation and inaugurating that of more punitive measures which led to sustained penal expansion. First, Labour began to focus resolutely on the shortcomings of Conservative criminal justice policies, matching or even outdoing the U-turn inaugurated by Kenneth Clarke and then, far more stridently, seeking to outtough Michael Howard and his ‘Prison Works’ programme. Secondly, Labour abruptly transformed its approach to problems of crime-ridden working-class areas, something that was increasingly viewed as a costly ‘hostage to fortune’. The background ‘causes of crime’ in joblessness and inequality were still registered, but the priority became tackling crime by stiffer penalties – being ‘tough on crime’ meant being ‘tough on the criminal’. Labour’s ambivalent support for the 1991 Criminal Justice Act was withdrawn and Blair offered no resistance to the scrapping by Kenneth Clarke in 1993 of the key clauses concerning previous convictions and income-related fines. The stage was now set for what came to be termed, by penal reformers, the ‘arms race’ of rivalry over which party could claim to be ‘toughest’ on crime. New Labour’s new stance was exemplified in its general assent to provisions in the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act, which inter alia introduced stiff penalties for offences of squatting, trespassing, land occupation and ‘raves’ – sanctions to deal with growing concern, not least among landowners, about ‘New Age’ travellers, itinerant benefit claimants and illicit gatherings for events on land without the owners’ permission.61 Lord Windlesham described what happened in parliament as follows: ‘The six-and-a-half-hour debate was noisy and argumentative . . . The opening speeches were constantly interrupted, with both Howard and Blair at their most combative and eloquent. The front-bench speakers were conscious of their role as rival champions in a trial of strength . . . Throughout the debate any attempts at thoughtful deliberation were drowned by vociferous partisanship and displays of party loyalty. The climax was bound to be the ritual of a division, but Labour tacticians shrewdly tabled a reasoned amendment which was defeated by 319 votes to 275. The Bill was then given an unopposed Second Reading, thereby avoiding the charge that the Opposition had voted against the government’s unilateral declaration of war on crime. The Labour banner of ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ was still flying at the end of the proceedings,

186

Explaining the Trends

having survived all Tory efforts to tear it down.62 There was, however, a price to be paid for this manoeuvring, a change of substance as well as face: The Opposition parties in the Commons shrank from deliberately obstructing the Bill, conscious that they would then be portrayed as ‘soft on crime’ . . . One of the purposes of the Bill was to regain the Conservative Party’s customary advantage on ‘law and order’ issues. Labour’s tactics throughout were constrained by their desire not to be wrong-footed in the public eye. Labour remained silent while Lord Taylor publicly criticised both this Bill and the Police and Magistrates Courts Bill, which threatened to bring the police under direct political control. Labour abstained on the Second Reading of the Criminal Justice Bill, ‘adding insult to injury by claiming this as a triumph’, according to The Observer, ‘because the Home Secretary had been caused a few moments of discomfort’ . . . (The Home Secretary had to abandon his prepared response to the second reading debate.) In the eye of The Observer, ‘If it were not for the Lord Chief Justice and some fellow peers, measures which jeopardise judicial independence and go to the heart of the relationship between the individual and the State would be passing virtually without debate.’63 The most substantive measure was the reform to the rules relating to the ‘right to silence’, which qualified what had been an absolute right to one which could yield grounds for scepticism on the part of the jury about a defendant’s innocence. This change was challenged by Blair in the debate on the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill, mainly on evidential grounds rather than as a matter of principle, though he did point to the ‘potential injustice’ of late disclosures being regarded as grounds for adverse inference especially in cases involving disadvantaged defendants. There had been relevant research, in particular by Michael Zander, which showed that the right to silence was resorted to by only 10 per cent of defendants and findings of guilt followed in 90 per cent of such cases.64 Choosing this line of attack meant that Labour registered their determination to portray the Tories as incompetent rather than unprincipled on crime control. Having established their position in this debate, and in their earlier lack of opposition to Kenneth Clarke’s reversal of key clauses on ‘just deserts’ in the 1993 Criminal Justice Act, New Labour, and especially Jack Straw, as shadow Home Secretary in 1995–7, built on this ground to eliminate the ‘hostage to fortune’ element in their approach to petty, persistent offenders. Labour made a series of policy announcements from 1994 onwards which ‘exorcised any trace of special pleading for socially disadvantaged offenders and even those guilty of no more than “incivilities”.’ 65 In his controversial speech in 1995, Straw proposed a crackdown on ‘squeegee merchants’ and the party later published a consultation document, A Quiet Life, in which the idea of a ‘community safety order’ for dealing with anti-social neighbours was introduced for the first time. The possibility of curfews for youngsters was also floated. The whole New Labour approach in this field was designed to signal a break with Labour’s traditional stance which had

Leaving the Past Behind 187 highlighted the connections between economic and social conditions and crime and had emphasised broadly welfarist measures in response to minor deviance. It was at this time that both Blair and Straw signalled their enthusiasm for zero tolerance and for what had been portrayed as the successful police role in the declining crime rate in New York City. Indeed, the USA has been the role model for both Tory and Labour policymakers in the 1990s, notwithstanding its continuing very high crime rates. Even though the greatest impact of such political flirtation was largely symbolic or rhetorical, it was nevertheless important in influencing the tone and direction of crime control policy.66 It was, however, by their broad acceptance of Michael Howard’s U-turn on penal and sentencing policy that Tony Blair and Jack Straw, successive shadow Home Secretaries from 1992–4 and 1994–7 respectively, most clearly signalled the break with past Labour policy. For example, immediately after the 1992 election, in conversation with a research officer in Blair’s team, it was stated that, in their view, the ‘previous convictions’ clause in the 1991 Criminal Justice Act – the clause that was the very core of the ‘just deserts’ component of the 1991 Act – ‘had to go’.67 Howard clearly aimed to ‘smoke Labour out’ as a party essentially unchanged from its straightforward welfarist days, by adopting a strong ‘prison works’ policy and by adopting a modified form of the type of ‘three strikes and you’re out’ mandatory custodial sentencing policy that had become so popular in America. Blair’s and then Straw’s broadly bipartisan approach effectively neutralised this strategy, with great popular and political success. An ICM poll in August 1996 showed Labour enjoying roughly double the support accorded the Conservatives on ‘law and order,’68 without apparently jeopardising Straw’s position within the party – his vote for the National Executive Committee by constituency members rose in autumn 1996. The fact that these much-publicised stances might create fresh ‘hostages to fortune’ of a different kind – how would such an arms race be brought to an end? – was clearly seen as a price worth paying to spike Conservative guns on this front.69

Passive resistance Labour Party history has been marked by a substantial, if chequered, experience of the involvement of a small number of key individuals and MPs who engaged in support for radical causes by means which amounted to law violation. In 1921 George Lansbury, later Leader of the Labour Party 1931–35, then Mayor of Poplar in East London, was imprisoned for leading the non-payment of Council precepts for poor relief, which he saw as the responsibility of central government.70 The 1926 General Strike embroiled the Labour Party in ambivalent support for the cause they could not openly uphold. In 1936 the ‘hunger marches’, in particular that from Jarrow to Westminster, were strongly supported by Ellen Wilkinson, ‘Red Ellen’, the local Labour MP, but the party leadership steered well clear of open support, fearing association with the Communist Party that had mobilised street protests against the mass unemployment and benefit cuts of the 1930s slump.71 Clement Attlee, elected Leader in 1935, ‘remained suspicious of

188

Explaining the Trends

communists in general, not least because of an increase in their activities in his own constituency [Stepney].72 That much Labour Party thinking, not least via the Fabian Society, had a Marxist core is undeniable. Evan Durbin, a key figure and possible future Labour leader till his tragically early death in 1948, summed up the position as sharing much of Marx and Engels’s diagnosis of what is wrong with capitalism, but not their prognosis of what should be done about it.73 The pursuit of Social Democracy by non-revolutionary, parliamentary means is still fraught with the risks of ‘guilt by association’ and Labour Party history is replete with debates about how to steer clear of such ‘hostages to fortune’. Such problems subsided during the Labour Government’s seminal post-war period of radical reform but reappeared somewhat in the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the foundation of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) that year, which launched the annual marches from the first American forces nuclear base at Aldermaston to Trafalgar Square. Prominent Left-wing MPs such as Michael Foot were to the fore on such demonstrations which, though eminently non-violent, were increasingly associated with extra-legal activities, such as the exposure by an anarchist group on the 1961 march of the hitherto secret Regional Seats of Government bases (RSGs) to be activated in the event of nuclear war.74 CND stimulated the formation in 1961 of the Committee of 100, which brought a new edge to civil disobedience: the systematic and highly publicised violation of the law, by sit-ins and occupations of public space, by leading and usually left-wing intellectuals, including Bertrand Russell and the playwright John Osborne, to focus attention on the nuclear disarmament cause.75 The 1960s saw an immense upsurge in levels and forms of protest. The Labour movement and the trade unions grew rather than diminished in militancy, despite a Labour government being in power from 1964 to 1970. The addition of the foremost militant union leader, Frank Cousins, to the Cabinet as Minister of Technology in 1964 stimulated hopes that union demands would be more amply met. But he resigned over a measure to freeze incomes in 1966. The seamen’s strike of 1965–6 prompted the prime minister, Harold Wilson, to attack the strikers’ leaders as ‘a small group of politically motivated men’. As stated above, public unease about the impact of strike action led Barbara Castle, the Minister of Labour, to produce a White Paper, In Place of Strife, in 1969 to regulate strike action more tightly. Its fierce rejection by the Trade Union Congress arguably led to the unexpected defeat of Labour in the 1970 general election. The repertoire of protest now came to embrace sit-ins and occupations, largely by students, in protest against paternalistic university governance, which denied them any say in course content, teaching methods, examination structure and the like, as well as against the Vietnam war. The Labour government had refused to commit British troops to any involvement in that war, but the anti-war demonstrations, largely led by students, were fuelled by the view that Labour should have voiced far stronger opposition to American policy. Dissidence culminated in the October 1968 march to the American embassy in Grosvenor Square, which involved a confrontation with mounted police that involved some hostile contact but nothing like the levels of violence predicted and even exaggerated in reportage

Leaving the Past Behind 189 by some of the press.76 The students also mounted marches and ‘demos’ against those anti-immigrant groups, notably London dockers, who avowed support for Enoch Powell’s call for immigrants, largely African-Caribbean and Asian, to be repatriated. Given that similar and in some ways more serious such protests were happening in the USA, and most western democracies, the Labour government was able to pursue a policy of damage-limitation without any undue association with being complicit in law violation. Indeed, that government presided over, and in part facilitated, an impressive sequence of liberal reforms: homosexual law reform, abortion law reform, the ending of theatre censorship and the abolition of capital punishment.77 The protests that were bookended by the Grosvenor Square disorder on the one hand, and the student demonstrations in Paris in May 1968 on the other, had a lasting impact on demonstrations and protests: ‘No left-wing cause had street credibility without a march, demonstration or occupation.’78 Though Labour’s defeat in the 1970 election was little affected by such events, having far more to do with the government’s lack of success in coping with industrial unrest, that defeat had signal repercussions in reactions on the Labour Left, some of whom, notably Tony Benn, concluded that the Labour programme had been far less radical than the situation demanded. Benn’s conversion to the cause of direct action led him to give much-publicised support to such developments as the Clydebank shipyards occupation. The workforce, led by shop steward Jimmy Reid, staged a ‘work-in’ in defiance of the liquidation of the firm, Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, after the Conservative government refused crucial financial assistance.79 A more complicated case arose in 1974 when ‘flying pickets’ were used to further a strike in the building industry. Six pickets were prosecuted for offences of assault and criminal damage in addition to conspiracy to intimidate workers, some of whom – the ‘Shrewsbury Three’ – received sentences of three years’ imprisonment. Upheld on appeal, the convictions and sentences were contested in protests at both the TUC and Labour Party Annual Conferences.80 It was also in 1974 that the Labour government’s Director of Public Prosecutions failed to prosecute Labour rent rebels in Clay Cross, Derbyshire. One of the greatest causes célèbres was the lengthy Grunwick strike in 1976–77, the months of mass picketing that ensued, and attendance in solidarity with the workforce of primarily Asian women who had been denied the right to unionise, of a wide range of Labour MPs, including even moderate Labour ministers such as Shirley Williams.81 ‘The 1970s were characterised by a plethora of such events, the policing of which was frequently contentious and costly, and at times tragically counter-productive.’82 The Labour Party had regained power in 1974, by the narrowest of margins, following the debacle of Edward Heath’s defeat at the hands of the unions. This further term of trial for Labour in government was characterised by a heightened momentum of industrial disputes, culminating in the bleak ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978–9,83 with its widespread strikes and disruption, all accompanied by its ‘punk rock’ soundtrack84 which seemed to symbolise the disillusionment of post-war hopes and the ‘ungovernability’ of Britain. Having been (ill-)advised to postpone the election until the spring of 1979, the Labour government ceded power to the

190

Explaining the Trends

Conservatives under Margaret Thatcher, whose ‘law and order’ credentials were a major component of her victory and, as we have seen, in which she was able successfully to link the Labour Party with a lack of respect for the rule of law. In the 1980s, street protest turned sour, its salience declining to the point where, unless violent confrontations were involved, little media coverage could be expected. The tragic events at Southall in 1979, when a march by the National Front through a largely Asian community culminated in the death of a liberal antiextremist, Blair Peach, following a confrontation with the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group, led to far tighter directives before any public space could be adopted for marches and/or demonstrations. The scope for civil disobedience became increasingly restricted, and it is an irony that the resignation of Margaret Thatcher in 1990 followed the widespread and bitter riots provoked by resentment of the so-called ‘Poll Tax’.85 The ‘freedom of the streets’ was, in this instance, reclaimed to signal effect. The 1990s saw the coinage of civil protest largely confined to single-issue campaigns on non-partisan lines, such as the sustained opposition to new motorways by-passing Winchester and Newbury.86 ‘There was less call for Labour to take a position on these events; and fading memories of the halcyon days of civil disobedience tend to be associated with ‘Old’ rather than “New Labour”,’87 This ‘hostage to fortune’ had been so effectively neutered that, by comparison with the success of the ‘Poll Tax’ riots, the entirely peaceful but vastly larger numbers, well over a million, marching against the invasion of Iraq in 2003 had no effect whatsoever on the government’s decision to do so.88

Libertarianism A great deal of the political agenda in questions of morals in the 1980s was set by what the ‘New Right’, and their interpretation of what they believed to have been the characteristics and consequences of the major social changes that took place in the 1960s. As such, it was something of a reversal of the more usual ‘golden age’ justification or moralising about the need for change.89 What was interesting about New Right social ideology of the 1980s was that it is posited in opposition to an age which was ‘viewed uniformly as having been harmful, indeed largely as being without redeeming features. Just as the economic troubles of the 1980s were laid by the Thatcher administrations at the door of previous governments and wider economic trends outside the control of the Conservative government, so similarly were the 1960s held to blame for the supposed moral ills of the 1980s.’90 And, while the Conservative government of 1959–64 had substantially legalised gambling, decriminalised attempted suicide, and had as its climax the scandals associated with the Profumo affair,91 the 1960s, especially the ‘permissive’ aspects of that decade, were mainly associated with the Labour governments of 1964–70. It was a salient achievement of the New Right to associate the signal reforms of that Labour period of office not with the humane accomplishments of the abolition of capital punishment, homosexual and abortion law reform, the liberalisation of the divorce laws and the abolition of theatre and literary censorship, but with the alleged evils of the supposed ‘permissive society’ that had flourished

Leaving the Past Behind 191 in the 1960s. Moreover, what was, by most standards, a major period of liberal reform promoting greater tolerance and freedom of expression came to be derided in the popular press and in right-wing mantras as the source of unprecedented rises in criminality in the 1980s. The efflorescence of ‘sex‘n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll’ coincided with the minutiae of rebellions in dress, fashion and hair length, the plethora of youthful subcultural styles, all of which had the common feature of confrontation with adult authority. They were bundled together as a recipe for moral panics which became the hallmark of the legacy of the 1960s. Moreover, the ‘permissive society’ concept filled a gap in the armoury of the later Thatcher governments’ promotion of their image as the party of law and order: their failure to stem the rising crime rate which, after 1989, steepened for two years to an annual increase of 17 per cent. This uncomfortable fact had to be explained away, and the method evolved unwittingly replicated that of the Soviet Union in a similar dilemma: how to account for the persistence of crime despite the advent of socialism? The answer lay in a combination of pre-communist ‘residues’ and capitalist encirclement. In similar vein, rising crime in 1980s Britain was held to be due to ‘permissive’ residues and socialist encirclement, via welfare dependency and left-wing local authorities. Hence, what had been in the 1960s a relatively clear-cut battle between the ‘progressive liberals’ and the forces of tradition had become much more complex. First, certain forms of backlash arose from unexpected quarters. For example, radical feminists, including such prominent Labour MPs as Clare Short, and leading traditionalists, such as Mary Whitehouse,92 ranged themselves, for different reasons, against pornography and the exploitation of women as occurred in the daily ‘Page 3’ nude in The Sun newspaper.93 The porn merchants had been quick to make far narrower and more profitable use of the new-found, if hard-won, liberties of expression of the 1960s than the exponents of liberalisation had ever anticipated. The newsagents’ ‘top shelf’, notionally out of view of young children, came to display as great a spread of female nudity as the average Soho porn shop of the 1950s. Secondly, gay militancy had extended forms of political expression to include material for primary schools and the resulting backlash included such legal constraints as section 28 of the Education Act 1988, which explicitly forbade including family imagery in school material other than that connoting the heterosexual nuclear family.94 ‘In sum, once basic freedoms had been won, the complications to which their extension gave rise tended to saddle Labour with the worst of both worlds, able neither to defend such developments as “gay” schoolbooks nor to define where the line should be drawn afresh. Such defensiveness left many minorities feeling betrayed, on the one hand, and the “silent majority” feeling that Labour had allowed too much scope for deviant viewpoints, on the other. Conversely, Labour spokespersons who opposed such phenomena as the “page three” could be castigated as killjoys . . . Labour could be blamed for both the unwanted developments of libertarianism and the negative aspects of the selective backlash against them.’95 Having wrested what Barry Sheerman called the ‘high ground’ on law and order from Labour, who had claimed it so successfully for a time in the 1960s, the Conservatives deployed a resolute and ‘commonsensical’ set of

192

Explaining the Trends

explanations for their conspicuous failure to stem the steepening rise in crime despite their policies of increased expenditure on criminal justice in general and policing and prisons in particular. Their main account stressed individual responsibility for crime over and above any possible links with structural factors such as growing inequality, relative deprivation and growing unemployment. These Labour articles of faith had by this time become millstones, and Labour’s defensiveness in relation to such matters could not match their Tory equivalent. Any wrong-doing on the part of the wealthy, banks, landlords or the police and prison authorities could be dealt with as the result of individual pathology, ‘a few bad apples’. By contrast, crime on rundown estates, or by adolescents who were affluent by comparison with the 1930s, when unemployment had been far more rife, resulted from a combination of human evil or lack of discipline in the home and state schools. Ingeniously, all structural explanations of crime, mocked as ‘root cause’ theories by Right-realist American criminologists such as James Q. Wilson and Charles Murray,96 were derided as in themselves being causes of crime, offering excuses for the very law violation they purported to explain. The impact of this anti-permissive mindset was later to be directed against the Conservative government’s own, long-gestated criminal justice policy which culminated in the 1991 Criminal Justice Act. Its abortive attempt to moderate custodial sentencing and to humanise prison regimes in accord with the Woolf Report met what Dunbar and Langdon termed ‘the watershed’97 in the incoming prime minister, John Major’s remark about law and order: ‘We should condemn a little more and understand a little less’. The unfortunate wording – ‘condone’ would have conveyed his point better than ‘understand’ – gave carte blanche to the ’punitive turn’ that resulted from the penal policies of both Michael Howard and Tony Blair. In this field, New Labour’s first substantial governmental initiative was entitled ‘No More Excuses’,98 which offered a decisive break with the ‘hostages to fortune’ that had symbolised ‘Old Labour’s difficulties in relation to crime control. Thus, in his preface, the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, stated: ‘An excuse culture has developed within the youth justice system. It excuses itself for its inefficiency, and too often excuses the young offenders before it, implying that they cannot help their behaviour because of their social circumstances. Rarely are they confronted with their behaviour and helped to take more personal responsibility for their actions. The system allows them to go on wrecking their own lives as well as disrupting their families and communities.’ By this point, Labour had regained the ‘high ground’, albeit by outdoing the Conservatives at their own game. It was, however, at the all-too-high opportunity cost of the liberal reform measures undertaken by the Conservative party reformers themselves a decade earlier, to which Labour had fundamentally assented.

Notes 1 This chapter, though expanding on their analysis, owes a great deal to the work of David Downes and Rod Morgan, initially published in: ‘Dumping the hostages to fortune’: the politics of law and order in post-war Britain, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: OUP, 1997, together with subsequent iterations published in later editions of the Oxford Handbook

Leaving the Past Behind  193  

     

        10 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1997): 100. In this regard see the arguments rehearsed by Lord Justice Scarman in his report on the Brixton riot in 1981: Scarman (1981) op. cit. 11 Quoted in Mandelson (2011) op. cit., p. 156 12 See especially Farrall, S. and Hay, C. (eds.), 2014, the Legacy of thatcherism: Assessing and Exploring thatcherite Social and Economic Policies, Oxford University Press for the British Academy. Also, Downes, D. (2021) op. cit. 13 Ibid., Ch. 7 by Farrall, S. and Hay, C. ‘Thatcherism and crime: the beast that never roared?’: 215; Matthews, K., Minford, P., Nickell, S. and Helpman, E. (1987) Mrs Thatcher’s economic policies, 1979–1987, Economic Policy, 2, 5, 57–101; Layard, R. and Nickell, S.J. (1985) The causes of British unemployment, National Institute Economic Review 14 See Will Hutton (1995) the State We’re In, London: Cape, for an extended analysis 15 Field, S. (1990) trends in Crime and their Interpretation: A study of recorded crime in post-war England and Wales, London: Home Office; Field, S. (1999) trends in Revisited, London: Home Office. Field, S. (2000) Crime and consumption, in Fielding, N., Clarke, A. and Witt, R. (eds.) the Economic Dimensions of Crime, Springer. Field’s work linked the rate of consumption rather than unemployment to crime rate trends, but the two are indirectly linked. The locus classicus for links between inequality and a number of unwanted side-effects, such as high mortality rates as well as crime, is Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett (2009) the Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, London: Allen Lane 16 Farrall, S. and Hay, C. op. cit.: 218; the link between unemployment and crime remains complex and cannot be taken for granted, see Katz, J. (2019) Hot potato criminology: Ethnographers and shame of poor people’s crimes, Annual Review of Criminology, 2, 21–52 17 See: Baldwin, J. and Bottoms, A.E. (1976) The Urban Criminal: A study in Sheffield, London: Tavistock; Power, A. (1998) Estates on the Edge: the social consequences of mass housing in northern Europe, Basingstoke: Macmillan 18 Farrall, S. and Hay, C. op. cit.: 219; an on the heroin ‘epidemics’ associated with such communities, see: Parker, H., Bakx, K. and Newcombe, R. (1988) Living with Heroin, Milton Keynes: Open University Press

194

Explaining the Trends

19 Almost £27 billion between 1979 and 1996: Alan Murie, 2014, ‘The housing legacy of Thatcherism’ in Farrall, S. and Hay, C. op. cit.: 147 20 Murie, A. (2015), ‘The Right to Buy: History and Prospect’ History and Policy, 11th November 2015 21 McGlone, F. (1990), ‘Away from the Dependency Culture?’ in Savage, S. and Robins, L. (eds.) Public Policy Under Thatcher, London: Macmillan 22 Farrall, S. and Hay, C. op. cit: 219, citing Carlen, P. (1996), Jigsaw: A Political Criminology of Homelessness, Buckingham: Open University Press 23 Farrall, S., Jennings, W., Gray, E. and Hay, C. (2017) Thatcherism, crime and the legacy of the social and economic ‘storms’ of the 1980s, Howard Journal, 56, 2, 220–243 24 Downes, D. (2021) op. cit. 25 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1994) op. cit.: 199. Harrison, M. (2018) Trade Unions and the Labour Party since 1945, London: Routledge 26 Hennessey, P. (1993) Never Again: Britain 1945–51, London: Vintage: 415. £307 million in 1950 equates to some £10 billion in 2017 27 Downes, D. (2011) Comparative Criminology, Globalization and the ‘Punitive Turn’, in David Nelken, Comparative Criminal Justice and Globalization, Farnham: Ashgate: 33; that Britain was by now in a long-term process of national decline was argued strongly in a series of influential books by Corelli Barnett; see, most particularly: Barnett, C. (1972) The Collapse of British Power, London: William Morrow and Company; Barnett, C. (1995) The Lost Victory: British dreams, British realities, 1945–50, London: Macmillan 28 Beilharz, P. (1992) Labour’s Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism and Social Democracy, London: Routedge; Milburn, J.F. (1958) The Fabian Society and the British Labour Party. Western Political Quarterly. 11, 2, 319–339; Bevir, M. (2011) The Making of British Socialism, Princeton University Press 29 Dahrendorf, R. (1995) LSE: A History of the London School of Economics and Political Science (1895–1995) Oxford: Oxford University Press 30 Jones, T. (1996) Remaking the Labour Party: From Gaitskell to Blair, London: Routledge; Seyd, P. (1999) New parties/new politics? A case study of the British Labour Party, Party Politics, 5. 3, 383–405 31 Kenny, M. & Smith, M.J. (1997) Discourses of modernization: Gaitskell, Blair and the reform of Clause IV, British Elections & Parties Review, 7, 1, 110–126 32 See Hall, P.A. and Soskice, D. (2001) (eds.) Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Hancké, B., Rhodes, M. and Thatcher, M. (2007) (eds), Beyond Varieties of Capitalism, Conflict, Contradiction and Complementarities in the European Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Hutton, W. (1995) op. cit. 33 Tyler, R. (2006) ‘Victims of our History’? Barbara Castle and In Place of Strife, Contemporary British History, 20, 3, 461–476 34 Hall, P.A. and Soskice, D. (2001) op. cit. 35 Will Hutton, 2010, ‘We Had It All – Sex, Freedom, Money. Did We Throw It All Away?’ The Observer New Review, 22nd August: 13. The committee that produced the Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Industrial Democracy, 1977, London: HMSO, Cmnd 6706, was chaired by the historian Sir Alan Bullock, hence it was usually referred to as ‘The Bullock Report’ 36 Shepherd, J. (2013) Crisis? What Crisis? The Callaghan government and the British ‘Winter of Discontent’, Manchester: Manchester University Press; Hay, C. (2010) Chronicles of a Death Foretold: the Winter of Discontent and Construction of the Crisis of British Keynesianism, Parliamentary Affairs, 63, 3, 446–470; Black, L. and Pemberton, H. (2009) The Winter of Discontent in British Politics, Political Quarterly, 80, 4, 553–561

Leaving the Past Behind 195 37 Downes, D. (2012) Introduction to Working Out of Crime, Farnham: Ashgate: xiii, citing S. Farrall and C. Hay, 2010, ‘Not so tough on crime? Why weren’t the Thatcher Governments more radical in reforming the criminal justice system?’ British Journal of Criminology, 50: 550–69 38 See R. Martin, 1981, New Technology and Industrial Relations in Fleet Street, Oxford: Oxford University Press 39 Beynon, H., Hudson, R. and Sadler, D. (1991) A Tale of Two Industries: The contraction of coal and steel in the north east of England, Milton Keynes: Open University Press; Waddington, D. Wykes, M. and Critcher, C. (1991) Split at the Seams? Community, continuity and change after the 1984–5 coal dispute, Milton Keynes: Open University Press; Warwick, D. and Littlejohn, G. (1992) Coal, Capital and Culture: A sociological analysis of mining communities in West Yorkshire, London: Routledge 40 Crewe, I., Norris, P. & Waller, R. (1992) The 1992 general election, British Elections and Parties Yearbook, 2:1, 15–36 41 Linton, M. (1995) Was it the Sun Wot Won It?, Oxford: Nuffield College. The Sun had claimed so in its headline ‘It Was the Sun Wot Won It’ on 11th April 1992. On election day its headline had been ‘If Kinnock Wins Today Can the Last Person to Leave Britain Please Turn Out the Lights?’ 42 Driver, S. and Martell, L. (1998) New Labour: Politics after Thatcherism, Cambridge: Polity Press; Rawnsley, A. (2001) Servants of the People: The inside story of New Labour, London: Penguin; Russell, M. (2005) Building New Labour: The politics of party organization, London: Palgrave 43 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1997) op. cit. 44 McIlroy, R. (2002) The Enduring Alliance? Trade Unions and the Making of New Labour, 1994–1997 British Journal of Industrial Relations, 36, 4, 537–64 45 Duster, T. (1987) Crime, unemployment and the black urban underclass, Crime and Delinquency, 33, 2; Sampson, R. and Wilson, W.J. (1995) Towards a theory of race, crime and urban inequality, in Hagan, J. and Peterson, R.D. (eds.) Crime and Inequality, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press; Will, J.A. and McGrath, J.H. (1995) Crime, neighbourhood perceptions, and the underclass: The relationship between fear of crime and class position, Journal of Criminal Justice, 23, 2, 163–176; Hayward, K. and Yar, M. (2006) The ‘chav’ phenomenon: Consumption, media and the construction of a new underclass, Crime, Media, Culture, 2, 1, 9–28 46 Macnicol, J. (1987) In Pursuit of the Underclass, Journal of Social Policy, 16: 293–318; Lister, R. (1996) (ed.) Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Continuing Debate, London: Institute for Economic Affairs and the Sunday Times 47 Lewis, O. (1968) The Culture of Poverty, in Moynihan, P. (ed.) On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, New York, NY: Basic Books 48 See, in particular, Murray, C. (1984), Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, New York: Basic Books. In some features, of course, these debates were resonant of mid-nineteenth century discussions of juvenile delinquency and more particularly, of what Mary Carpenter referred to as the ‘dangerous and perishing classes’: Carpenter, M. (1851) Reformatory Schools for the Dangerous and Perishing Classes and for Juvenile Offenders, London: C Gilpin. Such ideas were captured in novelised form in Morrison, A. (2012) A Child of the Jago, Oxford: Oxford University Press (originally published in 1896) 49 Lewis, O. (1961), The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family, New York: Basic Books 50 Mayhew, H. (1862), Those That Will Not Work, Vol. 4 of London Labour and the London Poor (1851–62) London: Griffin. Repr. ed. P. Quennell, London’s Underworld, London: Spring Books. 1955 51 This is discussed in detail in Newburn, T. (forthcoming) op. cit. Ch. 4

196

Explaining the Trends

52 See, for example, Dorn, N. and South, N. (eds.) (1987) A Land Fit For Heroin? Drug policies, prevention and practice, Basingstoke: Macmillan 53 See in particular Lea, J. and Young, J. (1984) What Is To Be Done About Law and Order?, Harmondsworth: Penguin; and Downes, D. (1983) Law and Order: Theft of an Issue, London: Fabian Society in association with the Labour Campaign for Criminal Justice 54 See Newburn, T. (forthcoming) op. cit. 55 This is not to suggest that there is some form of direct relationship between police actions, even the more extreme forms of police misconduct, and subsequent civil violence. A variety of other deep, structural and contingent factors inevitably form part of any rounded understanding of rioting: see, for example, Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorder (1968), New York: Bantam Books; Scarman, Lord Justice (1981) The Brixton Disorder of 10th-12th April: Report of an Inquiry, London: HMSO; Newburn, T. (2021) The causes and consequences of urban riot and unrest, Annual Review of Criminology, 4 56 So called because of their resemblance to the form of taxation which led to the Peasants Revolt led by Wat Tyler in 1381 57 Crick, M. & Van Klaveren, A. (1991) Mrs Thatcher’s greatest blunder, Contemporary British History, 5, 3, 397–416; King, A. and Crewe, I. (2013) The Blunders of Our Governments, London: Oneworld 58 The so-called ‘poll tax’, or community charge, introduced by the Conservative government in 1988 to replace local authority rates, levied the same tax per capita regardless of income, wealth, or size of property. The only major exemptions concerned people on income support and students, who were charged 20 per cent of the tax 59 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1994) op. cit., p. 202 60 Bagguley, P. (1996) The moral economy of anti-poll tax protest, in Barker, C. and Kennedy, P. (eds.) To Make Another World: Studies in protest and social action, London: Routledge; Stott, C. and Drury, J. (2000) Crowds, context and identity: Dynamic categorization processes in the ‘poll tax riot’, Human Relations, 53, 2, 247–273 61 Bucke, T. and James, Z. (1998) Trespass and Protest: Policing under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, London: Home Office 62 Windlesham, Lord 1996, Responses to Crime, Volume 3: Legislating With The Tide, Oxford: Clarendon Press: 58–9 63 Klug, F., Starmer, K. and Weir, S. (1996) The Three Pillars of Liberty: Political Rights and Freedoms in the United Kingdom, London: Routledge: 87 64 Michael Zander, QC FBA, Emeritus Professor of Law, London School of Economics, and a member of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, 1991–1993; See: Zander, M. (1981) Police Powers in England: Report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, American Bar Association Journal, 732, 67 65 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1997) op. cit., 105–6 66 See especially Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2004) Comparative criminal justice policymaking in the US and UK: The case of private prisons, British Journal of Criminology, 45, 1, 58–80; (2005) Symbolic politics and penal policy: The long shadow of Willie Horton, Crime, Media, Culture, 1, 1, 72–87; (2006) Three strikes and you’re out: Exploring symbol and substance in American and British crime control policy, British Journal of Criminology, 46, 5, 781–802; (2007) Symbolising crime control: reflections on zero tolerance, Theoretical Criminology, 11, 2, 221–243 67 See the chapter on ‘The Making of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act’ above, and also Downes, D. (2012) Introduction to Working Out of Crime, Farnham: Ashgate: xv. 68 The Guardian, 7th August 69 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. 1997, op. cit. 106 70 Schneer, J. (1990) George Lansbury, Manchester: Manchester University Press

Leaving the Past Behind 197 71 Beers, L. (2016) Red Ellen: The life of Ellen Wilkinson, socialist, feminist, internationalist, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 72 John Bew (2016) Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee, London: Riverrun: 207 73 Durbin, E. (1940) The Politics of Democratic Socialism, London: Routledge 74 Anarchy (1963) The Spies for Peace Story, 29, London: Freedom Press 75 Myers, F.E. (1971) Civil disobedience and organisational change: The British Committee of 100, Political Science Quarterly, 86, 1, 92–112 76 See especially J. D. Halloran, P. Elliott and G. Murdock (1970) Demonstrations and Communications, Harmondsworth: Penguin; see also Newburn, T. (forthcoming) op. cit., Ch. 10 77 All of these reforms were achieved via Private Member’s Bills; none was achieved via direct government legislation. See Rock P. (2019a) op. cit.; and Newburn, T. (1991) op. cit. 78 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1994) op. cit., 203 79 Benn, T. (1989) Office Without Power: Diaries 1968–1992, London: Arrow 80 See Wallington, P. (1975) ‘Criminal Conspiracy and Industrial Conflict, Industrial Law, Journal, 4:69–88 81 Discussed in some detail in Newburn, T. (forthcoming) op. cit. 82 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1994) op. cit, 204 83 Hay, C. (2009) The Winter of Discontent Thirty Years On, Political Quarterly, 80, 4, 545–552 84 Emerging in the late 1970s, at least in part as a protest against the incorporation of increasingly over-blown rock music into mainstream culture, the epitome of punk was the Sex Pistols’ anti-royalist God Save the Queen. The most reliable commentator on such developments is Jon Savage and, in particular, his 1991 book, England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock, London: Faber 85 Bagguley P. (1995) Protest, Poverty and Power: A Case Study of the Anti-Poll Tax Movement. The Sociological Review, 43, 4, 693–719 86 Milton, K. (2004) A changing sense of place: Direct action and environmental protest in the U.K., in Carrier, J.G. (ed.) Changing Environments: Local understanding in a globalizing world, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press; n Parker (1999) The role of the consumer-citizen in environmental protest in the 1990s, Space and Polity, 3:1, 67–83 87 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1997) op. cit., 108 88 This is detailed in Sir John Chilcot’s report, The Iraq Inquiry, available at: https:// webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20171123123237/http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/ 89 Beautifully captured in Pearson, G. (1983) Hooligan: A history of respectable fears, Basingstoke: Macmillan 90 Newburn, T. (1992) Permission and Regulation: Law and Morals in Post-war Britain, London: Routledge: 187; Newburn, T. (1996) Back to the future? Youth crime, youth justice and the rediscovery of ‘authoritarian populism’, In Pilcher, J. and Wagg, S. Thatcher’s Children? Politics, childhood and society in the 1980s and 1990s, Falmer Press 91 Davenport-Hines, R. (2012) An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, London: Harper Press 92 See Newburn, T. (1992) op. cit., for a fuller analysis of the career and beliefs of Mary Whitehouse 93 The Sun had been a broadly Labour supporting daily newspaper, renamed from its original title, The Daily Herald, which had been losing circulation. Bought by Rupert Murdoch in 1968, the ‘page 3’ nude became a regular feature associated with its huge rise in circulation, a factor in the victories of the Tory Party under Margaret Thatcher, to whom the paper lent consistent support, so much so that, after the 1992 election, won unexpectedly for a fourth successive term under the new leadership of John Major, and

198

94 95 96 97 98

Explaining the Trends

having vilified Neil Kinnock’s leadership of Labour, it carried the headline It’s the Sun Wot Won It Moran, J. (2001) Childhood sexuality and education: The case of section 28, Sexualities, Vol 4, 1, 73–89 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1994) op. cit., 205 Wilson, J.Q. (1975) Thinking About Crime, New York: Basic Books; Murray, C. (1990) The Emerging British Underclass, London: Institute of Economic Affairs Dunbar, I. and Langdon, A. (1998) Tough Justice: Sentencing and penal policies in the 1990s, Oxford: Oxford University Press November 1997, No More Excuses: A New Approach to Tackling Youth Crime in England and Wales, HMSO: Home Office. The White Paper led to the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, which introduced Anti-social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) to counter low-level but cumulatively distressing harassment and aggression

7

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics

As we have demonstrated thus far, the post-war period from 1945 until close to the turn of the century witnessed a transformation in the priority accorded crime control and criminal justice by the major political parties. Part of this transformation involved the demise of a broadly utilitarian approach to crime and its control and the correlative emergence of a set of strategies that placed greater emphasis on popular as opposed to expert opinion, on retribution as opposed to rehabilitation and, as the century wore on, saw greater party political competition around law and order as an important electoral issue.1 In this chapter we focus on one particular source of influence on penal policy and politics: the role of pressure and special interest groups. In this regard, it is probably fair to say that the period covered by this history witnessed an immense extension of participation in concerned attempts to influence the shape and development of criminal justice and penal policy. A wide variety of groups are active in this area, and they vary considerably in nature but, broadly speaking, there are three main forms of grouping we are concerned with here: pressure groups, ‘think tanks’ and professional interest groups. Issues of definition are legion and there is no clear boundary between such activities, particularly between pressure groups and think tanks. In this regard, Denham and Garnett have suggested that one important potential distinction lies in the fact think tanks ‘operate across a broad range of policy areas, whereas pressure groups tend to focus on issues that relate to one in particular’.2 In what follows therefore, groups such as the Howard League and NACRO, with their specific interest in criminal justice and penal policy might reasonably be distinguished from think tanks such as the Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs with their more general orientation toward the promotion of libertarianism and the free market across a range of policy domains. Think tanks themselves, however, also differ greatly, ranging from organisations on the one hand that might be thought of as ‘advocacy tanks’3 which ‘combine a strong policy, partisan or ideological outlook with aggressive salesmanship . . . in an attempt to influence current policy debates’4 – and the Institute of Economic Affairs would be counted among their number – to bodies on the other hand that to all intents and purposes are independent academic research organisations and seek to be, or present themselves as being, non-partisan. Examples of the latter would be the Urban Institute in Washington DC and the Policy Studies Institute that was

DOI: 10.4324/9781003330981-9

200

Explaining the Trends

a significant presence in the UK in the 1980s and 1990s. Finally, to this mix must be added the professional representative groups such as the Police Federation, the Prison Officers’ Association and the Association of Chief Police Officers5 that at various points have sought to bring influence to bear on governments in relation not only to matters such as pay and conditions but also in relation to specific areas of criminal justice and penal policy. Seeking to influence policy and claiming to have done so, as many think-tanks have done, is quite different, however, from actually having done so. Indeed, establishing pressure or interest group influence is problematic and to the extent it exists it is often indirect at best. In outlining such activities below we take the view, by and large, that the predominant impact of such organisations is on the ‘gradual, incremental creep of new ideas into prevailing thinking’6 rather than anything more substantive. Nevertheless, as we say, such bodies represent an important, and perhaps in the period under consideration here, increasingly important part of the policy landscape.

Pressure groups and penal welfarism At the onset of the period covered by this history the Howard League for Penal Reform had the field almost exclusively to itself. Formed in 1921 from the merger between the original Howard Association, founded in 1866, and the more militant Penal Reform League, founded in the wake of the suffragette movement in 1907, it had counterparts in many Commonwealth countries.7 The only other non-governmental focus for such concerns, apart from professional interest groups such as the Police Federation and the Prison Officers’ Association, and – until the founding of the Cambridge Institute of Criminology in 1959, a few academic posts in Cambridge, the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford8 – was the Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency (I.S.T.D.), founded in 1931 by Grace Pailthorpe as the Association for the Scientific Treatment of Criminals. It was renamed the Institute for the Scientific Treatment of Delinquency in 1932 and was principally a forum for psychoanalysts, counting Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Otto Rank, Emanuel Miller and Edward Glover among its early members, becoming the I.S.T.D. in 1951.9 Miller and Glover, with Herman Mannheim, founded the British Journal of Delinquency in 1950, which was renamed the British Journal of Criminology in 1960. The ISTD was not in any sense a campaigning penal reform agency, but rather a focal point for the growth of criminology in Britain. Its scientific cast was a formative influence in shaping belief in the treatment of offenders as an alternative priority to punishment and deterrence, its policy impact best represented by the 1959 White Paper Penal Practice in a Changing Society.10 As Bottoms and Stevenson stress,11 the fundamental variable in post-war criminal justice policy and practice was the seemingly unending rise of the crime rate. The almost unbroken increase in crime, from the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s, stimulated the growth of both criminological and pressure group activity, aimed respectively at accounting for and improving responses to crime. But a system which proved barely adequate for a million offences a year and 20,000 prisoners

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 201 in the early post-war years, regularly came close to breaking point as the number of recorded crimes doubled and then doubled again, and prison numbers climbed steadily towards 50,000 – despite increasing resources and a plethora of innovations and reforms. Pressure groups in the law and order field proliferated to a greater extent than the norm in fields such as health and education where party politics still adhered to fairly clear-cut policy divides. The first significant such event was the foundation of the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACRO) in 1966, which, under the direction of Vivien Stern and in little more than a decade, became a formidable voice for reform in criminal justice policy. From late in the decade, new and rather more politicised pressure groups emerged: Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP) was founded in 1969, the Legal Action Group (LAG) in 1971, and – within the Labour Party – the Labour Campaign for Criminal Justice in 1978. Each found a rationale in hitherto neglected facets of criminal justice provision. Even earlier than NACRO was the highly focused work of Justice, founded in 1957. Tom Sargant ‘was the first Secretary of Justice, for 25 years from its creation in 1957. It was he who took up – contrary to instructions – the cases of prisoners complaining of wrongful convictions.12 By contrast, the National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL, later Liberty) was set up in 1934 to counter what was seen as the threat of discrimination against far Left, in particular Communist, organisations. Its scope was only in part relevant to criminal justice, though it broadened its interests in the 1960s to address the growing problem of illicit drug use, in the 1970s perceived attacks on academic freedom and in the 1980s the nature of policing the miners’ strike.13 Added to the fray in the 1980s was Inquest (1981), to press for reforms to what were felt to be the overly stringent procedural limits to inquests, and the Prison Reform Trust (also 1981) which felt urgency needed to be added to pressures for penal reform. Some single-issue pressure groups rise and fall as the issue around which they were formed waxes and wanes, though for any such group to disappear completely is a rare event. An exception was the National Campaign for the Abolition of the Death Penalty (1925–66) which did not continue to operate after 1966 even though the abolition initially was for five years only, and even though the abolitionists were in many cases opposed to its replacement by mandatory life imprisonment.14 Other such groups continued to press for further changes or to monitor the operation of reforms, such as the Abortion Law Reform Association, founded in 1936, changing to the National Abortion Campaign in 1975. After its stringent legalisation by the 1967 Abortion Act, concerted action was felt necessary to counter the rise of pressure groups seeking its restoration. The Sexual Offences Act 1967 increased rather than reduced the scale of demands for homosexual liberation. ‘Far from “legalising homosexuality”, as has often been claimed, the Act increased the penalty for “gross indecency” from two to five years imprisonment; and prosecutions actually rose in the decade after 1967 . . . Already, by 1972, the Campaign for Homosexual Equality had sixty local groups.’15 The scale of pressure-group activity in the penal reform field can be gauged from the list of such groups as having given evidence to the Woolf inquiry into the prison

202 Explaining the Trends disturbances of 1990. They ranged from the Aids and Prison Consortium Group to the Mental Health Foundation, the Minimum Standards Group and Women in Prison,16 some 65 in all as well as professional associations, public service unions and ministries, and agencies of central and local government. The idea of the campaigning consortium had, by the end of the last century, become well established. Alliances between two or more reform groups enhanced the likelihood of success, as in the combined efforts of the Howard League, Justice and NACRO to expunge certain classes of ex-offender records in the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974.17 The strategy was most effectively adopted between 1978 and 1983 by the formation of New Approaches to Juvenile Crime, a grouping of NACRO and leading social work and probation organisations. It was chaired by Baroness Faithfull, herself a former Director of Social Services and a prominent Conservative in the House of Lords.18 The group played an important role in helping change the climate of opinion around elements of juvenile justice and helped facilitate the dramatic decline in the use of juvenile custody in the later 1980s. The group had been established in the run-up to the 1979 election, partly as a reaction to the suggestion that the Labour government had been soft on juvenile crime, even though there was plentiful evidence to suggest it had been anything but. ‘The group used all the informational techniques which made NACRO a force to be reckoned with: briefing papers and associated press releases were regularly produced; deputations to ministers were arranged; meetings with magistrates were held; and regular parliamentary briefings were organised.’19 Lady Faithfull, against government wishes, introduced amendments to the Bill which became the custody criteria for young offenders in the Criminal Justice Act 1982, and which led to a greatly reduced use of custody. It appears that New Approaches to Juvenile Crime did much to counter the rhetoric of the early 1980s in support of Whitelaw’s experimentally punitive ‘short, sharp shock’ regimes in detention centres and also helped to lay the foundations for the government’s funding of more than 100 Intermediate Treatment programmes from 1983 onwards.20 In 1989 an even more wide-ranging network was formed. The Penal Affairs Consortium (PAC – renamed the Criminal Justice Alliance in 2007) brought together as a lobbying collective of 13 organisations. By 1994 that had grown to 24, including such bodies as the Prison Governors and Prison Officers’ Associations, NACRO, the Prison Reform Trust, the Howard League and Liberty, a hitherto unthinkable combination. By 2017 it claimed 120 group members, perhaps not surprisingly given the unprecedented growth in the prison population. Originally established as a parliamentary lobbying body with a Labour peer, Jane Ewart Biggs, something of a driving force, the range of organisations represented gave it a degree of authority that had previously been lacking, not least given the seemingly commonly shared aims of its membership organisations.21 Having started life as a co-ordinating body it gradually sought to increase its profile outside parliament, not least during the period that penal policy was becoming an increasingly important site of contestation between the government and opposition from 1993 onward. PAC’s success was significantly aided by the secondment of the influential and highly effective Paul Cavadino from NACRO, together with the increasingly problematic relationship that NACRO

