Execution of disgraced mandarin. No Oxbridge College for him!
Someone asked me the other day, in relation to my recent posts about the ghastly mix of incompetence and cruelty in the Home Office, whether I thought civil servants who failed should be sacked. in general, no. I saw that policy or I should see instinct at work under Michael Howard, a man whose first thought under fire was to interpose the body of one of his servants between himself and the bullets. It is a bad policy for several reasons. As Putin has discovered, it leads to people telling you what you want to hear rather than what you need to know, and to people doing what is safe rather than what is necessary. Moreover, in large complicated organisations dealing with complicated matters, failure usually involves many people in varying degrees of culpability. Moreover , if somebody is in a role where they are completely incompetent, there are questions about the person who appointed them and the person who managed them. Moreover, the emphasis needs to be on learning from failure not on punishing it, and the second tends to get in the way of the first Sometimes, too, failure at a very senior level is inseparable from ministerial failure, eg failure to set the right priorities or provide necessary resources. But equally I do not think it is healthy for there to be no consequences whatsoever in the case of egregious failure, which is what happens in the civil service. At senior level, it is almost unknown for anybody to pay any penalty whatsoever. As far as I can ascertain no permanent secretary has been made to resign or be demoted since before WW2. Usually a senior civil servant who has failed on a big scale is promoted at exactly the same pace as if they had succeeded. That can't be right. (Case in point, Antonia Romeo, Senior Responsible Officer for the single greatest disaster in justice policy in a generation, the probation privatisation programme, that had to be expensively cancelled after years of critical inspection reports, has now become..... Permanent Secretary at the MoJ. Equality of opportunity was not supposed to mean promoting failure on an equal basis with success.) The circumstances in which I think there should be a penalty of some sort for failure - I'm talking of failure to do the job or deliver a reasonable service, not something like fraud, sexual harassment etc - are as follows. When someone does something or fails to do something which they ought to know will cause serious failure, or serious harm. When someone covers up or lies about serious failure. When someone allows a serious failure to continue over a period , without doing anything about it or reporting it . And when a senior person takes delivery of a report exposing serious failure and is charged with ensuring that there is an improvement, fails to do so. Outside of those circumstances, failure should be treated as an inherent aspect of work. It should be acknowledged, if necessary apology made, its causes should be ascertained and put right, which might mean more resources, doing things differently, retraining, or moving someone. But in most cases not punishment. But note that - public acknowledgement, public apology. An anonymous email, probably from a civil servant, once accused me of believing I was always right. He had obviously not read my book, of which a few copies are still available incidentally, which is full of my reflections on what I did not get right, or not right enough. I've never had any in inhibition about owning up to my failures. That is in part because I had the enormous privilege of working for three quite outstanding leaders, different in many ways, but united in their total integrity. Richard Tilt, Martin Narey, Phil Wheatley. These were not men who needed to be driven reluctantly to admit failure at. They were the first to announce it, driven by consciousness of the moral imperatives of their work, and the need for leadership. People at the top who cannot admit to and own failure are a danger to all around them. They are certainly not leaders. Unfortunately the senior civil service is full of them, including the Permanent Secretaries of the Home Office and of the Ministry of Justice. (By the way, do you know that Antonia Romeo is widely tipped for the next Cabinet Secretary? I put that in here because, sadly, some journalists who profile her fail to mention this in the published article. In point of fact, I think she has every qualification, in terms of how the job is now understood.)
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In a report which will surprise no one, particularly not Ukrainian refugees, it has been officially confirmed that the Home Office is still cruel, as well as incompetent. At least we now know it's not racist: it is indifferent to the suffering it causes the vulnerable, whatever your skin colour. Preferably brown or black, but white will do.