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 203 had with the Home Office during this period. Faced with potentially dramatic falls in its funding from government, NACRO toned down elements of its criticism of current penal policy, being at least partly replaced in the public eye by the PAC. Cavadino himself suggested that in that period the consortium, ‘provided a mechanism for much better coordination of Parliamentary lobbying; . . . demonstrated to Parliamentarians the existence of a wide consensus on penal issues; [and] particularly during 1994–97, made a very considerable impact . . . as a major voice in the media debate’.22 The importance of pressure-groups to democratic government is manifold. First, they bestow legitimacy on the ideal of informed debate which involves the citizenry. They can make authentic claims to a disinterested voice in shaping policy, unlike professional associations or trade unions, which can be seen as mainly ‘fighting their own corner’. Secondly, at their best, they can assemble evidence of a calibre that ‘raises the game’ and redirects focus on critical issues. A good example would be the research of the Lancaster group on juvenile justice, which established the over-use of ‘care’ orders, the breach of which could lead to detention centre or borstal, and ‘care’ orders were made too often too low down the tariff.23 Their findings informed the Parliamentary All-Party Group’s recommendations for more stringent criteria to be adopted in case of the custodial sentencing of juveniles, a policy that led to its much reduced use in the course of the 1980s. As Paul Cavadino observed: It became clear in the late 1970s that in a lot of cases where young people were going into residential care or custody that this was in line with the recommendations in their SERs [Social Enquiry Reports] and that social workers and probation officers were instrumental in the process that led to custody, so changing the nature of practitioner practice was clearly crucial and as important as changing government policy and the media discussion. We therefore formed New Approaches to Juvenile Crime, with NACRO, BASW,* ADSS, ACOP and NAPO as members. It was chaired by Lady Faithfull. We saw it as a counter to the emerging short, sharp shock and secure/residential care order debate – a more positive and constructive approach.24 As this account makes clear, the policy process in this and many other cases involved a complex interplay of academic research, pressure group activity and parliamentary networks as well as receptive Home Office civil servants. The latter were crucial: given the immense imbalance of power between the Home Office and the pressure groups, it is astonishing that they achieved as much influence as they did in this period. Nevertheless, they could be brushed aside when conflicts of opinion arose. For example, prison privatization was pushed through against the unanimous opposition not only of the penal reform groups but also the Prison Officers’ and the Prison Governors Associations, and indeed many senior officials.25 To bridge the gap, in the late 1970s and 1980s the pressure groups came to

* British Association of Social Workers

204 Explaining the Trends adopt a more sophisticated approach to the media and a more extensive deployment of comparative criminology. For much of the 1960s and 1970s, the Advisory Council on the Penal System (1966–80) and its predecessor the Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders (1944–64) had been an important source of established opinion. The abolition of the ACPS in 1980 signalled the end of the inside track enjoyed by these more establishment academic liberal reformers, and governments’ declining reliance on such officially organised advice helped stimulate the emergence of increasingly professional pressure groups, some of which, like NACRO, were also beneficiaries of government funding. Notwithstanding such funding, many such bodies were often critical of government penal policy, and generally favoured: explanations of crime which stressed structural causes such as economic and social inequality; the use of social policy in general rather than criminal justice measures in particular to prevent or control crime; an emphasis on individual vulnerability rather than human wickedness; a sceptical approach toward the value of police powers and punitive methods, especially imprisonment, as crime control measures – indeed, generally stressing the discriminatory and unjust consequences of such methods for repressing already oppressed minorities, who are viewed as under-protected and over-controlled. As such they tended to espouse views that had more in common with traditional Labour Party approaches to issues of law and order than they did Conservative.26 Thus, although there were ‘substantial differences between these groups regarding their ideological commitments, constitutional form, access to policymakers, and credibility with government’, they also had a great deal in common. As Downes and Morgan noted, ‘Given these dissonances, it is notable how much interchange occurred between the groups and the government in the 1980s’.27 The expertise gathered by the major organisations in the field, notably NACRO, the Prison Reform Trust and the Howard League often matched and in some cases outdid that of the Home Office and the relevant professional associations.28 That knowledge base encouraged them to beat a path to the ministerial door. Yet even Douglas Hurd, arguably the most sympathetic Home Secretary to informed advice, found their attempts to influence policy increasingly irksome, by late 1986 going so far as to give a lecture in which he was critical of the degree to which pressure groups were interposing themselves in the space between the executive and parliament, arguing that it was making it increasingly difficult to reach decisions that were both balanced and in the public interest. They were, he said, ‘like serpents constantly emerging from the sea to strangle Laocoon and his sons in their coils.’29 Ironically, a decade later, and following the U-turn in penal policy, ‘Hurd had already determined . . . to argue the case for a more liberal and less populist criminal justice policy. Free from the constraints of the Daily Mail tendency, free from the Tory right, he told an interviewer that he did not have to watch his back any more’,30 and in early 1997 it was announced that he was to succeed Jon Snow, the Channel Four newsreader, as Chairman of the Prison Reform Trust later that year. None of which should obscure the fact that at all levels in the Home Office, but most tellingly at senior levels, there was much discreet encouragement of the

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 205 interplay between official and pressure group activity, especially in the 1980s and early 1990s. Via ‘conferences, media debates, seminars and the regular call for expert evidence on penal matters in particular’ opportunities abounded for pressure groups to inform penal policymaking processes.31 That said, even when their influence was significant, as in the second half of the 1980s, none of these pressure groups enjoyed the kind of unforced access that the Howard League enjoyed in its heyday of close informal as well as formal contact with the Home Office or the strong role provided by the Advisory Councils.32 During this period a range of pressure groups drew on comparative criminology to illuminate the extent to which prisoners in Britain were both relatively more numerous and subject to worse prison conditions than prisoners in virtually all other Western European countries. NACRO produced a widely quoted league table of numbers of prisoners per head of population, drawing on Council of Europe data, which revealed often stark differences between comparable societies and Britain in their resort to custody. Penal conditions in England and Wales were compared unfavourably with those of the Netherlands,33 West Germany,34 the Netherlands and Japan,35 and those of England and Wales in the recent past.36 The findings were drawn on by the pressure groups, by criminologists in general, and those working within the Home Office Research and Planning Unit.37 The 1991 Woolf Inquiry built on these studies and broke new ground for an official report by interviewing British prisoners abroad, in Spain, the Netherlands and West Germany, as well as drawing on comparative evidence for the second part of the report. The momentum generated by this critical mass of pressure-group, parliamentary and in-house activity was to result in the 1991 Criminal Justice Act, the most far-reaching attempt at the fundamental reform of sentencing principle since the 1895 Gladstone Committee-inspired programme of welfare reform in the pre1970s period. Its short-lived duration naturally raises the question of how far the Act may have suffered from the malady of over-zealous reform. The attempt to install a minimalist model of ‘just deserts’ as the cornerstone of sentencing, at the expense of – though not disallowing some elements of – deterrence, rehabilitation and restitution, was felt by some to be ill-advised, at a time when the prison population was falling anyway. Against that view, it was argued that the opportunity to legislate for fundamental change should be seized, the fall in prison numbers could hardly last and needed to be sustained by a clear framework of law. In the event, it was the change in the politics of law and order which sealed its fate, with key clauses abolished rather than revised. That sea change flowed in part from comparisons coming to be made with the USA rather than Western Europe in the context of the unexpected defeat of the Labour Party in the general election of 1992. Well-established pressure groups across the field of penal reform found that the tenor of their relations with government changed in the early 1990s. The Howard League, according to its director, Frances Crook, had enjoyed a fairly positive and open relationship with Douglas Hurd, David Waddington and Kenneth Baker, but found things trickier when Ken Clarke became Home Secretary. Things deteriorated further with the arrival of Michael Howard who refused to see them and

206 Explaining the Trends didn’t respond to letters from the League, even when sent by their president. This general pattern was confirmed by Stephen Shaw, then Director of the Prison Reform Trust: ‘There was a period between 1979 and 1981, with Willie Whitelaw as Home Secretary with an agenda of opening up the prison system, when there was a feeling that one could achieve something. However, the high point of the lobby’s influence was from the late 1980s . . . when Douglas Hurd went to the Home Office, through Strangeways, the Woolf Report, the 1991 White Paper, up to Kenneth Clarke. When Michael Howard was Home Secretary he would have happily towed the prisons lobby out to sea and sunk us, if he thought we were important enough to sink . . . which he didn’t’.38 If their sustained influence within the Home Office Criminal Department in the long lead-up to the Criminal Justice Act 199139 was a high point of influence for many of these pressure groups, the very quick reversal of fortune that the Act enjoyed also marked a serious blow to their entire constructively critical approach. They were now increasingly marginalised and even excluded from the policymaking process. Certainly, notwithstanding some of Hurd’s criticisms of such bodies, as we have suggested the reception they received from the Conservative Home Secretaries who succeeded him, and from Michael Howard in particular, was much less warm. The transformation in criminal justice, and especially penal policy entailed a new trend in the standing of pressure groups, whose liberal bent and ‘soft on crime’ image had themselves become hostages to fortune in the struggle for the electorally crucial middle ground. In consequence pressure groups contact and influence in the worlds of Whitehall or Westminster declined markedly. The politicisation of criminal justice policymaking from 1992–3 onwards also effectively ushered in a period of change in Home Office culture. As Rock observed, these new modes of policy making were ‘the fruits of a new politics of populism, moralism, and the market’. Across a range of policy developments a number of Home Office ministers appeared recently to have been impelled by a strong sense of the political, by personal volition, a doughty common sense, and appeals to what are thought to be popular sentiment. They have consulted and conferred less often with the experts, distrusting the professionals, the criminologists, officials, and practitioners, who used to define much of the character of crime and criminal justice policy’.40 Increasingly, it seemed, traditional forms of policy development and interchange between officials and their political masters were superseded by a more electorally driven resort to ministerial diktat, recourse to outside consultancy and increased reliance on Special Advisers. It became increasingly difficult for the pressure groups to make their voices heard against competition from the new, more obviously ideological think tanks, and the proliferation of Special Advisers and government strategists newly attuned, especially in New Labour’s case, to public relations spin and who, accordingly, had little experience of, or long-term commitment to, particular departments or policy fields. In the crucial period of 1992–3, when the watershed in penal politics occurred, both major parties became much more interested in developments in the United States than what was occurring in criminal justice and penal politics in Europe, with growing interest in mandatory sentencing,

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 207 so-called zero tolerance approaches, and incivilities and anti-social behaviour, visible across the political divide.

Think tanks and the new right Think tanks, which had traditionally been divided into two main types – so-called ‘universities without students’ and smaller, more focused, non-profit contract research organisations41 – were increasingly joined from the 1980s on by what have been referred to as ‘advocacy tanks’,42 organisations that often presented themselves like other think tanks but were generally more ideological and partisan. In the UK it was in this period that the activities of a number of primarily free market think tanks became increasingly visible, several claiming both to have considerable access to senior members of government as well as to have exerted significant influence in a number of areas, including penal policy. In the 1990s, as these punitive policies grew to dominate much of this field, it was regularly suggested that domestic developments were increasingly being influenced by what was occurring in America.43 Crucial to such purported international influence were a number of think tanks, in particular those that promoted ideas of privatisation and market liberalisation. In Britain, the Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA), the Centre for Policy Studies, the Adam Smith Institute (ASI) and the David Hulme Institute all occupied this territory to a greater or lesser extent. One academic observer of such developments concluded that their primary impact lay ‘in the construction of legitimacy for certain policies and in agenda setting’.44 Despite the Thatcher administrations’ generally encouraging stance toward privatisation, the application of such an approach to punishment for a long time appeared a step too far. The ASI had mooted the idea of privatising aspects of punishment as early as 1984,45 and continued to promote the idea through the eighties even though there seems to have been little official encouragement to do so. Interest from the Home Affairs Committee and a junior minister kept the possibility of reform alive, and although the government was eventually persuaded of the value of experimentation, by the end of the decade there is little evidence in this case that pressure group activity was of any marked influence.46 Nevertheless, without ASI’s consistent support for private prisons in the early to mid-1980s it seems likely the path to policy change would have been lengthier and more complex. In the same general territory, though from a more traditional reformist perspective, an organisation called the Offender Tag Association was campaigning for the introduction of electronic monitoring. Again, while not necessarily crucial to the eventual adoption of tagging, it seems impossible to deny that the group, and the key entrepreneur in the area, Tom Stacey, were anything but of great significance to initial attempts to popularise the idea.47 Stacey, a journalist whose personal experiences led him to campaign against the use of incarceration, became a significant figure in the field.48 More than half a decade passed, however, before government began to show signs of interest in electronic tagging. The 1988 Green Paper, Punishment, Custody and Community, initially proposed a series of pilot projects, and the subsequent White Paper and 1991 Act established the potential

208

Explaining the Trends

for the electronic monitoring of curfew orders. At this point, however, the punitive turn in penal politics derailed such moves and it would be mid-decade before further activity and new pilots were launched. Although the Offender Tag Association kept its campaigning work going, and the Labour government significantly expanded the use of tagging after 1997, subsequently it was a conservative think tank, Policy Exchange, that began to have influence over the expansion of electronic monitoring in the 2000s, particularly once GPA technology became more widespread.49 During the late 1980s and first half of the 1990s a number of US neoliberal think tanks, the Heritage Foundation and the Manhattan Institute in particular, played an important role in attempts to promulgate American penal ideas abroad. Indeed, via transatlantic ties with bodies such as the ASI and the IEA they sought to bring American ideas to bear on British penal policy.50 The IEA which had links with the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC for example, was instrumental in publicising the work of Charles Murray in the UK via a series of conferences, seminars and private briefings.51 It also independently published the work of British academics which supported Murray’s general views about the importance of increasing the use of incarceration52 though, again, in terms of any influence on the ‘prison works’ agenda it was more at the level of affecting the broad climate of political opinion that directly, say, on Michael Howard or his team.53 Arguably, one of the greatest examples of impact on the general field was on the main political parties’ growing interest in the idea of ‘anti-social behaviour’ (ASB). The background to the rise of ASB up the policy agenda was the publicity attaching to the so-called ‘New York miracle’ in the early part of the 1990s. The city had witnessed remarkable declines in all major ‘index crimes’, and the mayor at the time, Rudy Giuliani, and his first Commissioner of Police, Bill Bratton, both claimed that it was the policing strategies that the NYPD had adopted that were the fundamental root cause of the turnaround. Those strategies, cracking down on minor incivilities, using the civil law in the furtherance of crime control efforts, and using a variety of tactics in an effort to ‘reclaim public space’, all owed some debt to the ‘broken windows’ thesis associated with James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. Though the term was rarely used in New York, on the other side of the Atlantic such tactics became associated with the idea of so-called ‘zero tolerance policing’. Politicians from across the political spectrum, Conservative and New Labour alike, competed to associate themselves with zero tolerance, yet beyond the regular deployment of such rhetoric there is little evidence that there was any significant appetite within British policing for the adoption of such tactics.54 Although both Giuliani and Bratton were consummate publicists and arguably needed little help in advertising their claims about their successes in New York, nevertheless it seems the Manhattan Institute in particular provided an important platform in promoting both broken windows and the more specific New York policing story and, via links with the IEA, helped bring it to a British audience, including a series of influential players in British newspapers including Conrad Black55, Sir David English56 and the editor of The Sunday Times.57

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 209 Although resistance within the police service limited the impact of such ideas on British policing, broken windows was to have a lasting impact on New Labour in the form of what became known as its ‘anti-social behaviour agenda’. The groundwork was laid prior to Labour coming to power in 1997. Jack Straw, when shadow Home Secretary, had visited New York and quickly began to deploy the language of zero tolerance. His controversial and highly publicised speech in September 1995, which we discussed in Chapter 5, took aim at aggressive begging, squeegee merchants and graffiti, all of which, he suggested gave ‘the impression of a lack of law and order on the streets.’58 In a discussion document the following year, Labour once again took up the theme: ‘The rising tide of disorder is blighting our streets, neighbourhoods, parks, town and city centres. Incivility and harassment, public drunkenness, graffiti and vandalism all affect our ability to use open spaces and enjoy a quiet life in our own homes. Moreover, crime and disorder are linked [in] a vicious circle of community decline’.59 The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 introduced Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs), subsequently reinforced and extended in the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003. Via the slightly circuitous route of the Manhattan Institute and the Economic Affairs, a version of the ideas that Wilson and Kelling had spelled out in their famous Atlantic article60 reached the attention of British politicians at a time when ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric was considered the sine qua non for electoral success. The impact on policing itself was relatively minor, but its impact on wider criminal justice policy under New Labour was very considerable indeed. The Home Office summarised its thinking in this field in a 2003 White Paper: ‘The anti-social behaviour of a few damages the lives of many. We should never underestimate its impact. We have seen the way communities spiral downwards once windows get broken and are not fixed, graffiti spreads and stays there, cars are left abandoned, streets get grimier and dirtier, youths hang around street corners intimidating the elderly. The result: crime increases, fear goes up and people feel trapped.’61 As others have observed, one indicator of the perceived success of the influence of new right think tanks in the 1980s and 1990s was the subsequent emergence of a series of similar organisations occupying territory on either the political centre ground or, indeed, the left of centre.62 These newer think tanks included the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) established in 1988 but coming to prominence a decade later, and Demos in 1993, both of which had ties to the Labour Party. They were joined by other think tanks with closer association to the Conservative Party, most notably the Social Market Foundation, established in 1989, and Policy Exchange in 2002. Both their focus and, where visible their influence, naturally was on the Labour Party in opposition in the mid-90s and then in government from 1997. There was a degree of resistance within Labour ranks, however, to such outside influence, much of it stemming from a sense that ‘Old Labour’ had been captured by special interests and that such influence had contributed to the party’s extended stay in the political wilderness. As Jack Straw put it in a newspaper article toward the end of his first year as Home Secretary: ‘I am not against interest groups. They play an important role in our pluralist democracy. Indeed, many significant reforms over the past 30 years may not have occurred without them. I have in government, as

210 Explaining the Trends in opposition, sought to talk to interested organisations whenever I can, and I hope most will agree that my door has been open to discuss proposals and hear suggestions for improving the criminal justice system. But elected politicians should be very wary of the dangers of becoming the agents of sectional interest and of ignoring the concerns of those who elect them. One need only look at how unsuccessful the Labour Party was throughout the 1980s to see that.’63 We return briefly to New Labour and the role of pressure groups in the book’s postscript.

The impact of professional associations One further source of influence on penal policy comes from the various professional associations that represent those who work within the criminal justice system. These include, inter alia, the Prison Officers’ Association (POA), the National Association of Probation Officers (NAPO) and the Association of Chief Officers of Probation (ACOP), and the three main police representative bodies: the Police Federation, the Superintendents’ Association and, as it then was, the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO).64 Arguably it has been the policing organisations that have had the most obvious impact in the political and policy arenas and we will focus upon them primarily, though we will also offer a few initial reflections on the prisons and probation representative bodies. The POA, it is undoubtedly fair to say, has rarely received a good press. Representing the vast majority of prison officers, its role in industrial relations within prisons has been subject to widespread and long-standing criticism, with the Morris’ famous study of Pentonville in the 1960s describing it as ‘suspicious of change, authoritarian in its penal views, . . . given to tenacious bargaining [and being above all] a militant organisation’.65 Industrial relations in English prisons deteriorated markedly in the 1970s and after a series of disturbances a Departmental Committee was established in 1979, chaired by Mr Justice May. Despite the changes undertaken both to custodial regimes and to industrial relations, if anything the problems within prisons escalated through the 1980s. Further widespread industrial action occurred in 1986, and in the ensuing disorder there were over twenty separate disturbances, 25 roof-climbing incidents and 245 escapes.66 The Home Office and the POA had, it felt to many, been in almost continuous dispute for over a decade, with the Home Secretary being booed at the POA’s annual conference in 1985.67 Much official frustration centred on the difficulty in changing working practices within prisons and in response to such difficulties the Home Office introduced the ‘Fresh Start’ package in 1986. Fresh Start abolished overtime working, reduced working hours and, overall, sought to introduce stricter financial management within prisons. The signal event of the period was the riot that broke out at Strangeways in Manchester in 1990s, the longest and most serious riot in English penal history. The Woolf Report, established to inquire into the causes of the disorder and the actions taken to bring it to an end, identified security, control and justice as the three basic requirements of a stable prison system. Rather than balancing these, it suggested the Prison Department had overemphasised security, paid too little

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 211 attention to justice and often taken inappropriate control measures. A radical overhaul of many aspects of the prison system was required it argued, including industrial relations. Indeed, from this point on the POA gradually lost power and influence, the two most significant changes being the effective ending of lawful industrial action, eventually enacted in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, and the embracing of the private sector within the prisons system. There were several stimuli behind the Criminal Justice Act 1991, the legislation that introduced the initial experiment with contracted out prisons. Managing a sizeable prison population, and one that had been subject to regular and increasingly violent disturbances, were obviously central. But poor industrial relations and the sense that greater managerial control needed to be established were also central. In this important sense the POA played a vital, if generally negative, role in prison policy agenda-setting.68 The POA had long been viewed as a significant block to effective prisons reform, as well as being a protector of inefficient and expensive working practices and, consequently, the introduction of private facilities, supervised by non-POA staff, was seen as an important means of reducing the power of the POA.69 The 1990s saw a significant shift in power within the prison system away from the POA and although disputes continued none ‘seriously threatened order in prisons as in the past’.70 Initially, and predictably perhaps, it is in relation to the territory of pay and conditions that police representative bodies can also be seen to be most visible and influential. When R.A. Butler, digging himself out of a problem largely of his own creation,71 established the Royal Commission on the Police under the chairmanship of Sir Henry Willink, its terms and conditions did not include the issue of police pay and conditions of service. Behind the scenes, however, there was considerable concern about police numbers and difficulties of recruitment, and although it was accepted that something would likely have to happen to increase the attractiveness of police employment there was considerable reluctance to open the subject of pay to public scrutiny once again. The breaking of the log-jam was largely a consequence of the work of the Police Federation and its then parliamentary adviser, James Callaghan MP. At the Federation’s conference in 1959 he had argued that the time was ripe for a big push on pay, and the subsequent announcement of a Royal Commission gave him the opening he was looking for. After initially being rebuffed by the Home Secretary, Callaghan kept up his campaign and at a later meeting with Butler secured agreement in principle to the addition of pay and conditions to the Commission’s remit. Once he had the Treasury onside, Butler made a public announcement that Willink’s inquiry would now cover the principles governing police pay and, furthermore, given the urgency of such concerns it would be able to publish its findings on that subject independently of its wider inquiry. Having scored this very considerable success, Callaghan then also took centre stage for the Federation in preparing its evidence to the Commission. Again, he not only pushed his luck – the Federation went way beyond the issue of principles to argue strongly for the introduction of an entirely new pay scale for police constables72 – but he was successful on almost all counts. The Commission published its report quickly, late in 1960, paralleled the Federation’s approach by

212

Explaining the Trends

going beyond its strict remit in outlining a new pay formula, and bestowing upon the police service a settlement that was undoubtedly more generous than Callaghan had imagined he would succeed in achieving73 and certainly greater than the Treasury had hoped would be the case. This was a period in which police-media relations were very basic, few forces having any form of professional means of dealing with public affairs.74 Nevertheless, the Federation slowly became a more visible presence in political debates, launching a document called ‘The Problem’ in 1965 which highlighted what it argued were the dangers of losing the fight against crime if better pay and conditions for the police weren’t forthcoming.75 The murder of three police officers in west London not long after capital punishment had been abolished for a trial period of five years led to a vociferous public debate, one in which the Federation was a conspicuous participant. That the Federation did not always enjoy such apparently easy success in relation to pay and conditions as it had in 1960 was very visible by the end of the decade. Failing to persuade the Labour government of its case for substantial increases, with no little irony it passed a motion of no confidence against Callaghan, by now Home Secretary. In late 1970 it took the unusual action of placing an advert in The Times in which, under the headline ‘Even for police 12% is not enough’, they argued that they were in an impossible situation being unable to strike and yet prevented from having proper bargaining power. A sizeable settlement eventually ensued, but any peace that broke out around pay and conditions was relatively brief and by the mid-1970s a further dispute threatened to derail relations. Pay and conditions have regularly generated more political concern than any other matter of police policy. Indeed, the bilateral meetings established between Margaret Thatcher and her Home Secretaries in the 1980s came back time and again to the subject of police pay and conditions, a matter that, if the size of the files are taken as an indicator, appeared preoccupy the Prime Minister more than any other single law and order issue. Over time, the Federation’s influence began to expand in a number of ways. As we discussed earlier from the late 1970s onward the Federation increasingly acted in an overtly political fashion. As we saw in chapter three, as law and order politics changed during that decade the Federation began to campaign for tougher approaches to crime. Sir Robert Mark’s Dimbleby lecture in 1975 signalled the beginnings of a sea-change,76 and this was followed by the Federation’s controversial law and order campaign launched in 1978. Carefully co-ordinated to reflect elements of both the messages and the timing of the Conservative opposition’s emergent general election campaign, the Federation called for severe penalties, including the reintroduction of capital punishment. Although the return of a ‘law and order’ Conservative government after the 1979 general election may not have brought about the stiffening of sentencing in quite the way the Federation had hoped, it sealed a close relationship between government and police that was to last for some years and, in the shorter term, brought about the immediate implementation of yet another generous pay award. If the campaigns of the 1970s established the Federation as an ‘authoritative voice’,77 then the conflicts of the 1980s, from the urban riots to the miners’ strike,

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 213 saw them confirmed as a regular presence in political debates around crime. Although it was increasingly the case that much of the Federation’s efforts were focused on agenda-setting, the concern being to attempt to shape political debates around law and order, there were nevertheless a number of occasions where resistance to change remained the primary objective.78 If their association with the law and order general election campaign in 1979 had put them on the front foot, then criticism aimed at the police from certain quarters in the aftermath of the Brixton and other riots of 1981 led them to a further law and order campaign in an attempt to regain lost ground. This ‘counter-offensive’79 involved placing advertisements in five national newspapers in early 1982 focusing once again on the possibility of reintroducing the death penalty. They were successful insofar as the campaign provoked a large number of MPs to sign a motion calling for further debate on the subject. Two years later, a further advertisement was placed, this time a full-page which, under the headline, ‘Of all the weapons a police officer has to face, this could do him the most harm’, the Federation took aim at elements of the government’s Police and Criminal Evidence Bill. It went on: ‘Point a knife or broken bottle at a police officer and he has the law and his training behind him. Point a finger and he’s on his own. If you don’t believe it, read the Police and Criminal Evidence Bill. On the one hand the new Bill legitimately strengthens the rights of the public who wish to pursue a genuine complaint against the police. On the other hand, it effectively reduced every man and woman on the beat to the rank of second class citizen’.80 Throughout the passage of both versions of the Bill the Federation, alongside civil liberties groups, continued to be one of the more vociferous critics of the new legislation.81 Although governmental political rhetoric continued to favour a tough law and order stance of a form generally favoured by the Federation, the closeness between the police service and Conservative administrations began to cool in the second half of the 1980s. The highest profile campaign of all, however, occurred in the early 1990s as Kenneth Clarke’s police reform agenda began to bite. There had been growing concern in Conservative circles for some time about value for money where the police were concerned and Clarke arrived in the Home Office convinced that reform to increase efficiency was a priority. Within six weeks he was on his feet at the Police Federation conference telling delegates that he was instituting a wide-ranging review of the role, responsibilities and pay of the police. Within days he also announced that other reviews were already underway in the Home Office which would likely lead to an overhaul of police governance. The subsequently launched Sheehy Inquiry concerned both those inside and outside the police service, not least because of the absence of anyone with specialist police knowledge among its membership.82 The combination of the likely Sheehy reforms – including performance-related pay, abolition of certain police ranks, and the introduction of fixed-term contracts, together with the greater central political control of police authorities as part of the Police and Magistrates’ Courts Bill (PMCB), and the potential hiving off of aspects of policing thanks to the Core and Ancillary Tasks Review, stirred both the Federation and the other police representative organisations into action. Thanks

214

Explaining the Trends

to its huge resources the Federation’s display of displeasure was the most visible. Again it took out full-page adverts in the national press and held a huge indoor rally at Wembley arena attended by an estimated 23,000 officers. The adverts, which had urged officers to join the protest, once again invoked the figure of James, now Lord Callaghan, quoting him as describing the Sheehy report as ‘a series of dogmatic conclusions backed with very little argument and based upon an inaccurate analysis of the problem’.83 In the end the Federation spent over one million pounds on its anti-Sheehy campaign. If the Federation’s campaign was the highest profile, there is some evidence to suggest that it was the activity undertaken by the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) that was the most successful in this period. So far as the PMCB was concerned, ACPO’s activity was aided and abetted by close liaison with the local authority associations who also harboured grave concerns about police reforms that appeared destined to lead to further dilution of their powers. Officials within the Home Office acknowledged that the parliamentary resistance to the Bill that was found at its strongest in the House of Lords reflected a ‘very wellorganised campaign by the local authority associations onto which ACPO climbed’.84 ACPO’s friends in the upper chamber made numerous crucial interventions in the debates that ensued, many of which successfully amended elements of the Bill. In particular, clauses that required the Home Secretary to consult with ‘persons whom he considers to represent the interest of chief constables’ when setting objectives for the police, were inserted after ACPO pressure and there is considerable evidence that the Association played a central role in resistance not only to elements of the Bill but also to both Sheehy and to the Core and Ancillary Tasks Review. Part of ACPO’s success lay in its position and in its working methods, many of which departed significantly from the Federation’s very public and often quite confrontational style. ACPO, by contrast, tended to work behind the scenes, exploiting its political relationships and using its corporate weight to influence policymakers. In the late 1980s the eminent civil rights lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson, described it as ‘the most powerful club in the country, promoting policies agreed amongst its members, resisting attempts to introduce measures for accountability and actively entering the political arena’.85 In fact, ACPO’s ability to speak with one voice was a relatively new development and for much of its history it had been largely unable to provide a united front and often cast envious glances in the direction of the Federation’s leaders when they appeared in the media speaking on behalf of their huge membership. ACPO historically had been a ‘fragmented and disunited body’86 and the perspective of the chief constable had hitherto often been dominated by one or two outspoken individuals, such as Ken Oxford in Merseyside,87 James Anderton88 in Greater Manchester and John Alderson89 in Devon and Cornwall. Two major changes were to affect this position. One was the growing professionalism of the organisation, facilitated first and foremost by the creation of a permanent secretariat, part funded by the Home Office. At heart, the change was facilitated by a shift to what Savage and colleagues call the ‘presumption in favour of compliance’;90 in essence a form of collective responsibility in which any individual chief wishing

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 215 to depart from the general line had to explain their reasons for so doing, with the fundamental underlying assumption being that this would be rare. From the late 1980s on ACPO was able to present a corporate front in ways that hitherto proved impossible. Linked with this, ACPO also began differentiating between its staff side which dealt with pay and conditions of service, and its professional side that dealt with matters of policy, a split that was formalised in the mid-1990s. Beyond the internal logic of helping to distinguish bodies of work, the split also signalled externally that professional policy matters were to be seen as being distinct from narrow material concerns. Savage and colleagues, in their study of ACPO, argue that such was its success in reorienting itself in the late 80s and early 90s that it, together with the other representative bodies, and the Federation in particular, was able to move from agenda resistance to agenda setting. Though it is certainly the case that ACPO became much more effective in this period, it is important to recognise that any shift in their role was a rebalancing rather than some fundamental replacement of one form of operation with another. That is to say, while elements of the Association’s activities in the 1990s were very much focused upon attempts to set the policing policy agenda, a significant element of their success also lay in resisting government plans. This could be seen both in the campaign to amend elements of the PMCB already mentioned, as well as in their resistance both to aspects of the Sheehy Inquiry and to the Home Office’s internal Core and Ancillary Tasks Review. The fact that these were all happening pretty much simultaneously meant that the Association, the Federation and, to an extent, the Superintendents’ Association, were in fairly constant, and often difficult, dialogue with the Home Office. The resistance to Sheehy was particularly successful. In its official response, ACPO argued against the proposals to reduce the rank structure by three, together with the performance-related pay scheme and the proposed extent of the use of fixed-term appointments.91 Michael Howard was forced to backtrack on a number of these fronts, some before taking legislation to parliament, and some as a consequence of resistance within the Lords. In understanding this, however, it is important to recognise the difficult position the Home Secretary found himself in. Unlike any of his predecessors, Howard was under huge pressure from the Labour opposition which, having jettisoned its hostages to fortune, now sought to ‘outtough’ him on various fronts and, simultaneously, used any sign of backtracking on reform proposals as an opportunity to portray him as weak. Under these circumstances, behind the scenes both ACPO and HMIC offered support in reframing elements of the reform agenda whilst promising help in steering through those parts with which they had least difficulty. The police representative bodies’ successes in the first half of the 1990s, though perhaps to be understood more as resistance to rather than the setting of policy, were widespread. The proposed governance reforms, and the extension to the Home Secretary’s powers, were passed but were severely limited. The Sheehy reforms were emasculated in many ways: fewer ranks were removed than was planned, fixed-terms contracts were limited, and performance-related pay was restricted to the upper echelons of the service. The Core and Ancillary Tasks

216

Explaining the Trends

Review, interpreted as an attempt potentially to hand elements of policing to the private sector was almost entirely undermined. Early on senior representatives of the service made it clear that ‘there was an atmosphere of mistrust generally between the police and Home Office officials and ministers, and that this was a consequence of some of the more controversial aspects of the PMCB, feeling cut out of the Sheehy Inquiry, together with ‘great resentment about the way in which the Review was set up, apparently with the intention of not involving ACPO and the other associations.’92 In the end, such was the relentless pressure faced by the Home Office, and the range of difficulties the police service placed in the way of the emerging proposals in the Core and Ancillary Tasks Review that by the time its long-delayed final report was expected ministers were making it clear that they wished to draw a line under it, feeling that they did not ‘want continuing uncertainty about the police role, and a continuing backdrop of fuss and criticism from the police’.93 Less tricky for the government at this point was the passage of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill. Arising largely from the work of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice and against a background of concerns about widespread miscarriages of justice, one of the more controversial governmental moves was to reject the Commission’s recommendations in relation to the right to silence and to seek significant amendments. In this they received considerable support from the police, and ACPO not least. As we have noted the Association was by now a well-organised campaigning body. Moreover, it was determined to have greater impact than had been the case in relation to the Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure more than a decade before when its evidence had been treated dismissively.94 On this occasion a combination of its own survey research, careful analysis of the research of others, together with lobbying inside and outside parliament, led to considerable success. That the government was able to pass such controversial legislation was of course further facilitated by a Labour opposition that was determined to offer no new hostages to fortune in relation to its image on law and order.

Victims and restorative justice Certain emergent issues in the criminal justice field generated a surge in pressure groups growing from hitherto neglected issues, one of the more conspicuous being that of victims of crime. To the extent that there is something that might tentatively be thought of as a ‘victims’ movement’ in the UK, it arguably began with the introduction of criminal injuries compensation in the 1960s. Two groups were influential in the campaign to introduce such financial recompense, a general group of political reformers and a more specific group of penal reformers drawn from the likes of the Howard League and Justice. At its core was the entrepreneurial figure of Margery Fry, the first secretary of the Howard League and a member of ACTO.95 Initial Bills failed, and an apparent lack of governmental support prompted Justice to establish a working party which subsequently proposed compensation be made available for a limited range of offences.96 Sustained campaigning led

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 217 to the establishment of the new ex gratia scheme in 1964, though as Rock notes this was very much a penal reform rather than one which paid any significant or sustained emphasis on victims themselves. Compensation for what in principle might be a wider range of offences, though generally with much smaller sums involved, emerged as court-ordered compensation via the Criminal Justice Act 1972, largely as a consequence of the recommendations of the Advisory Council on the Penal System. Subsequently modified in 1982 and again in 1988, the compensation order has remained something of an afterthought in the criminal courts system. One of the most successful outcomes of campaigning around victims of crime was the rise and spread of the ‘victim support’ movement and the development of the National Association of Victim Support Schemes (NAVSS). NACRO, together with a small group of influential campaigning individuals, were in the vanguard of the establishment of what was to become a sizeable nationwide system of support. The National Victims Association was established in the early 1970s, the aim of which was to promote services for victims and to encourage experiments in victim-offender conciliation. Its secretary, Philip Priestley, commented in 1974 that ‘purely political reform, although it can achieve significant specific victories such as the abolition of hanging, can never lead to real penal reform since it leaves untouched the bedrock attitudes from which resistance to change draws its profound yet subtle strength’.97 Although NVA never really took off, a related development, the creation of Bristol Victims Support Scheme, eventually gave rise to a national movement. In terms of numbers of referrals to its service the Bristol scheme was highly successful, the great problem it faced was lack of funds. In due course the publicity generated by a BBC TV programme that had covered its work led to some financial donations and also to the spread of the idea. By 1977 there were 13 schemes, involvement from both ACPO and ACOP, and efforts by its main supporter, NACRO, to elicit financial help from the Home Office. By mid-1979 initial government funding had been agreed and it was at this point that NAVSS was launched. Within a relatively short period, with the Conservative government looking for innovative penal developments, and the Home Affairs Committee offering fulsome praise, the time looked right for much larger state funding of NAVSS. After some delay, £9 million was eventually allocated over a three-year period from 1986 to strengthen the work of local schemes. The rise of victim support schemes, and a growing awareness of the needs of those who had in general been regarded as the ‘forgotten’ party in the criminal justice process, was in many ways a remarkable success story in a field generally devoid of them. Part of the early success of Victim Support rested on its careful avoidance of political conflict and of any party-political links, though almost all of its early achievements were secured under Conservative governments. To the extent that there was a ‘victims’ movement’ in the UK, at least up until the 1980s, it was, by contrast with that in the US for example, a non-politicised one, and one focused on victims of volume crime rather than the self-identifying victims of traumatic crime that established support schemes in North America and Australasia.98 Over time, the work of Victim Support, as it subsequently became known, expanded into new areas, including support for victims and witnesses in court,

218 Explaining the Trends and in the mid-1990s it published The Rights of Victims of Crime99 in which it set out a broad agenda for the future of victims policy. The use of the term ‘rights’ chimed with wider developments at the time. On the one hand, John Major’s ‘Citizen’s Charter’ initiative was slowly being extended to criminal justice, and to victims of crime in particular, a second Victim’s Charter being published in 1996. Though this extended formal governmental recognition of the victim and their needs, there was never any prospect of justiciable rights being awarded, if only because the state was reluctant to be placed in the position of guaranteeing the safety of its citizens and wished also to avoid the financial burden that would impose.100 On the other hand, and in contrast to the long-held stance of Victim Support, a more politicised victims’ movement was slowly emerging, largely in parallel with the changed penal politics of the time. Increasingly there appeared those who saw penal politics as a ‘zero sum’ game, in which heightened support for victims was viewed as signalling a tougher approach toward offenders.101 Finally in this connection, the other major development was the emergence and spread of restorative justice.102 The evolution of the idea in this context is of interest as an expression of a long-germinated aspiration on the part of penal reformers to devise non-custodial options which would enable the offender to contribute constructively to the community by means which could contribute to their own social restoration and reintegration. Community Service Orders were a substantial step towards that end.103 Reparation or compensation by the offender to the victim was another, though this amounted to little more than an impersonal payment to the court akin to a fine. Arguably the first systematic example of victim-offender mediation in Britain was established in 1979 in Exeter, where it was used with juvenile offenders as a supplement to cautioning. Slowly such schemes began to grow and in 1984 the Forum for Initiatives in Reparation and Mediation (FIRM)104 was established to act as a general umbrella under which developments in the area could be encouraged. At the time a Home Office researcher, Tony Marshall, was working to encourage interest in such approaches and in 1985 four Home Office-funded pilot programmes were established in Coventry, Cumbria, Leeds and Wolverhampton. Although central funding did not extend beyond the initial two-year pilot, and the results of the evaluation of the schemes was mixed, the pilots nevertheless stood as an important contribution to the spread of ideas that would later come to be housed under the general term, restorative justice.105 FIRM continued to work to encourage such developments, Marshall having by now left the Home Office to become its Director and the mid- to late-1980s saw not only the growth of victim-offender mediation programmes but also community dispute resolution schemes using similar techniques as well as the expansion of the use of mediation principles in civil cases.106 Although at this stage the bulk of schemes worked with juveniles and at the ‘shallow-end’ of the penal system, there were examples both of adult schemes and of programmes that worked with the more serious forms of offending.107 Broadly, the projects fell into two categories, one that was offender-dominated and focused on reform efforts, and one which sought to place something closer to

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 219 equal emphasis on both victim and offender. It was John Braithwaite who provided the analytical framework to theorise why these approaches, rather than punishment, could combine to produce the desired effect of ‘restoring’ the offender to society and vice versa and, centrally, to restoring the victim. Basically, Braithwaite argued, the key element in successful ways of dealing with offenders, especially young ones, was to emulate elements of indigenous practices found in societies such as New Zealand and Japan, where forms of reintegrative shaming were pursued, which were argued to allow for remorse and renewal as well as redress, rather than the disintegrative approaches, which mainly focused on inflicting various forms of blame and pain on the offender.108 Despite seemingly growing evidence favouring such developments, the penal politics of the 1990s which increasingly denigrated such policies as diversion and the use of cautioning, worked to their disadvantage. As a consequence, victim-offender mediation in the UK remained fairly small scale and in some respects was eclipsed by what was termed ‘conferencing’ – the bringing together of victim, offender and their respective ‘supporters’ as well as independent community members.109 After a period of apparent neglect in the 1990s’ upsurge of bipartisan acclaim for imprisonment, and ‘despite the labours of organisations like Mediation UK, the Restorative Justice Consortium, and NACRO, and of individuals like Martin Wright, John Harding and Tony Marshall’,110 there was something of a revitalisation of interest in what by know was being widely thought of as restorative justice. Although again confined to youth justice, the Labour government that was to be elected in 1997 undertook far and away the largest experiment in restorative justice seen to that point, trailing its ideas in a 1997 White Paper in which it argued for the importance of what it called the ‘3Rs’: restoration, reintegration and responsibility. Restorative justiceinfluenced ideas were to feature heavily in the subsequent Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and, more particularly, in the Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999.

Politics and pressure groups The period covered by this history saw some fairly sizeable changes in the presence and influence of pressure groups. First, and most obviously, from the relatively small number of groups – with the exception of the Howard League mainly single-issue groups – visible in the 1960s, the field became a crowded one by the end of the century. Those bodies that might reasonably be categorised as pressure groups were joined by think tanks, particularly of a more ideological bent, as the decades passed. The high point of influence for pressure groups was arguably the period from the 1960s when a broad liberal bipartisan consensus still held, all the way through to the late 1980s and the construction and passage of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act. Just as support for the ’91 Act fell away sharply, so too did the influence of the mainstream pressure groups and, certainly by the mid-nineties, more than a degree of resistance to such influence had set in within the two main political parties. The more ideologically oriented think tanks grew in number and influence from the mid-eighties onward, though their influence

220

Explaining the Trends

tended to lie more in keeping ideas on the policy agenda than it did in directly influencing either the direction or substance of policy. By the end of our period it was a small number of professional representative bodies that were having the greatest influence, especially in the field of policing rather than penal policy. The Federation began to flex its muscles in the late seventies, its impact, as was generally the case, being greatest in influencing campaigns for improved pay and conditions of service. The 1990s saw some profound changes in the organisation of ACPO and, as a consequence, in its ability to intervene in political and policy debate. Again, arguably its greatest successes lay in resisting change, not least those aspects of Kenneth Clarke’s and later Michael Howard’s reform agendas that it viewed as least desirable.

Notes 1 There is a huge literature on this subject. Among the most influential texts are: Garland, D. (1985) Punishment and Welfare: A history of penal strategies, Aldershot: Gower; Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and social order in contemporary society, Oxford: Oxford University Press; Alexander, M. (2012) The New Jim Crow, New York: Free Press; Cohen, S. (1985) Visions of Social Control, Cambridge: Polity Press; Whitman, J.Q. (2003) Harsh Justice: Criminal punishment and the widening divide between America and Europe, New York: Oxford University Press; Young, J. (1999) The Exclusive Society, London: Sage. On the declining influence of utilitarianism in the post-war period in particular see Paul Rock’s two volumes in this Official History: Rock, P. (2019a) and (2019b) op. cit. 2 Denham, A. and Garnett, M. (1996) The Nature and Impact of ‘think-tanks’ in Contemporary Britain, Contemporary British History, 10, 1 43–61, at p. 46 3 Weaver, R.K. (1989) The changing world of think-tanks, Political Science and Politics, 22, 3, 563–578 4 Denham, A. and Garnett, M. (1998) Introduction: British think-tanks and the climate of opinion in the twentieth century, in Denham, A. and Garnett, M. (eds.) British ThinkTanks and the Climate of Opinion, London: UCL Press, at p. 11 5 Replaced by the National Police Chiefs’ Council in 2015 6 Stone, D. (1996) Stone, D. (1996) From the margins of politics: The influence of thinktanks in Britain, West European Politics, 19, 4, 675–692 7 See Ryan, M. (1978) The Acceptable Pressure Group – Inequality in the Penal Lobby: A Case Study of the Howard League and R.A.P., Farnborough: Saxon House 8 See Rock, P. Vol. 1, Ch. 1 of this history 9 It changed its name again in 1999 to the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies 10 See Ch. 1 above 11 ‘What Went Wrong?’ (1992) in D. Downes (ed.) op. cit. 12 Lord Irvine of Lairg (1997) ‘The development of Human Rights in Britain under an incorporated convention on Human Rights’, Tom Sargant Memorial Lecture, The Law Society 13 A matter of contention within the NCCL, whose chair, Larry Gostin, resigned over the rejection by the executive of upholding the principle of protecting the rights of nonstriking miners. See Chris Moores (2017) Civil Liberties and Human Rights in Twentieth Century Britain, Cambridge University Press: 229 et seq. See also, Lilly, M. (1984) The National Council for Civil Liberties: The first fifty years, Basingstoke: Macmillan 14 See Blom-Cooper, L. ‘The Penalty for Murder: Life After Death’, Ch. 8 in his Power of Persuasion: Essays of a Very Public Lawyer, Oxford: Hart; also, Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit.

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 221 15 Gregory Woods (2017) ‘No source of pride: The dubious legacy of the Act that decriminalized homosexuality “in private”.’ The Times Literary Supplement, 5th May 2017: 21 16 Prison Disturbances, April 1990, op. cit., 526–9 17 Mick Ryan (1978) The Acceptable Pressure Group, op. cit. 18 Lucy Faithfull (1910–1996) helped to organise evacuees during and after World War 2, worked as an inspector for the Children’s Department of the Home Office in the 1950s, became a children’s officer and Director of Social Services in Oxford 1958–70, and was ennobled in 1976 as Baroness Faithfull of Wolvercote. She played a continuously active role in promoting the welfare and opposing the imprisonment of children, and was instrumental in securing the passage of the Children Act 1989 19 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1994) op. cit., p. 208; one of NACRO’s other strengths lay in its relationship with the Home Office during this period; one which enabled it to act, from time to time, as a form of unofficial research and development arm, taking risks and publishing work that would have caused government much greater difficulty 20 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1994) op. cit. See also Denis Jones, Conditions for Sustainable Decarceration Strategies for Young Offenders, 2012, PhD thesis, London School of Economics, electronically available 21 Wilson, C. (2001) Networking and the lobby for penal reform: Conflict and consensus, in Ryan, M., Savage, S.P. and Wall, D.S. (eds.) Policy Networks and Criminal Justice, Basingstoke: Palgrave 22 Quoted in Wilson, J.Q. (2001) op. cit., at p. 138 23 Thorpe, D., Smith, D., Green. C.J. and Paley, J.H. 1980, Out of Care: The Community Support of Juvenile Offending, London: Allen & Unwin. David Thorpe, David Smith and Norman Tutt were core members of the ‘Lancaster School’ at the Centre for Youth, Crime and Community (CYCC) at the University of Lancaster. They developed a model for the analysis of youth justice and began to ‘use this base to initiate the most significant change in IT (Intermediate Treatment] practice . . . To study the phenomenon in more depth, they devised a ‘care and control’ test, based on the assumption that residential care was only required if: A) the offence implied a public danger; B) the child was a danger to themselves; C) there was no home that could be worked with; and D) the child or young person had special educational, psychiatric or medical needs that could only be met in residence. This test was ‘failed’ by 89 per cent of those given care orders in Rochdale’ and similar results were found around the country. The group went on to develop practical forms of Intermediate Treatment that met the aim of the 1969 Children and Young Persons Act to deal with as many young offenders as possible in the community. Denis Jones, 2012, Conditions for Sustainable Decarceration Strategies for Young Offenders, PhD thesis, London School of Economics, electronically accessible: 129–30 et seq. See also the chapter ‘The making of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act’ above 24 Paul Cavadino, Director of Policy, Race and Resettlement at NACRO, 1972–2002, personal interview with Denis Jones. Denis Jones, op. cit., 141. See especially Ch. 3 ‘Seeds of Change: 1976–1981’, and Ch. 4 ‘The Start of the Decarceration Years: 1982–1987’. BASW refers to the British Association of Social Workers, ADSS to the Association of Directors of Social Services, ACOP to the Association of Chief Officers of Probation and NAPO to the National Association of Probation Officers 25 For a fuller account, see the chapter ‘The Pursuit of Innovation’ in Downes, D. (2021) op. cit. 26 See Ryan, M. (1978) op. cit. and his 1983, The Politics of Penal Reform, London: Longman 27 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1997) op. cit., p. 115 28 It was at times asserted that NACRO was the R&D arm of the Home Office, a division of labour which suited both as, if things went wrong, the Home Office could not be blamed

222

Explaining the Trends

29 Mark Stuart, 1998, Douglas Hurd: The Public Servant – An Authorised Biography, Edinburgh and London: Mainstream Publishing: 183 30 Ibid., 441 31 See Ryan, 1978, op. cit. 32 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1994) op. cit., 209 33 Hans Tulkens (1979) Some Developments in Penal Policy and Practice in Holland, London: NACRO; David Downes (1982) ‘The Origins and Consequences of Dutch Penal Policy since 1945: A Preliminary Analysis’, British Journal of Criminology, 22: 325–62 (1988) Contrasts in Tolerance: Post-War Penal Policy in the Netherlands and England and Wales, Oxford: Clarendon Press 34 Johannes Feest (1988) Reducing the Prison Population: Lessons from the West German Experience? London: NACRO 35 Andrew Rutherford (1984) Prisons and the Process of Justice, London: Heinemann 36 Roy King and Kathleen McDermott (1989) ‘British Prisons 1970–87: The EverDeepening Crisis’, British Journal of Criminology, 29/2: 107–28 (1991) ‘A Fresh Start: Managing the Prison Service’ in Robert Reiner and Malcolm Cross (eds.) Beyond Law and Order, London: Macmillan (1992) ‘Security, Control and Humane Containment in the Prison System in England and Wales’ in David Downes (ed.), Unravelling Criminal Justice: Eleven British Studies, London: Macmillan 37 Graham, J. (1988) The Declining Prison Population in the Federal Republic of Germany, Home Office Research and Planning Unit Research Bulletin, 24: 47–52 38 Quoted in Wilson, J.Q. (2001) op. cit., p. 141 39 See Downes, D. ‘The Making of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act’ and Garland, D. (1985) op. cit. 40 Rock, P. (1995) The Opening Stages of Criminal Justice Policy Making, British Journal of Criminology, 35, 1, 1–16, at p. 2 41 Weaver, R.K. (1989) The changing world of think tanks, Political Science and Politics, 22, 3, 563–78 42 Stone, D. (1991) Old guard versus new partisans: Think tanks in transition, Australian Journal of Political Science, 26:2, 197–215 43 See, for example, Wacquant, L. (1999) How penal common sense comes to Europeans: Notes on the transatlantic diffusion of the neoliberal doxa, European Societies, 1, 3, 319–52 44 Stone, D. (2000) Non-governmental policy transfer: The strategies of independent policy institutes, Governance, 13, 1, 45–70, at p. 67 45 Adam Smith Institute (1984) The Omega File, London: Adam Smith Institute 46 See Downes, D. (2021) op. cit., Ch. 7, ‘The Pursuit of Innovation’ 47 Whitfield, D. (1997) Tackling the Tag, Winchester: Waterside Press; Nellis, M. (2000) Law and order: the electronic monitoring of offenders, in Dolowitz, D. (ed) Policy Transfer and British Social Policy, Buckingham: Open University Press 48 Nellis, M. (2009) Tom Stacey: ‘Founder’ of electronic monitoring in the UK, The Journal of Offender Monitoring, 16–26 49 Geoghegan, R. (2012) Future of Corrections: Exploring the Use of Electronic Monitoring, London: Policy Exchange; see Hudson, K. and Jones, T. (2016) Satellite tracking of offenders and integrated offender management: a local case study, Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 55, 1–2, 188–206 50 Smith, J.A. (1991) The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite, New York: The Free Press; Stone, D. (2000) Non-governmental policy transfer: the strategies of independent policy institutes, Governance, 13, 1, 45–70 51 Murray, C. (1997) Does Prison Work?, London: Institute of Economic Affairs 52 Pyle, D. (1995) Cutting the Costs of Crime: The economics of crime and criminal justice, London: Institute for Economic Affairs

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 223 53 Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2007) Policy Transfer and Criminal Justice, Maidenhead: Open University Press 54 Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2007) Symbolising crime control: reflections on zero tolerance, Theoretical Criminology, 11, 2, 221–243 55 At the time owner of The Telegraph titles 56 At the time editor-in-chief of Associated Newspapers, including the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday 57 Dennis, N. (1997) (ed.) Zero Tolerance: Policing a free society, London: Institute of Economic Affairs 58 Quoted in Newburn, T. (1997) op. cit., p. 201 59 Labour Party (1996) Tackling the Causes of Crime, London: Labour Party; quoted in Jones and Newburn (2007) op. cit., p. 137 60 Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G.L. (1982) Broken Windows: The police and neighbourhood safety, Atlantic Monthly, March, 29–38 61 Home Office (2003) Respect and Responsibility: Taking a stand against anti-social behaviour, London: Home Office, emphasis added; on the wider history of ASB and New Labour see: Burney, E. (2009) Making People Behave: Anti-social behaviour, politics and policy, Cullompton: Willan; Crawford, A. (2009) Governing through antisocial behaviour: Regulatory challenges to criminal justice, British Journal of Criminology, 49, 6, 810–31; Mackenzie, S. (2008) Second chance punitivism and contractual governance of crime and incivility: New Labour, Old Hobbes, Journal of Law and Society, 35, 2, 214–39 62 Denham, A. and Garnett, M. (1996) The nature and impact of think tanks in contemporary Britain, in Kandiah, M. and Seldon, A. (eds) Ideas and Think Tanks in Modern Britain, London: Frank Cass 63 Straw, J. ‘Crime and old Labour’s punishment’, The Times, 8th April 1998 64 Replaced by the National Police Chiefs Council in 2015 65 Morris, T. and Morris, P. (1963) Pentonville: A sociological study of an English prison, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, at p. 217; see also the criticisms in the Woolf Report (1991); and Narey, M. (2002) 66 Scraton, P., Sim, J. and Skidmore, P. (1991) Prisons Under Protest, Milton Keynes: Open University Press 67 Sim, J. (1987) Working for the clampdown: Prisons and politics in England and Wales, 1969–90, Social Justice, 18, 3 68 A useful account of the POA’s role in industrial disputes can be found in Rock, P. (1996) Reconstructing a Women’s Prison: The Holloway redevelopment project, 1968–88, Oxford: Clarendon Press 69 David Mellor MP, personal interview with Tim Newburn, 2002; and see Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2005) Comparative criminal justice policy-making in the United States and the United Kingdom: The case of private prisons, British Journal of Criminology, 45, 1, 58–80; On the POA strike at Holloway Prison see Rock, P. (1996) Reconstructing a Women’s Prison: The Holloway Redevelopment Project, (1968–88, Oxford: Clarendon Press 70 Bennett, J. and Wahidin, A. (2008) Industrial relations in prisons, in Bennett, J., Crewe, B. and Wahidin, A. (eds.) Understanding Prison Staff, London: Routledge, at p. 125 71 See Newburn, T. (forthcoming) The Official History of the Police, 1955–1997, London: Routledge 72 The Federation team also included a young researcher by the name of Peter Jay; see Judge, T. (1994) The Force of Persuasion: The Story of the Police Federation, Surbiton: The Police Federation 73 Reiner, R. (1978) The Blue-Coated Worker, Oxford: Oxford University Press 74 Chibnall, S. (1977) Law and Order News, London: Tavistock

224

Explaining the Trends

75 McLaughlin, E. and Murji, K. (1998) Resistance through representation: ‘Storylines’, advertising and police federation campaigns, Policing and Society, 8:4, 367–399; also Judge (1994) op. cit. 76 Mark, R. (1977) Policing a Perplexed Society, London: Allen and Unwin; (1978) In the Office of Constable, London: Collins 77 McLaughlin, E. and Murji, K. (1998) Resistance through representation: ‘Storylines’, advertising and police federation campaigns, Policing and Society, 8:4, 367–399 78 See the discussion of these different strategies in Savage, S. and Charman, S. (2001) The bobby lobby: Police associations and the policy process, in Ryan, M., Savage, S. and Wall, D. (eds.) Policy Networks in Criminal Justice, Basingstoke: Palgrave 79 McLaughlin, E. and Murji, K. (1998) op. cit., p. 387 80 The Times, March 13th 1984 81 See Rock, P. (2019b) op. cit., Chapter 2 82 In addition to Sir Patrick Sheehy (Chairman of British American Tobacco), the members were: John Bullock (Joint Senior Partner, Coopers Lybrand), Professor Colin Campbell (Vice Chancellor, Nottingham University), Eric Caines (Director of Personnel, NHS) and Sir Paul Fox (former Managing Director, BBC Television). For all full discussion of the Sheehy Inquiry see Newburn, T., (forthcoming) op. cit. 83 ‘Police plan mass rally as part of pounds 1m protest: Confrontation with Government over Sheehy’, The Independent, 14th July 1993 84 Quoted in Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (1997) Policing After the Act, London: Policy Studies Institute, at p. 28 85 Robertson, G. (1989) The Individual and the Law, London: Penguin, at p. 24 86 Savage, S. and Charman, S. (2001) op. cit. at p. 36 87 Chief Constable of Merseyside from 1976 to 1989, Oxford was a controversial figure who was regularly in conflict with his highly critical police authority. The entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography describes him thus: ‘Oxford was a police officer of “the old school”. He was anathema to the new breed of graduate police officer that began to emerge in the 1980s, and the feeling was reciprocated. He maintained a starkly traditional view of police work and its management, and a conservative view of the society that he policed. His management style was feudal, his personality authoritarian.’ https://www.oxforddnb.com/abstract/10.1093/ ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-71283 88 Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police from 1976 to 1991. Anderton was a deeply controversial figure, a man of conservative views and a highly outspoken public figure – something senior police officers had generally sought to avoid. He is remembered for highly controversial statements on subjects such as homosexuality and HIV/ AIDS, as well as for his very strong religious views. One biographer even entitled his book: God’s Cop (Prince, M. [1988] God’s Cop: A biography of James Anderton, Frederick Muller) 89 Chief Constable of Devon and Cornwall from 1976 to 1982. Firmly associated with a liberal vision of policing, captured most obvously in the idea of ‘community policing’, it has been suggested that Alderson might justifiably ‘be regarded as a prophet of a new style of policing, who made seminal contributions to both the theory and the practice of how to protect order with legitimacy and justice. His achievement received significant recognition in academic circles, but in the last years of his policing career he had largely become a prophet without honour in his home profession’ https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/ odnb-9780198614128-e-104206?rskey=JlAiRh&result=2 90 Savage, S., Charman, S. and Cope, M. (2000) Policing and the Power of Persuasion, London: Blackstone Press 91 ACPO (1993) Response to the Inquiry into Police Responsibilities and Rewards, Vols. 1 and 2, London: ACPO 92 PCP 94 3/14/25, 25th July 1994, Home Secretary’s meeting with Sir John Smith and John Hoddinott

Pressure-Group and Interest-Group Politics 225 93 PCP 94 14/23/13, 3rd November 1994, Review of Core and Ancillary Tasks: The Future 94 See Rock, P. (2019b) op. cit. Chapter 7 95 This section draws heavily on Rock, P. (1990) Helping Victims of Crime: The Home Office and the Rise of Victim Support in England and Wales, Oxford: Clarendon Press 96 Justice (1961) Compensation for Victims of Violence, London: Justice 97 Rock, P. (1990) op. cit., p. 113 98 Van Dijk, J.J. (1988) Ideological trends within the victims’ movements: An international perspective, in Maguire, M. and Pointing, J. (eds.) Victims of Crime: A new deal?, Milton Keynes: Open University Press; Rock, P. (1990) op. cit. 99 Victim Support (1995) The Rights of Victims of Crime, London: Victim Support 100 See Rock, P. (2014) Victims’ Rights, in Vanfraechem, I., Pemberton, A. and Ndahinda, F.M. (eds.) Justice for Victims: Perspectives on rights, transition and reconciliation, London: Routledge 101 For a discussion, see, for example, Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 143; Zimring, F. (2001) Imprisonment rates and the new politics of criminal punishment, Punishment and Society, 3, 1, 161–166 102 On restorative justice, see: Braithwaite, J. (1989) Crime, Shame and Reintegration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Eglash, A. (1957) Creative restitution: a broader meaning for an old term, Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, 48, 619–622; Miers, D. (2006) The international development of restorative justice, in Johnstone, G. and Van Ness, D. W. (eds.) Handbook of Restorative Justice, Cullompton: Willan; Van Ness, D. and Strong, K. (1997) Restoring justice: an introduction to restorative justice, New Providence: Matthew Bender & Co; Zehr, H. (1990) Changing Lenses: A new focus for crime and justice, Scotsdale, PA: Herald Press 103 See the chapter on ‘The Pursuit of Innovation’ in Downes, D. (2021) op. cit. 104 In 1991 it was renamed Mediation UK 105 See Marshall, T. (1996) The evolution of restorative justice in Britain, European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 4, 4, 21–43; Marshall, T. and Merry, S. (1990) Crime and Accountability, London: HMSO 106 Martin Wright (1982) Making Good: Prisons, Punishment and Beyond. London: Burnett Books 107 Wynne, J. (1996) Leeds Mediation and Reparation Service: Ten years’ experience of victim-offender mediation, in B. Galaway and J. Hudson (eds.) Restorative Justice: International Perspectives, Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press 108 Braithwaite, J. (1989) op. cit. 109 For a more extended discussion see Crawford, A. and Newburn, T. (2003) Youth Offending and Restorative Justice, Cullompton: Willan, Chapter 2 110 Rock, P. 2004, op. cit. 295 and notes 50–56: Mediation UK was originally founded in 1984 as FIRM, the Forum for Initiatives in Reparation and Mediation, and claimed to represent some 300 mediation services by the early 21st century; the Restorative Justice Consortium was formed in 1997 to promote restorative justice in the criminal justice system, prisons, schools, the workplace and elsewhere. Martin Wright followed his seminal book Making Good with Justice for Victims and Offenders: A Restorative Approach to Crime, 1996, and Restoring Respect for Justice, 1999, both Winchester: Waterside Press. John Harding was Chief Probation Officer for Inner London, 1993–2001, and a pioneering advocate of community-based measures. Tony Marshall led Home Office initiatives in exploring the potential for restorative justice measures, and wrote Restorative Justice: An Overview, 1999, London: Home Office; and, with S. Merry, Crime and Accountability: Victim-Offender Mediation in Practice, 1990, London: HMSO

8

Matters of Scandal and Concern

It is a fact well known to students of social policy that reforms of the system often take place not so much because of a careful routine analysis by ministers and civil servants in the relevant Department of State, nor even because of a critique or exposé by an outside journalist or pressure group, but because one or more individual incident(s) occurs, drawing public attention to some underlying imperfections of policy in a dramatic way which seems to demand change.1 What remains as a source of policy change is the unpredictable realm of scandal and concern. Despite their best efforts, if at times the outcome of their worst, both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary groupings can be utterly outpaced by events which provoke public responses of alarm and calls for action to allay them. In the field of crime and penal policy, three types of event seemingly dwarf all others in their impact on the ‘public’: prison escapes, appalling murders and riotous assemblies, all of which presage or portend the breakdown of, or limits to, civil peace. The escapes of Ronald Biggs and George Blake in 1965–6 and the breakouts from the high-security prisons at Whitemoor and Parkhurst in 1994–5 led to radical changes in security in the Prison Service.2 The rioting at and occupation of Strangeways, Manchester, and other prisons in 1990 led to the major inquiry by Lord Justice Woolf which appeared to set a new agenda for prisons but which the security lapses of 1994–5 blew off course. The horrific murder of two-year–old James Bulger, by two 10-year olds occurred at a time of already growing unease about rising juvenile crime, and contributed significantly to the changed climate in which the government enacted custodial measures which contravened the moderating principles of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act only two years earlier.3 Other matters of scandal and concern so far only briefly addressed in this history are, first, the major miscarriages of justice stemming from the fear and anxiety aroused by the IRA bombing campaigns both in Northern Ireland and in mainland Britain. These and others prompted the establishment of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice and the consequent Criminal Cases Review Authority. A second event of signal importance was the murder of Stephen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003330981-10

Matters of Scandal and Concern 227 Lawrence in 1993 by five white youths, which came to epitomise the mishandling of cases involving black victims by the police, and the extent to which ethnic minorities are under-protected and over-controlled, not least in terms of imprisonment. A third set of scandals also concerned the police, and stretched from the minor corruption of Detective Inspector Challenor in 1963, who planted a half-brick in the pocket of a self-proclaimed anarchist on a demonstration as ‘proof’ of his guilt,4 to the use of aggressive policing in the miners’ strike at Orgreave in 1985 and the even greater cover-up involved in the botched policing of crowd control at Hillsborough football stadium in 1989, during which 97 people died.5 The latter set of cases involving policing are more remarkable for the absence of reform attempts – certainly in the period covered by this History – rather than their abundance. Before we discuss the series of miscarriages of justice linked with the conflict in Northern Ireland and the IRA bombing campaign on the mainland, we should acknowledge the impact of a series of other ‘scandals’ that contributed to the eventual moratorium on the death penalty in 1965.6 Now, in the case of capital punishment the events in question did not dramatically change public opinion, nor did they unfold in a context characterised by an absence of careful routine analysis, for an extensive Royal Commission inquiry had dissected the subject thoroughly between 1948 and 1953.7 Rather, their import was that they led many politicians, and some public commentators, to question their assumptions about the reliability of convictions in capital cases and, consequently, the morality of the use of such a penalty. The cases of Walter Rowland (a man hanged in 1947 despite the existence of a confession to the murder by someone else)8 and Derek Bentley (a 19-year-old of limited mental capacity hanged in 1953 as a consequence of the shooting of a police officer by his 16-year-old house-breaking accomplice)9 both caused considerable public and political controversy. Arguably, however, it was the conviction and execution of Timothy Evans that caused the greatest ripples. Evans was hanged in 1950 as a result of his conviction for the murder of his daughter. Central to his conviction was the testimony of his downstairs neighbour, John Christie. Some years later after the discovery of a number of other bodies in the same house, John Christie was arrested and eventually admitted a series of murders, including that of Timothy Evans’ wife, though not his daughter. The case led a number of leading retentionists to question their position. In 1955, Chuter Ede, who had been Home Secretary at the time of Evans’ execution, made the following statement in the House of Commons, ‘I was the Home Secretary who wrote on Evans’ papers, ‘The law must take its course . . .’ I think Evans’ case shows, in spite of all that has been done since, that a mistake was possible, and that, in the form in which the verdict was actually given on a particular case, a mistake was made.10 Finally in this regard was the case of Ruth Ellis, a young woman convicted of the shooting of one of her lovers. There was no suggestion in this case that she was innocent of the crime. Rather it was a crime passionnel, with considerable evidence that she had suffered considerable violence from her lover, including an assault that had caused her to miscarry just days before the shooting. Neither this

228

Explaining the Trends

evidence nor doubts about her mental state at the time of the shooting reduced the charge from murder to manslaughter. Despite considerable public outcry, the Home Secretary did not recommend a reprieve and Ellis was hanged in July 1955 aged 29, causing great public shock.11 These and other cases, individually and collectively, had an impact on press opinion and on views inside parliament.12 In particular, the increasing recognition of the very obvious potential for miscarriages of justice led some Law Lords and some within the higher echelons of the Church of England to revise their views. This was important in both its general contribution to the atmosphere of the time, and in the narrow sense that it had potentially very practical consequences for future debates within the House of Lords – it having been the Lords that had overturned Commons votes in favour of temporary abolition on several previous occasions.13

Northern Ireland and its Impact Though the terms of reference of this history are confined to developments in criminal justice policy in England and Wales, they can be conveyed at all fully only if account is taken of the impact of the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland over the period.14 That is the context which gave rise to the most notorious miscarriages of justice in Britain in the second half of the last century. Concerns about policing were raised most dramatically by three cases: the Guildford Four, the Maguire Seven and the Birmingham Six. In all three cases, Irish suspects were convicted of bomb explosions that killed multiple victims. Public outrage, as expressed through the media, put the police under immense pressure to get ‘results’. Sentences of life imprisonment were accompanied by recommendations that at least twenty years be served in several cases. Fifteen to seventeen years later, after tireless campaigning, the verdicts were declared ‘unsafe’ and the prisoners were freed. It is all too easy to understand the high levels of anxiety generated by the Northern Ireland conflict. Writing in 1993, O’Leary and McGarry noted that nearly 3,000 people had died in the political violence in Northern Ireland, and that the conflict had had consequences far beyond, including the deaths of roughly 200 people in Great Britain, the Irish Republic and elsewhere in Europe.15 With a population of approximately one and a half million in Northern Ireland according the 1981 census, it has been calculated that an equivalent ratio of victims to population would have led to 100,000 deaths in Great Britain over the same period, and over half a million in the USA, or about ten times the number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War.16 Comparatively speaking, ‘the death-toll in Northern Ireland alone made the UK absolutely the most violent liberal democracy during the same time-span.’17 Close to one in fifty of the population have suffered serious injuries over the period. The costs in law enforcement, paramilitary measures, compensation, and legal processes have been huge . . . The costs in terms of negative effects on public trust in British political institutions have been incalculable. The granting of strong emergency powers to the legal authorities under the regularly renewed Emergency Provisions Act in Northern Ireland, and the Prevention of Terrorism

Matters of Scandal and Concern 229 Act throughout the UK, has meant that departures from traditional English legal procedures have become normal in Northern Ireland and spill over into aspects of crime control in Britain . . . ‘Since 1973 no-jury single-judge courts have presided over cases arising from “scheduled offences”, i.e. “terrorist offences”, on the grounds that jury-trials are not safe from perverse verdicts or the intimidation of jurors and witnesses. Confessions are admissible as the sole basis for conviction on charges “of this kind.”’18 The rise and discrediting of ‘supergrass’ evidence in the 1980s;19 the abandonment of the ‘right of silence’ in 1988; the regular delay of several years in holding inquests on persons killed by the security forces;20 and the violation of the European Convention on Human Rights on a number of fronts concerning interrogation and time held in custody; all have severely eroded the belief, both nationally and internationally, in the impartiality of British justice.”21 Routine police practices in constructing the suspect were now perceived as so suspect in their own right as to justify setting up the 1991–3 Royal Commission on Criminal Justice.22 In the case of the Birmingham Six, a litany of police malpractice ranging from sheer incompetence through to physical aggression leading to forced and false confessions was documented in a blow-by-blow account painstakingly assembled by Chris Mullin.23 The precipitating event was the explosion of bombs in two pubs in the city centre of Birmingham, which on the evening of November 21st 1974, killed 21 people and injured 168 – ‘the biggest murder in British history’ as Mullin described the events. The Birmingham explosions came less than two months after pub bombings at Guildford and just a fortnight after a similar incident in Woolwich. ‘The pub bombings seemed to indicate that the indiscriminate murder of civilians was now a permanent feature of IRA strategy. But the Guildford and Woolwich pubs had been blown up because many of their customers were British soldiers based at nearby barracks. This was not the case in Birmingham. Many of the Birmingham victims were Irish.’24 Nevertheless, a wave of anti-Irish revenge attacks began and demands for the reintroduction of the death penalty soon followed. It was in this context that the police began their hunt for the perpetrators. The Birmingham Six,25 as they came to be known, had that evening embarked on a journey to Dublin to attend the funeral of James McDade, a young Irishman who had blown himself up while planting a bomb at the Central Telegraph Exchange in Coventry, a week earlier. They had been friends of McDade and his family but, unlike him, were sympathisers with but not members of the IRA. Spotted by the booking clerk at Birmingham New Street station as a group of Irishmen travelling together to Belfast, they were suspected of having taken part in the earlier bomb outrage and apprehended for questioning at Morecambe Police Station. Thereafter, at every point of their processing through police and prison custody, except at Lancaster Prison where for a time they were held on remand, they were subjected to verbal abuse and physical aggression to extract a signed confession of their involvement in the bombing. The key event in the sequence which led ultimately to their wrongful conviction, and to their serving sixteen years of their life sentence, came shortly after their arrest when forensic evidence

230

Explaining the Trends

was assembled by Dr. Frank Skuse, the Home Office pathologist for the region. The most damning evidence in his eyes was revealed by swabs containing nitroglycerine taken from the hands of two of the accused, Hill and Power, which also yielded traces of nitrate and ammonium, chemicals Skuse stated to be additional and conclusive proof of handling explosive material.26 His adamant certainty convinced the already highly suspicious police and, later, prison officers that they were the men guilty of mass murder and, therefore, fair game for sustained abuse and ill treatment. For example, the prelude to one of the six, Billy Power, signing his confession was recounted by Mullin as follows: ‘It was dark in the room save for the light from the two doors which were slightly ajar. Power guesses there were about half a dozen men in the room . . . Power said later, “The officer who had me by the hair with my head pulled downwards let go and then from all sides I was being punched, hit and kicked. I doubled up and slid down the wall towards the floor. I was dragged up by the hair and again punched systematically. I was kicked in the stomach and was sliding down the wall. Then I was kicked in the legs. I was then dragged up again by the hair. This was repeated three or four times.” It was at this stage, said Power, that he fouled his trousers. After about ten minutes, he went on, someone shouted, “Hold it”. He was spread-eagled against the wall and then a voice said, “Stretch his balls”. Someone put his mouth close to Power’s ear and bellowed, “You’ll never have sex with your wife again.” This was the point at which Power surrendered.’ ‘I screamed “okay, okay”. I had to say something to stop them. I couldn’t take any more.”’27 The police involved denied any element of such malpractice. The subsequent trial hinged on the forensic evidence far more than the confessions, which the defence claimed were forced and false. Two crucial developments that might have been seen by the jury as introducing an element of doubt into Dr. Skuse’s ‘ninety-nine per cent’ certainty that the accused had handled explosive materials were his own, later and more sophisticated laboratory tests on the samples taken from the swabs. All but one of the results were negative. The second was the evidence for the defence by a former Home Office Chief Inspector of Explosives, Dr. Hugh Black. He argued strongly that other materials, with a nitrocellulose composition, contained in many products in everyday use, such as lacquer and the kind of varnish used on bar counters and table tops, could produce a similar effect to nitro-glycerine. Unfortunately, from the defendants’ point of view, Dr. Black had not conducted tests to show such a result and had never conducted laboratory experiments. The prosecution successfully cast him as a theoretician rather than an experienced expert in this forensic field. The judge’s interventions were similarly damning. Most notably, Black stated that tests on the playing cards used by the accused on their train journey to the ferry should have been contaminated by traces of nitro-glycerine – but though tests on the packs used proved negative, this key point was ignored. ‘It would be another ten years before anyone bothered to put Dr. Black’s opinions to the test. And . . . the results would prove that, for all his ineptitude, Dr. Black had been right all along.’28 On the afternoon of August 15th, 1975, the jury had returned 126 verdicts of ‘Guilty’ against the six defendants. Mr. Justice Bridge pronounced sentence,

Matters of Scandal and Concern 231 saying to the six – William Power, Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Joseph Hill, Robert Gerald Hunter, Noel Richard McIlkenny and John Walker – ‘you stand convicted on each of twenty-one counts, on the clearest and most overwhelming evidence I have ever heard, of the crime of murder.’29 They were sentenced to life imprisonment without any recommendation for a minimum term of years. One might infer that, by this means, the judge intended ‘life’ to mean, literally, life. The case for appeal was heard on March 3rd 1976. The main grounds concerned the judge’s derogatory remarks about the ‘expert’ defence witnesses, and the inadequacy of his coverage of key points in the defence, especially discrepancies in the alleged confessions. In dismissing the case for appeal, Lord Chief Justice Widgery gave short shrift to the photographic evidence of physical damage to the accused, and the appeal was swiftly dismissed. The police conducted an internal inquiry into the allegations of ill treatment and found no basis for police misconduct. However, the report by Mr. Davis Owen, Assistant Chief Constable of Lincolnshire, to the Director of Public Prosecutions led to charges of assault against 14 Winson Green prison warders. All were acquitted of such offences but, in the course of the trial, the prison officers had called in their defence Dr. David Paul, a highly experienced consultant in clinical forensic medicine, who specialised in the interpretation of injuries on photographs. He detected signs of facial injuries in photographs of all six defendants taken in Queens Road police station, where they had been detained and questioned overnight before being remanded in custody in Winson Green prison. It was clear that his evidence ran directly counter to the evidence that had been presented by the police, and it was subsequently taken by the six to provide grounds for a civil action against the police for injuries received in their custody and before they entered Winson Green prison. The police attempted to have the action struck out, to no avail, though their appeal against that dismissal was upheld in the Court of Appeal. These time-consuming processes meant that a full five years intervened between the judicial refusal to the final possible action the ‘Birmingham Six’ could legally take and the original alleged assaults. The appeal against the civil action by the prisoners against the police was heard and upheld by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, perhaps the most renowned legal authority of the day. His judgement was a remarkable statement of blind faith in established authority. ‘At times he appeared more concerned with the consequences for the government and the police than with due process of law. “Just consider the course of events if this action is allowed to proceed to trial,” said Denning. “If the six men fail, it will mean that much time and money will have been expended by many people for no good purpose. If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and were improperly admitted in evidence and that the convictions were erroneous. That would mean the Home Secretary would either have to recommend they be pardoned or he would have to remit the case to the Court of Appeal. This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: It cannot be right these actions should go any further.” . . . In November 1981, almost seven years to the day since the

232

Explaining the Trends

alleged assaults, the House of Lords upheld Lord Denning’s judgement. The six men had now exhausted all the legal avenues through which they could hope to prove their innocence.’30 In May 1985 Granada Television’s investigative series World in Action commissioned two eminent forensic scientists, Dr. Brian Caddy and Mr. David Baldock, to conduct a range of Greiss tests on an array of common substances, including nitrocellulose. Baldock’s results showed positive readings on three nitrocellulose products, refuting the view of Dr. Skuse that such outcomes were not possible unless such tests were conducted on material heated to sixty degrees centigrade. Tests by Dr. Caddy were of even greater moment. Positive readings were obtained from various lacquered surfaces. Caddy also obtained a positive reading from two packs of old playing cards which, given five of the accused had been playing cards on the train from effectively undermined Skuse’s evidence. Three days after the World in Action programme was shown, Dr. Skuse retired from his post at the Home Office Forensic Laboratory at Chorley. Fourteen months later, David Mellor, Minister of State at the Home Office, admitted to Parliament that his retirement had been requested on grounds of ‘limited efficiency’. The World in Action programme, instigated by the research undertaken by Chris Mullin, who also claimed to have met some of the men actually responsible for the bombings, and followed by the publication of his book, Error of Judgment, in 1986, created a furore which led the Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd eventually referring the case for a second time to the Court of Appeal.31 Again, in January 1988, after the longest criminal appeal ever held, taking some six weeks, the appeals were dismissed by Lord Chief Justice Lane, and the original convictions upheld as safe and satisfactory. As Hurd reports, the Lord Chief Justice made his announcement ‘in terms which suggested that I had been weak and foolish to refer the case back to them’.32 A veritable storm of appeal by media ensued, both nationally and internationally, accompanied by campaigning for the men’s release in Britain, Ireland, Europe and the USA. The second full appeal by the ‘Birmingham Six’ was granted by the then Home Secretary, Kenneth Baker, in 1991, when they were represented by Lord Gifford, QC, and the formidable human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce. Fresh evidence of police fabrication of confessions and doubts relating to the 1975 forensic evidence led the Court of Appeal to conclude that the convictions were both ‘unsafe and unsatisfactory’. The six were released to popular acclaim for their innocence to which, in strictly legal terms, there was no entitlement.33 This judgement, and those on other actual and potential miscarriages of justice, notably concerning the ‘Guildford Four’ and the ‘Maguire Seven’, but also some not linked to IRA terrorist bombings, such as the ‘Bridgewater Four’,34 led to Kenneth Baker’s establishment of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice in 1991, the first for over a decade. As he put it, evidence in these miscarriage of justice cases had ‘revealed some serious weaknesses in the criminal justice system [and the] best way to address these and to restore the public’s confidence was to have a thorough review of the whole system’.35 There was, however, little doubt that the impact of the

Matters of Scandal and Concern 233 Northern Ireland ‘troubles’ and their manifestation in the lethal terrorism of the IRA, had tested the calibre of the English criminal justice process to destruction. Reforms were needed and the Royal Commission, chaired by Lord Runciman, was a major opportunity to promote them. In the event, the Runciman Report’s main recommendation, that an independent Criminal Cases Review Commission should be established to investigate cases of suspected miscarriages of justice, met most of the concerns aroused by the sequence of wrongful convictions that had so discredited British justice both at home and abroad. Where grounds for retrial or a fresh appeal existed, they would be referred to the Court of Appeal. To Lord Windlesham, who played an active role in the parliamentary proceedings, ‘All in all, by the customary standards of law-making at Westminster, the Criminal Appeal Act was an orderly reform.’36 The Home Secretary and C3 Division of the Home Office, which had too often proved a brake on appeals procedures, would now lose their power to refer cases for appeal. Two grounds for misgiving were the lack of an independent investigative body to follow the CCRC’s need for fresh evidence through; and the retention of the Home Secretary’s right to revise minimum terms of sentence to life imprisonment. As Windlesham infers, however, the change in public mood from one of concern for miscarriages of justice to anxiety and anger about serious crime mean that the reform came just in time.

From Challenor to Hillsborough As previously outlined the Royal Commission on the Police, established by R.A. Butler in 1960 had been preceded by a succession of mainly small-scale scandals involving police abuse of authority. Though they had a direct connection with the establishment of the inquiry, the Royal Commission itself had little to say about police malpractice. Indeed, in the main it acted as if British policing was largely above approach. No sooner had it reported than a succession of further scandals, some altogether more significant in scale and substance, were revealed. The first occurred in early July 1963 on the occasion when a large police operation occurred in the vicinity of Claridge’s Hotel in London. Their aim was to prevent demonstrations that had been organised in protest against the state visit of Queen Frederika. According to Mary Grigg, one of the demonstrators, Donald Rooum, was ‘kept at a distance from the hotel by a solid line of police across the width of the road, while he circled around with a paper banner . . . The banner simply said, “Lambrakis R.I.P.’’’37 Rooum was arrested by a team led by Detective-Sergeant Harold Challenor of the Metropolitan Police and taken to West End Central Police Station, where he was detained and beaten. Rooum asserted that Challenor said to him, ‘There you are, my old beauty. Carrying an offensive weapon. You can get two years for that.’ He then produced from his own pocket a piece of brick, wrapped in newspaper. Eight other demonstrators, three of whom were juveniles and some who claimed to be simply trying to find passage through the crowd, were later brought in by Challenor and three other police officers. Pieces of brick were added to their property, despite their denials about any such possession. However, Rooum, who

234

Explaining the Trends

was both an anarchist and a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and was refused bail, was astute enough about forensics to know the importance of his clothing being examined by an independent scientist, a matter his lawyer arranged next morning. At his trial, two months later, this evidence proved to be Challenor’s nemesis. Key evidence for the defence came from a scientist who explained that the friable nature of a broken brick would have meant that it would have scratched the material in Rooum’s coat pocket as well as having left grains there. Scientific examination of the clothing found evidence of neither. Moreover, as Rooum had been in custody continuously there had been no opportunity for the clothing to have been cleaned and, indeed, the examination revealed a range of other materials, dust, fluff etc, showing that the jacket had not been cleaned. Challenor had already stated in evidence that he had been involved in the quite separate arrests of others that evening, two, in particular, named Ede and Hill. ‘The importance of this questioning became clear when together with the piece of brick said to have been in Rooum’s possession, two other pieces of brick were produced – the “property” of Ede and Hill. The three fitted together. Placed in position, the markings on the bricks ran across them to read “Marston” which was part of a trade name, Marston Valley Brickworks.’38 Challenor’s explanation, that the three defendants, two of whom were juveniles, must have known each other, failed to convince the magistrate, who dismissed the case against Rooum, though without granting him costs. From this small beginning, the implications of what became known as the ‘half-brick case’ built to the point where Challenor was himself charged in March 1964 with perverting the course of justice. His defence was that the pressure of work had led to mental illness.39 Clearly a sick man, he collapsed in court and had to be helped out of the dock. At his retrial in June, the jury found him insane and unfit to plead. He was detained in Netherne mental hospital with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia.40 In his wake, three young police constables who had worked with, and under Challenor on the night of the demonstration were found guilty of planting the bricks or framing charges. They were sentenced to three years imprisonment and subsequently dismissed from the force. At least 26 innocent men were charged during his time at West End Central, 13 of whom had been imprisoned spending a total of 13 years in jail. Compensation was paid to some, including Donald Rooum, of £600. Alongside Challenor, the best-known case at this time occurred in Sheffield and centred around police brutality and forced confessions. Notably, the officer at the centre of the allegations was said to be in possession of a ‘rhino whip’ which was used on uncooperative detainees.41 The impact of these cases on the public’s faith in the police was to reinforce the trend of declining trust and growing challenge to the carefully crafted image of British policing, captured most vividly the Jack Warner’s portrayal of the fictional P.C. George Dixon in the immensely popular TV series Dixon of Dock Green.42 Although the Dixon image belied the reality, and greater realism slowly began to prevail as the periodic scandals erupted that could not be contained or ‘hushed up’, nevertheless, public faith in the police remained at a level markedly higher than any other profession bar medicine.

Matters of Scandal and Concern 235 Some aspects of police work are inherently resistant to monitoring and reform, not least as a consequence of the high levels of discretion and the low level of visibility that characterises much police activity, especially by the least senior in the organisation.43 The Challenor case appeared to exemplify a number of problems with the character of British police and criminal justice, at a time when they were generally held in very high regard. It offered a perhaps prototypical example of some of the core elements of police occupational culture: not least its solidarity, isolation and the effectiveness of the ‘blue wall of silence’.44 It is impossible to imagine that Challenor’s conduct was unknown to others and yet neither his corrupt activities, which it appeared were far from a recent development, nor his mental ill health became the subject of any official investigation or intervention until, unusually, a defendant was able to reveal how he had been framed. The case offered evidence of the extent to which police authority and conduct went unchallenged. It illustrated the tendency of the courts to accept the police version of events over and above those of defendants; it required the alignment of three pieces of broken brick to convince the magistrate in Rooum’s case that he was ‘in doubt’ as to his guilt. Finally, the Challenor and other cases made it clear that the channels for complaint about police conduct were difficult to access and afford, so that much dubious police work went unchallenged. In the case of Donald Rooum, the active support of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and of its then General Secretary, Martin Ennals, proved decisive.45 Rooum was also put in touch with an exceptional barrister, Mr. Michael Sherrard, whose defence of Rooum proved conclusive. Pressure groups can at such times play an invaluable role in the criminal justice process. Neither the Challenor case nor the Sheffield ‘rhino whip’ incident led to significant change. They provided a backdrop, however, against which later scandals of corruption and malpractice served to reinforce a growing realisation that the image of British policing that had infused much of the Royal Commission’s deliberations was little more than rose-tinted wishful thinking. In addition, both cases and the inquiries they gave rise to can be seen as the beginnings of a path toward a series of more critical inquiries into police conduct, beginning perhaps with Christopher Price’s46 campaigning in relation to the Maxwell Confait case, the subsequent Royal Commission on Criminal procedure47 and, in turn, the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice some quarter of a century later.48 The lasting impression, nevertheless, was that any scandal would have to be fairly significant before the police faced any serious challenge and that, even then, police representatives and interest groups were generally able to deflect anything that looked like fundamental reform. Hillsborough: From ‘Truth’ to Truth The worst tragedy in the history of English football occurred on 15th April 1989. Ninety seven49 supporters of Liverpool Football Club were killed at an FA Cup semi-final at Sheffield Wednesday’s ground, Hillsborough. The game was to have been a key event in the English and Welsh soccer calendar, an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool FC and Nottingham Forest. Cup semi-finals were traditionally

236

Explaining the Trends

held at neutral grounds,50 and Hillsborough had for several years been the ground for one of the events. The pitch was of high quality, so much so that a standard Sheffield joke was that Wednesday fans would gather to look at the ‘sacred turf’ even if no match was being played. The stadium, however, was far from the standard required for an important match that would attract a capacity crowd made up of the huge following for both clubs, and serious concerns about spectator safety had been raised on previous occasions. In 1989, the disaster that unfolded was the outcome of a sequence of events that culminated in crowd congestion in one section of the terraces at the end of the ground where Liverpool fans were primarily located that was so extreme that many died of asphyxiation or crush injuries. Subsequent inquiries, notably that conducted by Lord Justice Taylor,51 established that the primary responsibility for the catastrophic loss of life lay with the South Yorkshire police, who had been responsible for crowd security and control at the match. The key to what unfolded that day was the decision of the police to open exit gates at the Leppings Lane end of the stadium, as the turnstile system was inadequate to the task of admitting large numbers of people increasingly anxious not to miss the start of the game. Having been kept outside, once the extra gates were opened the spectators entering the ground understandably made for the nearest entry to the terrace. The failure by the police to direct them away from the central tunnel to the Leppings Lane terrace meant that huge numbers attempted to enter a part of the ground that was already full. The situation that rapidly developed was akin to a pressure cooker without a safety valve. The only such valve would have been escape to the pitch. But fans were fenced in by high security mesh installed as preventive measures following violence and occasional pitch invasions. Gates to the pitch were controlled by the police but they were opened too late to prevent the appalling death toll. Indeed, such was the mindset at the time, in particular the authorities’ preoccupation with the risk of ‘hooliganism’, that many fans attempting to escape over the fencing on to the pitch were pushed back into the pens by the police. In the grim aftermath, confusion reigned as emergency services converged on an already chaotic scene. The dire consequences of the police narrative affected the way in which the police and the coroner dealt with survivors of the deathtrap and family members who arrived in fearful anticipation of their fate. The first crucial element in the narrative that emerged was the statement, shortly after 3.15 p.m., by David Duckenfield, the senior police officer in charge of the operation, to the Football Association executives present, Graham Kelly and Glen Kirton, that ‘Liverpool fans had forced Gate C, causing an inrush into the stadium, down the tunnel and on to the backs of those already in the central pens . . . Graham Kelly52 unwittingly and in good faith repeated Duckenfield’s lie to the waiting media. Within minutes it was broadcast around the world. As the worst football disaster in British history was unfolding, the consequence of deliberately misleading information from the police was that the fans themselves were blamed.53 The second crucial element was the search for evidence of alcohol-fuelled fans. ‘At some point after his arrival at the gymnasium [which was being used

Matters of Scandal and Concern 237 as a temporary mortuary], Popper [the coroner] also took what was to prove a most controversial decision with lasting and painful consequences. In an unprecedented move he authorised the taking of blood alcohol samples, and the recording of blood alcohol levels, from all who died, including children . . . Popper’s decision immediately implied that each of the deceased could have been drunk and, in some way, could have contributed to their own and others’ deaths. It was a received agenda already set by Duckenfield’s lie and senior officers’ initial assessments. It guaranteed that allegations of drunkenness would remain centre stage. It deeply hurt the bereaved as they realised that the naming of their dead would imply the shaming of their lives.’54 The third crucial element in what was becoming the framing of the police’s master narrative of responsibility for the disaster, was to question family and friends of the deceased, as well as survivors, about their drinking habits, both in the past and on the day. In a microcosm of the experience of many other relatives, Barry Devonside, who had been at the match but whose son Chris had been with a group of friends some distance away. Utterly distraught after fruitless searches, at midnight, having found his son’s dead body in a body bag in the gymnasium, ‘he was led to a table at the far end of the gymnasium . . . He was asked for his name, address and age and details of Christopher. Suddenly, without warning, the “formal statement of identification” turned into something quite different. Barry was asked what time they had arrived in Sheffield and whether they had stopped for a drink. Barry asked why these questions could be considered relevant to the identification: “We’re trying to build a picture of the whole day,” came the reply. The questioning focused on alcohol, pubs, off-licences and supermarkets, whether he had seen heavy drinking or bad behaviour.’55 The fourth element in the construction of the master narrative was the press-led vilification of Liverpool fans as not only instigators of the physical disaster but also monsters of depravity who behaved vilely in circumstances of their own making. Even prior to The Sun capitalising on the disaster, several newspapers on the Sunday and Monday denounced the Liverpool fans as bearing prime responsibility. A ‘crazed surge’ of fans caused up to 40 deaths in the tunnel (Sheffield Star); ‘They literally killed themselves and others to be at the game’ (London Evening Standard); ‘Gate crashers wreaked their fatal havoc . . . uncontrolled fanaticism and mass hysteria which literally squeezed the life out of men, women and children’ (Liverpool Daily Post): such examples could be typified as, at the very least, serious misreportage. Early the following week a series of other stories began to appear, in both the local and national press. These included suggestions not only that the fans had forced the gates at the Leppings Lane end but had also attacked emergency workers. It appeared that the failures of the authorities in relation to the management of the crowd at Hillsborough was quickly being followed by an attempt to cover up what had occurred and to shift the blame. Most egregiously, The Sun newspaper led with perhaps its most notorious headline: Gates of Hell: The Truth. Liverpool FC fans were cast as the villains of the piece, were accused of having ‘picked pockets of victims’, having ‘urinated on the brave cops’ and in one further headline it was suggested ‘Some fans beat up PC giving life kiss’.

238

Explaining the Trends

Figure 8.1 Front Page from the Sun Source: The Sun

There was no shortage of commentators willing to offer reinforcement to the idea that somehow the fans were to blame. Police officers and even a local Sheffield MP, Irvine Patnick, were cited to substantiate accusations, most centrally to support the main thrust of the police view that ‘their rescue effort was hampered by hooligans tanked up at a three-hour boozing session.’ Even the ‘quality’ papers

Matters of Scandal and Concern 239 and the BBC failed to challenge the underlying thesis that fans had caused the fatal crush. Despite subsequent apologies for what transpired to have been gross misreporting, especially by the then editor, Kelvin McKenzie, The Sun newspaper is still viewed with implacable hostility in Merseyside.56 When eventually published Lord Justice Taylor’s report was damning. He found no evidence of significant misconduct by fans though suggested concerns about hooliganism had had a particular influence of the conduct of the police that day. Not only had senior officers in the control room misconstrued the struggles of desperate fans to break through the mesh fence as a potential pitch invasion, but crucial minutes were lost before police were ordered to open the gates onto the pitch, too late to save fans’ lives. Taylor went on to severely criticise senior officers, especially their commander David Duckenfield, commenting that he found the quality of police evidence to his inquiry to be ‘in inverse proportion to [the] rank’ of those giving it. Whereas some junior officers were ‘intelligent and open’, and he praised the heroic efforts of some, by contrast the senior officers ‘were defensive and evasive’ and failed to offer the qualities that ought to have attached to their rank. The Taylor report, which exonerated the Liverpool fans and roundly condemned the actions of the police as causing the disaster, was far from the end of the matter. Taylor’s inquiry was limited to the causal sequence leading up to the tragedy and was unable to pronounce on the issue of legal liability for the deaths that afternoon. An investigation by the West Midlands police rejected the view that grounds existed for criminal prosecutions against individual officers of the South Yorkshire police and the Crown Prosecution Service came to the same conclusion on that basis. Further anger followed the holding of the subsequent inquests on Sheffield: first, ‘mini’ inquests for each of the 9657 victims, and subsequently a ‘generic’ inquest for the overall tragedy. The latter, the longest inquest in English history, but one which was artificially restricted in the time period it covered, returned the verdict of ‘accidental deaths’. Despite the clarity of Taylor’s findings, and the campaign work undertaken by what by now was known as the Hillsborough Family Support Group, the picture that had been established by the police and other authorities in the immediate aftermath continued to hold sway. How, the families wanted to know, had the police managed to pass off as ‘accidental’ what was, to them, the result of criminal negligence. The answer in part lies in the fifth element in the police construction of a master narrative, the orchestration of rank-and-file accounts by senior police management. This was highlighted initially by a former police officer recounting his experience at Hillsborough as amounting to post-traumatic stress, heightened by the ways in which ‘people tried to alter the truth’.58 In a later interview,59 the former officer recalled how, having written his recollections of the day’s events, as all officers there had been required to, ‘he received back a word-processed version of his recollections. It was annotated, sentences scored out, words altered. His most personal comments, his experiences, deleted. Someone had systematically gone through his recollections and reshaped them. He was devastated: the implication was that “recollections” had been taken and turned into “statements”.