Actually, what I've said is not entirely true. This report will surprise one person: Matthew Rycroft, head of the Home Office, man who last year described the Home Office as ‘a beacon of light for the vulnerable’. I am going to make a rather daring prediction here: that Ryecroft will not be fired, will not resign early, will be knighted, and will retire on a pension not far off £100,000 a year to take up a nice job like head of an Oxford college. That is the penalty for outrageous failure in today's civil service. My family has banked with First Direct, a subsidiary of HSBC, since it started and it's been a good bank.
Not any more. Today the FT reports that not only has HSBC decided not to wind down its operations inside Russia, as most banks have done, but it has edited its reprots to remove the word 'war' about Ukraine and replace it with 'conflict' and also talks of regretting casualties 'on both sides'. You know, like when Nazi soldiers were shot while executing Jewish partisans. 'On both sides'. Apparently it's much more profitable to be the only big western bank still operating in Russia than to quit. Well, I cant and wont stomach that and I'm closing all our accounts today. It's a bore, but when I look into the eyes of a child orphaned by HSBC's client, what else can I do? If you bank with HSBC or First Direct I urge you to do likewise Matthew Rycoft, head of the Home Office, a man who last year described the Home Office as 'a beacon of light for the vulnerable'.
A thing that has become increasingly apparent, and is brought into sharp focus by the Ukrainian refugee crisis, is the astonishing incompetence, at the most basic level, of the British State. In the refugee context, it is incompetence mixed with carelessness. (Conceivably, the two naturally go together. If you don’t care what happens to people, why care whether what you do works or not?) A lot of this, clearly, is due to ministers – Priti Patel, a woman fired by pathological hatred of the most vulnerable, but who is also surprisingly dense; and of course Johnson, who doesn't do detail and doesn't care about anything except himself. But it's increasingly clear that there is a deep seated and very basic incompetence at official level also. For example, the decision even some weeks into the crisis that one official would be adequate at Calais, with no need for a Ukrainian interpreter, and no need to set up a visa processing office there. Then the bizarre idea of setting up one at Lille but concealing its whereabouts, and the decision that visa processing did not need reinforcing at other locations in Europe, and that there was no need for Ukrainian translation of the visa documentation, are all surely the actions of officials. The new scheme for allowing people to house in their homes Ukrainian refugees not eligible for the previous scheme is equally shambolic. No thought was given to how hosts and refugees would be matched up. The idea that charities and faith groups could somehow do this was not brokered with them at all before the announcement, and they are simply not equipped or resourced to do. As a result all sorts of ad hoc arrangements are growing up, and I know from my own experience of using them that they are wide open to abuse of various kinds, but equally worrying, there is nothing to support people whose immediate instinct is to offer a home with thinking through what that will actually mean for them. And very worryingly, nothing has been done to put in place the specialist resources needed to support refugees themselves, and hosts. Oxford council tell me that government did not talk to or even inform local government before the announcement - parts of a pattern of pathological centralization which is a mark this government. Or rather, a pathological centralization of decision making, combined with the casual assumption that local authorities can always sweep up the mess thus created. And of course, many of the services most urgently needed for refugees, such as housing, social care, mental health services, are precisely those services most badly damaged by Tory cuts. Nor is any source of help identified full cases where either host or refugee come unstuck, and a new home is needed urgently. What is striking is that these are not complex or technical issues, but very basic and very obvious, and exactly the sort of thing that an hours brainstorming would put up on the whiteboard as issues which simply had to be tackled. I mean, there was a room full of Home Office officials, and someone said, let’s allow people to welcome Ukrainians into their home, just as long as they already know the Ukrainian in question, and the person chairing that meeting said; good idea, that’ll work well. The excellent reporting by Amelia Gentleman of the Guardian details what such breath-taking incompetence means for the traumatised war victims: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/25/ukrainian-refugees-frustration-grows-over-long-wait-times-for-uk-visas https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/09/anger-and-exhaustion-as-ukrainians-turned-away-by-uk-in-calais Refugee families sleeping in cars at Calais, with little