240

Explaining the Trends

It was an incredible story and a most irregular practice . . . Other officers had discussed the procedure – and were unhappy about having to alter their recollections. Usual practice had been abandoned. Told not to write up a record of the day in their pocket-books, then given sheets of paper to write personal emotional accounts, none of the Criminal Justice Act procedures had been followed. To the former officer, Hillsborough was being “sanitised.”’60 Several years later, and following the immense publicity generated by Jimmy McGovern’s film for ITV, Hillsborough,61 the new Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw, announced a fresh judicial inquiry into the tragedy in 1997. Despite establishing the role of the police’s solicitors in editing the officers’ version of events, and that the removal of criticisms of the police was not matched by similar removal of criticism of fans, Lord Justice Stuart-Smith played down the extent to which the processes involved were highly irregular. The outcome was to propose a tightening of police disciplinary measures, such as ending the practice of allowing officers to retire on medical grounds before disciplinary proceedings could be completed. Such changes were welcome, but once again an inquiry had fallen well short of answering the Hillsborough families’ questions, were felt still to have failed to hold the police to account, and certainly hadn’t established responsibility for what occurred on 15th April 1989. This lack of effective closure left not only the families concerned but also local MPs, Home Office ministers such as George Howarth, together with a number of supportive researchers and campaigners, determined to press for what Howarth termed the provision of access to ‘everything that is required’.62 Such provision was to be made available by Andy Burnham, Minister for Culture, Media and Sport, in 2009. 450,000 documents were released to an independent panel chaired by the Bishop of Liverpool and to its research team headed by Professor Phil Scraton.63 The eventual report, published in 2012, led to the reopening of the case for criminal charges to be brought against five senior police officers, notably David Duckenfield, who faced 95 counts of manslaughter. The initial trial failed to reach a verdict and the Duckenfield case was retried. In the event, Duckenfield was found not guilty, with the families of those who died once again feeling that the law had failed them.64 The only conviction relating to Hillsborough was that of Graham Mackrell, the former chief executive of Sheffield Wednesday and the designated safety officer on the critical day, who was found guilty of failing to discharge a duty under the Health and Safety at Work Act in respect of ensuring there were enough turnstiles to prevent unduly large crowds building up outside the ground and was fined £6,500. Almost one hundred deaths, a clear and concerted cover-up by the police, and decades of obfuscation and victim-blaming all ended with a lasting and bitter sense of injustice.

The Case of Stephen Lawrence The Stephen Lawrence case proved another landmark example of the creative force exerted on criminal justice policy by family members most closely associated with the victim.65 Stephen Lawrence, the eighteen-year-old son of West

Matters of Scandal and Concern 241 Indian parents, was stabbed to death in what the inquest jury concluded was an unlawful killing ‘in a completely unprovoked attack by five white youths’. Stephen and a friend, Duwayne Brooks, had been waiting for a bus when they were insulted as ‘niggers’ and then assaulted. Brooks managed to escape but Stephen was fatally stabbed by the assailants.66 So much was clear from witness statements. What followed transpired to be a travesty of police investigation into the identities of those responsible. First of all, the police waited for a fortnight before questioning the five youths who were named by local residents as responsible for several previous attacks on ethnic minority youths. This gave the suspects ample time to dispose of any weapons or clothing that might have linked them to the offence. The senior officer questioned at the subsequent inquiry into the case in 1997, chaired by the former high court judge, Sir William Macpherson, stated in explanation that he had not been aware that suspects could be questioned before enough relevant information had been gathered to justify their arrest. This seemed little more than a somewhat cynical ploy. It is inconceivable that a senior officer would be so inept. Secondly, the police made every effort to discredit the testimony of Duwayne Brooks who, in the absence of any other witnesses, was the sole source of any account of the events. They also sought to depict the assault as an outcome of gang warfare between local youths. Though such possibilities merited initial examination, the lack of substance to either should have been rapidly established. Thirdly, the police set out to portray Stephen’s parents, Doreen and Neville Lawrence, as troublemakers who were exploiting the racial character of the case for their own ends.67 As both were exemplary citizens in every sense, this line of approach led nowhere except to unwarranted delay and confusion. The net result of these methods was the decision of the Crown Prosecution Service not to prosecute the five youths who were linked to the killing only by repute and their description by Brooks. A private prosecution against them was initiated in 1996 by Stephen Lawrence’s parents but was halted by the judge due to lack of evidence. Yet the inquest jury had found unambiguously that ‘Stephen Lawrence was unlawfully killed in a completely unprovoked racist attack by five white youths’. It was to be a further sixteen years before two of the main culprits were tried, convicted and imprisoned for his murder. The tortuous path to that trial was mainly laid by the decision of the new Home Secretary in 1997, Jack Straw, to establish the inquiry, referred to above, ‘to inquire into the matters arising from the death of Stephen Lawrence on 22nd April 1993 to date, in order particularly to identify the lessons to be learned for the investigation and prosecution of racially motivated crimes’. The inquiry reported in February 1999 and memorably said that: ‘The conclusions to be drawn from the evidence in connection with Stephen Lawrence’s racist murder are clear. There is no doubt but that there were fundamental errors. The investigation was marred by a combination of professional incompetence, institutional racism, and a failure of leadership by senior officers. A flawed MPS [Metropolitan Police Service] review failed to expose these inadequacies. The second investigation could not salvage the faults of the first investigation.’68

242

Explaining the Trends

The ‘professional incompetence’ included a lack of direction and organisation in the hours after the murder, little or no pursuit of the suspects, insensitive treatment of both the Lawrence family and Duwayne Brooks, inadequate processing of intelligence, ill-thought-out surveillance and inadequate searches. At least as, if not more damningly, the inquiry concluded that incompetence alone could not account for the failure of the Metropolitan Police. Rather, it suggested that the very fact that the victim was black led directly to less competent behaviour on the part of officers, in particular with regard to their actions at the scene of the crime, in connection with family liaison, the treatment of Duwayne Brooks, and in the use of inappropriate and offensive language. The Service, the inquiry suggested, was ‘institutionally racist’. This, it defined as: ‘The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.’69 There is always the danger that public inquiries, however well-researched and urgent their policy implications, will fail to be acted on at all fully. Although there are many examples he might have chosen to illustrate this point, rather oddly Jack Straw used Lord Scarman’s judicial inquiry into the 1981 Brixton Riots which he described as having ‘been as thorough and as wide-ranging in its way as the Lawrence Inquiry report. But there had not been the political will to implement his recommendations, and the report simply gathered dust.70 I was determined that Sir William Macpherson’s report should not suffer the same fate. I therefore set up the “Lawrence Working Party”, with Doreen and Neville as members to agree and monitor an action plan for the report’s recommendations. This simple progress-chasing device had a substantial impact. Sixty-seven of the seventy recommendations had a concrete result, in changes in practice, or law.’71 Straw subsequently announced new targets for recruitment, retention and promotion of black and Asian police officers, reform of the police complaints system, and new race relations legislation – enacted as the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000 – which in addition to new provisions for the protection and support of victims, made chief officers liable for racial discrimination carried out by their officers. One of the most significant recommendations of the Macpherson report was that ‘double jeopardy’ should be reinvestigated. Subsequently, the Law Commission produced a consultation paper, and the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee also produced a report recommending reform.72 It had long been an established principle of English law that a person may not be tried twice for the same offence, whether they were acquitted on the first occasion (autrefois acquit) or convicted (autrefois convict). The Law Commission eventually recommended limited reform, suspending this principle in limited circumstances where the offence involved was murder.73 The law was eventually reformed by the Criminal Justice Act 2003 which gave the State the power to retry persons previously acquitted of murder and, additionally, quite a wide range of offences including: attempted murder, manslaughter, rape, attempted rape, and unlawful importation, exportation or production of a Class A drug. The reason for its importance in

Matters of Scandal and Concern 243 the Stephen Lawrence case was that the failed earlier private prosecution of the five suspects had rendered them immune from any subsequent prosecution for the same offence. As a result, in 2012, almost two decades after the incident, two men, Gary Dobson and David Norris, were convicted at the Old Bailey of Stephen Lawrence’s murder. As Jack Straw observed, this could ‘not have happened without Doreen and Neville’s persistence in persuading me to establish the inquiry, since this second prosecution had only become possible with the change in the double-jeopardy rule.’74 By the same token, the other changes in criminal justice policy could hardly have been accomplished at that point, if at all, without the Lawrences’ principled determination to pursue the issues relating to their son’s murder over so many years. The sheer force of the importance of race in the Stephen Lawrence case so dominated its coverage, most strikingly in the Macpherson inquiry and report, that other aspects of the implications for policy and the police investigation became somewhat marginalised. In an exhaustive analysis of the report’s impact on policy, Paul Rock concluded: ‘It had not been the plight of a bereaved family or the unsatisfactory circumstances of an investigation alone that had produced that political response. Neither was it the result of the plight of victims conceived in any conventional sense, and victims were often overshadowed in the report and its aftermath, reinstated only as an arrière-pensée. The political response had arisen instead from a peculiar concatenation of a murder, on the one hand and, on the other, of politically charged readings of policing and racism, that led to victimisation being defined substantially and perhaps metaphorically as the oppressiveness of race. The matter of Stephen Lawrence was not focused on the problems of mundane crime victims at all.’75 Nevertheless, the impact of the inquiry and the report facilitated and accelerated several policy reforms to the benefit of victims in general, not least the Human Rights Act, the Freedom of Information Act, and the strengthening of the 1996 Victims Charter. A second casualty of the report’s overriding emphasis on ‘institutional racism’ in the culture of policing as a whole was the emphatic rejection of possible police corruption as a key factor in the litany of error involved in the police investigation – though the Metropolitan police were lambasted not only for their racism but also for their ‘professional incompetence and bad leadership’. There had been concern from the outset that Clifford Norris, the father of one of the perpetrators, was both involved in organised drug trafficking and linked to senior detectives on the local force who were directing the investigation. In other words, it was alleged that the botched police work at the crucial early stages of the investigation was not so much ‘cock-up’ as wrecking tactics. Only after some 16 years after the report appeared to dismiss this possibility so conclusively was an inquiry into the role of the detectives, now long since retired, established in 2015 by the then Home Secretary, Theresa May. In 2018 the National Crime Agency, which had been conducting the inquiry, announced that up to four detectives faced criminal charges of ‘misconduct in a public office’ as a consequence of their negligence in the case and a case file was sent to the Crown Prosecution Service in late 2020 for further consideration.76

244

Explaining the Trends

Nevertheless, in a number of areas the Macpherson Inquiry appeared to be an important lever for change in some aspects of policing. These included improvements in the general police response to hate crimes, in the recording and monitoring of racist incidents and in the management of murder investigations and some aspects of family liaison. It appeared also that certain forms of behaviour, and explicitly racist language in particular, had become much rarer under the increased scrutiny the Inquiry had prompted. That said, it also appeared to many minority officers that much of the change was ‘cosmetic’ and that ‘Women, minority ethnic and LGBT officers continued in large numbers to feel excluded’ and that ‘their experiences went largely unrecognised and unaddressed’.77 Moreover, the concept of institutional racism, which had been expressly aimed at moving beyond a focus on police ‘canteen culture’, in effect proved opaque on how to do so.78

Conclusion Overall, the inference could be drawn, from the matters of scandal and concern examined above, that a significant and underrated source of changes to criminal justice policy have been the families, friends and reform and legal agencies in the field, aided by the media, reporters and academics and, from time to time, compliant politicians in response: Sam Silkin in the case of Maxwell Confait for example, and Jack Straw and, later, Theresa May in relation to the Stephen Lawrence case. In the case of the ‘Birmingham Six’, families and the prisoners themselves kept up the pressure for reopening the question of their false convictions, and a dedicated legal team, headed by Gareth Peirce, eventually accomplished their release. But the book by Chris Mullin and the TV coverage it prompted were crucial to that end. In the case of Donald Rooum, the ‘evidence’ of Detective Inspector Challenor was discredited by a defence made possible by the National Council of Civil Liberties. The Maxwell Confait case led eventually to the setting up on an independent prosecution service79 and the passage of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.80 In the case of the victims of the Hillsborough tragedy, their families grouped together to mount a decades-long campaign for justice, a process informed and sustained in part by the dedicated research, not least that by Phil Scraton and colleagues, without whose efforts it is also unlikely that those in positions of responsibility for crowd safety would have faced trial almost three decades after the event. And in the case of Stephen Lawrence, which embodied the essence of racist crime, the pace and momentum for justice and reform was led by his parents, Doreen and Neville Lawrence. It is impossible to imagine that, without their efforts, crucial changes would have been enacted decades after the original offence.

Notes 1 Bottoms, A. and Stevenson, S. (1992) op. cit. p. 23 2 See the chapters ‘Dropping the Admiral’ and ‘The Woolf Report and After’, in Downes, D. (2021) op. cit.

Matters of Scandal and Concern 245 3 See the chapter on ‘The Making of the Criminal Justice Act 1991’ in Downes, D. (2021) op. cit. 4 See also Rock, P. (2019b) op. cit. Ch. 5, on the importance of this case for the creation of the Crime Prosecution Service and Newburn (forthcoming) for further detail on the policing context and the nature of the case itself 5 See especially Grigg, M. (1965) The Challenor Case, Harmondsworth: Penguin; and Scraton, P. (2000) Hillsborough: The Truth, Edinburgh: Mainstream. Revised and updated from the 1999 first edition 6 All of this is dealt with in detail in Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit. 7 See, for example, the opinions expressed in: Christoph, J.B. (1962) Capital Punishment and British Politics, London: George Allen and Unwin; Radzinowicz, L. (1999) Adventures in Criminology, London: Routledge 8 See Silverman, S.S. (1953) Rex v. Walter Graham Rowland, in Silverman, S., Paget, R.T. and Hollis, C. Hanged and Innocent? London: Victor Gollancz 9 The case caused considerable controversy both because there was evidence that Bentley had urged Craig to give up the weapon when confronted by the police officer and because Craig, because he was only sixteen, did not suffer the death penalty himself whereas Bentley, who had no part in the shooting, was hanged. See Paget, R.T. (1953) Regina v. Derek Bentley, in Silverman, S., Paget, R.T. and Hollis, C. Hanged and Innocent? London: Victor Gollancz. Bentley was posthumously pardoned in 1998 10 Hansard, 19th February 1955, 2090. In October 1966 Roy Jenkins, Labour Home Secretary, announced in the House of Commons that Timothy Evans would receive a posthumous free pardon, Rubin, G.R. (2007) Posthumous pardons, the Home Office and the Timothy Evans case, Criminal Law Review, 41–59 11 See Ballinger, A. (2000) Dead Woman Walking: Executed women in England and Wales 1900–1955, Aldershot: Ashgate; Marks, L. and Van Den Bergh, T. (1990) Ruth Ellis: A case of diminished responsibility? London: Penguin 12 They may also have had an effect on the Home Office. Philip Allen, who had worked under Sir Frank Newsam the Permanent Secretary in the 1950s was interviewed by the BBC in the late 1990s and was asked about the Ruth Ellis case. He said, ‘You may say we came to the wrong conclusion. I don’t know. Perhaps we did . . . I gradually became a convinced abolitionist, having dealt with a number of cases. It didn’t seem to me to be right that an individual life should be taken.’ Quoted in Klein, L. (2006) A Very English Hangman: The life and times of Albert Pierrepoint, London: Corvo, at p. 181 13 Thus, in the 1965 debate the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Justice Parker said: ‘I am in favour of abolition, not, I’m afraid, on any moral ground, but merely because of the working of the Homicide Act 1957. I confess, looking back eleven years, that if anybody had then said that I should come out as a full-blooded abolitionist, I should have been surprised . . . I think I can say that all the Judges are quite disgusted at the results produced by the Homicide Act.’ HL Hansard, Vol. 268, Cols. 480–1 (19th July 1965), quoted in Drewry, G. (1974) Parliament and hanging: further episodes in an undying saga, Parliamentary Affairs, 27, 251–261, at p. 252) 14 For greater detail on the history of the ‘troubles’ see: McKittrick, D. (2002) Making Sense of the Troubles: The story of conflict in Northern Ireland, New Amsterdam Books; Coogan, T.P. (1996) The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace, Cornerstone Books; Toolis, K. (2011) Rebel Hearts: Journeys within the IRA’s soul, London: Picador 15 Brendan O’Leary and John McGarry, 1993, The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland, London: Athlone Press 16 Ibid., 2 17 Ibid., 4 18 Ibid., 24 19 Greer, S. (1995) Supergrasses, Oxford: Clarendon Press 20 Amnesty International, 1978, British Amnesty No. 27 (August)

246

Explaining the Trends

21 Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (2002) op. cit., 315 22 Cmnd. 2263 23 Error of Judgement: The Truth about the Birmingham Bombings, 1986, London: Chatto and Windus. The 1987 revised and updated paperback edition was published by Poolbeg, Dublin. Mullin was Labour MP for Sunderland South 1987–2015. ‘Chris Mullin has done as much, or more, than any other individual in public life to expose the trail of wrongful convictions which came to light in the late 1980s and early 1990s and led to the setting up of a Royal Commission on Criminal Justice in 1991.’ Windlesham, Lord 1996, op. cit., 68–9 24 Mullin, C. op. cit., 7 25 Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Hill, Gerry Hunter, Richard McIlkenny, Billy Power and Johnny Walker. Callaghan had not joined in the trip to Ireland. His name came to the fore in the course of the five being questioned 26 Ibid., 45–6, for a description of the so-called Greiss test applied by Skuse 27 Ibid., 53 28 Ibid., 171 29 Ibid., 206 30 Ibid., 216 31 Evidence heard at the fresh inquests ordered in 2016 into the deaths in Birmingham has tended to confirm Mullin’s claims: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/ apr/05/birmingham-pub-bombings-botched-warning-call-led-to-deaths-inquest-rules 32 Hurd, D. (2003) Memoirs, London: Abacus, at p. 391 33 See in particular Louis Blom-Cooper (1997) The Birmingham Six: Victims of Circumstance, London: Duckworth, and his Power of Persuasion: Essays by a Very Public Lawyer (2015) Oxford: Hart: 279–80 34 Carl Bridgewater, a thirteen-year-old boy, was killed on his newspaper round. The four men convicted of his murder were released in 1997 after serving 20 years in jail when their sentences were quashed after lengthy campaigns which threw doubts about police-induced confessions 35 Baker, K. (1993) The Turbulent Years: My life in politics, London: Faber, at p. 431 36 Windlesham, Lord 1996, op. cit. 432. The Act was passed in 1995 37 Grigg, M. (1965) op. cit., 49–50. The German-born Queen Frederika of Greece was associated by elements of the Greek left with supporting fascistic movements they deemed responsible for the death of a prominent dissident, Grigoris Lambrakis. This case is also covered in some detail of part 1 of Newburn, T. (forthcoming) op. cit. 38 Ibid., 53–4 39 Challenor published his own account of events in Harold Challenor and Albert Draper (1990) Tanky Challenor: SAS and the Met, London: Leo Cooper. Challenor exonerated himself from responsibility in the case by explaining his behaviour as due to the traumatic effects of having served in the SAS during World War 2. 40 Ibid., 95. See also Rooums’ original account, ‘I’ve dislodged a bit of brick’, in Arms of the Law, Anarchy 36, February 1964, 40–61, which differs in a few minor respects 41 All these cases are dealt with in detail in the opening chapter of Newburn, T. (forthcoming) Official History of the Police 42 See especially Robert Reiner (1985) The Politics of the Police, Brighton: Wheatsheaf; McLaughlin, E. (2005) From reel to ideal: The Blue Lamp and the popular cultural construction of the English ‘bobby’, Crime, Media, Culture, 1, 1, 1–11 43 The classic analysis of this is to be found in Wilson, J.Q. (1978) Varieties of Police Behaviour, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 44 Skolnick, J. (1996) Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in a Democratic Society, New York: Wiley; van Maanen, J. (1978) Kinsmen in repose: Occupational Perspectives of Patrolmen, in Manning, P.K. and van Maanen, J. (eds.) Policing: A View from the Street, Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear Publishing Co.

Matters of Scandal and Concern 247 45 Rooum, op. cit., 48 46 Christopher Price, born in 1932, was a journalist and politician, who was the Labour member of parliament for Lewisham West, 1974–1983 47 See the detailed account of the Royal Commission, which stresses the overwhelming importance of the Confait case, in Rock, P. (2019b) op. cit. 48 See the discussion also in Bottoms, A. and Stevenson, S., op. cit. 49 Ninety five died at the time of the disaster and a further two died subsequently as a consequence of their presence in the crush 50 Since 2008 the semi-finals have been held at Wembley Stadium 51 Taylor, Lord Justice, August 1989, Hillsborough Stadium Disaster Inquiry – Interim Report, London: HMSO: 49 52 Kelly was secretary of The Football League from 1978 to 1989 and chief executive of The Football Association (FA) from 1989 to 1998; see also: Taylor, R., Ward, A. and Newburn, T. (1995) The Day of the Hillsborough Disaster, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 53 Scraton, P. (2000) Hillsborough: The Truth, Edinburgh: Mainstream 54 Scraton, P. op. cit.: 88–9 55 Ibid., 90 56 Sufficient for the Liverpool manager, Jurgen Klopp, to ban Sun journalists from the ground in 2017. Jemphrey, A. and Berrington, E. (2000) Surviving the Media: Hillsborough, Dunblane and the press, Journalism Studies, 1:3, 469–483; One estimate suggested that in the aftermath of the disaster the Sun’s circulation fell from 55,000 to approximately 12,000 copies in Merseyside, Guardian, 31st May 2005 https://www. theguardian.com/media/2005/may/31/sun.pressandpublishing. 57 Andrew Devine died in July 2021. Severely injured in the crush 32 years previously the coroner determined that Devine had been ‘unlawfully killed’ and was thus Hillsborough’s 97th victim 58 Ibid., 184. The quotation is from a programme on various experiences of rescue work 59 By Phil Scraton, ibid., 184–5 60 Ibid., 185–6 61 ‘Hillsborough’ was first shown on 5th December 1996. It won the BAFTA for best film for television in 1997 62 Hansard, ‘Hillsborough’ Adjournment Debate, Clmns. 942–1003, 8th May 1998 63 Together with colleagues, Phil Scraton’s role in conducting research on the tragedy, both archivally and by interview, over a thirty-year period, leading to books, articles and reports that have contributed to the long-delayed prosecutions of senior police officers for criminal negligence, combined with his campaigning with the Hillsborough Families Support Group, is arguably unique in the annals of criminology 64 Conn, D. (2019) Once again, the law has failed the victims of Hillsborough, The Guardian, 6th December 65 Rock, P. (forthcoming) The Role of Victim Advocacy in Criminal Justice Reform in England and Wales Annual of Criminology 66 Brooks, D. (2003) Steve and Me: My friendship with Stephen Lawrence and the search for justice, London: Abacus; Cathcart, B. (2003) The Case of Stephen Lawrence, London: Penguin; Bowling, B. (1999) Violent Racism, Oxford: Clarendon Press 67 Indeed, it was subsequently revealed that members of a specialist undercover unit, the Special Demonstration Squad, had used undercover officers to infiltrate the Lawrence’s circle in order to collect information on their campaign. See Evans, R. and Lewis, P. (2014) Undercover: The true story of Britain’s secret police, London: Guardian/Faber 68 Macpherson, W. (1999) The Stephen Lawrence inquiry, Report of an Inquiry by Sir William Macpherson of Cluny, advised by Tom Cook, The Right Reverend Dr. John Sentamu and Dr. Richard Stone, Cmnd. 4262–1, London: The Stationery Office, para. 46.1

248

Explaining the Trends

69 Macpherson, W. (1999) op. cit., para 6.34 70 As we have described in some detail in Chapter 4, while aspects of Scarman’s recommendations may not have been acted upon, within policing in particular it had a significant impact. See also, Newburn, T. (forthcoming) op. cit. 71 Jack Straw (2012) Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor, London: Macmillan: 248–9. Mr Straw was approached for interview on several occasions but did not respond to any inquiries. Despite positive progress on many fronts, signs of substantive change within the police service were, at best, mixed: Foster, J., Newburn, T. and Souhami, A. (2005) Assessing the Impact of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, London: Home Office; Murji K. (2007) Sociological Engagements: Institutional Racism and Beyond. Sociology. 41, 5, 843–855; Holdaway, S. and O’Neill, M. (2006) Institutional Racism after Macpherson: An Analysis of Police Views, Policing and Society, 16, 4, 349–369 72 Law Commission Consultation Paper No 156 (1999) Double Jeopardy, London: Stationery Office; Home Affairs Committee, Third Report: The Double Jeopardy Rule, HC Session 1999–2000, 17th May 2000 73 More fully, it recommended, ‘That the rule against double jeopardy should be subject to an exception in certain cases where new evidence is discovered after an acquittal, but only where the offence of which the defendant was acquitted was murder, genocide consisting in the killing of any person, or (if and when the recommendations in our report on involuntary manslaughter are implemented) reckless killing.’ Law Commission 267 (2001) Double Jeopardy and Prosecution Appeals, London: Stationery Office, para 4.30 74 Ibid., 249 75 Paul Rock (2004) Constructing Victims’ Rights: The Home Office, New Labour, and Victims, Oxford: Clarendon Press: 482 76 https://www.policeconduct.gov.uk/news/file-evidence-being-sent-cps-followingconclusion-stephen-lawrence-corruption-investigation 77 Foster, J., Newburn, T. and Souhami, A. (2005) Assessing the Impact of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, London: Home Office, at p. 95; The issue of policing, race and racism is discussed at greater length in Newburn (forthcoming) op. cit. 78 Souhami, A. (2014) Institutional racism and police reform: an empirical critique, Policing and Society, 24: 1–21 79 See Rock, P. (2019b) op. cit. and Rock, P. (2022 forthcoming) op. cit. 80 See Newburn, T. (forthcoming) op. cit.

9

Conclusion

The first, and most obvious thing we must note at this point is that criminal justice policymaking is unintelligible without analysis of the political aspects of its development. But certainly until the late 1970s, and possibly even as late as the early 1990s, it was the case that individual Home Secretaries, much more so than their parties, shaped changes in the criminal justice field. The major liberal reforms of the 1960s were not explicit in Labour Party manifestos. Indeed, the vast majority were the product of backbench initiative and wider campaigning, with the government of the day acting in support, and not always enthusiastically in the beginning.1 Indeed, even in the 1980s and early 1990s it could not be argued that the measures to rein in, and even reduce, the size of the prison population were in any way a product of the official policy of the Conservative Party. It is after 1992 that matters changed, and changed quickly, in the wake of an unusually steep rise in the crime rate 1989–92, which undoubtedly both heightened and deepened public ‘fear of crime’ concerns which, as constituents, they expressed to their MPs.2 The repositioning of the Labour Party on home affairs under Tony Blair ushered in a period of bipartisan rivalry over ‘toughness’ on crime. From this point onward, for the best part of two decades, home affairs policy was generally seen as crucial to electoral success and was consequently the subject of much greater party discipline and control than had earlier been the case. The long arc of penal reform, which stretched back not only to the report of the Gladstone Committee of 1895, but also to the seminal work of John Howard in the late 18th century, reached its zenith in the Criminal Justice Act 1991. Its flawed introduction was the prelude to its hasty abolition and a period of penal regression3 that has lasted to the present day. The so-called ‘arms race’ in relation to criminal justice and penal policy represents an increasing politicisation of criminal justice policy. Such politicisation is linked logically and empirically with trends towards the neo-liberal marketisation of political economy.4 Penal capital is inversely, and increasingly, related to welfare capital. Prison and quasi-prison measures, such as house arrest, become more prevalent as antagonism to welfare measures grows in neo-liberal contexts5 and net-widening measures proliferate in the attempt to allay resulting social tensions.6 The politics of law and order are thus integrally related to governmental and state policy in other fields, such

DOI: 10.4324/9781003330981-11

250

Explaining the Trends

as income support, education, health and housing. Modes of penality, including imprisonment, are also related variably to welfare trends and practices.7 Criminal justice policies in other societies hold the potential for importation, as do those of Britain for export.8 An example of the latter was the international popularity of Community Service Orders. Historically, the penal philosophy of the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria proved seminal in promoting the idea that certainty rather than severity of punishment was the greater in terms of effective punishment. The researches of John Howard showed the lack of necessity for prisons to be bastions of harsh inhumanity. Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont saw the new penitentiaries of the New World in America as preferable to the old prisons devoid of any reformist character, and recommended their adoption in France, but warned of their potential for a new despotism.9 Ironically, almost two centuries later, English penal policy and sentencing processes were to be influenced by those of the USA more than of any other society.10 Both Michael Howard as Home Secretary and Tony Blair as his shadow embraced the American emphasis on being ‘tough on crime’ without acknowledging the danger of a slide into mass incarceration. Other societies practised radically different and far more moderate approaches, as in the Netherlands and Scandinavia, but their influence on what was happening in England and Wales remained marginal by contrast with that of the USA. The electoral sway exerted by issues of crime control reached a crescendo in the 1990s – as, indeed, did overall levels of crime – when both major parties became obsessively concerned to be seen as the ‘party of law and order’. Michael Howard has long celebrated his tenure of office as Home Secretary with the account of how his civil servants greeted him with a graph showing the rise and rise of crime rates by five per cent a year for the past half-century and advised him that his job was to manage public expectations about the apparent futility of trying to do anything about it.11 He refused to accept this advice, and set about introducing changes to make crime control more effective: by ending the ‘right of silence’, by introducing mandatory sentences for repeated serious offences such as burglary and drug trafficking, and by endorsing custodial sentencing in his ‘Prison Works’ speech to the 1993 Tory Party Conference. As the start of a lasting fall in the crime rate virtually coincided with that speech, he became understandably convinced that the policies he embraced – and which were in large part adopted by his New Labour successors – were largely responsible for it. There is, however, another account for the sustained ‘crime drop’ of the past two decades. First, the fall in crime, or a stable crime rate, have occurred in other comparable societies which have not adopted such ‘tough on crime’ measures as Britain and the USA. At the very least, one can say, with Zimring, that we do not know with any certainty why these sudden crime drops occurred.12 Secondly, new thinking about crime prevention, based on the idea that much crime is opportunistic, and can be deterred, without its ‘displacement’, by situational crime control measures, such as ‘target hardening’ and enhanced surveillance, had led to measures introduced on so widespread a scale that falls in burglary and car crime were far more likely to be due to their effect rather than that of imprisonment. Though Michael Howard had

Conclusion

251

backed many such measures, especially CCTV, they had not appeared overnight but as the result of a decade or more of research and experiment by the very civil servants that Howard caricatured as fatalistically passive.13 It was a major irony of criminal justice policymaking that crime prevention measures came to successful fruition in the mid-1990s only for their effectiveness to be misconstrued as proof that ‘prison works’. The ultimate conclusion to be drawn is that radical attempts to redress problems arising from an imbalance between principles, such as that between just deserts, rehabilitation and deterrence, and policy, such as the pursuit of penal moderation, need favourable times in which to become established. And the fateful twist to achieving that outcome in the late eighties and early nineties was the steep rise in the crime rate of approaching fifty per cent in the space of a few years, and its widespread attribution to ‘soft on crime’ penal policies rather than structural changes such as deindustrialisation, deepening inequality and the upsurge of a ‘winner-loser culture’.14 The primacy accorded just deserts in the 1991 Act proved too anti-utilitarian in the absence of a clearer statement of how it should be applied in practice. Even so forthright a champion of the need for radical liberal reform as Lord Woolf commented that to ignore past criminal convictions is ‘very artificial’.15 In the end, the danger of allowing policy and practice to revert, after a failed attempt at radical innovation, to the status quo ante, is that their faults are restored also, often in aggravated form. Much the same logic applies as in the celebrated essay on ‘broken windows’ and crime control by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling.16 Just as broken windows, if left unfixed, may be taken as a cue by the unruly to vandalise the rest of the building, so high rates of crime, if left untended, will tip a neighbourhood into decline by driving out the respectable and attracting the deviant. Extending the analogy, the abandonment or rejection of innovative policies can relegitimise the very faults they were designed to address. The 1991 Act and the Woolf Report were ‘windows of opportunity’ to do something fundamental to change penal policy and practice for the better. That they were over-hastily ‘broken’ or inadequately replaced has led, after well over two decades, to the doubling in size of the penal system. After the decade of ‘austerity’ from 2010, substantial cuts to the courts, police, prisons and probation have left the criminal justice system, as a whole, plagued by what successive reports by Inspectorates and Select Committees have found to be a criminal justice and penal system that is unable to cope with the demands placed upon it. Although law and order politics is somewhat ‘cooler’ than it was it in the mid1990s, there is little sign of significant opportunity for radical reconstruction in the foreseeable future.

Notes 1 Rock, P. (2019a) op. cit. 2 See, for example, Hough, M. (1995) Anxiety about Crime: Findings from the 1994 British Crime Survey, London: HMSO; Farrell, S., Jackson, J. and Gray, E. (2009) Social Order and Fear of Crime in Contemporary Times, Oxford: Clarendon Press

252

Explaining the Trends

3 The term was employed by Leon Radzinowicz in relation to the far greater expansion of punitive sentencing in the USA which has led to unprecedented levels of mass imprisonment there: see his 1991, Penal regressions’, Cambridge Law Journal, 50: 422–444 4 Reiner, R. (2020) Social Democratic Criminology, London: Routledge 5 There is a burgeoning criminological literature on the subject of the political economy of punishment. See in particular Michael Cavadino and James Dignan, 2006, Penal Systems: A Comparative Approach, London: Sage; Nicola Lacey, 2008, The Prisoners’ Dilemma: Political Economy and Punishment in Contemporary Democracies, Cambridge University Press; David Garland, 2001, The Culture of Control, Oxford University Press; Michael Tonry (ed.), 2007, Crime, Punishment, and Politics in Comparative Perspective, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lacey, N., Soskice, D. and Hope, D. (2018) Understanding the determinants of penal policy: Crime, culture and comparative political economy, Annual Review of Criminology, 1, 195–217; Melossi, D., Sozzo, M. and Brandariz-Garcia, J.A. (2018) (eds.) The Political Economy of Punishment Today, London: Routledge. For the origins of this approach see Katherine Beckett and Bruce Western, ‘Governing social marginality: Welfare, incarceration and the transformation of state policy’ in David Garland (ed.) 2001, Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences, London: Sage 6 Wacquant, L. (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press 7 See Garland, D. 1985, op. cit., for the growing influence of welfare on punishment in Britain and Downes, D. 1988, op. cit. for a comparison between the Netherlands and England and Wales since 1945 8 Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2021) When crime policies travel: Exploring cross-national policy transfer in crime control, in Tonry, M. (ed.) Crime and Justice, Vol. 50, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 9 James Q. Whitman, 2003, Harsh Justice: Criminal Punishment and the Widening Divide between America and Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press: 124–25 10 But see Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2007) Policy Transfer and Criminal Justice, Buckingham: Open University Press, for significant limits to such influence 11 As, for example, in his interview by Peter Hennessey, BBC, 31st August 2017, and in his interview with the present authors cited above 12 Zimring, F. (2007) The Great American Crime Decline, New York: Oxford University Press 13 See the chapter on ‘the pursuit of innovation’ in Downes, D. (2021) op. cit. Among those government researchers who had the greatest influence foremost was arguably Ron Clarke who worked in the Home Office between 1964 and 1984 and subsequently became Professor of Criminology at Rutgers University, Newark, NJ. See Mayhew, P. and Hough, M. (2012) Situational crime prevention: The Home Office origins, in Tilley, N. and Farrell, G. (eds.) The Reasoning Criminologist: Essays in honour of R.V.G. Clarke, London: Routledge 14 The phrase is Oliver James’s, in his 1995, Juvenile Violence in a Winner-Loser Culture, London: Free Association Books. However, the concept is related to that of anomie, especially that based on Robert Merton’s reworking of the original theory of Emile Durkheim 15 In interview April 2014. See Ch. 6 in Downes, D. Vol. 3 on penal policy in this series 16 J. Q. Wilson and G. Kelling (1982) ‘Broken windows: the police and neighbourhood safety’, Atlantic Monthly, March, 29–38. See also P. Zimbardo, 1973, ‘A field experiment in auto shaping’ in Colin Ward (ed.), Vandalism, London: Architectural Press, 85–90; and Downes, D. (1995) ‘Broken windows of opportunity: crime, inequality and employment’ in Helen Jones and John Lansley (eds.) Social Policy and the City, Aldershot: Avebury, 135–148

Part Three

10 Postscript Law and Order Politics, 1997–2010

As we have seen, the belief that growing affluence would lead to generally improved social conditions, including reductions in offending, came under increasing strain in the post-Second World War period in England and Wales as growing economic prosperity was accompanied by apparently ever-rising crime levels. From the early 1970s onward crime and penal policy came increasingly to occupy a central place in political and public debate. As faith in rehabilitative interventions declined, so an increasingly harsh form of penal populism emerged which placed great emphasis on the general deterrent and incapacitative effects of imprisonment and disparaged welfare-oriented approaches as ‘soft on crime’. Although stirrings of a more populist and punitive penal environment were noticeable from the mid-1970s, it appears that the decisive shift occurred in the early 1990s when both the two main political parties locked themselves into a second order consensus around the need to be seen to be ‘tough on crime’. Though the Thatcher administrations of the 1980s had often talked tough on crime, the failure of the Labour Party to mount any significant challenge on this front meant that the tough talk was not necessarily matched in policy terms. John Major’s premiership was rather different however, partly once Michael Howard arrived in the Home Office with his ‘prison works’ rhetoric and policy, but crucially because the Labour Party began significantly to shift its position on law and order matters under Tony Blair, initially as shadow Home Secretary and subsequently as party leader. The consequence was that Michael Howard arrived in office to be greeted with a challenge that no Tory Home Secretary had faced before – a shadow who sought to occupy the very law and order territory that the Conservative Party had monopolised for the previous decade and a half. Tony Blair scored some quick successes and, despite increasingly frantic efforts, there appeared little Howard could do to outflank Labour on law and order. Blair’s success lay in marrying Labour’s traditional concerns about the deep-lying structural causes of crime with a new-found willingness to embrace a tough stance toward punishment. The outcome was a law and order auction conducted between the two front benches, the outcome of which could most obviously be seen in the rapidly rising prison population. Between 1990 and 1993 the total prison population in England and Wales remained relatively

DOI: 10.4324/9781003330981-13

256

Part Three

static at around 44,000. It rose to over 48,000 by 1994 and then in three successive years rose by five, eight and ten per cent annually, reaching what to many seemed an astonishing 61,000 by the time Blair’s ‘New Labour’ government came to power in 1997. As we outlined earlier, such was New Labour’s success in wresting the law and order issue from the Tories that by the time the 1997 election came around, the matter had relatively little impact on the campaign. Indeed, one authoritative estimate suggests that law and order was only the third among the ‘domestic social issues’ in the campaign, and only around eleventh overall in terms of the amount of coverage policy issues received in 1997.1 Of much greater importance was the Conservatives’ loss of reputation for economic competence and, though to a lesser degree, for leadership and probity.2 Nevertheless, the pivotal role that law and order politics played in Labour’s successful reinvention, and the continued strength of the belief in the political importance of a tough on crime message held by Blair and others, meant there appeared little likelihood that once in government there would be any dramatic shift of course by a Labour Home Secretary. Far from it for, as we will detail, if anything, Jack Straw and his successors remained every bit as willing to espouse a tough on crime message in office as they had in opposition. One early indicator was New Labour’s treatment of Michael Howard’s Crime (Sentences) Act 1997. As we outlined earlier, though the mandatory sentencing provisions in the legislation were controversial, Labour in opposition was determined not to lose any ground it had fought so hard to win from the Conservatives, and left any formal resistance to the Bill either to the smaller parties or to the House of Lords. The legislation passed before the general election, but it fell to the new government to implement it. Two of the mandatory sentencing elements – the less controversial ones covering sentences for sexual and violent crimes and for drug trafficking – were implemented soon after the election. Both the third mandatory provision – for third-time burglars – and the ‘honesty in sentencing’ proposal were initially left dormant. Indeed, it had been expected that this might well remain the case, the new government having the comfort of a huge parliamentary majority and under no obvious pressure to implement the most contentious of the Act’s elements. In early 1999, however, after two years in office, it appeared the Home Secretary could resist no longer, and an announcement was made that the final of the ‘three strikes’ provisions was to be implemented. Some commentators at the time argued that the Home Secretary’s initial reluctance to implement this provision was not based on any principled objection to the power but ‘was founded solely on the likelihood (or, rather, unlikelihood) of adequate resources being available’. Similarly, they suggested that its eventual implementation had more to do with projecting a tough image than any in principle support for the change.3 As we noted earlier, in its 1997 general election manifesto Labour had continued its assault on the Conservative record on crime, saying that during their time in office, ‘crime has doubled and many more criminals get away with their crimes: the number of people convicted has fallen by a third, with only one crime in 50 leading to a conviction. This is the worst record of any government since the Second World

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 257 War – and for England and Wales the worst record of any major industrialised country.’ It then sought to reinforce the message claiming that: ‘Last year alone violent crime rose 11 per cent.’4 What the manifesto carefully avoided noting was that the period since 1993 showed something of a counter trend. Indeed, the beginnings of what appeared to be a sizeable crime decline meant that when it came to office in 1997 the law and order environment that confronted New Labour was radically different from what the majority of its post-war predecessors had faced. Crime, according to most measures, was in decline. The crime survey suggested crime had peaked in the mid-1990s and had been falling for at least two full years by the time of the election victory. According to the crime survey, in the decade since its peak around 1995, vehicle theft and burglary had fallen by over half, violent crime by over 40% and vandalism by a quarter. Recorded crime statistics also showed burglary to have declined by close to half. The big difference between the two data sources was in relation to violence, the administrative changes to recorded crime statistics leading to what appeared to be a substantial rise in violent crime. Nonetheless, most informed observers suggested they tended also to support the general picture of a decline in crime though, predictably, the absence of an unequivocal message from recorded crime statistics allowed the Conservatives some leeway to challenge Labour’s claims. It was entirely understandable that when contesting the 1997 general election that New Labour stuck closely to the law and order rhetoric it had developed in opposition. What perhaps came as more of a surprise to some observers was Labour’s continuing commitment to tough rhetoric, and often quite punitive practice, during its years in power. New Labour’s devotion to ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric 100

80

60

40 ALL BCS CRIME

0

1995

1997

Domestic burglary

1999

All vehicle theft

2001/02 2002/03 2003/04 2004/05 ints ints ints ints

Figure 10.1 Trends in Crime (Crime Survey), 1995–2005 Source: Crown Copyright

All violence

258

Part Three

was by now well-established and successive Home Secretaries, and as we have suggested the Prime Minister in particular, continued to see such a stance as crucial to the government’s political reputation in general and to its likely electoral success more particularly. Not only was there little appetite for a change of direction but New Labour, unlike the situation the Tories enjoyed in the 1980s, were unlikely to be offered an easy ride on law and order. Importantly, there was also strong evidence that despite the apparently sizeable and ongoing falls in crime, at least in one respect public opinion remained resolutely unaffected. From its earliest days the crime survey had included questions about perceptions of changes in national and local crime. In 1998, some three to four years after crime had apparently peaked, three in five respondents reported that they felt crime had increased in the previous two years, approximately half of whom thought it had increased ‘a lot’. As we noted earlier, although the trends reported by the crime survey seemed clear, police-recorded crime statistics were less clear, not least as a consequence of administrative changes to collection procedures that led to an increase in crime figures,5 particularly where recorded violent crime was concerned. Alistair Campbell,6 in his characteristically blunt manner laid the blame for this at the Home Secretary’s door: ‘In a classic Jackesque [Straw] kind of move, he had changed the system for recording crime so that although crime was in fact falling the figures showed a twenty per cent rise’. Tony Blair, he reported, ‘was in a real rage about crime figures’.7 Although the figures rose and fell, the general pattern was that a majority of the population continued to feel that the national crime rate was increasing (see fig. 10.2). Moreover, in terms of public priorities, from the late 1990s onwards a higher proportion of the electorate felt spending on police and

Figure 10.2 Beliefs about changes in the national crime rates, 1996–2002/03 Source: Simmons, J. and Dodd, T. (eds.) (2003) Crime in England and Wales 2002–03, Home Office Statistical Bulletin 07/03

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 259 prisons was a greater priority than welfare benefits, though the reverse had been the case throughout the 1980s.8 Had New Labour ever felt moved to consider a change of direction, its concern to keep the public onside would have given them considerable pause for thought. As we shall shortly discuss, the first Labour administration (1997–2001) pursued a fairly extensive legislative programme. Even so, the degree to which it was able to pursue its law and order priorities was arguably somewhat constrained by its decision to keep government expenditure within the limits set out by its Conservative predecessor. In the lead-up to the 1997 election Labour had been confronted with the usual claims that it was a ‘tax and spend’ party and its response had been to commit to Tory public spending levels for the first two years of a new government. Indeed, Gordon Brown later suggested that during those early years the New Labour government had tightened spending discipline far beyond anything Ken Clarke might have done had the Conservatives been returned to power.9 The anticipated ending of these restrictions, and Labour’s return to power with a second sizeable parliamentary majority, roughly coincided with the publication of a new 10-year plan for criminal justice.10 The plan documented what was described as an unprecedented rise in resources, and the availability of such significant expenditure it said, would enable the government significantly to expand police numbers, as well as increase the capacity of the CPS and the courts. It would also help fund new prison places and improve the ability of the new national probation service to cope with helping prisons resettle after release from prison. It highlighted the increased funding for tackling drug-related offending, including the establishment of the National Treatment Agency, and it noted developments affecting victims of crime including the new

Figure 10.3 ‘Public Order and Safety’: Annual Average Real Increase in Spending11 Source: Self-generated

260

Part Three

right to submit a ‘victim personal statement’ to the court, together with improved procedures for consulting and notifying victims of violent and sexual offences when offenders were to be released from prison. By contrast with 1997, by the time of the 2001 general election Labour was keen to draw attention to the seemingly downward trend in crime, and to its claimed contribution to that trend, saying: ‘Overall crime is down ten per cent in Labour Britain, recorded crime down seven per cent, and police numbers are now rising. Our strategy is clear and consistent – tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.’12 It went on to highlight its ten-year plan, saying its overall goal of reducing crime depended on ‘reform of the criminal justice system at every level, from police to courts to prison.’ By contrast, the Conservatives claimed that ‘Labour have talked tough on law and order but they have failed to deliver. Police numbers have fallen, and violent crime is on the rise.’13 It continued, ‘Conservatives will trust the instincts of the mainstream majority on law and order. That means more police and less bureaucracy holding them back. It also means tougher sentences for some crimes and more honest sentencing for all crimes.’ It highlighted the importance of persistent offending by young people and promised a ten-fold increase in the places available in Secure Training Centres. The Liberal Democrats criticised Labour for attempting to sound as tough as the Conservatives but failing to be any more effective and proposed a shift in emphasis away from prison building and toward crime prevention. The Labour government was criticised for a fall in police numbers, and the Liberal Democrats, as all the main parties did, promised to reverse that trend though, in a departure suggested it would create a new Community Safety Force to reinforce frontline policing.14 Law and order played relatively little part during the 2001 election campaign, and Labour’s position came under little threat and attracted relatively little media coverage.15 What then did New Labour seek to do during its first two administrations, to what extent did they depart from their Conservative predecessors and what was the impact on policing and the penal system?