to eat. Being forced to go to Paris just to fill up a form. Some, God help us, leaving safety to return to Ukrainian cities under siege because their money has run out while waiting for dozy Home Office officials to process their applications or just to answer the question: how long? The officials seem utterly without shame, and are – of course! - never held to account, never even named. Well, let’s make a start here: Glynn Williams DG Migration and Borders Amma Haddad DG Asylum protection Tony Eastaugh Immigration Enforcement (Since you ask: there are 10 ‘Director Generals’. And an unbelievably 68 Directors - I’m quoting from the last official Home Office organisation chart. This from the Department that cut 20,000 police officers.) The institutional incompetence of the British state, which is been growing this past decade or so, no doubt has many causes, including the pathological hostility of ministers towards their own servants, their unwillingness to listen, consequent timidity of civil servants, and a decline in the calibre of people who are willing to serve in such circumstances, so that third raters rise to the top. (I mean, which of us would choose to work for Priti Patel, rather quit and than do something useful – a dustman, for example.) Yet the times are going to require much more of government, not less. Expect more failure. Marina Ovsyannikova is, or rather was, a journalist on the Russian state television channel, an editor, presumably well paid by Russian standards. Then a week ago, she couldn't stand it anymore, and burst in front of the news reader with a homemade sign denouncing the war and telling viewers they were being lied to. She was hauled off in an instant of course, but for that instant, the truth was told, to everybody.
She's in a cell now somewhere, perhaps in the Lubyanka itself, being interrogated, beaten, possibly tortured. Probably her close friends and relatives have been holding to, and maybe some of them will lose their jobs or their university places and certainly be shunned by many who knew them. and for her, what lies ahead? Surely for such an egregious breach, the full 15 years prescribed by new laws, served in some gulag where, under Russian tradition, an attractive young woman must exect the worst. And unless Russia changes, she will be released in 2037, well into middle age, traumatised, coarsened, remembered by no one, with no job and no future. She knew, of course, that exactly this would happen. she must also have known that it would make no difference, that the vast majority of viewers would it obediently wipe their memories of the truth they had seen for an instant, against their will. They are a mystery, aren't they, these lone protestors against dictatorships that are supported by the more or less consent of the majority. A day comes when they can stand it no longer, their throats will no longer utter the lies, their hands no longer write them, and they speak, or act. They burn with a fierce brightness for a moment before going out forever, like a light bulb before it fails. Sophie Scholl in Germany during WW2 was another. But they fascinate us precisely because they are so exceedingly rare. For every or Ovsyannikova or Scholl, there are many millions who plod on submissively, acclimatising ourselves to tyranny, through lies and half lies and little accommodations. The fascinate us because we know, don't we, that we would fail the test she passed, with colours flying. But today, please, just say her name, diffcult though it is to pronounce, say it under your breath, once or twice: Marina Ovsyannikova. e to edit. "The honest politician's guide to prison and probation" by Roy D. King and Lucy Willmott. A review11/3/2022 This is a strange book, and a bad one: indeed, so bad, it's embarrassing. I’m sorry to say that, because Roy King* has had a very distinguished career indeed in criminology, and accomplished much. But there is a phenomenon which I have seen before, of someone so eminent in their field that no one feels able to tell them that they have produced something that simply won't do, and which if published, will embarrass them. Ultimately, this is a failure by the publisher, who should have saved King from himself. [* I am not acquainted with the work of his co-author Lucy Willmott.] The book sets out to chronicle what it calls the growing crisis in prisons and probation since 1991. Most of it is devoted to a very full chronology of the period, interlarded with summaries of interviews with very many of the key players, at very senior level. It's a remarkable achievement to have got so many to agree to be interviewed, and the chronology will be extremely helpful to historians, through read at one go it is incredibly depressing. There is then a short passage of diagnosis, and then suggestions as to what needs to be done. There are three main reasons why this is a bad book. The first is that, for book that sets out to be a history, it's strangely unhistorical. It is utterly bizarre that it takes 1990 as a starting point for the progressive decline of these services, because that year actually saw the worst crisis in the prison system in history. Here's