Flagship Legislation Labour approached its first term in office having had considerable time to prepare. Such was the success with which many of Labour’s ‘hostages to fortune’ had successfully been ditched, including their previously vulnerable position on law and order, that it seemed clear a good two years before a likely general election that John Major would not win a second term of office. In the lead up to the election Labour produced a range of documents detailing its likely policy direction. At the core of its proposed home affairs policy were two broad areas of activity: reform of youth justice on the one hand, and an overhaul of arrangements for what by now was widely referred to as community safety on the other. The two formed the core of the new government’s flagship criminal justice legislation, the Crime and Disorder Bill. In an article in The Times in April 1998, Home Secretary Jack Straw outlined the new government’s position on law and order:

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 261 What pleases me the most is not just the content of the Bill, but the fact that it is rooted in the experience of local communities across the country. The Bill includes the new Anti-Social Behaviour Orders to help to combat the kind of neighbourhood nuisance and disorder which faced my constituents, major reforms of the youth justice system (including swifter procedures), measures to ensure young offenders and their parents face up to the consequences of their wrongdoing, new offences to tackle racial violence, and proposals to break the vicious circle of drugs and crime . . . For too many years, the concerns of those who live in areas undermined by crime and disorder were ignored or overlooked by people whose comfortable notions of human behaviour were matched only by their comfortable distance from its worst excesses. And for all its claims to socialist principle and a working-class base, the Labour Party of the early 1980s conspired in this approach by handing over control of policy to a vanguard of single-issue pressure groups. The Labour Programme published in 1982, served as a prelude to the 1983 general election manifesto. It represented the zenith of pressure group pressure. Running to 280 pages it included every conceivable demand and request of just about every organisation which could be bothered to make one . . . In contrast, there was very little of substance on law and order. There was no pressure group speaking up for the interests of those who suffered from the shocking increase in criminal behaviour. So the victims’ voice went unheard, even though it was Labour’s natural constituency which was most affected by the rise in crime. As a result, our analysis and solutions were rejected by the very people we sought to help. It was only when my party began to ensure that our policies were relevant to our constituents themselves that we started a serious examination of the problems which communities faced and how we could begin to solve them. I make no apology for this . . . This is why I believe the Crime and Disorder Bill represents a triumph of democratic politics – in truth a victory over detached metropolitan elites.16 The youth justice reforms had been widely trailed and, when published, there was little in the Crime and Disorder Bill that was unexpected. New Labour’s command and control instincts were visible early on. One of Jack Straw’s first moves had been to establish a Youth Justice Task Force with the aim of maintaining the momentum developed in opposition. It was chaired by Norman Warner,17 and its secretary had been one of the authors of the Audit Commission’s influential Misspent Youth report18, Mark Perfect. Building on the Audit Commission’s criticisms, the proposals in the Bill when published were firmly managerialist, creating a new overarching body, the Youth Justice Board, emphasising inter-agency co-operation, not least via the newly introduced Youth Offending Teams (YOTs), together with an overarching aim for the youth justice system and the creation of

262

Part Three

a range of performance indicators. In due course Warner became Chairman of the Youth Justice Board, and Perfect its first Chief Executive.19 One of the Crime and Disorder Act’s signal changes was the scrapping of the extant system of cautioning, and the introduction of reprimands (for less serious offences) and a final warning. The use of multiple cautioning, in particular, had led to widespread criticism and, via the Audit Commission’s proposals, to Labour’s introduction of a ‘two strikes’ approach that deliberately reduced police discretion and limited opportunities for diversion. Perhaps more controversially the Act repealed doli incapax, the rebuttable principle that had limited the criminal liability of young offenders aged under 14. The practical consequence of this reform was to lower the age of criminal responsibility to 10, reversing a change introduced by the Children and Young Persons Act 1969. Jack Straw defended the move in uncompromising fashion, arguing that the idea ‘that children aged 10 to 13 do not know the difference between serious wrongdoing and simple naughtiness flies in the face of common-sense’.20 At the same time, parental responsibility for their children’s offending was implicit in the attachment of criminal sanctions to those refusing to attend parenting classes. It in effect created a presumption of dual responsibility for the offending behaviour of children aged 10–14.21 Working within the paradigm that was to become known as ‘what works’, of which more later, and using the language of risk and protective factors, New Labour introduced a range of new preventive orders, 22 including the child safety order, the local child curfew order and the sex offender order. Much influenced by a particular reading of Wilson and Kelling’s ‘Broken Windows’ article, the Crime and Disorder Act also included the new antisocial behaviour order (ASBO). Originally called the ‘community safety order’ it was renamed in order to avoid confusion with the proposed ‘community protection order’, the latter eventually becoming the sex offender order. The ASBO was designed to combat behaviour ‘likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress to one or more persons not of the same household’. Applications could be made by the police and by local authorities, and were civil orders demanding only a civil burden of proof. Orders included a series of potential prohibitions, designed to protect local people from further anti-social behaviour. Most controversially, breach of this civil order was a criminal offence carrying a maximum sentence in a magistrates’ court of six months and in the Crown Court of five years. As one set of senior academic critics observed, it appeared odd ‘that a government which purports to be interested in tackling social exclusion at the same times promotes a legislative measure destined to create a whole new breed of outcasts.’23 New Labour also extended the Conservative Party’s existing custodial plans, continuing the building programme for Secure Training Centres for juvenile offenders and introducing a new, generic custodial sentence, the Detention and Training Order (DTO). Replacing the Secure Training Order (for 12–14-yearolds) and detention in a YOI (for 15–17-year-olds), and running from a minimum of six months to a maximum of two years, half the sentence was to be served in

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 263 custody and half in the community. The ‘reparation order’ required young offenders to make such reparation as was specified in the order either to a specified person(s) or ‘to the community at large’. This was the beginnings of New Labour’s attempts to utilise restorative justice principles within the youth justice system. The Home Office junior minister at the time, Alun Michael, suggested that one of the problems of the current system was that ‘Young offenders are spectators at legalistic, adversarial court proceedings and often hear lawyers making excuses for their offending. With the restorative approach there is no way for youngsters – or their parents – to hide from their personal responsibilities.’24 Similarly, under the ‘action plan order’ juveniles were to be supervised by a ‘responsible officer’ (probation officer, social worker or member of the YOT) and would undertake agreed actions for a period of three months. Also linked to these developments was the ‘parenting order’. The Act gave the courts powers to require parents to attend counselling and guidance sessions and to impose ‘requirements’ aimed at ensuring that they exercised control over their children’s behaviour. The rationale behind their introduction, according to the Home Office, could be understood in the following way: ‘The principal aim of the youth justice system . . . is to prevent offending by children and young people. Parents have an important role to play in this; they have a responsibility to the child, and to the community to take proper care and control of their children, and to do what they can to prevent offending. Some parents may need help, support, and encouragement and direction in this. This is the objective behind the parenting order’.25 The reach of the order, like many other preventive orders, was very considerable, for parents were to be identified not only because their child had been convicted of a criminal offence, but where for example they had been made subject to another order such as an ASBO, or if the parents themselves had been convicted for failing to ensure that their children attended school. New Labour’s initial youth justice reforms were therefore an interesting amalgam of managerialism, interventionism and punitiveness, allied to an interest in experimentation with the idea of restorative justice.26 The other major element of the Crime and Disorder Act concerned community safety, an area rather like youth justice that had been flagged up as a priority in New Labour’s pre-election publications. The 1997 general election manifesto committed Labour to implementing the Morgan Committee’s major recommendations, and these found their way into the Crime and Disorder Bill. The previous Conservative administration had been reluctant to follow Morgan’s recommendation that local authorities be given powers to lead and direct partnership working in this field. In the event, Labour also decided to sidestep potential difficulties by proposing that partnerships take their lead jointly from local authorities and the police. The legislation therefore imposed upon both a statutory duty, in cooperation with other bodies such as police authorities, probation committees and health authorities to formulate and implement ‘a strategy for the reduction of crime and disorder in their area’. To do this they were required to review patterns of crime and disorder in the local area, publish a report and seek local views about

264

Part Three

appropriate ways to tackle the problems identified. Local community safety plans were to include both long-term and short-term performance targets against which progress against objectives could be assessed.27 ‘Consultation’ was central to the community safety elements of the CDA. In addition to identifying the police and local authority (county/city, district and unitary councils) as the ‘responsible authorities’ to lead crime and disorder partnerships, it also specified a number of ‘co-operating bodies’ such as the police authority, probation service, and health authorities also expected to be involved, and laid down various ‘invitees’ who were to be invited to participate in partnerships, including a wide range of community groups and statutory and voluntary bodies. Additionally, partnerships were encouraged to build on existing consultation arrangements, not least those established by the Police and Magistrates’ Courts Act 1994, under section 106 of the PACE 198428 and as a consequence of the government’s ‘Best Value’ initiative. This initiative, which focused on economy, efficiency, effectiveness and quality in the delivery of local services, also highlighted the need to extend the involvement of the public, both as consumers of local services and as local taxpayers, via more effective consultation arrangements (DETR 1998). Moreover, the Local Government Act 1999 placed a duty upon local authorities to consult local people in the planning and delivery of public services. These new arrangements, in some ways the culmination of a decades-long move toward greater partnership working and entailed ‘a set of criminological assumptions (the new ‘criminologies of everyday life’); a style of governance (‘responsibilisation’; ‘governing-at-a-distance’); and a repertoire of techniques and knowledges, all of which are quite novel and at variance from the previously established ways of thinking and acting’.29 Nevertheless, as Garland observed, the attitude of elected officials toward these new structures and systems for dealing with local issues of crime and safety was never less than ambivalent. The desire to control, or direct, from the centre was ever-present. Indeed, from the earliest days there were indications that government was impatient with the pace and nature of reform. Local partnerships were perceived as being slow to implement the new system of auditing, consultation and strategy-development. A lack of expertise, the continued dominance of the police and the inadequacy of partnership working all hampered developments in community safety. The local groupings created by the CDA were initially referred to as ‘community safety partnerships’, reflecting a shift away from situationally dominated models of crime prevention toward the incorporation of social crime prevention measures. Although the idea of community safety had dominated Labour’s policy pronouncements in this field in the years before coming to power, subsequently it was gradually superseded by that of crime and disorder, with the governments preferred description of ‘crime and disorder reduction partnerships’ becoming the accepted terminology in England.30 The change in emphasis reflected elements of New Labour thinking and, indeed, findings from the crime survey31 and elsewhere, with discussions of crime increasingly being accompanied by reference

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 265 to ‘disorder’ (or antisocial behaviour), and also slowly shifting attention away from broad-based social inclusion initiatives toward targeted crime and disorder reduction. It was simultaneously a widening of concerns to include behaviours that might not reach the criminal threshold, and a narrowing of means by which the targeted problems might be tackled. During the course of the second Labour administration it became increasingly clear that government was less than convinced by the effectiveness of what were increasingly referred to as Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs). A governmental review found that ‘a significant number of partnerships struggle to maintain a full contribution from key agencies and even successful ones are not sufficiently visible, nor we think accountable, to the public as they should be’.32 Part of the problem facing partnerships was the relentless pace at which the Home Office appeared to introduce new initiatives and impose new demands, culminating in a further review and eventually, in its third term, the Police and Justice Act 2006. The Act loosened audit requirements but extended the existing requirement to consider the crime and disorder implications of their decisions to encompass antisocial behaviour and substance misuse. In parallel with other changes taking place in policing, the new requirements also stressed the importance of proactive intelligence-gathering as well, once again, as reinforcing central and local frameworks for co-ordinating policing and community safety activities. Although the CDA emphasised ‘local solutions for local problems’, this was some distance from what occurred in practice. As one academic observer noted, the ‘hierarchical structure of managerial control, which runs from the Treasury to the Home Office, to regional government offices, to . . . CDRPs, and . . . to neighbourhoods, puts neighbourhoods not in the vanguard, but at the end of the chain of command: there to ‘perform’ according to specified requirements of the centre’.33 Arguably the most egregious example of central influence around this time involved what became known as the Street Crimes Initiative. Launched after a crime summit at 10 Downing Street, it was the product in particular of Blair’s concern to be seen to be responding to rises in recorded street crime in the early years of the new century. Sensing a crisis, Blair and new Home Secretary, David Blunkett, supported by Michael Barber, appointed to run the government’s ‘Delivery Unit’, decided that it would be appropriate to call together COBR and to use that mechanism to drive some quick change. The first meeting, in March 2002, was attended by a large proportion of the cabinet, a wide range of officials, and police representatives.34 Under the Initiative ten police forces that had the most pressing street crime problems were directed to focus increased resources in an attempt to mitigate the problem. During a six-month period, each reported on a weekly basis to a named Cabinet minister, providing local crime statistics relating to street robbery and every ‘Friday, David Blunkett and Blair saw the figures for the country and for each of the ten forces.’ Then, acting on their behalf, the Delivery Unit ‘were able to question relatively poor performance and challenge excuses.’35 The Initiative

266

Part Three

was part of an ongoing struggle between the centre and local police forces and CDRPs over the nature and direction of local crime control strategies. In Michael Barber’s view this led to a variety of positive changes: The profile of the initiative, the strong application of deliverology and the huge commitment of prime ministerial time and energy had raised the stakes to a very high level. In fact, meeting the September target successfully was only part of the gain; a much-needed new momentum had been brought to criminal justice reform too, the relationship between government and police was strengthened . . . and across the range of institutions responsible for bringing integrity to law, order and justice, new and constructive relationships had been forged.36 By contrast, in some force areas the initiative was perceived as working directly against locally consulted and agreed priorities, and outside the government’s Delivery Unit there appeared to be few that were happy. A joint inspection report, led by HMIC, concluded that although it had had some positive impact on some undeperforming working relationships, in others it had simply served to highlight the largely ineffective nature of Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships.37

Sentencing One of New Labour’s electoral commitments, and one that was relatively quickly acted upon, was the ‘incorporation’ into law of the European Convention on Human Rights. The purpose of incorporating the Convention was, as Jack Straw put it, ‘to enable the British people to access their rights in the British courts, rather than having to go to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg’.38 More centrally in sentencing territory, one of New Labour’s other concerns focused on the idea of more formalised sentencing guidance. This had been in debate for most of the 1990s, and although the 1991 Act had sought to impose some new restrictions, in the view of some it had failed sufficiently to reform the ‘transmission mechanism’ that translated general rules and principles found in statute into consistent and coherent practice in court.39 The consequence was often a considerable gap between policy and practice in sentencing. In the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, Labour took the opportunity to respond, introducing a Sentencing Advisory Panel and also putting on a statutory footing the provision of guideline judgements by the Court of Appeal. The Sentencing Advisory Panel became operational in July 1999, with its initial role being to provide ‘advice’ to the Court of Appeal which then had the power, though not the duty, to implement draft guidelines. A subsequent Home Office review of sentencing was critical of this process and recommended a number of potential ways forward. Further attempts by government to reduce discretion and increase consistency were introduced via the Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act 2000 and the Criminal Justice and Court Services Act 2000. The outcome of the sentencing review was eventually enacted in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 which introduced the formal

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 267 Sentencing Guidelines Council – advised by the Sentencing Advisory Council – with responsibility for issuing guidelines to all courts.40 New Labour Home Secretaries appeared to be driven by two potentially competing imperatives where sentencing and the courts were concerned. On the one hand, Labour’s modernising agenda led to a number of reforms both to the organisation of the courts and to sentencing frameworks. Simultaneously, however, populist pressures, whether inbuilt or external, meant reforms were often accompanied by, and sometimes influenced by, a punitive rhetoric. The balancing act was a difficult one and was by no means made easier by the huge and growing costs of the prison system and some continuing, if often unspoken by ministers, scepticism about the efficacy of increasing imprisonment.41 As always, when confronted with problematic choices, one political solution is to set up an inquiry. In this area Jack Straw set up two: the Review of Criminal Courts in England and Wales under Lord Justice Auld,42 and the aforementioned Review of the Sentencing Framework under John Halliday.43 Again the balancing act was visible. There was a desire to modernise sentencing practice but, nonetheless, the overall aim of the reform process was said to be to ‘rebalance’ the criminal justice system in favour of victims and witnesses at the expense of defendants. In addition to the Sentencing Guidelines Council, the 2003 Act introduced a series of changes to sentencing options, including the new sentences of Custody Plus (custodial sentences of less than 12 months combining custodial terms of between two weeks and three months with a ‘licence period’ of at least six months), intermittent custody (custodial sentences to be served in short blocks), and Custody Minus (suspended custodial sentences with a presumption that they would be activated if breached).

Restorative justice New Labour’s youth justice was influenced by a variety of imperatives – from the managerialist to the populist. This was also the field where Labour began its most significant experiment with restorative justice. It has been argued that in comparison with many other jurisdictions, ‘the concept of restorative justice has been relatively slow to take root in England, at least at the level of mainstream developments that are intended to operate as an integrated part of the regular criminal justice system.’44 Stand-alone initiatives had a somewhat longer history,45 but it was under New Labour that more substantial reform took place. Thames Valley Police had begun a system of police-led conferencing in the mid-1990s,46 and toward the end of the decade it caught Jack Straw’s attention, subsequently influencing other restorative justice developments, not least the reformed cautioning system introduced by the CDA, with ministers considering that such additions would ‘make final warnings more meaningful and effective’.47 The Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act 1999 introduced a new primary sentencing disposal – the referral order – a mandatory sentence of between three and twelve months, for juveniles pleading guilty and convicted for the first time by the Youth Court.48 The consequence of the imposition of an order was that

268 Part Three the young offender was referred to a youth offender panel (YOP), consisting of two community representatives and one youth justice professional, with those present also including the offender and a parent and, in principle, the victim and their supporters. The idea was that such panels would be different from the formality of a court, with greater opportunity for the offender to speak and, where possible, the opportunity also for the offender and victim to meet and to talk about the offence. The outcome would be a ‘contract’ devised by and agreed with the offender, but that it should always include reparation to the victim or wider community and a programme of activity designed primarily to prevent further offending. The panels drew on at least three separate sources of experience: that of the Scottish children’s hearings system, family group conferencing and the history of victim-offender mediation in England and Wales.49 The referral order quickly came to account for a substantial proportion of all youth court disposals, though initial research produced mixed results.50 There was some evidence that, in terms of reoffending, the order proved more successful than the characteristics of the offenders subject to them might have suggested would be the case, but the generally low level of victim participation likely limited effectiveness in this regard.51 Although reparation orders, referral orders and related developments concerning victims of crime may have fallen well short of the ‘restorative justice revolution’52 some advocates had been calling for, this nevertheless represented a set of significant developments within youth justice. Nevertheless, there remained a number of tensions between such reforms and other aspects of New Labour’s youth justice. On the one hand, partly through what it had inherited, and partly through the strand of punitiveness that ran through its own reforms, the promotion of restorative justice occurred simultaneously with a continuing increase in the numbers of juveniles entering custody. Second, New Labour’s managerialism, and its concern with reducing time from offence to disposal, and on performance monitoring, did not always sit easily with the emphasis within restorative justice on community involvement and volunteer decision-making.53

Anti-social behaviour Although introduced by the CDA, both the ASBO and what became known as New Labour’s ‘anti-social behaviour agenda’ expanded considerably in the years after the passage of the Act. At the time of the CDA the ASBO was, though controversial, still a relatively minor element in the overall programme of reforms that was introduced. Initially there appeared to be some reluctance to seek the orders. New Labour remained convinced of their importance and senior government figures repeatedly sought to promote and invigorate the initiative. ASBOs were something of a bone of contention between Nos 10 and 11 Downing Street from time to time, Blair feeling that Brown tended to see antisocial behaviour as a ‘political’ issue rather than a ‘real’ one.54 The ‘quality of life’ ideas connected with ASB found expression beyond the Home Office, with the Department of the

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 269 Environment, for example, releasing a consultation document in 2002, which proposed a range of measures to local authorities to improve urban environments.55 Despite the initial guidance accompanying the CDA anticipating thousands of ASBOs per year, the total was only around 300 by 2001. An ‘antisocial behaviour unit’ was created within the Home Office, and a series of pieces of legislation added new powers to those made available in 1998. The range of people who could make an application for an order was widened – to include social landlords for example – and, following the Police Reform Act 2002, orders could also be made on conviction (becoming known as CRASBOs). Further strengthening of powers was introduced via the Antisocial Behaviour Act 2003 and gradually the numbers of orders being made rose. By 2005 most police force plans included targets either for the number of ASBOs to be sought or included a general aim to increase the number.56 The criticism of ASBOs never entirely disappeared, and by 2005 particular concern was being voiced about the impact of the orders on children and young people. The core of the concerns focused on the extensiveness of the orders, both in terms of their length and also with regard to what some considered to be the excessive number of prohibitions being imposed. Second, and in the face of official guidance, there was evidence some areas were failing to abide by consultative and partnership-oriented elements of the initiative, effectively cutting youth justice professionals out of the process. There were also concerns that authorities were applying for ASBOs without having attempted other potential remedial actions first. Perhaps most importantly, and this was linked to the nature of the orders and their requirements, the fear was that a significant number of young people that might otherwise have escaped custody were finding themselves incarcerated and, possibly, that ASBOs were being used as an evidential short cut for the police to fast track persistent young offenders into custody.57 The simultaneous expansion of this new form of contractualised social control58 and the increasing use of formal community and custodial penalties, raised serious concerns about the potential dangers of ‘net-widening’ and ‘mesh-thinning’,59 not dissimilar in some broad respects to what had occurred three decades earlier in relation to Care Orders.60 It was at this point that the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights weighed in: The ease of obtaining such orders, the broad range of prohibited behaviour, the publicity surrounding their imposition and the serious consequences of breach all gave rise to concerns. . . . What is so striking . . . about the multiplication of civil orders in the United Kingdom, is the fact that the orders are intended to protect not just specific individuals, but entire communities. This inevitably results in a very broad, and occasionally, excessive range of behaviour falling within their scope as the determination of what constitutes anti-social behaviour becomes conditional on the subjective views of any given collective . . . such orders look rather like personalised penal codes, where non-criminal behaviour becomes criminal for individuals who have

270

Part Three incurred the wrath of the community . . . I question the appropriateness of empowering local residents to take such matters into their own hands. This feature would, however, appear to be the main selling point of ASBOs in the eyes of the executive, one cannot help but wonder . . . whether their purpose is not more to reassure the public that something is being done – and, better still, by residents themselves – than the actual prevention of anti-social behaviour itself.61

Academic evaluation was also highly critical, describing the government’s ASB campaign as reinforcing a ‘declining standards’ narrative, negatively focused on young people.62 For New Labour, for the time being at least, it remained a central part of their overall strategy and its rationale, as well as being important to Labour’s tough on crime image.

Continued populism After 1997, Tony Blair continued to use law and order in much the way he had developed during the period in which Labour had been seeking a route back to power. Using the media was central to this strategy, as were initiatives that were believed to be likely to be popular both with the tabloid press and its readers. One of the more infamous of these initiatives, which were often apparently dreamt up at short notice and outside cabinet,63 was an idea that involved a new variant on ‘on-the-spot fines’. In this case, the headline-grabbing idea was that police might be given new powers to impose such an immediate penalty for, as Blair put it in a speech in June 2000, ‘A thug might think twice about kicking in your gate, throwing traffic cones around your street or hurling abuse into the night sky if he thought he might get picked up by the police, taken to a cashpoint and asked to pay an on the spot fine of, for example, £100.’64 There was tentative support from the Police Federation, but the bulk of the response was critical, and a good deal of it incredulous, not least because of the sheer impracticality of the proposal. Within a month Blair backed away from the idea, admitting that it was unworkable, and the Home Office Minister of State, Charles Clarke, was forced to defend the idea as having been only ‘a metaphor’. Indeed, it was far from plain sailing for Blair at this time, for just a month previously he had received a very rough ride from an unpredictable quarter: the Women’s Institute. His mistake had been to give a speech that was viewed as too obviously party political in front of an audience that liked to see itself as non-partisan. Displaying an unusual inflexibility Blair compounded his mistake by failing to change tack once slow hand clapping started, ploughing on with a speech that further antagonised those listening. The newspaper headlines undoubtedly made for uncomfortable reading.65 On various fronts Blair appeared to be feeling the pressure, and it was at this point that a series of his handwritten memos, leaked to the The Sun and The Times, offered further insight into how New Labour sought to manage the issue. In one memo, Blair drew attention to the need to be seen to respond to the Tony Martin

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 271 case – a controversy in which a homeowner had shot and killed a burglar in his home, was initially convicted of murder, a charge which that was later downgraded to manslaughter. In this instance, Blair suggested, perhaps they could ask: ‘a senior judge to look at changing the sentencing law, i.e. to allow lesser sentences than life. We also need far tougher rebuttal or alternatively action, re the allegations that jurors were intimidated.’ More generally: On crime we need to highlight the tough measures: compulsory tests for drugs before bail; . . . the extra number of burglars jailed under “three strikes and you’re out”. Above all, we must deal now with street crime, especially in London. When the figures are published for the six months to April, they will show a small, 4% rise in crime. But this will almost entirely be due to the rise in levels of street crime – mobile phones, bags being snatched. This will be worst in London. The Met police are putting in place measures to deal with it; but as ever we lack a tough public message along with the strategy. We should think now of an initiative, e.g. locking up street muggers. Something tough, with immediate bite, which sends a message through the system. Maybe, the driving licence penalty for young offenders. But this should be done soon, and I, personally, should be associated with it.66 The memo captured a number of characteristics of the somewhat febrile nature of New Labour’s approach to penal policymaking at the turn of the century and beyond. First, all too frequently it seemed, the government was in the grip of ‘initiativitis’, with even medium-term planning regularly knocked off course by ideas floated in the hope of short-term advantage. Ironically, for an administration that was in many respects wedded to image-management as a core component of governing, the consequence was often to confuse the public presentation of its criminal justice policymaking.67 Second, the short-termism was often a product of an attempt at news management, seeking to deflect attention from other matters or, once again, to use penal policy initiatives to bolster the government’s reputation. The same approach infused the Queen’s Speech at the end of the year when, among the initiatives announced, there were promises to introduce new measures to enable ‘the assets of crime barons’ to be seized, as well as new penalties for ‘drunken yobs, kerb crawlers and cowboy wheel-clampers’.68 These trends were undoubtedly facilitated by a series of other changes that had been taking place under New Labour and, in some cases, for some time longer. The rise of the ‘paperless office’, and the concomitant decline in the standard forms of record-keeping typical of the British civil service, fed into changes in the nature of (criminal justice) policymaking, a shift itself encouraged by dramatic changes in the civil service itself in which large numbers of highly experienced mandarins left the service. Indeed, preceding New Labour’s rise to power there had been a visibly growing frustration in government with traditional civil service methods of working, and under Blair this found form in a growing emphasis on service delivery, ‘implementation’ and ‘delivery’.69 As Blair put it, ‘I came to the conclusion that the traditional skill set of the Civil Service is not what is really required if you want to drive change. There is

272

Part Three

an inherent dysfunctionality in the gap between what we really want those systems to do today – implementation, delivery, performance – and what they are traditionally geared up to do, which is analysis and policy advice’.70 In his diaries in 2002, Alistair Campbell noted that Blair’s ‘continuing frustration at the lack of strategic capability in the main departments came out in virtually every note he wrote. I think we both felt frustrated that so much fell upon the centre, whilst departments complained that it was because we took things away from them. If they were more competent and capable, I think everyone would be happy’.71 Whatever the reason behind it, the final New Labour characteristic captured in the quote from the memo above, is that the hand on the tiller in matters of home affairs, in contrast with Margaret Thatcher’s administrations, often appeared to be the Prime Minister’s rather than the Home Secretary’s. Blair, it seemed, kept an ever-watchful eye on Home Office matters.

‘What works’ Among the many consequences of the tough on crime era of increased populism and greater punitiveness, one was the creation of a more distant relationship between government and scholars. Alongside its populism and punitiveness, however, as we have seen, penal policy also became increasingly influenced by a form of systemic managerialism,72 wherein government sought, using a variety of mechanisms, to promote greater consistency in the delivery of public services and to increase both efficiency and effectiveness via monitoring, measurement, and comparison. Such managerialism also had important implications for those tasked with the implementation of government policy. As David Faulkner observed, the overall aim was ‘to reduce the influence and discretion of supposedly self-interested service providers and career civil servants; to separate ‘purchasing’ from ‘providing’ or ‘delivery’; to focus on outcomes rather than process; and to create a ‘performance culture’ based on rewards for success and penalties for failure’.73 It was in Blair’s second term that what Michael Barber termed ‘deliverology’ came to the fore.74 This was manifested in the spread of performance targets, auditing, the use of league tables and a belief in the power of the private sector and markets to deliver organisational efficiency and valuefor-money. Although there was generally greater scepticism within New Labour when it came to both marketisation and the role of the private sector, nevertheless a developing impatience emerged, especially within Downing Street, with the apparent slowness of departments and public agencies to ‘deliver’ government policy.75 One outcome of public sector reform was to shift the focus of activity. In policing, the increasing emphasis on outcome measurement saw a gradual move back toward viewing ‘crime control’ as the core mission, and in youth justice the CDA established a new command and control system to oversee and monitor performance against the system’s new overarching and subsidiary objectives: ‘to prevent offending by children and young people’. Growing managerialism, and the centralisation it required, also prompted a shift in governmental attitudes toward

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 273 the types of knowledge perceived as necessary for the efficient functioning of such systems.76 Again, building on reforms initially introduced under its Conservative predecessor, New Labour’s ‘modernising government’ agenda emerged midway through its first term of office. At its core was the suggestion that ‘policy making must be soundly based on evidence of what works’.77 Crucially, at this time there appeared a mounting body of research that appeared to hold out the promise of greater success in a variety of areas of criminal justice, not least in identifying means of intervening in the lives of offenders in a manner that would likely reduce future reoffending.78 One of the most immediate consequences of the ‘what works’ agenda was the establishment of a £250m Crime Reduction Programme (CRP), with ten percent allocated to research, as part of the 1998 Comprehensive Spending Review in 1998. Despite all its promise, the trumpeting of claims as to its likely impact, its comparatively generous funding, and its avowed commitment to evidence-based policymaking, in the end the CRP and its related research programme was a disappointment, being largely ill-thought out and poorly executed. On the research side, although the Home Office significantly expanded its capacity, in the process it diluted its criminological expertise, and arguably restricted potential lessondrawing by seeking to impose a quite tightly defined model on the evaluative analyses related to the CRP: at the heart of which was a series of booklets and ‘toolkits’ centring on a commitment to economic cost-effectiveness analyses.79 The CRP itself was something of a damp squib, with huge resources being consumed by evaluators ‘to mount research that yielded lower benefits than expected either by ourselves or our funders’.80 Certainly, the programme did not provide the ‘evidence-base’ that government had imagined using as the basis for future policy development. In the narrow field of relationship between government and academic experts the consequence was a considerable cooling, with Ministers quickly tempering their faith in research.81 They were far from alone. Louise Casey, who had headed up the government’s Antisocial Behaviour Unit, later renamed the ‘Respect Unit’, was widely reported as having made a series of intemperate remarks in an after-dinner speech, which included a scathing dismissal of recent official advice on binge drinking. She then went on, as the Guardian reported it, to take ‘a swipe at Downing Street officials for being obsessed with laborious research and delays in formulating policy. “If No 10 says bloody ‘evidence-based policy’ to me one more time I’ll deck them.”’82

Trends in punishment 1997–2005 There can be little surprise that a decade or thereabouts that began with Michael Howard’s ‘prison works’ declaration and Tony Blair’s ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ soundbite, should see a very sizeable expansion in incarceration. The prison population had rapidly expanded from around 45,000 at the beginning of the 1990s to well over 60,000 by the time Labour took office. Although the growth was much less steep in Blair’s first administration, it continued its upward trend, and began to expand more markedly in the early 2000s.

274

Part Three

80,000 75,000 70,000 65,000 60,000 55,000 50,000 45,000 40,000 35,000 30,000 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 Major/Baker

Major Clarke

Blair/Straw

Blair/Blunkett

Major/Howard

Figure 10.4 Average Prison Population, 1990–2005: Prime Ministers and Home Secretaries

Source: Self-generated

There were three primary potential sources for this continued growth in prison numbers: an increase in the number of serious offences coming before the courts; an increase in the seriousness of the offences prosecuted, or an increase in sentence severity. A review of correctional services conducted in 2003 suggested that there was little evidence for the former,83 and other research found little support for the idea that offences before the courts were increasing in seriousness. Rather, the bulk of the evidence pointed to increasingly serious outcomes for those appearing in court. The proportion of offenders found guilty of an indictable offence receiving a custodial sentence rose from 15% in 1991 to 25% in 2001, and the chances of a first time domestic burglar receiving a custodial sentence increased from 27% in 1995 to 48% just five years later. Another indicator of generally increased punitiveness was the fact that it was offenders without any previous convictions that made up over half of the increase in those receiving custodial sentences for indictable offences between 1996 and 2003. Not only were custodial sentences now being imposed on offenders who would previously have been dealt with via other means, but there was evidence that sentence lengths were also increasing. Data from the correctional services review showed a particularly steep increase in offenders sentenced to up to one year in prison. The decade to 2004 saw a doubling of the number of male prisoners serving longer-term determinate sentences of four or more years, and an increase by substantially over half (57 per cent) of the number serving sentences of twelve months up to four years. The number of life sentence prisoners also increased 75 percent between 1994 and 2004 (see table 10.1). Similar trends were visible in the nature and use of community sentences, with fines and discharges declining markedly as the use of other, more intensive and intrusive penalties increased.84 The use of the fine dropped by 25% in the decade to 2001, with a similar if less stark drop in the use of discharges. By contrast, the

Table 10.1 Prison Population by Sentence Length, 1994–2004 1994

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

Remand ≤ 6 months 6–12 months 12 months to < 4 years 4 years to life Life

12,533 3,891 2,060 13,621

11,056 4,339 2,210 15,203

11,568 4,582 2,376 17,112

12,105 4,929 2,475 19,796

12,903 5,009 2,511 21,130

12,589 5,190 2,190 19,741

12,903 6,389 2,405 19,633

11,433 6,202 2,340 20,053

13,081 5,447 2,349 21,858

13,307 5,971 2,209 21,378

12,495 5,751 2,306 21,436

12,472 3,191

13,822 3,289

15,355 3,489

17,753 3,271

19,485 3,934

19,966 4,206

20,071 4,593

20,764 4,810

22,471 5,147

24,416 5,419

25,837 5,594

Source: RDS NOMS (2005) Offender Management Caseload Statistics 2004

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 275

Sentence Length

276

Part Three

Figure 10.5 Selected Sentences for Indictable Offences, 1986–2004 Source: Self-generated

proportion of convictions for an indictable offence resulting in a community sentence rose from 22% in 1991 to 32% a decade later. Once again the correctional services review found no evidence that such trends reflected changes offence seriousness or the nature of the offenders coming before the courts. Indeed, and again paralleling the broad pattern that had been found in custodial sentencing, the review found that two thirds of the increase in community sentences involved offenders with no previous convictions. One further contribution to the growing prison population was the increasing number of community penalties that were breached, as concerns about community penalties and a more managerialist environment led to a tougher compliance culture. Thus, although the proportion of orders that resulted in imprisonment declined substantially between 1993 and 2004, the huge increase in the absolute number of breaches meant that the number eventually ending in incarceration continued to increase steeply – increasing by almost half between 1998 and 2004.85

Labour’s Third Term Some seven years into power, with substantial parliamentary majorities and relatively little pressure from the Conservative opposition on law and order and with some colleagues who were less enthusiastic, Tony Blair showed little in the way of diminished enthusiasm for utilising crime and punishment as a means of burnishing New Labour’s credentials. In 2004, and against the advice of many colleagues, the Prime Minister insisted that all government departments publish five-year plans. The Home Office plan86 was largely unexceptional, outlining

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 277 continued policy initiatives in crime prevention, tackling anti-social behaviour and drug and alcohol use, together with developing a National Offender Management Service and new means of tackling organised crime. David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, gave a fairly routine speech in the House of Commons to mark its launch, in which he said: ‘For decades, rising crime and insecurity seemed inevitable. By the mid-1990s crime had risen to the highest levels in the developed world, and fear of crime and antisocial behaviour rose as police numbers fell. Since 1997, we have demonstrated that a very different future is possible. Crime has fallen by well over a quarter, and the chance of being a victim is at its lowest for over 20 years.’87 He went on to outline Labour’s plans to invest heavily in neighbourhood police, to expand local community justice centres, and to ‘put the victim first’ in criminal justice. He began by saying that of all the public services the Labour government had inherited in 1997 it was the criminal justice system that was ‘most unfit for purpose.’ In evidence for this he pointed to falling police numbers, levels of recorded crime that were double their 1970s levels despite recent falls, declining rates of detection and conviction, high levels of fine default, the menace of unrestrained antisocial behaviour and, above all, ‘a resigned tolerance of failure.’ He went on: In the first few years we took some important first steps. We stopped the fall in police numbers, once free of the spending constraints of the first two years. We halved the time to bring persistent juvenile offenders to justice. We introduced the first testing and treatment orders for drug offenders. . . . We toughened the law. . . . we are the first Government since the war to have crime lower than when we took office. But that’s the statistics. It’s not what people feel. Building on these foundations, we started to become a lot more radical in our thinking. . . . But as fast as we act, as tough as it seems compared to the 1970s or 1980s, for the public it is not fast or tough enough. What we signal today is a step-change. It has three components to it. First, we seek to revive community policing. People want not just the bobby on the beat, but a strong, organised uniformed presence back on the streets. . . . Second, we are shifting from tackling the offence to targeting the offender. . . . For as long as they remain a danger, the most violent offenders will stay in custody. Thirdly, we are giving local communities and police the powers they need to enforce respect on the street. ASB measures will be strengthened. Summary justice through on-the-spot fines, seizure of drug dealers’ assets, closure of pubs, clubs and houses that are the centre of drug use or disorder, naming and shaming of persistent ASB offenders, interim ASBOs, will be rolled out . . . The purpose of the CJS reforms is to re-balance the system radically in favour of the victim, protecting the innocent but ensuring the guilty know the odds have changed . . . for the first time in my political lifetime the politicians,

278 Part Three police and public are on the same side . . . We understand criminal behaviour often has complex and tragic antecedents. But our first duty is to the lawabiding citizen. They are our boss. It’s time to put them at the centre of the CJS. That is the new consensus on law and order for our times.88 If Blair had been hoping to make headlines, he was not disappointed. The story was carried prominently in the press and on television, with both The Times and the The Guardian leading with the story. Blair’s pre-emptive action ‘set the stage for the Labour Party national policy forum due to take place at the end of [the month], fired the first Conservative-Party-out-manoeuvring shots in the General Election then predicted to take place in May 2005; and further distanced New Labour from its Old Labour roots’.89 In the event, it was the ‘rhetorically tough’90 tenor of Blair’s speech than won out over the drier language of the Home Office five-year plan when it came to the following year’s general election. Although its chapter on ‘crime and security’ began with headlines reminding readers of how much crime had risen in the years before Labour came to power in 1997, and highlighted how much it had fallen since, and how much Labour had begun to invest in police numbers, it warned against complacency. Although there was now less chance of becoming a victim of crime than for more than 20 years, it said, ‘our security is threatened by major organised crime; volume crimes such as burglary and car theft, often linked to drug abuse; fear of violent crime; and anti-social behaviour.’ It then outlined plans for neighbourhood policing teams in every local area, with new powers for local people to trigger action by the police and local authorities against ‘neighbours from hell’.91 Although it talked of more intensive community programmes for young offenders, the bulk of the manifesto’s coverage of punishment focused on the large number of ASBOs and Penalty Charge Notices (4,000 and 66,000 respectively) that had been imposed since they had been introduced, while also highlighting the 16,000 extra prison places that had been built. By 2005 New Labour had become a party that appeared entirely comfortable aligning itself with an approach to law and order that was much closer in approach to that of its Conservative predecessor than it was to Old Labour’s. The Conservative Party, by this time under Michael Howard’s leadership, predictably attempted to portray Labour as failing on law and order. Crime, their manifesto claimed, ‘is out of control. There is a gun crime every hour. A million violent crimes are committed each year. Fewer than one in four crimes are now cleared up. Criminals have a better chance of getting away with breaking the law today than at any time in the last 25 years. Anti-social behaviour – vandalism, graffiti, binge-drinking, threatening behaviour – is a growing concern in all our communities. Too many of Mr Blair’s responses have been gimmicks, some of which, like marching yobs to cash machines, were never even introduced.’92 As part of the solution they promised 5,000 extra police officers and 20,000 extra prison places, ‘honesty in sentencing’, an end to current early release procedures, and a massive expansion in drug treatment programmes.

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 279 So far as media reporting was concerned in fact, crime dropped down the agenda during the 2005 election campaign, only rating as the seventh most important issue in terms of coverage.93 The approaches taken by the two main parties were broadly similar and, as we have seen, the manifestos also covered largely similar territory. In the event, Labour were returned to government once again, albeit with a now reduced majority of 66 seats. Charles Clarke, who had taken over from David Blunkett in late 2004, remained as Home Secretary until 2006, but the remainder of the parliament saw the installation of a further three Home Secretaries: John Reid, Jacqui Smith and Alan Johnson. As such regular turnover suggests Labour’s home affairs policy was perhaps less obviously coherent in its third term than it had been in previous administrations. Nevertheless, it didn’t depart significantly with what had gone before and, in many respects, sought both to add to, and to reinforce what had been achieved in the previous eight years. Early on at least, part of this strategy was to be seen most obviously in the continued expansion in the use of out-of-court penalties. In 2006, Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor, had published a paper entitled Doing Law Differently in which he outlined what he took to be public frustrations with the slow and bureaucratic nature of the law. While recognising the need to protect the accused, he nevertheless argued that some ‘anti-social behaviour and other less serious crimes, such as certain cases of criminal damage, theft or public order offences, do not need to come to court if the defendant admits guilt and is willing to make reparation to the victim, accept a fine, pay compensation, go for drug treatment or carry out unpaid work. Many cases can be diverted out of court and dealt with by the use of fixed-penalty notices or Conditional Cautions.’94 Of all the Labour initiatives, one that was among those having the greatest impact was its desire to narrow what it referred to as the ‘justice gap’. In its 1997 manifesto, it had said: ‘The number of people convicted has fallen by a third, with only one crime in 50 leading to a conviction. This is the worst record of any government since the Second World War – and for England and Wales the worst record of any major industrialised country.’95 It was this disparity that became known as the justice gap and, consequently, one of Labour’s overriding objectives became to increase the number ‘offences brought to justice’. Targets were introduced from 2002 onward and gradually added to, or expanded, in the coming years. Initially it seemed the targets were largely being met not by increasing the number of convictions overall – indeed, these appeared to be dropping – but by greater use of cautioning and, later, other out-of-court disposals (these included cannabis warnings, penalty notices for disorder, and the conditional cautions for adults, and the youth restorative disposal and youth conditional caution for juveniles). In the period between 2003 and 2008, for example, while recorded crime fell by approximately 20%, the number of ‘offences brought to justice’ rose by 32%. Superficial signs of success were quickly tempered by the realisation that the targets might be having unintended consequences, most obviously in terms of ‘net-widening’. Informal warnings, for example, did not count as Offenders Brought to Justice (OBTJs),

280

Part Three

and consequently one fairly typical means of hitting the targets was to focus on low-level offences committed by juveniles, often those whose offending typically took place in groups in public places and who represented a relatively soft touch.96 Indeed, the very substantial increase in ‘offenders brought to justice’ that occurred between 2001–07 was achieved not by an increase in offenders appearing before the courts, but through ‘the substantial growth in the use of cautions, the rapid expansion of the new kids on the summary pre-court block, the PNDs and formal warnings for possession of cannabis, and a slight resurgence in the number of offences “taken into consideration”.’97 For some critics the OBTJ measure was one of the more obvious examples of the negative consequences of New Labour’s second-term target culture.98 The large number of offenders, especially juveniles, being drawn into the system eventually led to something of a rethink, and new targets, this time focused on bringing more ‘serious’ crime to justice, replaced the earlier measures. In consequence the OBTJ target-driven increase in out-of-court disposals peaked around 2008 and began to decline thereafter. ASBOs, which had begun slowly, also picked up during Labour’s second administration, and reached their peak around 2005, then slowly began to drop away. Criticism had begun to gather, not least a consequence of the very high levels of breach that were being recorded – at 53% in 2005 and rising to over 60% in 2007. Even these figures, however, disguised the degree of the problem, with orders often being breached on multiple occasions. In 2007, for example, 1,619

Figure 10.6 Out-of-Court Disposals, by Disposal, 12 months ending March 2004-March 201299

Source: Self-generated

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 281

Figure 10.7 ASBOs Issued Annually, 2000–2012101 Source: Self-generated

ASBOs gave rise to 8,740 ‘breach occasions’, and in 2009 Alan Johnson, by now Home Secretary, was moved both to criticise the police and to seek to impose targets on them, in order to try to tighten the enforcement measures that were taken. The tide had turned, however, and by the time of election in 2010 both opposition parties were promising fundamental overhauls in this area, with the Conservatives saying: ‘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. We will introduce a series of early intervention measures, including grounding orders, to allow the police to use instant sanctions to deal with anti-social behaviour without criminalising young people unnecessarily.100

New Labour and policing One of the significant factors in understanding shifts in the development of New Labour criminal justice and penal policy had been the loosening of the purse strings after the end of Gordon Brown’s self-imposed spending limits during Labour’s first term. As had so often been the case during the Thatcher governments, one of the main beneficiaries of increased expenditure was the police. From the late 1980s through to Labour’s arrival in power in 1997, expenditure on the police had risen by about one third.102 In the decade from 1998 to 2008 expenditure on policing rose a further 88% in real terms. The rises were particularly steep in 2002–03 and 2003–04, increasing by 6.1% and 9.6% respectively (in real terms).103 As would be expected, the bulk of the increased expenditure

282

Part Three

Figure 10.8 Total Police Officer Numbers (all ranks), 1997–2010104 Source: Self-generated

was accounted for by salary increases and staffing increases in particular. With spending restrictions in the first years of government, police numbers fell slightly, but from 2000 to 2005 underwent substantial growth, increasing by over 14%. One of New Labour’s first legislative reforms, via the 1998 CDA, had been the imposition of a statutory duty on the police, together with local authorities, to take lead responsibility for local crime and disorder reduction strategies. The Act, using a variety of means, sought to place greater emphasis on ‘community’ within policing. Thus, its guidance specified a wide range of bodies that it suggested should be involved in the process of local auditing of community safety, and local partnerships were also encouraged to consult bodies that represented or promoted the interests of, or who provided services to, women, the young, the elderly, the disabled, those groups specifically identified by the Race Relations Act, together with those considered to be ‘hard to reach’.105 Potentially, the Act raised the possibility of greater challenge to traditional police organisation and conduct, something reinforced by the Macpherson Inquiry established by Jack Straw when Labour came to power. One of the implications of the CDA was that the police would be subject to increased scrutiny, something also encouraged by Labour’s Local Government Act 1999 and by its Best Value initiative, and as a number of commentators observed at the time, a further likely consequence was an increased role for the private sector and other actors in the broad field of policing.106 New Labour displayed a somewhat mixed attitude toward the relationship between government and police. On the one hand, much of what it did continued

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 283 the centralising trend that had long been visible in British policing, continuing to set central objectives and reinforcing national policing systems and structures. In 2003, for example, it proposed the idea of a dedicated, national organised policing unit107 and, subsequently, via the Serious, Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, established the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), by amalgamating the functions of the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the National Crime Squad, together with the investigative branches from the Immigration Service and the Revenue and Customs Service. On the other, it eventually pursued a number of localising initiatives, largely in response to the identification of the so-called ‘reassurance gap’. This referred to fact that while crime appeared to be in decline, a substantial proportion of the population continued to believe that it was still rising. In addition, the further complication came from evidence from the crime survey which suggested that public ratings of police performance were continuing to decline. At least one senior police leader, undoubtedly reflecting a wider perception, linked the reassurance gap to continuing problems surrounding antisocial behaviour: ‘Why has this [reassurance] gap arisen? Research suggests that it is because the incivilities that the public experiences in town centres and on housing estates belie the soothing message of criminal statistics. The police have become increasingly less visible and the public are sceptical about alternatives’.108 Some support for this view came from a sizeable study conducted in London which suggested that the centrally imposed performance indicators that the police – like all public services – were increasingly subject to, was one significant factor in distorting police activity, not least by reducing their focus on the more minor forms of disorder that often had a significant impact on citizens’ lives and which, in turn, affected public views of police effectiveness.109 The idea of ‘reassurance policing’ largely emanated from the police service itself and was initially received rather coolly by the Labour government. It began with a pilot reassurance policing programme starting around 2002–03 and, after successful evaluation,110 morphed into what New Labour described as the ‘Neighbourhood Policing Programme’, launched in 2005. By 2008 New Labour appeared to be in full-scale retreat from the centrally driven target culture that had dominated policing for well over a decade. A review of policing111 and a Green Paper112 led to proposals to abolish the vast majority of policing indicators, a ‘new deal’ focused on ‘local priorities set by local people’, with the promised reform of police governance by introducing ‘local directly elected Crime and Policing Representatives’. This latter pledge was Labour’s response to a growing debate around the effectiveness of current arrangements for police accountability and, more particularly, the traction that some Conservative spokespeople appeared to be getting for their proposals for similar directly elected officials. As early as 2003 the think tank, Policy Exchange, had begun to promote the idea of American-style elected ‘sheriffs’ and the shadow Home Secretary, Oliver Letwin announced what he described as ‘radical proposals to hand power over neighbourhood policing back to local communities’.113 Although the Labour Party in its long wilderness years in opposition had regularly championed the idea of wholly elected police authorities, and greater local

284

Part Three

intervention via monitoring groups and the like, when in power it largely shied away from radical reform and limited itself to relatively minor proposals to tinker with local authority policing arrangements.114 The so-called ‘New York miracle, the major crime decline, which had become associated in many people’s minds with ‘quality of life’ or ‘zero tolerance policing’, continued to exercise quite a hold over the political imagination at this time. Reform of police authorities, influenced by what was believed to be American-style police governance, was increasingly promoted by members of the Conservative opposition, including their leader, David Cameron.115 Labour responded with a Green Paper in which it flirted with the notion of introducing elected crime and policing representatives. The idea was a short-lived one, receiving immediate criticism from the other political parties, from the Local Government Association and the Police Federation. Crucially, however, events in London had a dramatic impact on Labour’s stance. Boris Johnson, a long-time critic of the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, was elected Mayor of London in early 2008. As Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority he consequently had considerable influence over the policing of London and, when he indicated that he had less than full confidence in the Commissioner, Blair felt he had to resign. In response, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, removed the clauses relating to elected representatives from the Policing and Crime Bill that was by then before parliament, and asked one of her predecessors, David Blunkett to examine and to report on ‘how direct elections could be delivered in a way that strengthens public accountability and supports the work already being done by local government colleagues to improve public confidence across public services’.116 In the event Blunkett rejected the idea of elected police commissioners, and argued that there were more effective ways of improving police accountability as well as raising concerns ‘about the potential for elected police authorities and for the position of an elected police commissioner to be hijacked by extremist political groups’.117 As a consequence, when a general election was called the following year the Labour manifesto simply promised to ‘protect the police from politicisation’118 whereas the Conservatives, much influenced by further work by Policy Exchange, were committed to ‘replace the existing, invisible and unaccountable police authorities and make the police accountable to a directly-elected individual who will set policing priorities for local communities.’119 The 2010 Coalition Agreement120 included just such a proposal, using the exact language from the Conservative manifesto, and the subsequent Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011, in the most fundamental overhaul of police governance in almost half a century, introduced what have since been called ‘Police and Crime Commissioners’.

Conclusion: New Labour, penal policy and populism Criminal justice and penal policymaking changed quite markedly from the early 1990s onward. From a field in which the influence of party politics had been relatively muted, with the birth of ‘New Labour’ under Tony Blair such matters were to dominate proceedings for the next decade and a half. Labour successfully

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 285 shook off opponents’ claims that it was ‘soft on crime’ and via Blair’s soundbite sought to present itself as a party that could marry its traditional concerns with poverty and inequality as drivers of crime, with its new-found willingness to embrace those elements of public opinion that demanded tough punishment. The most obvious consequence was the continued upward trend in the prison population. Although it remained relatively stable during the first Labour administration, in part thanks to the introduction of the Home Detention Curfew HDC,121 it then began a steady rise throughout both the second and third administrations, reaching 85,500 by the time of the 2010 general election. The prison population had risen nearly 40% since New Labour came to power. On its own this would be a fairly astonishing rise, but it is important to remember that this rise was set against a backdrop of a huge increase in the years immediately prior to the election and, in turn, that increase was from a level that both the Conservative government and Labour opposition felt was close to unacceptably high in the late 1980s. Indeed, on becoming Conservative Justice Secretary in 2010, Kenneth Clarke remarked that the total of over 85,000 in prison was ‘an astonishing number which I would have dismissed as an impossible and ridiculous prediction if it had been put to me as a forecast in 1992.’122 Labour introduced various measures in order to attempt to stem the growth in prison numbers from time to time, including the HDC and the ‘End of Custody Licence’ which allowed some prisoners to be released 18 days before the end of their sentence. As we have seen, the rise, at least in Labour’s early administrations, reflected both increasing use of custody and longer sentence lengths. There was also a steady increase in the prisoners serving indeterminate sentences, initially via the growing number of life-sentence prisoners and then, in the aftermath of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, via the introduction and growing use of ‘Indeterminate Sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection’ (IPP).123 Beginning with just over one thousand prisoners on IPPs in 2006, the numbers rose quickly to 4,461 by 2008 and 5,205 a year later.124 Labour’s problems in this area were exacerbated by the fact that these numbers were far larger than had originally been estimated, leading one set of commentators to suggest that it must count as one of the least carefully planned and implemented pieces of legislation in the history of British sentencing’.125 The IPP sentence was eventually amended by the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. The broadly punitive trends visible in relation to custodial sentencing were in many way paralleled by the general trends in community punishments. Labour had introduced some quite far-reaching reforms of community penalties, introducing the Suspended Sentence Order – a custodial sentence to be served in the community – had generally sought to toughen the nature and appearance of non-custodial punishments and had reduced discretion in relation to breach of community orders. It also restructured the probation service, initially introducing a national service and subsequently a single organisation – the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) containing both prison and probation services. Finally, it also broadened the scope for the operation of the private sector in non-custodial provision. During New Labour’s years in power the

286 Part Three number of offenders subject to community sanctions steadily increased, with the available evidence suggesting that far from mitigating the use of custodial sanctions, among other things the expansion reflected the declining use of penalties such as the fine and the discharge for first-time offenders.126 For the bulk of its 13 years in power, New Labour presided over what appeared to be a continuous and substantial fall in crime. Certainly this was the picture presented by the crime survey, and although police-recorded crime told a largely similar story, complications arising from administrative changes to the construction of such data muddied the waters somewhat. Nevertheless, one cannot avoid the observation that the significant expansion in the use of both custodial and non-custodial penalties, and the vast growth in a range of ‘preventive justice’-style orders,127 coincided with apparently steep falls in crime in the New Labour era. Whereas much of the tough on crime talk in the Thatcher years had been just that – talk – under Blair the promised tough on crime action was regularly translated into fairly punitive practice. Throughout, however, the lessons that Labour had learned about the power of tough on crime rhetoric, and that were associated with Tony Blair more than any other single figure, continued regularly to be displayed throughout its three terms. It was by no means always the case that other senior figures in the party were entirely on board with the regularity with which crime issues were used to stake out Labour’s ground, or with the generally ‘tough’ emphasis public messages were designed to portray. In his diaries, Alistair Campbell reports several occasions where hugely difficult meetings were held between the Prime Minister and Gordon Brown, his Chancellor of the Exchequer, and his team: Then to a meeting with GB [Gordon Brown] and the Eds [Balls and Miliband], which was better than usual because TB [Tony Blair] was much firmer. There was a big disagreement though, TB and I strongly believing we had not only to deal with crime and antisocial behaviour, but be seen to deal with it because in part the signals you sent out were important actually to dealing with it. Their basic take was that to talk about crime was to alarm the public that it wasn’t being dealt with. Ed Balls felt we had lost the ‘causes of crime’ part of the argument. TB said we always had to do both.128 From the implementation of the more extreme of Michael Howard’s ‘three strikes’ penalties to Blair’s ‘cashpoint’ speech, New Labour regularly used crime as a means of capturing headlines or deflecting attention from other problems or scandals. One final example of Labour’s ‘governing through crime’ strategies129 occurred in mid-2006 as the government found itself under pressure as a consequence of a series of news stories which focused on the alleged mishandling of the release of a number of foreign national prisoners. The reaction was swift, with both the Prime Minister and new Home Secretary, John Reid, announcing several new headline-grabbing initiatives seemingly designed to protect some of their hard-won law and order reputation. Central among these initiatives was the announcement that the government was going to undertake further investigatory work to assess the potential for the introduction of a paedophile notification

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010  287 New Labour elected

20,000 18,000

Crime Survey

Number of offences (000s)

16,000 14,000

BCS

12,000 10,000 8,000 6,000 4,000 2,000

82 19 8 19 3 84 19 85 19 86 19 8 19 7 88 19 89 19 90 19 91 19 92 19 93 19 94 19 95 19 96 1 19 997 98 19 /9 99 9 20 /00 0 20 0/0 01 1 20 /02 0 20 2/0 03 3 20 /04 04 20 /05 0 20 5/06 06 / 20 07 07 20 /08 0 20 8/0 09 9 / 20 10 10 /1 1

19

19

81

0

Recorded Crime - Old Counting Rules

Recorded Crime - New Counting Rules

Recorded Crime - Post NCRS

Figure 10.9 Trends in Crime (Recorded crime and crime Survey) 1981–2010/11 Source: Crown Copyright Publication

scheme along the lines of US Megan’s laws – something which had been floated and rejected several years previously.130 One journalist linked the announcement with Blair’s appearance that week as a guest presenter on a BBC radio World Cup phone-in show, describing both as ‘stunts driven by the desperate desire to make some sort of emotional connection with a disaffected public’.131 That same week Blair gave a long-trailed speech promising a proposed ‘radical overhaul’ of the criminal justice system in order to ‘safeguard the human rights of victims at the expense of offenders’.132 In it he promised that thousands more prison places would be built, new laws would be introduced to fill gaps with, once again, renewed emphasis being placed on summary powers to deal with antisocial behaviour. He said, ‘There is a myth that we have legislated 50 times, the problem still exists, ergo we don’t need more laws. I disagree. Laws have made a real difference, but they have not been clear or tough enough . . . We need swifter, summary powers to deal with antisocial behaviour . . . The blunt reality is that at least in the short and medium term, the measures proposed will mean an increase in prison places’.133 Certainly by the time of Labour’s third term of office it appeared that penal policy was driven less by strategic planning and increasingly by short-term image control and by the Prime Minister’s concerns around news management. In his diaries, the long-standing Labour MP, Chris Mullin, described one incident in which potentially significant legislative changes were being proposed: ‘This evening, with others, a meeting with John Reid in the Prime Minister’s room at which he sought to persuade us of the need for yet more laws on terrorism, including a return of something strongly resembling the old, discredited ‘Sus’ laws and extension of detention without

288

Part Three

trial. Confidence was not inspired when, on entering, we were each handed a bit of paper recording the results of a Populus poll suggesting that the population favoured stronger measures by a margin of two to one. Is this the evidence base we are being asked to consider?’134 New Labour’s criminal justice and penal policy is not easily pigeonholed. It included a strong centralising tendency and also a desire to see greater localism and more joined-up activity at the level at which services were delivered. It had, as we have illustrated, strong punitive elements, but within the narrow confines of criminal justice it also invested considerably in restorative-justiceinfluenced initiatives and, more broadly, did much to illustrate a commitment to being ‘tough on the causes of crime’. As regards the latter, from its concerted attempts to reduce child poverty, improve the life chances of the disadvantaged through Sure Start and other programmes, and its more general economic success in reducing long-term unemployment and increasing investment in education and health, all likely contributed to the continued decline in crime in the first decade of the twenty-first century. And yet, for all that New Labour understood this, it never displayed the confidence to promote such successes, all too often allowing its ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric and measures to outmuscle the ‘tough on the causes of crime’ half of the equation. In the end, the irony was that Tony Blair, a politician who came to prominence in part as a consequence of his ability to wrest the law and order territory away from the Conservatives, found himself after a decade as Prime Minister, and a decade in which official measures suggested crime was falling continuously, having law and order used against him. As the then leader of the Liberal Democrats, Nick Clegg put it after Blair’s 2006 announcements described earlier, ‘This is clearly an admission of failure by the Prime Minister . . . We have prisons bursting at the seams, a judiciary at loggerheads with the Government, a Probation Service on its knees, falling conviction rates for serious crimes, one of the highest rates of reoffending in Western Europe, and a Home Office in a state of institutional meltdown. One speech at the tail-end of his premiership cannot absolve Tony Blair of his responsibility for this dismal state of affairs’.135 In Labour’s last few years in power law and order had long ceased being comfortable territory for the government. From Tony Blair’s position it seemed that despite years of pushing hard on the subject, less progress had been made than he had hoped, and the blame for much of this he placed on government departments, and the Home Office in particular, that he felt were poor on ‘delivery’ and had let the government down.136 For the public, almost inevitably perhaps, the ‘tough on crime tough on the causes of crime’ message that had seemed so fresh in the mid-1990s, was much less so a decade or more on, and despite crime declines Labour started to struggle to deal with criticism from both Tories and Liberal Democrats. Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, reflected on the situation in the following terms: Under the 1997–2010 Labour administration, crime fell by 40 per cent, with seven million fewer crimes committed every year. Ours was the first

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 289 government since records began under which crime went down and not up, a tribute not only to the professionalism of all our public servants but the 33,000 extra police – 17,000 more officers and 16,000 new Police Community Support Officers – backed up by 26,000 extra prison places. Of course, problems remained – illegal immigration was one – but with police numbers rising and prison places expanding, why were we on the back foot on law and order? There were many reasons why we lost the battle – for example, one complaint from a victim of crime can send a more powerful message than any good set of statistics about cuts in crime . . . But more important and wider lessons were being learned: it takes both reform and resources to assure high-quality public services. Reform without investment is a cynical slogan. Investment without reform will yield too little. 2008 proved we needed both.137 The New Labour years were a period when the continuing fall in the crime rate invited the question ‘what went right?’ rather than its more usual reverse. Much hinges on the weight assigned to criminal justice policies compared with those of the broader social and economic context. The Blair soundbite, which sought to embrace both, implied a dual commitment both to narrow crime prevention and penal interventions and to wider, and longer-term, social and economic policies that might hold some promise of ameliorating problems of crime and disorder. Yet, in practice, for New Labour being both ‘tough on crime’ and on its causes too often meant being ‘tough on the criminal’.138 A variety of punitive measures often appeared to take priority over both crime prevention and wider social reforms. In part this was a result of New Labour’s ongoing preoccupations with imagemanagement and their fear of being portrayed as ‘soft on crime’. It was also a result of the common political desire for relatively quick results. Where addressing ‘crime’ by changes to policing and both social and situational preventive measures might bring some short- and medium-term gains, addressing the ‘causes of crime’ in general required much longer-term solutions – even assuming any consensus on causation existed. Again, the gap was too readily filled by tough rhetoric and ‘tough’ measures. As a result, the impressive record of New Labour, which in some respects – the Freedom of Information Act, the Human Rights Act and the Macpherson and Hillsborough Inquiries – bears comparison with the progressive liberal reforms of the 1960s, must be weighed against what that earlier decade lacked: punitive measures of over-control and startling increases in levels of custodial and non-custodial forms of punishment.

Notes 1 Norris, P. (1998) The battle for the campaign agenda, in King, A., Denver, D., Mclean, I., Norris, P., Norton, P., Sanders, D. and Seyd, P. New Labour Triumphs: Britain at the Polls, Chatham, NJ: Chatham House 2 King, A. (1998) Why Labour won – at last, in King, A. et al. (eds.) New Labour Triumphs: Britain at the Polls, Chatham, NJ: Chatham House

290

Part Three

3 It came into force on 1st December 1999. See Dunbar, I. and Langdon, A.J. (1998) Tough Justice: Sentencing and penal policies in the 1990s, Oxford: OUP, at p. 155 4 http://www.labour-party.org.uk/manifestos/1997/1997-labour-manifesto.shtml (accessed 18.3.19) 5 Berman, G. (2008) Changes in crime recording practices, House of Commons Library, Standard Note SN/SG/2607, 31st October 6 Labour Party press secretary, 1994–1997; Downing Street Press Secretary, 1997–2000; Downing Street Director of Communications and Strategy, 2000–2003 7 Campbell, A. (2012) op. cit., p. 132 8 See Farrell, S. and Jennings, W. (2014) Thatcherism and crime: the beast that never roared? In Farrell, S. and Hay, C. (eds.) The Legacy of Thatcherism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 9 Brown, G. (2018) op. cit., pp. 108–109 10 Home Office (2001) Criminal Justice: The way ahead, CM 5074, London: HMSO 11 Emmerson, C. and Frayne, C. (2005) Public Spending, General Election Briefing: Institute for Fiscal Studies. The IFS data are drawn primarily from HM Treasury sources and, in this category, refer primarily to spending by the two main government departments in this area: the Home Office and the Ministry of Justice 12 http://www.politicsresources.net/area/uk/e01/man/lab/ENG2.pdf (accessed 18.3.19) 13 http://www.conservativemanifesto.com/2001/2001-conservative-manifesto.shtml# safely (accessed 18.3.19) 14 http://www.libdemmanifesto.com/2001/2001-liberal-manifesto.shtml#crime (accessed 18.3.19) 15 Butler, D. and Kavanagh, D. (eds.) The British General Election of 2001, Basingstoke: Palgrave; Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (2002) The skeletons in the cupboard: The politics of law and order at the turn of the millennium, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: OUP 16 Straw, J. ‘Crime and old Labour’s punishment’, The Times, 8th April 1998 17 A former Director of Social Services in Kent and, latterly, policy adviser to Straw 18 Audit Commission (1996) Misspent Youth, London: Audit Commission 19 See, for example, Souhami, A. (2015) Creating the Youth Justice Board: Policy and policy-making in English and Welsh youth justice, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 15, 2, 152–168; See also Jones, D. (2001) ‘Misjudged Youth’: A Critique of the Audit Commission’s Reports on Youth Justice, British Journal of Criminology, 41: 362–380 20 Straw, J. (1998) Speech to Magistrates’ Association, Blackburn, 25th June; on the broader politics of the treatment of juvenile suspects in England and Wales and elsewhere see Green, D.A. (2008) When Children Kill Children: Penal populism and political culture, Oxford: Clarendon Press 21 Downes, D. and Morgan R. (2012) ‘Waiting for Ingleby: the Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility – a Red Line Issue?’ in Newburn, T. and Peay, J. (eds.) Policing: Politics, Culture and Control – Essays in Honour of Robert Reiner, Oxford: Hart, 245–264 22 These orders, their philosophy and practice, are examined in detail in, Ashworth, A. and Zedner, L. (2014) Preventive Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press 23 Gardner, J., von Hirsch, A., Smith, A.T.H., Morgan, R., Ashworth, A. and Wasik, M. (1998) Clause 1 – the hybrid law from hell?, Criminal Justice Matters, Spring, 25–27 24 Michael, A. (1998) Speech to the Crime Concern Parliamentary Discussion Group, 7th July, quoted in Newburn, T. (1998) op. cit., p. 206 25 Home Office Juvenile Offenders Unit (1998) The Parenting Order: Draft Guidance Document, London: Home Office, at p. 2 26 Newburn, T. (1998) Tackling Youth Crime and Reforming Youth Justice: The origins and nature of New Labour policy, Policy Studies, 19, 3–4, 199–212

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 291 27 Newburn, T. (2001) Community safety and policing: Some implications of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, in Hughes, G., McLaughlin, E. and Muncie, J. (ed.) Crime Prevention and Community Safety: New Directions, London: Sage 28 As amended initially by the Police Act 1996 and subsequently S. 17 Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act 2011 29 Garland, D. (2000) The culture of high crime societies: Some preconditions of recent law and order policies, British Journal of Criminology, 40, 3, 347–79, at p. 349 30 Wales continued to refer to them as ‘Community Safety Partnerships 31 Hough, M. (1995) Anxiety About Crime: Findings from the 1994 British Crime Survey, Home Office Research Study no. 147, London: Home Office; Budd, T. and Simms, L. (2001) Antisocial behaviour and disorder: Findings from the 2000 British Crime Survey, Findings no. 145, London: Home Office; Jackson, J. (2004) Experience and expression: Social and cultural significance in the fear of crime, British Journal of Criminology, 44, 946–966 32 Home Office (2004) Building Communities; Beating Crime: Developing a better police service for the 21st century, London: Home Office, CM 6360, at p.123 33 Gilling, D. (2007) Crime Prevention and Community Safety, Cullompton: Willan, at p. 222 34 Barber, M. (2007) Instruction to Deliver: Fighting to transform Britain’s public services, London: Methuen 35 Barber, M. (2007) op. cit., p. 157 36 Barber, M. (2007) op. cit., p. 159 37 HMIC and others (2003) Streets Ahead: A Joint Inspection of the Street Crimes Initiative, London: Home Office 38 Straw (2012) op. cit. p. 271 39 Ashworth, A. (2000) Sentencing and Criminal Justice, 3rd ed., London: Butterworths 40 For a full history of developments in this field, see Ashworth, A. and Roberts, J.V. (2013) Sentencing Guidelines: Exploring the English Model, Oxford: Oxford University Press, esp. Ch. 1 41 In a speech in June 2002, David Blunkett, Home Secretary from June 2001 to December 2004, said, ‘In the past eight years the prison population has risen from just over 40,000 to just over 70,000 and a fat lot of good it’s done us in crime control terms’ (verbatim notes, author). Similar views were expressed by Blunkett at a speech to the National Association of Probation Officers on 5th July 2001, at: http://society.guardian. co.uk/crimeandpunishment/story/0,8150,517211,00.html (accessed 20.3.19) 42 Auld, Lord Justice (2001) Review of the Criminal Courts of England and Wales, London: The Stationery Office 43 John Halliday, former Deputy Under Secretary of State, Home Office. Halliday, J. (2001) Making Punishments Work: Report of the review of the sentencing framework for England and Wales, London: The Stationery Office 44 Bottoms, A.E. and Dignan, J. (2004) Youth justice in Great Britain, in Tonry, M. (ed.) Youth Crime and Youth Justice: Comparative and cross-national perspectives, Crime and Justice, Vol. 31, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, at p. 155 45 Marshall, T. and Merry, S. (1990) Crime and Accountability, London: HMSO 46 Goold, B. and Young, R. (1999) Restorative Police Cautioning in Aylesbury – from Degrading to Reintegrative Shaming Ceremonies? Criminal Law Review, 126–138 47 Quoted in Bottoms, A.E. and Dignan, J. (2004) op. cit. p.157 48 Unless the crime was serious enough to warrant custody or the court ordered an absolute discharge 49 See Crawford, A. (2002) The prospects for restorative justice for young offenders in England and Wales: A tale of two Acts, in McEvoy, K. and Newburn, T. (eds.) Criminology and Conflict Resolution, Basingstoke: Palgrave; Whyte, B, (2000) Between two stools: Youth justice in Scotland, Probation Journal, 47, 2, 119–25; Morris, A. and

292

50

51 52 53 54 55

56

57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

Part Three

Maxwell, G. (2000) The practice of family group conferences in New Zealand: Assessing the place, potential and pitfalls of restorative justice, in Crawford, A. and Goodey, J. (eds.) Integrating a Victim Perspective within Criminal Justice, Aldershot: Ashgate; Young, R. (2000) Integrating a multi-victim perspective into criminal justice through restorative justice conferences, in Crawford, A. and Goodey, J. (eds.) Integrating a Victim Perspective within Criminal Justice, Aldershot: Ashgate Newburn, T., Crawford, A., Earle, R., Goldie, S., Hale, C., Masters, G., Netten, A., Saunders, R., Hallam, A., Sharpe, K. and Uglow, S. (2002) The Introduction of Referral Orders into the Youth Justice System: Final Report, Home Office Research Study No. 242, London: Home Office See Offender Management Caseload Statistics 2004, Statistical Bulletin 17/05, London: Home Office Dignan, J. (1999) The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the prospects for restorative justice, Criminal Law Review, 48–60 Crawford, A. and Newburn, T. (2003) Youth Offending and Restorative Justice, Cullompton: Willan Campbell, A. (2013) The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq, London: Arrow Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, DEFRA and others (2002) Living Places Powers, Rights, Responsibilities Options for Reforming the Legislative Framework, PB 7226, London; Stationery Office. Fearing that it would divert attention from a speech Blair was due to give on ASB, the timing of the DEFRA release, and elements of its content, caused the Downing Street communications team some anxiety. In Alistair Campbell’s blunt assessment: ‘I was working on TB’s [Tony Blair’s] words for Monday re the ASB Bill for his press conference, the plan having gone a bit off track yesterday with a consultation paper containing the idea of £50 fines for dropping chewing gum on the street. It was total bollocks, and annoying, though I suppose it did at least get over the kind of issues we were talking about’. Campbell (2013) op. cit., p. 349. See also ‘Sticky end for gumming up the streets’, The Times, 1st November 2002 Morgan, R. (2006) With Respect to Order, the Rules of the Game have Changed: New Labour’s dominance of the law and order agenda, in Newburn, T. and Rock, P. (eds.) The Politics of Law and Order: Essays in honour of David Downes, Oxford: Clarendon Press Morgan, R. and Newburn, T. (2007) Youth justice, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: OUP Crawford, A. (2003) Contractual governance of deviant behaviour, Journal of Law and Society, 30, 4, 479–505 Terms introduced by Stan Cohen. See Cohen, S. (1979) The punitive city: notes on the dispersal of social control, Contemporary Crises, 3, 4, 339–363 See above, Chapter 7. Thorpe, D., Smith, D., Green, C.J. and Paley, J.H. 1980, Out of Care: The Community Support of Juvenile Offending, London: Allen & Unwin Council of Europe Office of the Commissioner for Human Rights (2005), Report by Mr. Alvaro Gil-Robles, Commissioner for Human Rights on his Visit to the United Kingdom, 4th-12th November 2004, Council of Europe Millie, A., Jacobson, J., McDonald, E. and Hough, M. (2005) Antisocial Behaviour Strategies: Finding a balance, Bristol: Policy Press Rhodes R.A.W. (2007) Blair and Governance, in Koch R. and Dixon J. (eds.) Public Governance and Leadership, Wiesbaden: DUV Speech by the Prime Minister, ‘Values and power of community’, to the Global Ethics Foundation, Tubingen University, Germany, 30th June 2000, https://www.weltethos. org/1-pdf/20-aktivitaeten/eng/we-reden-eng/speech_Blair_eng.pdf (accessed 8/2/19) ‘Heckled, jeered, booed – Blair bombs at the WI’, The Guardian, 8th June 2000; ‘Blair is clapped out’, The Daily Telegraph, 8th June 2000 Quoted in the The Guardian, 17th July 2000, emphasis added https://www.theguardian. com/politics/2000/jul/17/labour.politicalnews1 (accessed 8/2/19)

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 293 67 Newburn, T. and Reiner, R. (2007) Crime and penal policy, in Seldon, A. (ed.) Blair’s Britain, 1997–2007, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 68 ‘Full speed ahead on the hunting ban’, The Times, 7th December 2000 69 Barber, M. (2007) op. cit. 70 ‘A covert war conducted with the utmost courtesy’, The Times, 14th January 2013 71 Campbell, A. (2013) The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq, London: Arrow, at p. 287 72 Bottoms, A.E. (1995) The philosophy and politics of punishment and sentencing, in Clarkson, C. and Morgan, R. (eds.) The Politics of Sentencing Reform, Oxford: Oxford University Press 73 Faulkner, D.E.R. (2008) Servant of the Crown: A civil servant’s story of criminal justice and public service reform, Winchester: Waterside Press at p. 233 74 Barber, M. (2007) op. cit. 75 Rock, P. (2004) Constructing Victims’ Rights: The Home Office, New Labour and Victims, Oxford: Clarendon Press 76 Involving, as one commentator put it, the gradual displacement of socially oriented and explanatory criminology by predictive, risk-oriented rational choice models’. O’Malley, P. (2009) Risk, crime and prudentialism revisited, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 09/122, Sydney: University of Sydney Law School; see also Zedner, L. (2006) Opportunity makes the thief-taker: The influence of economic analysis on crime control, in Newburn, T. and Rock, P. (eds.) The Politics of Crime Control: Essays in Honour of David Downes, Oxford: Clarendon Press 77 Cabinet Office (1999a) Modernising Government, London: Cabinet Office, emphasis added Cabinet Office (1999b) Professional Policy Making for the Twenty-First Century, London: Cabinet Office 78 See, for example, the influential reviews in Sherman, L.W., Gottfredson, D., MacKenzie, D.L., Eck, J., Reuter, P. and Bushway, S. (1997) What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising, Report to the U.S. Congress, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Justice; and Goldblatt, P. and C. Lewis (1998) Reducing Offending: An Assessment of Research Evidence on Ways of Dealing with Offending Behaviour. Home Office Research Study No. 187. London: Home Office 79 Dhiri, S. and S. Brand (1999) Analysis of Costs and Benefits: Guidance for Evaluators, London: Home Office; Hope, T. (2004) Pretend it works: Evidence and governance in the evaluation of the reducing burglary initiative, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 4, 3, 287–308 80 Hough, M. (2004) Modernization, scientific rationalism and the Crime Reduction Programme, Criminal Justice, 4(3): 239–253, at p. 240 81 Wiles, P. (2002), Criminology in the 21st century: public good or private interest? The Sir John Barry Memorial Lecture, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 35, 238–252 82 The Guardian Profile: Louise Casey, Guardian, 9th September 2005 83 Carter, Sir P. (2003) Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime, London: Stationery Office 84 Mair, G. (2004) Diversionary and Nonsupervisory Approaches to Dealing with Offenders, in Bottoms, A.E., Rex, S. and Robinson, G. (eds.) Alternatives to Prison, Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan 85 For a more extended discussion of these trends see Newburn, T. (2007) ‘Tough on crime’: Penal policy in England and Wales, in Tonry, M. (ed.) Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective, Crime and Justice: An Annual Review, Vol. 36, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 86 HM Government (2004) Confident Communities in a Secure Britain: The Home Office Strategic Plan 2004–08, London: Home Office 87 Hansard, HC Debs, 19th July 2004, Vol. 424, Col. 421 88 http://www.ukpol.co.uk/tony-blair-2004-speech-on-law-and-order/ (accessed 7.2.19), emphasis added

294

Part Three

89 Morgan, R. (2006) With respect to order, the rules of the game have changed: New Labour’s dominance of the ‘law and order’ agenda, in Newburn, T. and Rock, P. (eds.) The Politics of Crime Control: Essays in Honour of David Downes, Oxford: Clarendon Press 90 Morgan, R. (2006) op. cit. 91 The Labour MP, Frank Field, had published a book in 2003 entitled Neighbours From Hell, published by Politico, in which he called for precisely such powers 92 Conservative election manifesto, at p. 15 http://www.maniffesto.com/wp-content/ uploads/2015/09/Conservatives-manifesto-uk-2005.pdf 93 Millie, A. (2006) Crime as an issue during the 2005 UK general election, Crime, Media, Culture, 4, 1, 101–111 94 Department for Constitutional Affairs (2006) Doing Law Differently, London: Department for Constitutional Affairs, at p. 10 95 Quoted in Solomon, E., Eades, C., Garside, R. and Rutherford, M. (2007) Ten Years of Criminal Justice under Labour: An independent audit, London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies 96 Morgan, R. and Newburn, T. (2007) Youth justice, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 4th ed. 97 Morgan, R. (2008) Summary Justice – Fast but Fair? London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies 98 Bateman, T. (2008) ‘Target practice’: sanction detection and the criminalisation of children, Criminal Justice Matters; Morgan, R. (2011) Austerity, subsidiarity and parsimony: offending behaviour and criminalisation, in Silvestri, A. (ed.) Lessons for the Coalition: An end of term report on New Labour and criminal justice, London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies 99 Source: Ministry of Justice (2014) Criminal Justice Statistics: Quarterly Update to March 2014, London: Ministry of Justice 100 Invitation to join the government of Britain: Conservative Manifesto 2010, Conservative Party, at p. 56 101 Anti-social behaviour order statistics, England and Wales 2013, available at: https:// www.gov.uk/government/statistics/anti-social-behaviour-order-statistics-englandand-wales-2013 102 Barclay, G. and Tavares, C. (1999), Information on the Criminal Justice System in England and Wales Digest 4, London: Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate 103 Mills, H., Silvestri, A. and Grimshaw, R. (2010) Police Expenditure 1999–2009, London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies 104 Home Office (various) Police Service Strength, England and Wales, London: Home Office 105 Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2001) Widening Access: Improving police relations with hard to reach groups, London: Home Office 106 Johnson, L. (2003) From ‘pluralisation’ to ‘the police extended family’: discourses on the governance of community policing in Britain, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 31, 185–204; Newburn, T. (2002) Community safety and policing: Some implications of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, in Hughes, G., McLaughlin, E. and Muncie, J. (eds.) Crime Prevention and Community Safety: New Directions, London: Sage 107 In a Green Paper, Policing: Building Safer Communities Together, Home Office, 2003 108 Denis O’Connor [at the time Chief Constable of Surrey Constabulary; subsequently Chief Inspector of Constabulary], quoted in Hough, M. (2010) Policing, new public management and legitimacy, in Brookes, S. and Grint, K. (eds.) The New Public Leadership Challenge, Basingstoke: Palgrave, at p. 75

Postscript: Law and Order Politics 1997–2010 295 109 FitzGerald, M., Hough, M., Joseph, I. and Qureshi, T. (2002) Policing for London, Cullompton: Willan Publishing 110 Tuffin, R., Morris, J. and Poole, A. (2006) An Evaluation of the Impact of the National Reassurance Policing Programme, London: Home Office 111 Casey, L. (2008) Engaging Communities in Fighting Crime: A Review by Louise Casey, London: Cabinet Office 112 Home Office (2008) From the Neighbourhood to the National: Policing Our Communities Together, CM 7448, London: Home Office 113 https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/oct/07/conservatives2003.conservatives4 (accessed 4th April 2019); see also Loveday, B. and Reid, A. (2003) Going Local: Who Should Run Britain’s Police Force, London: Policy Exchange 114 See for example: Home Office (2004) Building Communities, Beating Crime: a Better Police Service for the 21st Century, CM 6360, Home Office, London 115 See, for example, Police Foundation Lecture, 10th July 2006, available at: http:// www.police-foundation.org.uk/files/POLICE0001/speeches/David%20Camer ons%202006%20speech.pdf 116 Quoted in Blunkett, D. (2009) A People’s Police Force: Police accountability in the modern era, available at: http://davidblunkett.typepad.com/files/a-peoples-policeforce-2.pdf 117 Blunkett, D. (2009) op. cit., at p. 51 118 Labour Party (2010) A Future Fair for All, London: Labour Party http://www.cpa.org. uk/cpa_documents/TheLabourPartyManifesto-2010.pdf, at 5:3 119 Conservative Party (2010) An Invitation to Join the Government of Britain, London: Conservative Party file:///Users/TimNewburn/Downloads/Manifesto2010%20(2).pdf, at p. 57 120 The relevant sections can be found at: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ 20100603151510/http://programmeforgovernment.hmg.gov.uk/crime-and-policing/ 121 The Home Detention Curfew was a scheme introduced in 1999 the scheme electronically tags some offenders, permitting them to be released up to 135 days early 122 ‘The Government’s vision for criminal justice reform’, Lecture at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, available at: https://www.crimeandjustice.org.uk/resources/govern ments-vision-criminal-justice-reform 123 The IPP was made available for ‘dangerous’ offenders convicted of a ‘specified’ and ‘serious’ violent or sexual offence: in effect one that had a maximum sentence of at least ten years’ imprisonment. Annison, H. (2015) Dangerous Politics: Risk, political vulnerability and penal policy, Oxford: Clarendon Press. IPPs were abolished by the Coalition Government for offenders convicted on or after 3rd December 2012. The new government suggested that the IPP system was ‘not defensible’, and introduced new sentences for dangerous offenders. The change was not made retrospective 124 Beard, J. (2017) Sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection, House of Commons Library Briefing Paper 06086, file:///Users/TimNewburn/Downloads/SN06086%20 (1).pdf 125 Jacobson, J. and Hough, M. (2010) Unjust Deserts: Imprisonment for Public Protection, London: Prison Reform Trust, at p. vii; Annison, H. (2014) Weeding the garden: The Third Way, the Westminster tradition and Imprisonment for Public Protection, Theoretical Criminology, 18, 1, 38–55 126 Mills, H. (2011) Community Sentences: A solution to penal excess? London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies 127 Ashworth, A. and Zedner, L. (2014) op. cit. 128 Campbell, A. (2013) The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq, London: Arrow, at p. 220 129 Simon, J. (2006) Governing Through Crime: How the war on crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear, New York: Oxford University Press

296

Part Three

130 Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2013) Policy Convergence, Politics and Comparative Penal Reform: Sex Offender Notification Schemes in the US and UK, Punishment and Society, 15, 5, 439–467 131 ‘Sarah’s Law, Sven’s Law, lynch law – it’s the law of the desperate politician, The Times, 23rd June 2006 132 ‘Blair to launch overhaul of criminal justice’, The Guardian, 24th June 2006 133 ‘Blair pledges action on all fronts in war against crime’, The Times, 24th June 2006 134 Mullin, C. (2011) Decline and Fall: Diaries 2005–2010, London: Profile Books, at pp. 180–1 135 ‘Blair pledges action on all fronts in war against crime’, The Times, 24th June 2006 136 In his diary in August 2003 Alistair Campbell reflected on the content of a lengthy note he had received from Blair on a range of policy issues: ‘Sometimes these notes were just TB letting off steam and the crime and criminal justice stuff was full of it. So many things that needed to be done, he had been banging on about them for ages and yet there was a sclerosis in parts of the system. Sentencing, and the use of noncustodial. The loss of the rehab side in prisons. Drugs, organised crime, crap IT in the courts. And then on asylum and he was off again: why did he keep having to ask for the same things again and again when with the public this was no. 1 issue?’. Campbell, A. (2016) Outside, Inside: Diaries: Volume 5, 2003–2005, London: Biteback, at pp. 7–8 137 Brown, G. (2017) op. cit., pp. 239–240 138 Pease, K. (2010) Prison, Community Sentencing and Crime, Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society

Bibliography

Abrams, M. (1959) The Teenage Consumer, London: Press Exchange Adam Smith Institute (1984) The Omega File, London: Adam Smith Institute Adams, R. (1992) Prison Riots in Britain and the USA, Basingstoke: Macmillan Advisory Council on the Penal System (1970) Non-Custodial and Semi-Custodial Penalties, London: HMSO Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders (1960) Corporal Punishment, London: HMSO, Cmnd. 1213 Alexander, M. (2012) The New Jim Crow, New York: Free Press Allen, Lord Allen of Abbeydale (1983) State service: Reflections of a bureaucrat, in The Home Office: Perspectives on Policy and Administration: Bicentenary Lectures 1982, London: RIPA Anderson, D. (1995) Crime and the Politics of Hysteria: How the Willie Horton story changed American justice, New York: Random House Anderson, P. and Mann, N. (1997) Safety First: The making of New Labour, London: Granta Annison, H. (2014) Weeding the garden: The Third Way, the Westminster tradition and Imprisonment for Public Protection, Theoretical Criminology, 18, 1, 38–55 Annison, H. (2015) Dangerous Politics: Risk, political vulnerability and penal policy, Oxford: Clarendon Press Ashworth, A. (2000) Sentencing and Criminal Justice, 3rd ed., London: Butterworths Ashworth, A. (2001) The decline of English sentencing and other stories, in M. Tonry and R. Frase (eds.) Sentencing and Sanctions in Western Countries, New York: Oxford University Press Ashworth, A. and Roberts, J.V. (2013) Sentencing Guidelines: Exploring the English Model, Oxford: Oxford University Press Ashworth, A. and Zedner, L. (2014) Preventive Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press Audit Commission (1990) Footing the Bill: Financing Provincial Police Forces, Police paper No. 6, London: Audit Commission Audit Commission (1990) Taking Care of the Coppers: Income generation by provincial police forces, Police paper No.7, London: Audit Commission Audit Commission (1990) Effective Policing: Performance Review in Police Forces, Police paper, No.8, London: Audit Commission Audit Commission (1996) Misspent Youth, London: Audit Commission Auld, Lord Justice (2001) Review of the Criminal Courts of England and Wales, London: The Stationery Office Bagguley P. (1995) Protest, Poverty and Power: A Case Study of the Anti-Poll Tax Movement. The Sociological Review, 43, 4, 693–719

298

Bibliography

Bagguley, P. (1996) The moral economy of anti-poll tax protest, in Barker, C. and Kennedy, P. (eds.) To Make Another World: Studies in protest and social action, London: Routledge Baldwin, J. and Bottoms, A.E. (1976) The Urban Criminal: A study in Sheffield, London: Tavistock Bailey, V. (1989) Delinquency and Citizenship: Reclaiming the young offender, 1914–1948, Oxford: Clarendon Press Bailey, V. (2019) The Rise and Fall of the Rehabilitative Ideal, 1890–1970, London: Routledge Balen, M. (1994) Kenneth Clarke, London: Fourth Estate Ball, S. and Seldon, A. (1996) (eds.) The Heath Government, Harlow: Longman Baker, K. (1993) The Turbulent Years: My Life in Politics, London: Faber and Faber Ballinger, A. (2000) Dead Woman Walking: Executed women in England and Wales 1900–1955, Aldershot: Ashgate Bandalli, S. (1998) Abolition of the presumption of doli incapax and the criminalisation of children, Howard Journal, 37, 2, 114–123 Barber, M. (2007) Instruction to Deliver: Fighting to transform Britain’s public services, London: Methuen Barclay, G. and Tavares, C. (1999), Information on the Criminal Justice System in England and Wales Digest 4, London: Home Office Research, Development and Statistics Directorate Barker, M. (1984) A Haunt of Fears: The strange history of the British horror comics campaign, London: Pluto Press Barker, M. and Petley, J. (2002) Ill Effects: The Media Violence Debate, 2nd ed., London: Routledge Barnett, C. (1972) The Collapse of British Power, London: William Morrow and Company Barnett, C. (1995) The Lost Victory: British dreams, British realities, 1945–50, London: Macmillan Bateman, T. (2008) ‘Target practice’: sanction detection and the criminalisation of children, Criminal Justice Matters Bean, P. (1974) The Social Control of Drugs, London: Martin Robertson Beard, J. (2017) Sentences of Imprisonment for Public Protection, House of Commons Library Briefing Paper 06086 Beckett, A. (2009) When the Lights Went Out: What really happened to Britain in the seventies, London: Faber and Faber Beilharz, P. (1992) Labour’s Utopias: Bolshevism, Fabianism and Social Democracy, London: Routledge Bell, S. (1998) (ed.) The Conservative Party Since 1945, Manchester: Manchester University Press Benn, T. (1989) Office Without Power: Diaries 1968–1992, London: Arrow Bennett, J. and Wahidin, A. (2008) Industrial relations in prisons, in Bennett, J., Crewe, B. and Wahidin, A. (eds.) Understanding Prison Staff, London: Routledge Benton, M. and Russell, M. (2012) Assessing the impact of parliamentary oversight committees: The select committees in the British House of Commons, Parliamentary Affairs, 1–26 Berman, G. (2008) Changes in crime recording practices, House of Commons Library, Standard Note SN/SG/2607 Bevir, M. (2011) The Making of British Socialism, Princeton University Press Bew, J. (2016) Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee, London: Riverrun

Bibliography 299 Bewley T. H. (1970) The Drug Situation in England and Wales. International Journal of Offender Therapy, 14(2):72–80 Beynon, H., Hudson, R. and Sadler, D. (1991) A Tale of Two Industries: The contraction of coal and steel in the north east of England, Milton Keynes: Open University Press Black, L. and Pemberton, H. (2009) The Winter of Discontent in British Politics, Political Quarterly, 80, 4, 553–56 Blackwell, J. (1988) The saboteurs of Britain’s opiate policy: over-prescribing physicians or American-style junkies?, International Journal of the Addictions, 23, 517–26 Blair, T. (1993) Why crime is a socialist issue, New Statesman, 29th January Blom-Cooper, L. (1997) The Birmingham Six: Victims of Circumstance, London: Duckworth Blom-Cooper, L. (2015) Penalty for Murder: Life After Death”, in Blom-Cooper, L. (ed.) The Power of Persuasion: Essays of a Very Public Lawyer, Oxford: Hart Blom-Cooper, L.J and Morris, T. (2004) With Malice Aforethought: A study of the crime and punishment for homicide, Oxford: Hart Publishing Bonilla, Y. and Rosa, J. (2015) #Ferguson: Digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the United States, American Ethologist, 42, 1, 1–17 Booker, C. (1969) The Neophiliacs, London: Paladin Bottoms, A.E. (1977) Reflections on the renaissance of dangerousness, Howard Journal, 16, 2, 70–96 Bottoms, A.E. (1982) The suspended sentence in England 1967–1978, British Journal of Criminology, 21, 1, 1–26 Bottoms, A.E. (1987) Limiting prison use: Experience in England and Wales, Howard Journal, 26, 3, 177–202 Bottoms, A.E. (1987) Reflections on the criminological enterprise, Cambridge Law Journal, 46, 2, 240–63 Bottoms, A.E. (1995) The philosophy and politics of punishment and sentencing, in Clarkson, C. and Morgan, R. (eds.) The Politics of Sentencing Reform, Oxford: Oxford University Press Bottoms, A.E. and Dignan, J. (2004) Youth justice in Great Britain, in Tonry, M. (ed.) Youth Crime and Youth Justice: Comparative and cross-national perspectives, Crime and Justice, Vol. 31, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Bottoms, A.E., Gelsthorpe, L. and Rex, S. (2001) Introduction: The contemporary scene for community penalties, in Bottoms, A.E., Gelsthorpe, L. and Rex, S. (eds.) Community Penalties: Change and challenges, Cullompton: Willan Bottoms, A.E. and Stevenson, S. (1992) ‘What Went Wrong?’: Criminal Justice Policy in England and Wales, 1945–70, in Downes, D. (ed.) Unravelling Criminal Justice: Eleven British Studies, London: Macmillan Brady, J. (1997) Bad Boy: The life and politics of Lee Atwater, New York: Addison Wesley Braithwaite, J. (1989) Crime, Shame and Reintegration, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bratton, W. (1998) Turnaround: How America’s top cop reversed the crime epidemic, New York: Random House Bratton, W. and W. Andrews (1998) ‘What We’ve Learned about Policing’, City Journal, available at www.city-journal.org Brown, G. (2018) My Life, Our Times, London: Vintage Bucke, T. and James, Z. (1998) Trespass and Protest: Policing under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, London: Home Office

300

Bibliography

Budd, T. and Simms, L. (2001) Antisocial Behaviour and Disorder: Findings from the 2000 British Crime Survey, Findings no. 145, London Bunyan, T. (1985) From Saltley to Orgreave via Brixton, Journal of Law and Society, 12, 3, 293–304 Burney, E. (1985) Sentencing Young People: What went wrong with the Criminal Justice Act 1982, Aldershot: Gower Burney, E. (2009) Making People Behave: Anti-social behaviour, politics and policy, Cullompton: Willan Butler, D. 1952: The British General Election of 1951, London: Macmillan Butler, D. (1956) The British General Election of 1955, London: Macmillan Butler, D. and Rose, R., 1960: The British General Election of 1959, London: Macmillan Butler, D and King, A., 1965: The British General Election of 1964, London: Macmillan Butler, D. (1967) The British General Election of 1966, London: Macmillan Butler, D. and Pinto-Duschinsky, M., 1971: The British General Election of 1970, London: Macmillan Butler, D. and Kavanagh, D., 1975: The British General Election of February 1974, London: Macmillan Cabinet Office (1999a) Modernising Government, London: Cabinet Office Cabinet Office (1999b) Professional Policy Making for the Twenty-First Century, London: Cabinet Office Callaghan, J. (1983) Cumber and variableness, in The Home Office: Perspectives on Policy and Administration: Bicentenary Lectures 1982, London: RIPA Campbell, A. (2012) Power and Responsibility: Diaries 1999–2001, London: Arrow Campbell, A. (2013) The Burden of Power: Countdown to Iraq, London: Arrow Campbell, A. (2016) Outside, Inside: Diaries: Volume 5, 2003–2005, London: Biteback Campbell, B. (1993) Goliath: Britain’s Dangerous Places, London: Methuen Canter, D. (2007) Mapping Murder: The secrets of geographical profiling, London: Virgin Books Carpenter, M. (1851) Reformatory Schools for the Dangerous and Perishing Classes and for Juvenile Offenders, London: Gilpin, C. Carter, Sir P. (2003) Managing Offenders, Reducing Crime, London: Stationery Office Casey, L. (2008) Engaging Communities in Fighting Crime: A Review by Louise Casey, London: Cabinet Office Cavadino, M. and Dignan, J. (2002) The Penal System: An introduction, London: Sage Chibnall, S. (1977) Law and Order News, London: Tavistock Christoph, J.B. (1962) Capital Punishment and British Politics, London: George Allen and Unwin Clarke, A. and Taylor, I. (1980) Vandals, Pickets and Muggers: Television Coverage of Law and Order in the 1979 Election, Screen Education, 38, 99–111 Clarke, H.D., Mishler, W. and Whiteley, P. (1990) Recapturing the Falklands: Models of Conservative popularity, 1979–1983, British Journal of Political Science, 20, 1, 63–81 Clarke, K. (2016) Kind of Blue: A political memoir, London: Pan Clarke, R.V.G. and Mayhew, P. (1980) (eds.) Designing Out Crime, London: HMSO Clarke, R.V.G. and Hough, J.M. (1980) (eds.) The Effectiveness of Policing, Aldershot: Gower Clutterbuck, R. (1978) Britain in Agony, London: Faber Clutterbuck R. (1983) The Battle of Saltley, 1972, In R. Clutterbuck (ed.) The Media and Political Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, London Cohen, S. (1979) The punitive city: notes on the dispersal of social control, Contemporary Crises, 3, 4, 339–363 Cohen, S. (2003) Folk Devils and Moral Panics, London: Routledge, 3rd ed.