what I said in my book: “In 1987, some 19,000 prisoners were held two or three two a cell designed to hold one, with those prisoners enduring the squalors others defecating into buckets inches from their bunk, the bucket remaining there for many hours. And not just at night: in many prisoners, prisoners were locked in their cells most of the day... hundreds of prisoners had to be held in police cells …. The reality of prison life is vividly recalled by a governor at Strangeways prison, pre-riot: ‘the smell of excrement and urine at slopout, the abysmal food that we served, the relationship between staff and prisoners where every second word was ‘fuck’, prisoners weren’t treated with respect, they weren't treated with decency …..the place was run for the benefit of staff earning massive amounts of overtime at fantastic cost, where racism and brutality was rife’ “Management was appallingly weak. The POA was both powerful... yet anarchic... The POA seemed opposed to anything that made prisoners lives better. Governors only control their jails with the agreement of their POA branch... In October 1990 there were industrial disputes at 70 prisons... Both governors and the POA felt a huge gulf between them and headquarters, headed by career mandarins with no experience of working in prisons. ‘Management’ as such barely existed: headquarters did not set standards that prisons should operate to and had little information about how prisons are actually doing, or where and how resources were being consumed. Yet... it was gobbling up money like a black hole... HMPS had dramatically increased both spending and staffing... yet regimes did not improve: they got worse. “Not only did the service provided appalling conditions and impoverished regimes, it was barely under control. In one year there were 67 acts of concerted indiscipline and 49 incidents where prisoners got on the roof... each year hundreds escaped and thousands absconded... In 1986 this unholy mix of poor conditions, union irresponsibility and management incapacity exploded when management at last tried to get a grip on staffing levels... There was disturbances at 40 prisons, several were partly destroyed 45 prisoners escaped …. There again serious riots several prisons in 1988 and 1989. In 1990 the entire prison system erupted the most serious breakdown ever known One of the largest prisons in the country , Strangeways, was destroyed and held by rioters for four weeks as prisoners demonstrated the incompetence and impotence of the prison service from the prison roofs the TV news”. So to take 1990 is the start of a growing crisis which finally came to a head around 2020 is absolutely perverse. In one passage the book suggests that politically things were much better before 1990 - which begs the question of why then the entire prison system nearly collapsed in that year, with the worst riots ever known? I see in these statements the same denial of reality of the left wing mantra that all evils started with Thatcher: you can only believe that if you wipe your mind of any recollection of the politics, and economics, of the 1970s. A second denial of history is that the book seems to take it for granted that things just got worse through the period 1990. However there is overwhelming evidence that the prison system, and I would argue probation, were in a much better state by middle to end of the 2000s. This was achieved precisely through political leadership (Straw and Blair) as well as the outstanding management leadership of Narey and Wheatley, together of course with a great deal more money. I'm not - of course - arguing that prison or probation services in 2010 were excellent, overcrowding was still extremely high, but I think it's incontrovertible that they were in much better state than they had been in 1990. (Or rather, I would say that in 1990 there was no knowing whether probation was doing well or not: it is simply the practise of criminologists to assert that it was all much better then, the lack of any evidence not bothering them a bit. That the prison service was appalling in almost every way in 1990 is a matter of record). In fact there is a strong argument that even today, the prison system isn’t nearly as bad as it was in 1990: the old punitive POA culture and the institutionalised brutality by staff on prisoners, the open racism, has largely gone, management exists, information exists and attention is paid to what’s happening in prisons a way that wasn’t at all true in the 1980s, and so on. In other words, the arc of this book’s narrative is fundamentally out of line with reality. The second thing that makes this book so bad is the weird lack of reflection, lack of interest in the wider picture and most extraordinary for such eminent researchers, lack of interest in research. This takes various forms. Perhaps the most extraordinary mission is a lack of reference to what was happening to crime over this period. We know from the British Crime Survey, that the long post War rise in crime in this country petered out around 1995, and was followed by the most extraordinary and pretty much unexplained drop in crime: a fall of about 75%. A 