Bibliography 301 Conservative Party (1964) Prosperity with a Purpose, London: Conservative Party Conservative Party (1992) The Best Future for Britain, London: Conservative Party Conservative Party (1997) You Can Only Be Sure with the Conservatives, London: Conservative Party Conservative Political Centre (1962) A Report on Compensation for Injuries through Crimes of Violence, London: Conservative Political Centre Coogan, T.P. (1996) The Troubles: Ireland’s Ordeal 1966–1995 and the Search for Peace, Cornerstone Books Cottrell, R.C. (2015) Sex, Drugs and Rock’n’Roll: The rise of America’s 1960s counterculture, Boulder, CO: Rowman and Littlefield Crawford A. (1997) The Partnership Approach To Community Crime Prevention: Corporatism at the Local Level? Social & Legal Studies, 3, 4, 497–519 Crawford, A. (2002) The prospects for restorative justice for young offenders in England and Wales: A tale of two Acts, in McEvoy, K. and Newburn, T. (eds.) Criminology and Conflict Resolution, Basingstoke: Palgrave Crawford, A. (2003) Contractual governance of deviant behaviour, Journal of Law and Society, 30, 4, 479–505 Crawford, A. (2009) Governing through anti-social behaviour: Regulatory challenges to criminal justice, British Journal of Criminology, 49, 6, 810–31 Crawford, A. and Newburn, T. (2003) Youth Offending and Restorative Justice, Cullompton: Willan Crewe, I. (1992) The 1987 General Election, in Denver, D. and Hands, G. (eds.) Issues and Controversies in British Electoral Behavior, London: Harvester Wheatsheaf Crewe, I., Norris, P. & Waller, R. (1992) The 1992 general election, British Elections and Parties Yearbook, 2:1, 15–36 Crick, M. (2005) In Search of Michael Howard, London: Simon and Schuster Crick, M. & Van Klaveren, A. (1991) Mrs Thatcher’s greatest blunder, Contemporary British History, 5, 3, 397–416 Crump, J. (2011) What are the police doing on Twitter? Social media, the police and the public, Policy and the Internet, 3, 4, 1–27 Dahrendorf, R. (1995) LSE: A History of the London School of Economics and Political Science, 1895–1995, Oxford: Oxford University Press Darlington, J. (2016) A Clockwork Orange: The Art of Moral Panic? The Cambridge Quarterly, 45, 2, 119–134 Davenport-Hines, R. (2002) The Pursuit of Oblivion: A social history of drugs, London: Phoenix Press Davenport-Hines, R. (2012) An English Affair: Sex, Class and Power in the Age of Profumo, London: Harper Press Davies, C. (1975) The Permissive Society, London: Pitman Davies, C. (2004) The Strange Death of Moral Britain Dawtry, F. (1966) The abolition of the death penalty in Britain, British Journal of Criminology, 6, 2, 183–191 Denham, A. and Garnett, M. (1996) The Nature and Impact of ‘think-tanks’ in Contemporary Britain, Contemporary British History, 10, 1 43–61 Denham, A. and Garnett, M. (1996) The nature and impact of think tanks in contemporary Britain, in Kandiah, M. and Seldon, A. (eds.) Ideas and Think Tanks in Modern Britain, London: Frank Cass Denham, A. and Garnett, M. (1998) Introduction: British think-tanks and the climate of opinion in the twentieth century, in Denham, A. and Garnett, M. (eds.) British ThinkTanks and the Climate of Opinion, London: UCL Press

302

Bibliography

Dennis, N. (1997) (ed.) Zero Tolerance: Policing a free society, London: Institute of Economic Affairs Department for Constitutional Affairs (2006) Doing Law Differently, London: Department for Constitutional Affairs Dhiri, S. and Brand, S. (1999) Analysis of Costs and Benefits: Guidance for Evaluators, London: Home Office Dignan, J. (1999) The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the prospects for restorative justice, Criminal Law Review, 48–60 Dolowitz, D., Greenwold, S. and Marsh, D. (1999) Policy Transfer: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, But Why Red, White and Blue?, Parliamentary Affairs, 52: 719–30 Donnison, D. and Stewart, M. (1958) The Child and the Social Services, Fabian Research Series 196, London: Fabian Society Dorn, N. and South, N. (eds.) (1987) A Land Fit For Heroin? Drug policies, prevention and practice, Basingstoke: Macmillan Downes, D. (1982) The Origins and Consequences of Dutch Penal Policy since 1945: A Preliminary Analysis, British Journal of Criminology, 22: 325–62 Downes, D. (1983) Law and Order: Theft of an Issue, London: Fabian Society in association with the Labour Campaign for Criminal Justice Downes, D. (1987) The drug addict as folk devil, in Rock, P. (ed.) Drugs and Politics, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books Downes, D. (1988) Contrasts in Tolerance: Post-War Penal Policy in the Netherlands and England and Wales, Oxford: Clarendon Press Downes, D. (1989) Only Disconnect: Law and Order, Social Policy and the Community, in Bulmer, M., Lewis, J. and Piachaud, D. (eds.) The Goals of Social Policy, London: Unwin Hyman Downes, D. (1995) Broken windows of opportunity: crime, inequality and employment, in Jones. H. and Lansley, J. (eds.) Social Policy and the City, Aldershot: Avebury Downes, D. (2011) Comparative Criminology, Globalization and the ‘Punitive Turn’, in Nelken, D. Comparative Criminal Justice and Globalization, Farnham: Ashgate Downes, D. (2012) Introduction to Working Out of Crime, Farnham: Ashgate Downes, D. (2021) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Vol. 3: The Rise and Fall of Penal Hope, London: Routledge Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1994) ‘Hostages to Fortune”? The Politics of Law and Order in Post-War Britain, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: OUP Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (1997) Dumping the ‘Hostages to Fortune”? The Politics of Law and Order in Post-War Britain, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: OUP Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (2002) The skeletons in the cupboard: The politics of law and order at the turn of the millennium, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: OUP Downes, D. and Morgan R. (2012) Waiting for Ingleby: The Minimum Age of Criminal Responsibility – a Red Line Issue? in Newburn, T. and Peay, J. (eds.) Policing: Politics, Culture and Control – Essays in Honour of Robert Reiner, Oxford: Hart Downes, D. and Morgan, R. (2020) ‘The Skeletons in the Cupboard: The Politics of Law and Order at the Turn of the Millennium’, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology, 3rd Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Bibliography 303 Drewry, G. (1974) Parliament and hanging: further episodes in an undying saga, Parliamentary Affairs, 27, 251–261 Driver, S. and Martell, L. (1998) New Labour: Politics after Thatcherism, Cambridge: Polity Press Dromey, J. and Taylor, G. (1978) Grunwick: The workers’ story, London: Lawrence and Wishart Dunbar, I. and Langdon, A. (1998) Tough Justice: Sentencing and penal policies in the 1990s, London: Blackstone Press Dunleavy, P. (1995) Policy disasters: Explaining the UK’s record, Public Policy and Administration, 10, 2, 52–70 Dunleavy, P. and Hood, C. (1994) From public administration to new public management, Public Money and Management, 14, 3, 9–16 Dunning, E., Murphy, P. and Williams, J. (1988) The Roots of Football Hooliganism; London: Routledge Durbin, E. (1940) The Politics of Democratic Socialism, London: Routledge Duster, T. (1987) Crime, unemployment and the black urban underclass, Crime and Delinquency, 33, 2 Eglash, A. (1957) Creative restitution: a broader meaning for an old term, Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science, 48, 619–622 Elder, N.C.M., 1984, ‘Conclusion’ and Dixon, D. and Fishwick, E. The Law and Order Debate in Historical Perspective, in Norton, P. (ed.), Law and Order and British Politics, Aldershot: Gower Emmerson, C. and Frayne, C. (2005) Public Spending, General Election Briefing: Institute for Fiscal Studies Estrich, S. (1988) Getting Away with Murder: How politics is destroying the criminal justice system, Cambridge: Harvard University Press Evans, R. and Lewis, P. (2014) Undercover: The true story of Britain’s secret police, London: Guardian/Faber Farrall, S. and Hay, C. (eds.), 2014, The Legacy of Thatcherism: Assessing and Exploring Thatcherite Social and Economic Policies, Oxford University Press Farrell, S., Jackson, J. and Gray, E. (2009) Social Order and Fear of Crime in Contemporary Times, Oxford: Clarendon Press Farrell, S. and Jennings, W. (2014) Thatcherism and crime: the beast that never roared? In Farrell, S. and Hay, C. (eds.) The Legacy of Thatcherism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Farrall, S., Jennings, W., Gray, E. and Hay, C. (2017) Thatcherism, crime and the legacy of the social and economic ‘storms’ of the 1980s, Howard Journal, 56, 2, 220–243 Faulkner, D. (2006) Crime, State and Citizen: A field full of folk, Winchester: Waterside Press, 2nd ed. Faulkner, D.E.R. (2014) Servant of the Crown: A civil servant’s story of criminal justice and public service reform, Winchester: Waterside Press Favretto, I. (2000) ‘Wilsonism’ reconsidered: Labour party revisionism 1952–64, Contemporary British History, 14, 4, 54–80 Feest, J. (1988) Reducing the Prison Population: Lessons from the West German Experience? London: NACRO Field, S. (1990) Trends in Crime and their Interpretation: A study of recorded crime in post-war England and Wales, London: Home Office Field, S. (1999) Trends in Revisited, London: Home Office

304

Bibliography

Field, S. (2000) Crime and consumption, in Fielding, N., Clarke, A. and Witt, R. (eds.) The Economic Dimensions of Crime, Springer Fielding, N. (1981) The National Front, London: Routledge Finckenauer J.O. (1978) Crime as a National Political Issue: 1964–76: From Law and Order to Domestic Tranquility, Crime & Delinquency, 24(1):13–27 Fisher, Sir H. (1977) Report of an inquiry by the Hon. Sir Henry Fisher into the circumstances leading to the trial of three persons on charges arising out of the death of Maxwell Confait and the fire at 27 Doggett Road, London SE6, London: HMSO FitzGerald, M., Hough, M., Joseph, I. and Qureshi, T. (2002) Policing for London, Cullompton: Willan Publishing Flamm, M.W. (2005) Law and Order: Street crime, civil unrest and the crisis of liberalism in the 1960s, New York: Columbia University Press Foster, J., Newburn, T. and Souhami, A. (2005) Assessing the Impact of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, London: Home Office Franklin, B. and Petley, J. (1996) Killing the age of innocence: Newspaper reporting of the death of James Bulger, in Pilcher, J. and Wagg, S. (eds.) Thatcher’s Children: Politics, childhood and society in the 1980s and 1990s, London: Falmer Frosdick, S. and Marsh, P. (2005) Football Hooliganism, Cullompton: Willan Gaffney, J. (1987) Interpretations of violence: The Handsworth riots of 1985, Policy Papers in Ethnic Relations No. 10, Warwick: Centre for Research in Ethnic Relations Gardner, J., von Hirsch, A., Smith, A.T.H., Morgan, R., Ashworth, A. and Wasik, M. (1998) Clause 1 – the hybrid law from hell?, Criminal Justice Matters, Spring, 25–27 Garland, D. (1985) Punishment and Welfare: A history of penal strategies, Aldershot: Gower Garland, D. (1996) The limits of the sovereign state: Strategies of crime control in contemporary society, British Journal of Criminology, 36, 4, 445–471 Garland, D. (1997) Of crimes and criminals: The development of British criminology, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd ed. Garland, D. (2000) The culture of high crime societies: Some preconditions of recent law and order policies, British Journal of Criminology, 40, 3, 347–79 Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control, Oxford: Oxford University Press Garnett, M. and Aitken, I. (2003) Splendid! Splendid! The authorized biography of Willie Whitelaw, London: Pimlico Geary, R. (1985) Policing Industrial Disputes 1893–1985, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Geoghegan, R. (2012) Future of Corrections: Exploring the Use of Electronic Monitoring, London: Policy Exchange Gibson, B. (2008) The New Ministry of Justice, Winchester: Waterside Press, 2nd ed. Gies, L. (2017) Miscarriages of justice in the age of social media: The Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito innocence campaign, British Journal of Criminology, 57, 723–40 Gilling, D.J. (1994) Multi-agency crime prevention: Some barriers to collaboration, Howard Journal, 33, 3, 246–257 Gilling, D. (2007) Crime Prevention and Community Safety, Cullompton: Willan Gilmour, I. and Garnett, M. (1998) Whatever Happened to the Tories: The Conservatives since 1945, London: Fourth Estate Glass, R. (1960) Newcomers: The West Indians in London, London: George Allen and Unwin

Bibliography  305 Goldblatt, P. and Lewis, C. (1998) Reducing Offending: An Assessment of Research Evidence on Ways of Dealing with Offending Behaviour. Home Office Research Study No. 187. London: Home Office Goodhart, D. and Wintour, P (1986) Eddie Shah and the Newspaper Revolution, London: Coronet Goold, B. and Young, R. (1999) Restorative Police Cautioning in Aylesbury – from Degrading to Reintegrative Shaming Ceremonies? Criminal Law Review, 126–138 Gould, P. (1998) The Unfinished Revolution: How the Modernisers Saved the Labour Party, London: Little Brown Graham, J. (1988) The Declining Prison Population in the Federal Republic of Germany, Home Office Research and Planning Unit Research Bulletin, 24: 47–52 Grainger, R. (2009). ‘Artistic Creativity: British Posters and Print Advertising during the 1970s.’ in Pasadeos, Y. (ed.), Variety in Mass Communication Research, Atiner Green, D.A. (2012) When Children Kill Children: Penal populism and political culture, Oxford: Clarendon Press Greer, S. (1995) Supergrasses, Oxford: Clarendon Press Grigg, M. (1965) The Challenor Case, Harmondsworth: Penguin Guiney, T. (2018) Getting Out: Early release in England and Wales, 1960–1995, Oxford: Clarendon Press Gummer, J.S. (1971) The Permissive Society, London: Cassell and Co. Hagell, A. and Newburn, T. (1994) Persistent Young Offenders, London: Policy Studies Institute Hall, P.A. and Soskice, D. (2001) (eds.) Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford: Oxford University Press Hall, S. (1980) Reformism and the Legislation of Consent, in National Deviancy Conference (ed.) Permissiveness and Control, Basingstoke: Macmillan Hall, S., Critcher, C., Clarke, J., Jefferson, T. and Roberts, B. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the state and law and order, Basingstoke: Macmillan Halliday, J. (2001) Making Punishments Work: Report of the review of the sentencing framework for England and Wales, London: The Stationery Office Halloran, J.D., Elliott, P. and Murdock, G. (1970) Demonstrations and Communication: A Case Study, Harmondsworth: Penguin Hancké, B., Rhodes, M. and Thatcher, M. (2007) (eds.), Beyond Varieties of Capitalism, Conflict, Contradiction and Complementarities in the European Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press Hay C. (1995) Mobilization Through Interpellation: James Bulger, Juvenile Crime and the Construction of a Moral Panic, Social & Legal Studies, 4, 2:197–223 Hay, C. (2009) The Winter of Discontent Thirty Years On, Political Quarterly, 80, 4, 545–552 Hay, C. (2010) Chronicles of a death foretold: The winter of discontent and the construction of the crisis of British Keynesianism, Parliamentary Affairs, 63, 3, 446–470 Haydon, D. and Scraton, P. (2000) ‘Understand a Little Less; Condemn a Little More’: The political context and rights implications of domestic and European rulings in the Thompson-Venables case, Journal of Law and Society, 27, 3, 416–48 Hayward, K. and Yar, M. (2006) The ‘chav’ phenomenon: Consumption, media and the construction of a new underclass, Crime, Media, Culture, 2, 1, 9–28 Hebdige, D. (1979) Subculture: The meaning of style, London: New Accents Hennessey, P. (1992) Never Again: Britain 1945–51, London: Cape

306

Bibliography

Hennessey, P. (2006) Having It So Good: Britain in the fifties, London: Penguin Hennessey, P. (2019) Winds of Change: Britain in the early sixties, London: Allen Lane Heppell, T. and Theakston, K. (eds.) How Labour Governments Fall: From Ramsay Macdonald to Gordon Brown, London: Palgrave Hitchens, P. (2003) A Brief History of Crime, London: Atlantic Books HMIC and others (2003) Streets Ahead: A Joint Inspection of the Street Crimes Initiative, London: Home Office Holdaway, S. and O’Neill, M. (2006) Institutional Racism after Macpherson: An Analysis of Police Views, Policing and Society, 16, 4, 349–369 Home Affairs Committee (1987) Contract Provision of Private Prisons, Fourth Report 1986/87, London: HMSO Home Affairs Select Committee (1993) Juvenile Offenders, Memoranda of Evidence, Session 1992–93, 444-I, London: HMSO Home Affairs Committee, Third Report: The Double Jeopardy Rule, HC Session 1999–2000, 17th May 2000 Home Office (1959) Penal Practice in a Changing Society: Aspects of future development (England and Wales), London: HMSO, Cmnd. 645 Home Office (1964) Compensation for Victims of Crimes of Violence, Cmnd. 1406, London: HMSO Home Office (1964) The War Against Crime in England and Wales, 1959–1964, London: Home Office Home Office (1988) Private Sector Involvement in the Remand System, Cmnd. 434, London: HMSO Home Office (1993) Police Reform White Paper, Cm 2281, London: HMSO Home Office (1997) No More Excuses: A New Approach to Tackling Youth Crime in England and Wales, London: Stationery Office Home Office (2001) Criminal Justice: The way ahead, CM 5074, London: HMSO Home Office (2003) Respect and Responsibility: Taking a stand against anti-social behaviour, London: Home Office Home Office (2004) Building Communities; Beating Crime: Developing a better police service for the 21st century, London: Home Office, CM 6360 Hood, C., Baldwin, R. and Rothstein, H. (2000) Assessing the Dangerous Dogs Act: When does a regulatory law fail? Public Law, 2000: 282–305 Hood, R. (1965) Borstal Reassessed, London: Heinemann Hood, R. (1974) Criminology and penal change: A case study of the nature and impact of some recent advice to governments, in Hood, R. (ed.) Criminology and Penal Policy: Essays in honour of Sir Leon Radzinowicz, London: Heinemann Hope, T. (2004) Pretend it works: Evidence and governance in the evaluation of the reducing burglary initiative, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 4, 3, 287–308 Hope, T. and Shaw, M. (eds.) Communities and Crime Reduction, London: HMSO Hopkins, H. (1963) The New Look: A social history of the forties and fifties in Britain, London: Secker and Warburg Hough, M. (1995) Anxiety about Crime: Findings from the 1994 British Crime Survey, London: HMSO Hough, M. (2004) Modernization, scientific rationalism and the Crime Reduction Programme, Criminal Justice, 4(3): 239–253 Hough, M. (2010) Policing, new public management and legitimacy, in Brookes, S. and Grint, K. (eds.) The New Public Leadership Challenge, Basingstoke: Palgrave Howard, A. (1987) RAB: The Life of R A Butler, London; Jonathan Cape

Bibliography 307 Hudson, K. and Jones, T. (2016) Satellite tracking of offenders and integrated offender management: a local case study, Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, 55, 1–2, 188–206 Ingleby Committee (1960) Report of the Committee on Children and Young Persons, Cmnd. 1191, London: HMSO Inquiry into Police Responsibilities and Rewards, London: HMSO, Final Report Jackson, L.A. (2008) ‘The Coffee Club Menace’, Cultural and Social History, 5:3, 289–308 Jacobs, B. (1984) Labour against the centre: The Clay Cross syndrome, Local Government Studies, 10:2, 75–87 Jacobson, J. and Hough, M. (2010) Unjust Deserts: Imprisonment for Public Protection, London: Prison Reform Trust Jackson, J. (2004) Experience and expression: Social and cultural significance in the fear of crime, British Journal of Criminology, 44, 946–966 Jacques, C. (2005) Ram-raiding: the history, incidence and scope for prevention, in Gill, M. (ed.) Crime at Work, Basingstoke: Macmillan James, A., Liebling, A., Bottomley, A.K. and Clare, E. (1997) Privatizing Prisons: Rhetoric and Reality, London: Sage James, A. and Bottomley, A.K. (1998) Prison privatization and the remand population: Principle versus pragmatism? Howard Journal, 37, 3, 223–233 Jansen, K. (undated) The British Crime Survey: Measuring crime for 25 years, London: Home Office Jarvis, M. (2003) Conservative Governments, Morality and Social Change in Affluent Britain, 1957–1964, Manchester: Manchester University Press Jay, P. (1962) A plan for family bureaux, in Donnison, D., Jay, P. and Stewart, M. The Ingleby Report: Three Critical Essays, London: Fabian Society Jefferson, T. (1987) Beyond paramilitarism, British Journal of Criminology, 27, 1, 47–53 Jefferson, T. (1993) Pondering paramilitarism: A question of standpoints? British Journal of Criminology, 33, 3, 374–88 Jemphrey, A. and Berrington, E. (2000) Surviving the Media: Hillsborough, Dunblane and the press, Journalism Studies, 1:3, 469–483 Jenkins, R. (1959) The Labour Case, Harmondsworth: Penguin Jenkins, P. (1988) Mrs Thatcher’s Revolution, London: Jonathan Cape Johnson, L. (2003) From ‘pluralisation’ to ‘the police extended family’: discourses on the governance of community policing in Britain, International Journal of the Sociology of Law, 31, 185–204 Jones, D.W. (2012) Conditions for Sustainable Decarceration Strategies for Young Offenders, Unpublished PhD thesis, London School of Economics Jones, T. (1996) Remaking the Labour Party: From Gaitskell to Blair, London: Routledge Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2001) Widening Access: Improving police relations with hard to reach groups, London: Home Office Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2005) Comparative criminal justice policy-making in the United States and United Kingdom: The case of private prisons, British Journal of Criminology, 45, 58–80 Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2005) Symbolic politics and penal policy: The long shadow of Willie Horton, Crime, Media, Culture, 1, 1, 72–87 Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2006) Three strikes and you’re out: Exploring symbol and substance in American and British crime control politics, British Journal of Criminology, 46, 781–802 Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2007) Policy Transfer and Criminal Justice, Maidenhead: Open University Press

308

Bibliography

Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2013) Policy Convergence, Politics and Comparative Penal Reform: Sex Offender Notification Schemes in the US and UK, Punishment and Society, 15, 5, 439–467 Jones, T. and Newburn, T. (2021) When crime policies travel: Exploring cross-national policy transfer in crime control, in Tonry, M. (ed.) Crime and Justice, Vol. 50, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Jones, T., Newburn, T. and Smith, D.J. (1994) Democracy and Policing, London: Policy Studies Institute Jowell, R., Hedges, B., Lynn, P., Farrant, G. and Heath, A. (1993) The 1992 British Election: The failure of the polls, Public Opinion Quarterly, 57, 2, 238–263 Judge, T. (1994) The Force of Persuasion: The story of the Police Federation, Surbiton: Police Federation Justice (1961) Compensation for Victims of Crimes of Violence, London: Stevens Karmen, A. (2000) New York Murder Mystery: The true story behind the crime crash of the 1990s, New York: New York University Press Kaspersson, M. (2008) On treating the symptoms and not the cause: Reflections on the Dangerous Dogs Act, Papers from the British Criminology Conference, Volume 8, British Society of Criminology Katz, J. (2019) Hot potato criminology: Ethnographers and shame of poor people’s crimes, Annual Review of Criminology, 2, 21–52 Kavanagh, D. and Morris, P. (1994) Consensus Politics: Attlee to Major, Oxford: Blackwell Kaye, T. (1991) Unsafe and unsatisfactory? Report of the independent inquiry into the working practices of the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad, London: Civil Liberties Trust Kelling, G.L. and Bratton, W.J. (1998) Declining Crime Rates: Insiders’ Views of the New York City Story, Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 88, 4, 1217–1231 Kennedy, L. (1961) 10 Rillington Place, London: Victor Gollancz Kenny, M. & Smith, M.J. (1997) Discourses of modernization: Gaitskell, Blair and the reform of Clause IV, British Elections & Parties Review, 7, 1, 110–126 King, A. (1998) Why Labour won – at last, in King, A. et al. (eds.) New Labour Triumphs: Britain at the Polls, Chatham, NJ: Chatham House King, A. and Crewe, I. (2013) The Blunders of Our Governments, London: Oneworld King, R.D. and McDermott, K. (1989) British Prisons 1970–1987: An ever-deepening crisis, British Journal of Criminology, 29, 2, 107–128 King, R.D. and McDermott, K. (1991) A Fresh Start: Managing the Prison Service, in Reiner, R. and Cross, M. (eds.) Beyond Law and Order, London: Macmillan King, R.D. and McDermott, K. (1992) Security, Control and Humane Containment in the Prison System in England and Wales, in Downes, D. (ed.), Unravelling Criminal Justice: Eleven British Studies, London: Macmillan Klein, L. (2006) A Very English Hangman: The life and times of Albert Pierrepoint, London: Corvo Klug, F., Starmer, K. and Weir, S. (1996) The Three Pillars of Liberty: Political Rights and Freedoms in the United Kingdom, London: Routledge Kramer, P. (2011) A Clockwork Orange, London: Macmillan Labour Party (1964) Crime: A Challenge to Us All, London: Labour Party Labour Party (1992) It’s Time to Get Britain Working Again, London: Labour Party Labour Party (1996) Tackling Youth Crime, Reforming Youth Justice, London: Labour Party Labour Party (1996) Tackling the Causes of Crime, London: Labour Party

Bibliography 309 Labour Party (1997) New Labour – Because Britain Deserves Better, London: Labour Party Labour Party (2010) A Future Fair for All, London: Labour Party Lacey, N. (1994) Government as manager citizen as consumer: The case of the Criminal Justice Act 1991, Modern Law Review, 57, 4, 534–554 Lacey, N., Soskice, D. and Hope, D. (2018) Understanding the determinants of penal policy: Crime, culture and comparative political economy, Annual Review of Criminology, 1, 195–217 Law Commission (1999) Double Jeopardy, Consultation Paper No 156, London: Stationery Office Law Commission 267 (2001) Double Jeopardy and Prosecution Appeals, London: Stationery Office Layard, R. and Nickell, S.J. (1985) The causes of British unemployment, National Institute Economic Review Lea, J. and Young, J. (1984) What Is To Be Done About Law and Order?, Harmondsworth: Penguin Learmont, General Sir John (1995) Review of Prison Service Security in England and Wales and the Escape from Parkhurst Prison on Tuesday 3rd January 1995, London: HMSO, Cmnd. 3020 Lerman, A.E. and Weaver, V.M. (2014) Race and Crime in American Politics: From law and order to Willie Horton and beyond, in Bucerius, S. and Tonry, M. (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Ethnicity, Crime and Immigration, New York: Oxford University Press Lewis, D. (1997) Hidden Agendas: Politics, law and disorder, London: Hamish Hamilton Lewis, O. (1961), The Children of Sanchez: Autobiography of a Mexican Family, New York: Basic Books Lewis, O. (1968) The Culture of Poverty, in Moynihan, P. (ed.) On Understanding Poverty: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, New York, NY: Basic Books Liberal Party (1964) Think for Yourself – Vote Liberal, London: Liberal Party Liberal Democrat Party (1997) Make the Difference, London: Liberal Democrat Party Light, T., Nee, C. and Ingham, H. (1993) Car Crime: The offenders’ perspective, London: HMSO Loader, I. (2006) Fall of the ‘platonic guardians’: Liberalism, criminology and political responses to crime in England and Wales, British Journal of Criminology, 46, 4, 561–586 Loader, I. and Mulcahy, A. (2003) Policing and the Condition of England, Oxford: Clarendon Press Lodge, M. and Hood, C. (2002) Pavlovian policy responses to media feeding frenzies? Dangerous dogs regulation in comparative perspective, Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management, 10, 1, 1–13 Loveday, B. and Reid, A. (2003) Going Local: Who Should Run Britain’s Police Force, London: Policy Exchange Mackenzie, S. (2008) Second chance punitivism and contractual governance of crime and incivility: New Labour, Old Hobbes, Journal of Law and Society, 35, 2, 214–39 Macnicol, J. (1987) In Pursuit of the Underclass, Journal of Social Policy, 16: 293–318; Lister, R. (1996) (ed.) Charles Murray and the Underclass: The Continuing Debate, London: Institute for Economic Affairs and the Sunday Times Macpherson, C.B. (1962) The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Oxford: Oxford University Press

310

Bibliography

Mahon, T.A. (1971) The British System, Past and Present, International Journal of the Addictions, 6:4, 627–634 Mair, G. (2004) Diversionary and Nonsupervisory Approaches to Dealing with Offenders, in Bottoms, A.E., Rex, S. and Robinson, G. (eds.) Alternatives to Prison, Cullompton, Devon, UK: Willan Major, J. (2000) John Major: The autobiography, London: Harper Collins Mandelson, P. (2011) The Third Man, London: Harper Collins Mannheim, H. (1964) This Sentencing Business, British Journal of Criminology, 4, 608–9 Maple, J. (2000) The Crime Fighter: Putting the Bad Guys Out of Business, New York: Random House Mark, R. (1977) Policing a Perplexed Society, London: Allen and Unwin Mark, R. (1978) In the Office of Constable, London: Collins Marks, L and Van Den Bergh, T. (1990) Ruth Ellis: A case of diminished responsibility? London: Penguin Marshall, T. (1996) The evolution of restorative justice in Britain, European Journal on Criminal Policy and Research, 4, 4, 21–43 Marshall, T. (1999) Restorative Justice: An Overview, London: Home Office Marshall, T. and Merry, S. (1990) Crime and Accountability, London: HMSO Martin, J.P. (1988) The development of criminology in Britain, 1948–60, British Journal of Criminology, 28, 2, 35–44 Martin, R. (1981) New Technology and Industrial Relations in Fleet Street, Oxford: Oxford University Press Marwick, A. (1982) British Society Since 1945, Harmondsworth: Penguin Matthews, K., Minford, P., Nickell, S. and Helpman, E. (1987) Mrs Thatcher’s economic policies, 1979–1987, Economic Policy, 2, 5, 57–101 Maudling, R. (1978) Memoirs, London: Sidgwick and Jackson Mayhew, H. (1862), Those That Will Not Work, Vol. 4 of London Labour and the London Poor (1851–62) London: Griffin. Repr. Ed. P. Quennell, London’s Underworld, London: Spring Books, 1955 Mayhew, P. and Hough, J.M. (1988) British Crime Survey: Origins and Impact, in M. Maguire and J. Pointing (eds.) Victims of Crime: A new deal? Milton Keynes: Open University Press Mayhew, P. and Hough, J.M. (1992) The British Crime Survey: The first ten years, Market Research Society Journal, 34, 1, 1–15 Mayhew, P., Elliott, D. and Dowds, L. (1989) The 1988 British Crime Survey, Home Office Research Study No 111, London: Home Office Mays, J.B. (1961) Teen-Age culture in contemporary Britain and Europe, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 338, 22–32 McLaughlin, E. & Murji, K. (1998) Resistance through representation: ‘Storylines’, advertising and police federation campaigns, Policing and Society, 8:4, 367–399 McDermott, K. and King, R.D. (1989) A fresh start: The enhancement of prison regimes, Howard Journal, 28, 3, 161–76 McGlone, F. (1990) ‘Away from the Dependency Culture?’ in Savage, S. and Robins, L. (eds.) Public Policy Under Thatcher, London: Macmillan McIlroy, R. (2002) The Enduring Alliance? Trade Unions and the Making of New Labour, 1994–1997 British Journal of Industrial Relations, 36, 4, 537–64 McKenzie, R.T. (1968) Angels in Marble: Working-class Conservatives in urban England, London: Heinemann Educational

Bibliography 311 McNee, Sir D. (1983) McNee’s Law: The memoirs of Sir David McNee, Five critical years at the Metropolitan Police, London: Collins Melly, G. (1972) Revolt into Style, Harmondsworth: Penguin Melossi, D., Sozzo, M. and Brandariz-Garcia, J.A. (2018) (eds.) The Political Economy of Punishment Today, London: Routledge Miers, D. (2006) The international development of restorative justice, in Johnstone, G. and Van Ness, D. W. (eds.) Handbook of Restorative Justice, Cullompton: Willan Milburn, J.F. (1958) The Fabian Society and the British Labour Party. Western Political Quarterly. 11, 2, 319–339 Miliband, R. (1969) The State in Capitalist Society, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson Millie, A. (2006) Crime as an issue during the 2005 UK general election, Crime, Media, Culture, 4, 1, 101–111 Millie, A., Jacobson, J., McDonald, E. and Hough, M. (2005) Antisocial Behaviour Strategies: Finding a balance, Bristol: Policy Press Mills, H. (2011) Community Sentences: A solution to penal excess? London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Mills, H., Silvestri, A. and Grimshaw, R. (2010) Police Expenditure 1999–2009, London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Milton, K. (2004) A changing sense of place: Direct action and environmental protest in the U.K., in Carrier, J.G. (ed.) Changing Environments: Local understanding in a globalizing world, Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press Mitchell, G.A.M. (2013) Reassessing ‘the Generation Gap’: Bill Haley’s 1957 Tour of Britain, inter-generational relations and attitudes to rock ‘n’ roll in the late 1950s, Twentieth Century British History, 24, 4, 573–605 Moore, C. (2014) Margaret Thatcher: The authorized biography, Volume one, London: Penguin Moore, T. (2015) The Killing of Constable Keith Blakelock: The Broadwater Farm Riot, Winchester: Waterside Press Moores, C. (2017) Civil Liberties and Human Rights in Twentieth Century Britain, Cambridge University Press Moran, J. (2001) Childhood sexuality and education: The case of section 28, Sexualities, Vol 4, 1, 73–89 Morgan, K. (1990) The People’s Peace: British History 1945–1990, Oxford: Oxford University Press Morgan, K.O. (1997) Callaghan: A Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press Morgan, R. (1996) Custody in the police station: How do England and Wales measure up in Europe?, Policy Studies, 17, 1, 55–72 Morgan, R. (1996) Learmont: Dangerously unbalanced, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 35, 4, 346–353 Morgan, R. (2006) With Respect to Order, the Rules of the Game have Changed: New Labour’s dominance of the law and order agenda, in Newburn, T. and Rock, P. (eds.) The Politics of Law and Order: Essays in honour of David Downes, Oxford: Clarendon Press Morgan, R. (2008) Summary Justice – Fast but Fair? London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Morgan, R. (2011) Austerity, subsidiarity and parsimony: offending behaviour and criminalisation, in Silvestri, A. (ed.) Lessons for the Coalition: An end of term report on New Labour and criminal justice, London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies

312

Bibliography

Morgan, R. and Newburn, T. (2007) Youth justice, in Maguire, M., Morgan, R. and Reiner, R. (eds) Oxford Handbook of Criminology, Oxford: OUP Morris, A. and Giller, H. (1987) Understanding Juvenile Justice, London: Croom Helm Morris, A. and Maxwell, G. (2000) The practice of family group conferences in New Zealand: Assessing the place, potential and pitfalls of restorative justice, in Crawford, A. and Goodey, J. (eds.) Integrating a Victim Perspective within Criminal Justice, Aldershot: Ashgate Morris, T. and Morris, P. (1963) Pentonville: A sociological study of an English prison, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Morrison, A. (2012) A Child of the Jago, Oxford: Oxford University Press (originally published in 1896) Mullin, C. (1986) Error of Judgement: The Truth about the Birmingham Bombings, London: Chatto and Windus Mullin, C. (2011) Decline and Fall: Diaries 2005–2010, London: Profile Books Murie, A. (2015) ‘The Right to Buy: History and Prospect’ History and Policy, 11th November Murji K. (2007) Sociological Engagements: Institutional Racism and Beyond. Sociology. 41, 5, 843–855 Murray, C. (1984), Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980, New York: Basic Books Murray, C. (1997) Does Prison Work?, London: Institute of Economic Affairs Myers, F.E. (1971) Civil disobedience and organisational change: The British Committee of 100, Political Science Quarterly, 86, 1, 92–112 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968) [The Kerner Commission] Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders New York: Bantam Books Nelken, D. (ed.) 2011, Comparative Criminal Justice and Globalization, Farnham: Ashgate Nellis, M. (2000) Law and order: the electronic monitoring of offenders, in Dolowitz, D. (ed.) Policy Transfer and British Social Policy, Buckingham: Open University Press Nellis, M. (2009) Tom Stacey: ‘Founder’ of electronic monitoring in the UK, The Journal of Offender Monitoring, 16–26 Nelson, E. (1989) The British Counter-Culture 1967–1973: A study of the underground press, Basingstoke: Macmillan Newburn, T. (1991) Permission and Regulation: Law and morals in post-war Britain, London: Routledge Newburn, T. (1996) Back to the future? Youth crime, youth justice and the rediscovery of ‘authoritarian populism’, In Pilcher, J. and Wagg, S. Thatcher’s Children? Politics, childhood and society in the 1980s and 1990s Newburn, T. (1998) Tackling youth crime and reforming youth justice: The origins and nature of New Labour policy, Policy Studies, 19:3–4, 199–212 Newburn, T. (2001) Community safety and policing: Some implications of the Crime and Disorder Act 1998, in Hughes, G., McLaughlin, E. and Muncie, J. (ed.) Crime Prevention and Community Safety: New Directions, London: Sage Newburn, T. (2003) Crime and Criminal Justice Policy, 2nd ed., Harlow: Longman Newburn, T. (2007) ‘Tough on crime’: Penal policy in England and Wales, in Tonry, M. (ed.) Crime, Punishment and Politics in Comparative Perspective, Crime and Justice: An Annual Review, Vol. 36, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Newburn, T. (2021) The causes and consequences of urban riot and unrest, Annual Review of Criminology, 4, 53–73

Bibliography 313 Newburn, T. (forthcoming) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Vol. V: Policing, 1955–1997, London: Routledge Newburn, T. and Jones, T. (2007) Symbolising crime control: Reflections on zero tolerance, Theoretical Criminology, 11, 2, 221–243 Newburn, T., Brown, D., Crisp, D. and Dewhurst, P. (1990) Policing the streets, Home Office Research Bulletin, 10 Newburn, T., Crawford, A., Earle, R., Goldie, S., Hale, C., Masters, G., Netten, A., Saunders, R., Hallam, A., Sharpe, K. and Uglow, S. (2002) The Introduction of Referral Orders into the Youth Justice System: Final Report, Home Office Research Study No. 242, London: Home Office Newburn, T. and Reiner, R. (2007) Crime and penal policy, in Seldon, A. (ed.) Blair’s Britain, 1997–2007, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Newsam, Sir F. (1954) The Home Office, London: George Allen and Unwin Nicholas, S., Povey, D., Walker, A. and Kershaw, C. (2005) Crime in England and Wales 2004–05, Home Office Statistical Bulletin 11/05, London: Home Office Norris, P. (1998) The battle for the campaign agenda, in King, A., Denver, D., Mclean, I., Norris, P., Norton, P., Sanders, D. and Seyd, P. New Labour Triumphs: Britain at the Polls, Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Oakley, A. (2012) The strange case of the two Wootton Reports: What can we learn about the evidence-policy relationship?, Evidence and Policy, 8, 3, 267–283 Oakley, A. (2015) A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century, London: Bloomsbury O’Connell, S. (2006) From Toad of Toad Hall to the ‘Death Drivers’ of Belfast: An exploratory history of joyriding, British Journal of Criminology, 46, 455–469 Okojie, P. (1985) Chief constables and political interference: The case of Anderton and Greater Manchester, in Fine, B. and Millar, R. (eds.) Policing the Miners’ Strike, London: Lawrence and Wishart, at pp. 55–56 O’Leary, B. and McGarry, J. (1993) The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland, London: Athlone Press O’Malley, P. (1992) ‘Risk, power and crime prevention’, Economy and Society, Vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 252–75 O’Malley, P. (2009) Risk, crime and prudentialism revisited, Legal Studies Research Paper No. 09/122, Sydney: University of Sydney Law School Parker, H. (1974) The joys of joyriding, New Society, 27, 587 Parker, H. (1984) Locking up the joyriders, Youth in Society, 96, 11–13 Parker, H. Bakx, K. and Newcombe, R. (1988) Living with Heroin, Milton Keynes: Open University Parkin, F. (1967) Working-class Conservatives: A Theory of Political Deviance, British Journal of Sociology, 18, 3: 278–90 Parkinson, M. and Duffy, J. (1984) Government’s response to inner-city riots: The Minister for Merseyside and the task force, Parliamentary Affairs, 37, 1, 76–96 Parkinson, M. (2019) Liverpool on the Brink: The remaking of a post-industrial city, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press Pearson, G. (1983) Hooligan: A history of respectable fears, London: Macmillan Pearson, G. (1987) The New Heroin Users, Oxford: Blackwell Pearson, J. (1995) The Profession of Violence: The rise and fall of the Kray twins, 4th ed., London: Harper Collins Pease, K. (1980) Community service and prison: Are they alternatives? In Pease, K. and McWilliams, W. (eds.) Community Service By Order, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press

314

Bibliography

Pease, K. (2010) Prison, Community Sentencing and Crime, Civitas: Institute for the Study of Civil Society Pease, K., Durkin, P., Earnshaw, I., Payne, D. and Thorpe, J. (1975) Community Service Orders, Home Office Research Study 29, London: HMSO Penal Affairs Consortium (1995) Sentencing and Early Release: The Home Secretary’s proposals, Penal Affairs Consortium, December Petley, J. (1994) In defence of ‘video nasties’, British Journalism Review, 5, 3, 52–57 Petley, J. (2011) Film and Video Censorship on Modern Britain, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Pimlott, B. (1988) The myth of consensus, in Smith, L.M. (ed.) The Making of Britain: Echoes of greatness, Oxford: Martin Robertson Pimlott, B. (1992) Harold Wilson, London: Harper Collins Pike, K. (2020) Mere theology? Neil Kinnock and the Labour Party’s aims and values, 1986–1988, Contemporary British History, 34, 1, 95–117 Pitts, J. (1988) The Politics of Juvenile Crime, London: Sage Power, A. (1998) Estates on the Edge: The social consequences of mass housing in northern Europe, Basingstoke: Macmillan Power, A. and Tunstall, R. (1997) Dangerous Disorder: Riots and violent disturbances in thirteen areas of Britain, 1991–92, York: Joseph Rowntree Foundation Prime Minister (1992) The Citizen’s Charter: First Report 1992, Cmnd. 2101, London: HMSO Prince, M. (1988) God’s Cop: A biography of James Anderton, Frederick Muller Pyle, D. (1995) Cutting the Costs of Crime: The economics of crime and criminal justice, London: Institute for Economic Affairs Radzinowicz, Sir L. (1999) Adventures in Criminology, London: Routledge Raine, J. and Willson, M.J. (1993) Managing Criminal Justice, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf Raine, J. and Willson, M.J. (1995) New public management and criminal justice, Public Money and Management, 15, 1, 35–40 Ramsden, J. (1996) The Prime Minister and the making of policy, in Ball, S. and Seldon, A. (eds.) The Heath Government, Harlow: Longman Rawnsley, A. (2000) Servants of the People: The inside story of New Labour, London: Penguin Reiner, R. (1978) The police in the class structure, British Journal of Law and Society, 5, 2, 166–184 Reiner, R. (1978) The Blue-Coated Worker, Oxford: Oxford University Press Reiner, R. (1980) Fuzzy thoughts: The police and law and order politics, Sociological Review, 28, 2, 377–413 Reiner, R. (1984) Is Britain turning into a police state? New Society, 2nd August 1984 Reiner, R. (1985) The Politics of the Police, Brighton: Wheatsheaf Reiner, R. (2020) Social Democratic Criminology, London: Routledge Renton, D. (2014) The killing of Blair Peach, London Review of Books, 36, 10, 23–26 Rhodes R.A.W. (2007) Blair and Governance, in Koch R. and Dixon J. (eds.) Public Governance and Leadership, Wiesbaden: DUV Robertson, G. (1989) The Individual and the Law, London: Penguin Rock, P. (1990) Helping Victims of Crime: The Home Office and the rise of Victim Support in England and Wales, Oxford: Oxford University Press Rock, P. (1995) The opening stages of criminal justice policy-making, British Journal of Criminology, 35, 1, 1–16

Bibliography 315 Rock, P. (1996) Reconstructing a Women’s Prison: The Holloway redevelopment project, 1968–88, Oxford: Clarendon Press Rock, P. (2004) Constructing Victims’ Rights: The Home Office, New Labour and Victims, Oxford: Oxford University Press Rock, P. (2014) Victims’ Rights, in Vanfraechem, I., Pemberton, A. and Ndahinda, F.M. (eds.) Justice for Victims: Perspectives on rights, transition and reconciliation, London: Routledge Rock, P. (2019a) Official History of Criminal Justice, Volume 1: The Liberal Hour, London: Routledge Rock, P. (2019b) The Official History of Criminal Justice, Volume 2: Institution-Building, London: Routledge Rock, P. (forthcoming) The Role of Victim Advocacy in Criminal Justice Reform in England and Wales Annual of Criminology Rose, D. (1992) A Climate of Fear: The murder of PC Blakelock and the case of the Tottenham Three, London: Bloomsbury Rose, G. (1961) The Struggle for Penal Reform: The Howard League and its Predecessors, London: Stevens Rose, G. (1964) The War Against Crime in England and Wales, 1959–1964, British Journal of Criminology, 4, 606–609 Royal Commission on the Police (1962) Final Report, Cmnd. 1728, London: HMSO Rubin, G.R. (2007) Posthumous pardons, the Home Office and the Timothy Evans case, Criminal Law Review, 41–59 Russell, M. (2005) Building New Labour: The politics of party organization, London: Palgrave Rutherford, A. (1984) Prisons and the Process of Justice, London: Heinemann Rutter, M. and Giller, H. (1983) Juvenile Delinquency: Trends and perspectives, Harmondsworth: Penguin Ryan, M. (1978) The Acceptable Pressure Group – Inequality in the Penal Lobby: A Case Study of the Howard League and R.A.P., Farnborough: Saxon House Ryan, M. (1983) The Politics of Penal Reform, Harlow: Longman Salter, M. (2016) Crime, Justice and Social Media, London: Routledge Sampson, R. and Wilson, W.J. (1995) Towards a theory of race, crime and urban inequality, in Hagan, J. and Peterson, R.D. (eds.) Crime and Inequality, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press Sandbrook, D. (2006) Never Had it So Good, London: Abacus Sandbrook, D. (2010) State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974, London: Allen Lane Sanders, D., Ward, H., Marsh, D. and Fletcher, T. (1987) Government popularity and the Falklands: A reassessment, British Journal of Political Science, 17, 3, 281–303 Savage, J. (2004) England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and punk rock, London: Faber Savage, S. and Charman, S. (2001) The bobby lobby: Police associations and the policy process, in Ryan, M., Savage, S. and Wall, D. (eds.) Policy Networks in Criminal Justice, Basinstoke: Palgrave Savage, S., Charman, S. and Cope, M. (2000) Policing and the Power of Persuasion, London: Blackstone Press Scarman, Lord Justice (1981) The Brixton Disorders, 10 th-12th April 1981, Report of an Inquiry by the Rt. Hon. The Lord Scarman OBE, Cmnd. 8427, London: HMSO Schichor, D. and Sechrest, D. (1996) Three Strikes and You’re Out: Vengeance as Public Policy, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage

316

Bibliography

Schneer, J. (1990) George Lansbury, Manchester: Manchester University Press Scraton, P. (2000) Hillsborough: The Truth, Edinburgh: Mainstream Scraton, P., Sim, J. and Skidmore, P. (1991) Prisons Under Protest, Milton Keynes: Open University Press Seldon, A. (1981) Churchill’s Indian Summer, London: Hodder and Stoughton Seyd, P. (1999) New parties/new politics? A case study of the British Labour Party, Party Politics, 5. 3, 383–405 Shaw, S. (1985) Reflections on ‘short, sharp shock’, Youth and Policy, 13, 1–5 Sheerman, B. (1992) Seven Steps to Justice: Proposals for Reforming the Criminal Justice System, London: Labour Party Shepherd, J. (2013) Crisis? What Crisis? The Callaghan government and the British ‘Winter of Discontent’, Manchester: Manchester University Press Shute, S. (2004) Punishing murderers: release procedures and the ‘tariff’, 1953–2004, Criminal Law Review Silverman, S., Paget, R.T. and Hollis, C. Hanged and Innocent? London: Victor Gollancz Sim, J. (1987) Working for the clampdown: Prisons and politics in England and Wales, 1969–90, Social Justice, 18, 3 Simmons, J. and Dodd, T. (eds.) (2003) Crime in England and Wales 2002–03, Home Office Statistical Bulletin Simon, J. (2006) Governing Through Crime: How the war on crime transformed American democracy and created a culture of fear, New York: Oxford University Press Skolnick, J. (1996) Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in a Democratic Society, New York: Wiley Smart, C. (1984) Social policy and drug addiction: A critical study of policy development, British Journal of Addiction, 79, 31–39 Smith, A.T.H. (1978) The Criminal Law Act 1977, Criminal Law Review, 219 Smith, A.T.H. (1994) Doli incapax under threat, Cambridge Law Journal, 53, 3, 426–428 Smith, D.J. (1994) The Sleep of Reason: The James Bulger Case, London: Century Smith, J.A. (1991) The Idea Brokers: Think Tanks and the Rise of the New Policy Elite, New York: The Free Press Smith, M.J. (2008) Neil Kinnock and the modernisation of the Labour Party, Contemporary Record, 8, 3, 555–566 Sherman, L.W., Gottfredson, D., MacKenzie, D.L., Eck, J., Reuter, P. and Bushway, S. (1997) What Works, What Doesn’t, What’s Promising, Report to the U.S. Congress, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Dept. of Justice Solomon, E., Eades, C., Garside, R. and Rutherford, M. (2007) Ten Years of Criminal Justice under Labour: An independent audit, London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Souhami, A. (2014) Institutional racism and police reform: an empirical critique, Policing and Society, 24: 1–21 Souhami, A. (2015) Creating the Youth Justice Board: Policy and policy-making in English and Welsh youth justice, Criminology and Criminal Justice, 15, 2, 152–168 Spear, B. (1969) The growth of heroin addiction in the United Kingdom, British Journal of Addiction, 64, 245–55 Standing Conference on Crime Prevention (1991) Safer Communities: The local delivery of crime prevention through the partnership approach, (The Morgan Report), London: Home Office Stolzenburg, L. and D’Alessio, S.J. (1997) ‘Three strikes and you’re out’: The impact of California’s new mandatory sentencing law on serious crime rates, Crime and Delinquency, 43, 4, 457–469

Bibliography 317 Stone, D. (1996) From the margins of politics: The influence of think-tanks in Britain, West European Politics, 19, 4, 675–692 Stone, D. (2000) Non-governmental policy transfer: The strategies of independent policy institutes, Governance, 13, 1, 45–70 Stott, C. and Drury, C. (2000) Crowds, context and identity: Dynamic categorization processes in the ‘poll tax riot’, Human Relations, 53, 2, 247–273 Strang, J., Ruben, S., Farrell, M., Witton, J., Keaney, F. and Gossop, M. (2005) The history of prescribing heroin and other injectable drugs as addiction treatment in the UK, in Strang, J. and Gossop, M. (eds.) Heroin Addiction and the British System, Vol. 2: Treatment and Policy Responses, London: Routledge Straw, J. (2012) Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor, London: Macmillan Straw, J. and Michael, A. (1996) Tackling the Causes of Crime: Labour’s proposals to prevent crime and criminality, October 1996, London: Labour Party Stuart, M. (1998) Douglas Hurd: The Public Servant, Edinburgh: Mainstream Press Sutherland, J. (1982) Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain 1960–82, Junction Books Talbot, C. (2004) Executive agencies: Have they improved management in government? Public Money and Management, April, 104–112 Taylor, H. (1999) Forging the Job: A Crisis of ‘Modernization’ or Redundancy for the Police in England and Wales, 1900–1939, British Journal of Criminology Taylor, I. (1981) Law and Order: Arguments for Socialism, Basingstoke: Macmillan Taylor, I. (1987) Law and Order, Moral Order: The changing rhetorics of the Thatcher government, Socialist Register Taylor, Lord Justice, (1989) Hillsborough Stadium Disaster Inquiry – Interim Report, London: HMSO Taylor, R., Ward, A. and Newburn, T. (1995) The Day of the Hillsborough Disaster, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press Thatcher, M. (1993) The Downing Street Years, London: Harper Collins Thatcher, M. (1995) The Path to Power, London: Harper Collins Thomas, J.E. (1994) Woolf and prison staff: Still looking for ‘good gaolers’, in Player, E. and Jenkins, M. (eds.) Prisons After Woolf: Reform through riot, London: Routledge Thornton, D., Curran, L., Grayson, D. and Holloway, V. (1983) Tougher Regimes in Detention Centres: Report of an evaluation by the Young Offender Psychology Unit, London: HMSO Thorpe, D. Smith, D., Green, C.J. and Paley, J.H. (1980) Out of Care: The Community Support of Juvenile Offending, London: Allen & Unwin Tilley, N. (1993) Crime prevention and the Safer Cities story, Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 32, 1, 40–57 Tilley, N. and Laycock, G. (2000) Joining up research, policy and practice about crime, Policy Studies, 21, 3, 213–227 Timmins, N. (2017) The Five Giants: A biography of the welfare state, London: William Collins, 2nd ed. Tonry, M. (2007) (ed.), Crime, Punishment, and Politics in Comparative Perspective, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Toolis, K. (2011) Rebel Hearts: Journeys within the IRA’s soul, London: Picador Toye, R. (2012) From ‘consensus’ to ‘common ground’: The rhetoric of the postwar settlement and its collapse, Journal of Contemporary British History, 48(1) 3–23 Troup, E. (1925) The Home Office, London: G.P. Putnam and Sons

318

Bibliography

Tuffin, R., Morris, J. and Poole, A. (2006) An Evaluation of the Impact of the National Reassurance Policing Programme, London: Home Office Tulkens, H. (1979) Some Developments in Penal Policy and Practice in Holland, London: NACRO Tyler, R. (2006) ‘Victims of our History’? Barbara Castle and In Place of Strife, Contemporary British History, 20, 3, 461–476 Van Dijk, J.J. (1988) Ideological trends within the victims’ movements: An international perspective, in Maguire, M. and Pointing, J. (eds.) Victims of Crime: A new deal?, Milton Keynes: Open University Press van Maanen, J. (1978) Kinsmen in repose: Occupational Perspectives of Patrolmen, in Manning, P.K. and van Maanen, J. (eds.) Policing: A View from the Street, Santa Monica, CA: Goodyear Publishing Co. Van Ness, D. and Strong, K. (1997) Restoring justice: an introduction to restorative justice, New Providence: Matthew Bender & Co. Vinen, R. (2009) Thatcher’s Britain: The politics and social upheaval of the 1980s, London: Pocket Books Wacquant, L. (1999) How penal common sense come to Europeans: Notes on the transatlantic diffusion of the neoliberal doxa, European Societies, 1, 3, 319–52 Wacquant, L. (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press Waddington, D. (2012) Memoirs: Dispatches from Margaret Thatcher’s Last Home Secretary, London: Biteback Waddington, D., Wykes, M. and Critcher, C. (1991) Split at the Seams? Community, continuity and change after the 1984–5 coal dispute, Milton Keynes: Open University Press Waddington, P.A.J. (1987) Towards paramilitarism? Dilemmas in the policing of public order, British Journal of Criminology, 27, 1, 37–46 Waddington, P.A.J. (1993) The case against paramilitary policing considered, British Journal of Criminology, 33, 3, 353–373 Waddington, P.A.J. (1994) Coercion and accommodation: Policing public order after the Public Order Act, British Journal of Sociology, 45, 3, 467–485 Waddington, P.A.J. (1994) Liberty and Order: Public order policing in a capital city, London: UCL Press Walker, C. and Starmer, K. (1993) (eds.) Justice in Error, London: Blackstone Press Walker, N. (1965) Crime and Punishment in Britain, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press Waller, I. (1989) Current Trends in European Crime Prevention: Implications for Canada, Ottawa: Department of Justice Wallington, P. (1975) Criminal Conspiracy and Industrial Conflict, Industrial Law, Journal, 4:69–88 Warwick, D. and Littlejohn, G. (1992) Coal, Capital and Culture: A sociological analysis of mining communities in west Yorkshire, London: Routledge Weaver, R.K. (1989) The changing world of think-tanks, Political Science and Politics, 22, 3, 563–578 Western, B. (2001) Governing social marginality: Welfare, incarceration and the transformation of state policy, in Garland, D. (ed.) 2001, Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences, London: Sage Westlake, M. (2001) Kinnock: The authorised biography, London: Little Brown Whitehouse, M. (1982) A Most Dangerous Woman? Lion Publishing Whitelaw, W. (1989) The Whitelaw Memoirs, London: Aurum Press

Bibliography 319 Whitfield, D. (1997) Tackling the Tag, Winchester: Waterside Press Whitman, J.Q. (2003) Harsh Justice: Criminal punishment and the widening divide between America and Europe, New York: Oxford University Press Whitmore, Sir C. (1991) Management of change: The Whitehall experience, Occasional Papers in Administrative Studies, London: Home Office Whyte, B. (2000) Between two stools: Youth justice in Scotland, Probation Journal, 47, 2, 119–25 Widdecombe, A. (2013) Strictly Ann, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson Wiles, P. (2002), Criminology in the 21st century: public good or private interest? The Sir John Barry Memorial Lecture, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 35, 238–252 Wilkinson, R. and Pickett, K. (2009) The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, London: Allen Lane Will, J.A. and McGrath, J.H. (1995) Crime, neighbourhood perceptions, and the underclass: The relationship between fear of crime and class position, Journal of Criminal Justice, 23, 2, 163–176 Williams, B. (1993) Bail Bandits: The creation of a moral panic, Critical Social Policy, 13, 37, 104–112 Wilson, C. (2001) Networking and the lobby for penal reform: Conflict and consensus, in Ryan, M., Savage, S.P. and Wall, D.S. (eds.) Policy Networks and Criminal Justice, Basingstoke: Palgrave Wilson, D. (2007) Serial Killers: Hunting Britons and their Victims, 1960–2006, Winchester: Waterside Press Wilson, H. (1971) The Labour Government 1964–1970, London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson Wilson, J.Q. (1975) Thinking About Crime, New York: Basic Books Wilson, J.Q. (1978) Varieties of Police Behaviour, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Wilson, J.Q. and Kelling, G. (1982) Broken Windows: The police and neighbourhood safety, The Atlantic, March Windlesham, Lord (1993) Responses to Crime Vol. 2, Oxford: Oxford University Press Windlesham, Lord, (1996) Responses to Crime, Vol. 3: Legislating with the tide, Oxford: Oxford University Press Woodcock, Sir John (1994) Report of the Enquiry into the Escape of Six Prisoners from the Special Security Unit at Whitemoor Prison, Cambridgeshire, on Friday 9th September 1994, Cmnd. 2741, London: HMSO Woolf, Lord Justice (1991) Prison Disturbances, April 1990, Cmnd. 1456, London: HMSO Worley, M. (2017) No Future: Punk, politics and British youth culture, 1976–1984, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Wright, M. (1982) Making Good: Prisons, Punishment and Beyond. London: Burnett Books Wynne, J. (1996) Leeds Mediation and Reparation Service: Ten years’ experience of victim-offender mediation, in B. Galaway and J. Hudson (eds.) Restorative Justice: International Perspectives, Monsey, NY: Criminal Justice Press Young, J. (1971) The Drugtakers: The social meaning of drug use, London: Paladin Young, J. (1999) The Exclusive Society, London: Sage Young, R. (2000) Integrating a multi-victim perspective into criminal justice through restorative justice conferences, in Crawford, A. and Goodey, J. (eds.) Integrating a Victim Perspective within Criminal Justice, Aldershot: Ashgate

320

Bibliography

Zander, M. (1981) Police Powers in England: Report of the Royal Commission on Criminal Justice, American Bar Association Journal, 732, 67 Zander, M. (1988) A Matter of Justice, London: I.B. Taurus Zedner, L. (2006) Opportunity makes the thief-taker: The influence of economic analysis on crime control, in Newburn, T. and Rock, P. (eds.) The Politics of Crime Control: Essays in Honour of David Downes, Oxford: Clarendon Press Zehr, H. (1990) Changing Lenses: A new focus for crime and justice, Scotsdale, PA: Herald Press Zimbardo, P. (1973) A field experiment in auto shaping, in Ward, C. (ed.), Vandalism, London: Architectural Press Zimring, F. (2001) Imprisonment rates and the new politics of criminal punishment, Punishment and Society, 3, 1, 161–166 Zimring, F. (2007) The Great American Crime Decline, New York: Oxford University Press Zimring, F., Hawkins, G. and Kamin, S. (2001) Punishment and Democracy: Three Strikes and You’re Out in California, New York: Oxford University Press

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to figures. Page numbers in bold refer to tables. Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes. 28 bloodthirsty resolutions 13 1926 General Strike 57 Abortion Act (1967) 201 Abortion Law Reform Association 201 Action for Youth 101 Adam Smith Institute (ASI) 199, 207 Adult Offender, The 24, 30 Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence 33 Advisory Council on the Penal System 204, 217 Advisory Council on the Treatment of Offenders (1944–1964) 204 advocacy tanks 199, 207 African-Caribbean community 184, 189 Alton, D. 145 Americanisation 11 Anderton, J. 214 anti-Irish revenge attacks 229 anti-social behaviour (ASB) 208 Anti-Social Behaviour Act (2003) 209, 269 anti-social behaviour agenda 268–270; academic evaluation 270; antisocial behaviour unit 269; impact of orders on children and young people 269; quality of life 268–269 Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) 209, 261, 262, 278, 280–281 Antisocial Behaviour Unit 273 arms race 249 Association of Chief Officers of Probation (ACOP) 1–2 Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) 1, 199, 214–216

Attlee, C. 7, 8, 180, 187 Audit Commission 129, 261 Audit Commission conference (1993) 130 Auld, Lord Justice 267 Back to Basics campaign 162 bail bandits 111 Baker, K. 84, 100, 105–112, 126, 127, 133, 137, 156, 205, 232 Baldock, D. (Dr.) 232 Barber, M. 265, 266, 272 ‘Battle of Orgreave’ 86 Beccaria, C. 250 Beer, S. 52 Benn, T. 57, 189 Bentley, D. 227 Best Value initiative 264, 282 Bevan, A. 7 Beveridge, W. 7, 16 Beveridge Report (1942) 7 Biggs, J. E. 202 Biggs, R. 26 Bill of Rights 94 Birmingham Six 101, 110, 229–230, 232–233, 244 Black, H. (Dr.) 230 Black Wednesday 136 Blair, Sir I. 284 Blair, T. 89, 129–131, 133–135, 138, 140, 142–148, 154, 155, 157, 159, 161, 162, 176, 180, 182, 185–187, 192, 249, 250, 255, 256, 265, 268, 270–272, 276, 278, 284, 286, 288 Blake, G. 31 Blakelock, K. 88, 110, 184

322

Index

Blunkett, D. 265, 277, 279, 284 bomb/bombings 229–230 Bottoms, A. 200 Bow Group 24 Boys, T. 11 Brain, R. 32 Brain Committee 32 Braithwaite, J. 119, 219 Bratton, W. 208 Bridge, Justice 230 Bridgewater Four 232 Bristol Victims Support Scheme 217 British Crime Survey 92, 101 British Journal of Criminology (1960) 200 British Journal of Delinquency (1950) 200 British Politics and Law and Order (1992–1997) 125–128; abandonment of socialism 135; Bulger murder 145–150; child’s play 145–150; Crime (Sentences) Bill 156; crime prevention 158–159; crisis 150–154; doli incapax principle 155; election looms 158–162; fourth election victory 128–131; general election (1997) 158–162; Michael Howard entry 137–141; New York shadow 154–158; opposition, changing 133–137; police 139–141; policing and juveniles 131–132; prisons and punishment 132; reform of Criminal Justice Act 134; Secure Training Orders 131; twenty-seven pledges 141–145; TYCRYJ 155 Brittan, L. 83–85, 87, 95, 96, 100, 104, 114 Brixton Riots (1981) 242 Broadwater Farm riot (1985) 110 broken windows thesis 154, 208–209, 262 Brooke, H. 18, 20, 22, 26, 32 Brooks, D. 241, 242 Brown, G. 134, 161, 259, 281, 286, 288 Bulger, J. 134, 145–150 Bullock Committee 181 Burgess, A. 62 burglary 250 Burnham, A. 240 Bush, S. 31 Butler, D. 8, 50, 162 Butler, R. A. 11, 13, 14, 148, 211, 233 Butskellism 175

Caddy, B. (Dr.) 232 Callaghan, H. 231 Callaghan, J. 33, 36, 49–51, 53, 54, 58, 59, 61, 66, 68, 82, 181, 211, 212 Callaghan, Lord 143, 157, 214 Callaghan, W. 33, 35 Cameron, D. 141, 284 Campaign for Homosexual Equality 201 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 188 Campbell, A. 272 capital punishment 79–80, 103, 227; abolition of 10, 27, 190; ghastly apparatus 17; Homicide Act 13; reintroduction 88; suspension of 10, 27 car crime 111, 250 Carlile, A. 137 Carlisle, M. 96 Carr, Lord 143 Castle, B. 188 Cavadino, P. 202, 203 Challenor case 227, 233–235 Chamberlain, Lord 51 children 34–35 Children and Young Persons Act (1963) 34 Children and Young Persons Act (1969) 34, 53, 60 Children in Trouble 34 Children of Sanchez, The 183 Child’s Play 3 145 Child, the Family and the Young Offender, The 24 Christie, J. 227 Citizen’s Charter 129, 218 Clarke, C. 270, 279 Clarke, K. 128–132, 134–137, 142, 147, 185, 186, 205, 213, 220, 259, 285 Clay Cross affair 57 Clegg, N. 288 Clinton, B. 160, 161 Clintonisation 161 Clockwork Orange, A 62 Coalition Agreement (2010) 284 Cohen, S. 145 Commonwealth Immigration Act (1962) 14 Communist Party 187–188 community penalties 276

Index community safety 263–264; consultation 264; local community safety plans 264; order 262; partnerships 264–265; see also Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) community sentences 274–276 Community Service Orders 55, 218, 250 Compstat programme 154 Confait, M. 59 conflict 56–59 Conservative Party: lection (1979) 112; prison system 96; repositioning 51; third successive victory 91–95 Core and Ancillary Tasks Review 213, 215–216 corporal punishment 13 Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights 269 Cousins, F. 188 Crime – A Challenge To Us All 23 Crime (Sentences) Act (1997) 8, 256 Crime and Disorder Act (1998) 209, 219, 266 Crime and Disorder Bill 260, 261, 263 Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnerships (CDRPs) 265, 266 Crime (Sentences) Bill 156 Crime Concern 101 Crime Knows No Boundaries 27 crime prevention 158–159; British Crime Survey 101; capital punishment 103; Crime Concern 101; Crime Prevention Unit 100; Guildford case 102; process of sentencing reform 102–103; punishment 102; right of silence 101–102 Crime Prevention Council 125 Crime Prevention Unit 100 Crime Reduction Programme (CRP) 273 Criminal Appeal Act (Northern Ireland) 233 Criminal Justice Act (1948) 13, 16 Criminal Justice Act (1972) 54, 55, 217 Criminal Justice Act (1982) 77, 80, 202 Criminal Justice Act (1987) 91 Criminal Justice Act (1988) 91 Criminal Justice Act (1991) 8, 102, 103, 114, 125, 127, 133, 185, 187, 192, 205, 206, 211, 219, 249 Criminal Justice Act (1993) 186 Criminal Justice Act (2003) 242, 266

323

Criminal Justice and Court Services Act (2000) 266 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act (1994) 8, 185, 211 Criminal Justice and Public Order Bill 186, 216 Criminal Justice Bill 18, 30, 31, 53, 58, 99 Criminal Law Review Commission (CLRC) 96–97 Criminal Law Revision Committee 50 Critchley, T. 19 Crook, F. 205 Crossman, R. 27, 54 Cubbon, Sir B. 80, 81, 100 culture of poverty thesis 183 Cunningham, Sir C. 14, 15 Custody Plus 267 Dacre, P. 136 Daily Mail, The 104, 131, 132, 136, 141, 157, 204 Daily Telegraph, The 142, 144 Daley, J. 152 Dangerous Dogs Act (1991) 111–112 Dangerous Drugs Act 1967 32 David Hulme Institute 207 Davies, E. 61, 75, 76, 115 Day fines 55 death penalty 10, 13, 26, 227; absence of 27; challenges to police corruption 36; race riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill 17; reintroduction of 64; temporary suspension of 31 de Beaumont, G. 250 deindustrialisation 176–177, 183, 251 deliverology 272 Denham, A. 199 Denning, Lord 68, 152, 231 Departmental Committee 210 Departmental Committee on Corporal Punishment 9 Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) 178 Detention and Training Order (DTO) 262 de Tocqueville, A. 250 Devonside, B. 237 Dimbleby lecture (1975) 64, 212 Dixon of Dock Green 234 Dobson, G. 243 Doing Law Differently 279 doli incapax principle 155

324

Index

Donaldson, Lord 152, 156 double-jeopardy rule 242–243 Downes, D. 178, 204 drug czar 158 drugs 53–54; classification of 54; trafficking 250 Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act (1964) 32 Duckenfield, D. 236, 237, 239, 240 Dukakis, M. 160, 161 Durbin, E. 188

Foot, M. 82, 182, 188 Forsyth, M. 149 Forum for Initiatives in Reparation and Mediation (FIRM) 218 Frederika (Queen) 233 free collective bargaining 180 Freedom of Information Act 93 Fresh Start package 91, 115, 210 Freud, S. 200 Fry, M. 216 Fyfe, D. M. 9

economic radicalism 177 Economist, The 49 Ede, C. 9, 10, 227 Edmund-Davies, Lord 61 Edmund-Davies committee 67 education 178 Education Act (1944) 7 Education Act (1988) 178, 191 electronic monitoring 207–208 Elephant Boys 10 Ellis, R. 227–228 Emergency Provisions Act (Northern Ireland) 228 End of Custody Licence 285 Ennals, M. 235 equality of opportunity 7 Error of Judgment 232 European Convention on Human Rights 94, 229, 266 European Rate Mechanism (ERM) 177 Evans, T. 26, 227 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) 136

Gaitskell, H. 17, 23, 27 Gang of Four 82 Gardner, Sir E. 97 Garnett, M. 199 General Election (1970) 51 General Strike (1926) 187 George, G. L. 11, 13 Gifford, Lord 232 Giuliani, R. 208 Gladstone Committee (1895) 14, 249 Glover, E. 200 Goldwater, B. 51 Goldwaterism 51 Gormley, J. 84 Gould, P. 160–162 Grant, B. 88, 184 great train robbers 26, 27 Green Paper 91, 98, 102, 103, 207, 283, 284 Greiss tests 232 Griffiths, E. 75 Grigg, M. 233 Groce, C. 87, 184 Grosvenor Square disorder 188, 189 Grunwick strike (1976–1977) 189 Guardian, The 26, 95, 155, 157, 273 Guildford bombings 102 Guildford Four 101, 232

Fabian Society 179–180, 188 Faithfull, B. 202 Faithfull, L. 202, 203 Falconer, Lord 279 Falklands War (1982–1983) 176 Faulkner, D. 101–103, 105 Ferrers, Lord 144 Fisher, Sir H. 59 Fisher inquiry 58–59 flagship legislation 260–266; Best Value initiative 264; community safety 263–264; Crime and Disorder Act 262–264; doli incapax 262; local partnerships 264–265; parenting order 263; preventive order by New Labour 262; reparation order 263; Street Crimes Initiative 265–266; youth justice reforms 261–262

habeas corpus 8 half-brick case 234 Halliday, J. 267 ‘hands-off’ approach 113 hanging: abolition of 217; pro-hanging 83, 89, 90; reintroduction of 64, 90 Harding, J. 219 Hattersley, R. 79, 88, 95, 98, 104, 125–127 Hatton, D. 182 Heald, O. 152 Health and Safety at Work Act 240

Index Heath, E. 27, 48, 49, 52, 56, 58, 59, 84, 148, 181, 189 Hennessey, P. 7, 14, 179 Heritage Foundation 208 Heseltine, M. 79, 83 Hill, D. 161 Hillsborough Family Support Group 239 Hillsborough tragedy case 235–240, 244 Hogan-Howe, Sir B. 184 Hogg, Q. 31, 33, 35, 49–51 Home, A. D. 23 Home Affairs Committee 207 Home Detention Curfew (HDC) 285 Home Office 14–16, 21, 26, 30–32, 34, 36, 39n68, 276 Home Office-funded pilot programmes 218 Home Office Research and Planning Unit 205 Homicide Act 13, 17, 26 homosexual liberation 201 honesty in sentencing: critique 153; proposal 256 Hood, R. 55 hooliganism 19, 23, 91, 179, 181, 236, 239 house arrest 249 houses/housing: demunicipalisation of housing and policies 177–178; estates 177 Housing Act 1980 177 Howard, J. 249, 250 Howard, M. 77, 107, 130, 132, 137–144, 146–159, 185, 187, 192, 205, 206, 208, 215, 220, 250, 255, 256, 273, 278, 286 Howard League for Penal Reform 2, 58, 199, 200, 205 Howarth, G. 240 hunger marches (1936) 187 Hurd, D. 87–91, 93–98, 100–103, 107, 111, 114, 128, 132, 133, 156, 204–206, 232 Hutton, W. 181 ICM poll 187 immigration 14 Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP) sentence 285 Ingleby Committee 18, 34, 40n85 In Place of Strife 180, 188

325

Inquest (1981) 2, 201 Institute for Economic Affairs (IEA) (UK) 207 Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) 209 Institute for the Study and Treatment of Delinquency (ISTD) 200 Institute of Economic Affairs 199 institutional racism 243 International Times and Oz 52 IRA bombing campaigns 226–227 Irish hunger strikers (1974) 58 Irish National Liberation Army bomb 63 Jagger, M. 52 Jardine, J. 64 Jarrett, C. 184 Jenkins, R. 17, 18, 20, 25, 29–31, 33, 55, 57, 58, 60, 101 Johnson, A. 281 Johnson, B. 284 Johnson, L. 183 Johnston, A. 279 Jung, C. 200 justice gap 279 juvenile crime 13, 16, 18, 23, 131, 135, 202, 226 juvenile delinquency 6, 11, 15, 16, 24 Kaufman, G. 82, 84, 86, 149 Kavanagh, D. 162 Kelling, G. 154, 208, 209, 251, 262 Keynes, J. M. 7, 16 ‘Kill the Bill’ 84 Kinnock, N. 86, 88, 89, 92, 125, 126, 182 Knight, P. 108 Korean War (1950–1953) 179 Krays, the 28–29 Labour Campaign for Criminal Justice (1978) 201 Labour Case, The 17 Labour Opposition 184 Labour Party 49, 188–189; attitude and actions 112–113; Clause 4 180; deficit budget (1985) 182; history of 178–179; New Labour 182–183; prison system 96; socialist programme 179–180; strikes 179–182; third term 276–281; trade union movement and 178–183, 188; see also Law and Order Politics (1997–2010)

326

Index

Labour Party Annual Conferences 189 Labour Programme, The 261 labour, welfare and crime 183–187 Lamont, N. 136–137 Lancaster Prison 229 Lane, Lord 80, 102 Lansbury, G. 187 Last Exit to Brooklyn 51 Lattimore, C. 59 Law and Order: A new resolve (policy paper) 62; Dimbleby Lecture (1975) 64; Labour control 62–63; Labour’s crime record 63; public order problems 63–64; reintroduction of hanging 64 Law and Order Politics (1970–1979): Children and Young Persons Act (1969) 55–56, 60; conflict 56–59; Conservative-Labour battle 52–53; Conservative Party 59–61; Criminal Justice Act (1972) 54–55; Criminal Justice Bills 58; drugs 53–54; elections of 1974 56–59; Fisher Inquiry 58–59; Law and Order: A new resolve 62–64; miners’ strikes (1972 and 1973) 56–57; party of 64–69; penal system 55; Police Federation 60–61; police federation advert 65; Royal Commission 59; Selsdon man 48–52; student protests in Paris 52; violence 56 Law and Order Politics (1979–1992): annual increases in recorded crime (1980–1992) 113; Brittan, arrival of 83–84; capital punishment 79–80, 90; Conservatives third successive victory 91–95; crime prevention 100–103; Fresh Start 91, 115; Hurd in charge 87–89; miners’ strike 84–87; PACE 90–91; penal matters 80; Police and Criminal Evidence Bill 82–83; police culture 107; Police Federation 81; police pay 75–76, 115; police scandals 77–79; poll tax and strangeways 103–106; prisons crisis 95–97; private sector involvement in prison system 97–100; privatisation and managerialism 108–112; recorded crime England and Wales (1970–1987) 92; Royal Commission’s report on Criminal Procedure 80–81; ‘short, sharp shock’ reforms 76–77; Thatcher to Major, from 106–108; violence 78; Whitelaw, further challenges for 79–83; youth custody 80

Law and Order Politics (1997–2010): anti-social behaviour 268–270; continued populism 270–272; crime 257–258; CRP 273; Delivery Unit 265–266; flagship legislation 260–266; general election (1997) 256–257; IPP sentence 285–286; Labour administration (1997–2001) 259–260; Labour’s third term 276–281; New Labour 256–259, 284–289; New Labour and policing 281–284; penal policy 272–273; prison population in England and Wales (1990–1993) 255–256; punishment trends (1997–2005) 273–276; restorative justice 267–268; sentencing 266–267; soft on crime 284–285; tough on crime 255, 273; what works agenda 272–273 Lawless Youth 9 Lawrence, Sir I. 104, 152 Lawrence, Stephen, case of 240–244 Lawrence Inquiry report 242 Lawrence Working Party 242 Lawson, N. 88 Learmont, Sir J. 149, 150 Legal Action Group (LAG) 201 Letwin, O. 283 Lewis, D. 133, 147, 149, 150 Lewis, O. 183 Liberal Democrats 260 Liberal Party 93 libertarianism 190–192 Lilley, P. 142 Livingstone, K. 84 Local Government Act (1999) 264, 282 local partnerships 264–265 London School of Economics and Political Science 180 Longford, Lord 23, 29 Longford Committee 24 Longford Committee report 28, 34 Lygo, Sir R. 109 Maastricht Treaty 136 MacGregor, I. 84, 85 Mackrell, G. 240 Maclean, D. 139, 147, 152 Macleod, I. 48 Macmillan 14, 15, 18 Macpherson, Sir W. 175, 241, 242 Macpherson Inquiry 243–244, 282 ‘Maggie’s Army’ 86

Index Magistrates’ Association 2 Maguire Seven 101, 232 Mail on Sunday, The 135 Major, J. 106–109, 125, 126, 128, 132, 133, 135–137, 141, 142, 148, 150, 152, 162, 185, 192, 218, 255, 260 Management in Government 109 managerialism 108–112, 272 Mandelson, P. 135, 161 Manhattan Institute 208, 209 Mannheim, H. 26, 200 Mark, Sir R. 64, 212 Marriott, J. 149 Marshall, T. 218, 219 Marston 234 Maudling, R. 53–55, 77, 83 Maxwell Confait case 244 May (Justice) 77, 210 May, Sir J. 102 May, T. 243 Mayhew, H. 183 Mayhew, P. 102 McDade, J. 229 McGahey, M. 182 McGovern, J. 240 McKenzie, K. 239 McNee, Sir D. 78 Mellor, D. 232 Michael, A. 263 Michael, H. 158 Miller, E. 200 miners’ strike 84–85; Labour Party 86; mass picketing and ‘flying pickets 85; police operation during 85; reviews 86–87; violence 85–86 minimum sentences 151–152 Ministerial Group on Crime Prevention 101 Ministry of Justice 94 Misspent Youth report 261 Misuse of Drugs Act 53 Misuse of Drugs Bill 53 modernisation 161 Mondale, W. 160 Monday Club 90 monetarism 177 moral panic 145 Morgan, R. 178, 204, 263 Morgan Committee 263 Morgan Report 125, 158 Morris, T. 7, 23, 210 Morrison, H. 7 Muggeridge, M. 29

327

Mullin, C. 101, 229, 232, 244, 287 Murder (Abolition of the Death Penalty) Bill 26 Murray, C. 183, 192, 208 National Abortion Campaign 201 National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders (NACRO) 2, 199, 201, 202 National Association of Victim Support Schemes (NAVSS) 217 National Campaign for the Abolition of the Death Penalty (1925–1966) 201 National Council of Civil Liberties (NCCL) 201, 235 National Crime Agency 243 National Crime Squad 159, 283 National Criminal Intelligence Service 283 National Drug Intelligence Unit at New Scotland Yard 127 National Executive Committee 187 National Offender Management Service (NOMS) 285 National Treatment Agency 259 National Union of Mineworkers 84, 181 National Victims Association (NVA) 217 National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA) 29 Nationwide Festival of Light 29 Neave, A. 63, 68 Neighbourhood Policing Programme 283 Neighbourhood Watch 93 Never Again 7 New Labour 161, 162, 176, 182–183, 185–186, 190, 206, 256–259, 284–286; anti-social behaviour agenda 209; criminal justice and penal policy 288; expenditure on policing 281–282; government and police relationship 282–283; ‘No More Excuses’ initiative 192; policing and 281–284; reassurance policing 283; statutory duty imposition on police 282; see also Law and Order Politics (1997–2010) New Right 190–191 New York 154–158 New York miracle 208 ‘Next Steps Agency’ 109 No More Excuses 162, 176 Norris, C. 243

328

Index

Norris, D. 243 Northern Ireland 228–233; appeal against civil action by prisoners against police 231–232; Birmingham Six 229–230, 232–233; death-toll in 228; forensic evidence 230; political violence in 228–229; terrorism 75; World in Action programme 232 Nottingham 13–14 Notting Hill 14 Nuffield election studies 8 NUM 182 Observer, The 141, 186 Offenders Brought to Justice (OBTJs) 279–280 Offender Tag Association 207–208, 208 Official Secrets Act 93 Old Labour 192, 209 on-the-spot fines 270 Osborne, J. 188 Owen, D. 231 PACE 90–91, 97, 117n43, 126, 264 Pailthorpe, G. 200 parenting order 263 Park, D. 102 Parkhurst incident 149 Parkin, F. 175 parole 25, 94–96, 103, 114; permissiveness to 29–31; restrictions on 150; review of 156 party of law and order 64–69; Conservative election (1979) 68–69; Gallup polls 68; opinion poll 66–67; rule of law 67; sentencing 67 Patnick, I. 237 Patten, J. 103, 105, 111 Paul, D. 231 Peach, B. 68, 190 Peirce, G. 232, 244 Penal Affairs Consortium (PAC) 202–203 penal capital 249 penal policy 178; professional associations, impact of 210–216; soft on crime 251; victims movement 216–219; Whitelaw’s approach to 80; see also Law and Order Politics (1997–2010); pressure group; think tanks Penal Practice in a Changing Society 15, 200 penal welfarism 175

Perfect, M. 261, 262 permissiveness to parole 29–31, 33 permissive society 29, 33, 51, 190–191 Police Act (1964) 20 Police and Criminal Evidence Act (1984) 8, 84, 94, 244 Police and Criminal Evidence Bill 81–83, 114 Police and Justice Act (2006) 265 Police and Magistrates’ Courts Act (1994) 264 Police and Magistrates’ Courts Bill (PMCB) 214 Police Federation 2, 60–61, 75, 130, 139, 200 police pay 75–76, 115 Police Reform Act (2002) 269 Police Reform and Social Responsibility Act (2011) 284 policing: expenditure on 281–282; and juveniles 131–132; New Labour and 281–284; reassurance 283; zero tolerance 208, 284 Policy Exchange (2002) 209 policy paper see Law and Order: A new resolve (policy paper) politics and pressure groups 219–220 politics of law and order in changing society (1945–1970) 7–9; children and young persons 34–35; crime during the war years 10–11; drugs misuse 31–33; issues in national politics 8–9; local prisons 13; in mid-sixties 26–29; permissiveness to parole 29–31; postwar priorities 9–14; prison population daily average, England and Wales (1947–1959) 12; recorded crime England and Wales (1900–1960) 12; Suez crisis 13–14; war against crime 21–25; White Paper 14–21 polls 162 poll tax 125, 190, 196n58 poll tax riots (1990) 184–185, 190 Popper 237 populism: on-the-spot fines 270; shorttermism 271; Tony Martin case 270–271 positive custody 77 possessive individualism 175 Powell, E. 52, 189 Power, B. 230 Powers of Criminal Courts (Sentencing) Act (2000) 266

Index pressure group 2, 199–200; campaigning consortium 202; crime and 200–201; democratic government, importance of 203; Howard League for Penal Reform 200; IPPR 209–210; ISTD 200; in law and order field 201; PAC 202–203; parliamentary and in-house activity 205; penal welfarism and 200–207; politics and 219–220; prison system 206; single-issue 201–202 Prevention of Terrorism Act (UK) 228–229 Priestley, P. 217 Prior, J. 83 prison: escapes 25, 36; population 273–274, 274, 275, 276; reform 38n48; service 109, 147, 149, 226 Prison Officers’ Association (POA) 2, 77, 91, 96, 199, 210 Prison Reform Trust 2, 201, 204 Prison Rules (1964) 25 prison system 137; crisis 95–97; early release scheme 95–96; PACE 97; parole system 96; population 95; private sector involvement 97–100; professional associations 210–211; and quasi-prison 249; right to silence 96–97 Prison Works programme 185, 250, 251, 255, 273 private sector involvement in prison system: Fresh Start initiative 99; full-scale 98–99; Green Paper 98; prison-building programme 99; prison buildings 97; remand prisons 98 privatisation 108–112 Problem, The 212 pro-capital punishment 79 professional associations: ACPO 214–216; Core and Ancillary Tasks Review 215–216; law and order campaign 213; POA 210–211; policemedia relations 212; police pay and conditions 212; prison system 210–211; Royal Commission on the Police 211–212; Sheehy reforms 213–214, 216 professional incompetence 242 professional interest group 199 Profumo affair 190 Prosecution of Offences Act (1985) 8 Protecting the Public 153 punishment: community sentences 274–276; prison population 273–274,

329

274; trends (1997–2005) 273–276; see also hanging Punishment, Custody and Community 207 quality of life 268–269, 284 quasi-prison 249 Quiet Life, A 186 Race Relations (Amendment) Act (2000) 242 race riots (1958) 14 Radical Alternatives to Prison (RAP) 201 Radzinowicz, Sir L. 24 Raghip, E. 110 Rank, O. 200 Rawlinson, Sir P. 35 reassurance gap 283 reassurance policing 283 Rees, M. 48, 50, 51, 56, 58–61, 77, 80, 101 referral order 267–268 Rehabilitation of Offenders Act (1974) 202 Reid, J. 279, 286 Respect Unit 273 restoration, reintegration and responsibility (3Rs) 219 restorative justice: described 267; referral order 267–268 Richard, C. 29 Richardsons, the 28–29 Right Approach: A statement of Conservative aims, The 60 right of silence 229 Rights of Victims of Crime, The 218 right to silence 186 Robertson, G. 214 Rock Around the Clock 11 Rock, P. 141, 243 Rolleston Committee 32 Rooum, D. 233–235, 244 Rowland, W. 227 Royal Assent (1948) 10 Royal Assent (1969) 35 Royal Commission on Capital Punishment 10, 13 Royal Commission on Criminal Justice 216, 229 Royal Commission on Criminal Procedure 59, 216 Royal Commission on the Police 16, 18, 19, 39n72, 211–212, 233 Rumbold, A. 109

330

Index

Runciman, Lord 110 Russell, B. 188 Ryan, M. 16 Safer Cities 101, 127 Sandbrook, D. 52 scandal and concern 226–228; Challenor case 227, 233–235; crime passionnel 227–228; Hillsborough case 235–240; Northern Ireland and its impact 228–233; Stephen Lawrence case 226–227, 240–244 Scargill, A. 56, 61, 84, 85, 128, 181 Scarman, Lord Justice 78, 79, 114, 242 scheduled offences 229 Scraton, P. 240 Second World War 8 Secure Training Order (for 12–14-yearolds) 262 Selsdon man 48–52 sentencing 67, 266–267; courts and 267; honesty in sentencing proposal 256; incorporation into law of European Convention on Human Rights 266–267; proposal described 156; transmission mechanism 266 Sentencing Advisory Panel 266 Sentencing Council 125 Sentencing Guidelines Council 267 Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) 283 Seven Steps to Justice 125, 126 sex offender order 262 Sexual Offences Act (1967) 201 Shah, E. 84 Shaw, B. 179 Shaw, S. 206 Sheehy, Sir P. 129 Sheehy Inquiry 130, 139–140, 213, 215, 216 Sheehy reforms 213–214, 216 Sheerman, B. 125, 128, 191 Sherrard, M. 235 ‘short, sharp shock’ reforms 76–77 Shrewsbury Three 189 Silcott, W. 110 Silkin, S. 244 Silverman, S. 1, 10 sink estates 177 Skuse, F. (Dr.) 230 Smith, J. 134, 146, 161, 182, 185, 279, 284 social and economic policies 178 Social Insurance and Allied Services see Beveridge Report (1942)

social liberal 160 Social Market Foundation 147, 209 social security 178 Social Security Act 1988 177 Social Worker, The 180 soft on crime: Conservatives 128; Labour’s 126, 133, 155, 158, 159 Soskice, Sir F. 20, 25, 30 Spanish practices 181 Special Patrol Group 82 Stacey, T. 207 Stern, V. 96, 201 Stevenson, S. 200 Straw, J. 146, 149, 151, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 186, 187, 192, 209, 240, 241, 243, 244, 260, 261, 266, 267, 282 Street Crimes Initiative 265–266 strikes 179 Stuart-Smith, Lord Justice 240 Suez Crisis (1956) 13–14, 18, 188 Sunday Telegraph, The 48 Sunday Times, The 49, 144 Sun, The 138, 144–146, 159, 191, 197n93, 237 supergrass evidence 229 Suspended Sentence Order 285 suspended sentences 30 Tackling the Causes of Crime 158 Tackling Youth Crime: Reforming Youth Justice (TYCRYJ) 155 target hardening 250 Taylor, Lord 132, 152, 156, 186, 236, 239 Tebbitt, Lord 144 Telegraph, The 150 terrorist offences 229 Thames Valley Police 267 Thatcher, M. 2, 3, 19, 56, 58, 59, 61, 64, 68, 75, 81, 82, 86, 87, 92–94, 96, 98, 100, 103, 106–108, 113, 114, 135, 176, 177, 180–182, 185, 190, 191, 212, 272, 281 think tanks 199; ASB 208; broken windows thesis 208–209; electronic monitoring 207–208; Heritage Foundation 208; Manhattan Institute 208; new right and 207–210; types 207; US neoliberal 208 three strikes-style proposal 151–152 Times, The 10, 35, 53, 90, 145, 260 Tories 17, 28, 29, 48, 50, 51, 66, 68, 108, 128, 134, 144, 154, 158–160, 176, 181, 186, 256, 258, 288 Tory campaign 61

Index Tory Party 179 Tory Party Conference (1993) 250 tougher sentencing 93, 94, 147 ‘tough on crime’ 81, 133, 143, 154, 185, 209, 250, 255, 257, 272, 273, 286, 289 ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ 134, 160, 185, 273 ‘tough on the criminal’ 185, 289 Trade Union Act 1984 182 trade union movement 178–183 Trend, B. 15 tripartite system 20 Trotskyist Militant Tendency 182 twenty-seven pledges 141–145 underclass thesis 183 unemployment 68, 94, 126, 135, 158, 176, 177, 182, 185, 187, 192, 288 victim personal statement 260 Victim’s Charter 218 victims movement/victim support movement 216–219 video nasties 145 violence 56; Law and Order Politics (1979–1992) 78; miners’ strike 85–86 Waddington, D. 98, 103, 105, 106, 110, 114, 205 Waldron, Sir J. 35 Walker, N. 22 Walker, P. 83 war against crime 21–25 War Against Crime in England and Wales, The 22 Warner, J. 234 Warner, N. 261, 262 War on Poverty 183 watershed, the 192 Webb, S. 180 West, F. 149 West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad 110 what works agenda 272–273 Wheeler, Sir J. 91, 97–99, 109 Whitehouse, M. 29, 30, 51, 191 Whitelaw, W. 60, 68, 75–84, 89, 99, 111, 114, 143, 144, 148, 202, 206 White Paper 14–21, 24, 91, 103, 130, 139, 147; 3Rs 219; Adult Offender, The 25; Child, the Family and the Young Offender, The 24–25; compensation scheme for victims of crime 20–21; Conservative election (1959) 17; Crime

331

(Sentences) Bill 156; elements of party membership 18–19; issue of juvenile crime 18; No More Excuses 162, 176; Penal Practice 15–16; Penal Practice in a Changing Society (1959) 200; In Place of Strife (1969) 180, 188; Protecting the Public 153; rising crime 21; Royal Commission on the Police 19–20; see also Children in Trouble; Longford Committee report Whitmore, Sir C. 25 ‘Who Governs?’ theme 56, 84 Widdecombe, A. 149, 150, 153–154 Widgery, Lord 231 wildcat strikes 180 Wilkinson, E. 187 Williams, S. 189 Willink, Sir H. 211 Wilson, H. 23, 36, 48, 50–52, 56–58, 188 Wilson, J. Q. 154, 192, 208, 209, 251, 262 Wilson, R. 138 Windlesham, Lord 11, 21, 24, 35, 54, 76, 96, 97, 99, 105, 138, 143, 185, 233 windows of opportunity 251 winner-loser culture 251 ‘winner takes all’ system 7 Winson Green Prison 26, 231 Winter of Discontent 66, 67, 181, 189 Winterton, N. 88 Woodcock. Sir J. 148 Woolf, Lord 109 Woolf Inquiry 2, 150, 205 Woolf Report 126, 127, 149–150, 192, 206, 210, 251 Wootton, B. 26, 33, 55 World in Action programme 101, 232 World This Weekend, The 134 Wright, M. 219 wrongful convictions 233 Young, H. 157 Youth Astray 9 Youth Justice and Criminal Evidence Act (1999) 219, 267 Youth Justice Task Force 261 youth offender panel (YOP) 268 Youth Offending Teams (YOTs) 261 Zander, M. 186 zero sum game 218 zero tolerance 154, 158 zero tolerance policing 208, 284