75% drop in crime! This goes unremarked on in this book. Yet it should prompt the question of why this extraordinary drop in crime went hand in hand with increased punitiveness in sentencing. Likewise the fact that this drop occurred across much of the developed world at the same time is pretty conclusive evidence that the drop had nothing to do with justice policy or indeed social policy, which differed so much between countries. This in turn should have prevented the authors from making the casual statement, entirely unevidenced, that the ‘answer’ to crime lies in ‘social policy’. Not only does what is known as the ‘ crime drop’ contradict that, but it also calls him question whether there is in fact today any ‘crime problem’ to be ‘solved’. Indeed one of the major omissions of the book is the lack of interest in what was happening in British society, that might have brought about such a drop in crime, while nevertheless increasing punitive attitudes. Nor is there any awareness that public concern about crime as an issue seems according to the British Crime Survey to peak in the 2000s, but now be at rather low levels. There is at least a possibility that in looking for ever-increasing punitiveness, the Tories are flogging the wrong horse. Likewise is complete lack of interest it was happening in other countries at the same time. Also the near total lack of interest in the connexion between prisons and probation and what's happening ‘ upstream’ in the criminal justice system. There's a very strong argument to my mind that if you did think the criminal justice system was a tool for reducing crime - which I do not, and in that agree with the authors - then the means lie not in punishment but in increasing the very low number of crimes resulting in some sort of sanction of the offender, and the very long delays the justice process often incurs. None of this surfaces at all in this book. Yet criminologists are the ones who often (rightly) berate ministers for not taking an overview of the criminal justice system. The authors suggest en passant that the criminal justice system cannot affect crime levels nor can prisons or probation service reduce re-offending – though so casually that I can’t be sure. As it happens I agree on both points. But this isn’t argued, just passingly mentioned. Yet is a huge difference from what every politician and most criminologists believe: most criminologists believe that a much batter correctional system could bring reoffending rates down. But if it is accepted, doesn't that raise the most profound questions - such as what then is the role of prisons and probation to be, and how should we use them? All that is pretty much skated round here. The third great weakness in the book - and this is where it gets embarrassing, - is the quality of analysis. Indeed, there's a terrible imbalance between the very short passage of analysis and the many pages of description and reporting that have gone before. Some of this is so awful look one can hardly bear to recount it. But here goes. There is a passage on ‘ British democracy and the separation of powers’ which drifts all over the place. Even on third reading I cant tell you what it means. I think it favours separation of powers but I cant be sure. I think it’s arguing that ending FPTP would make parties more moderate and justice policy more thoughtful and moderate: a point of view, but does the 2010 Coalition support that? (BTW the authors do not notice that there is no such separation: because the Executive have 100 MPs on the payroll vote, and another 100 kept silent by ambition to replace them. To a practical extent ignored by the theory, the Executive IS the legislature]. The book rightly draws attention to the high rate of ministerial churn, but then cuts the ground from underneath itself by saying that isn't really the problem. The possibility that there's been a serious decline in the calibre of civil servants is not acknowledged, still less explored. The book rightly charts negative changes in political behaviour, such as an increasing tendency of ministers on appointment to forget everything done before then and instantly to announce some new panacea, the increasing confrontational nature of politics, unwillingness to take advice, and policy produced through mere assertion without genuine consultation or thinking through. But without asking itself why these changes came about come out or whether they've occurred elsewhere. I’d say that changes in the media, and indeed increasing confrontationalism in British society as a whole are part of the same picture and there is plenty of poll evidence of a profound polarisation in culture and politics here and in the US. A large part of the population don’t want to listen, or to find common ground. We may actually have the sort of politics we deserve. Where the book fails most is when it comes to proposals for the future. It goes much like this: politicians ought to be nicer to each other and more honest with the public and think things through better and not interfere so much. Yes, what a nice world, but without real analysis of why things are as they are or how to change them is just Pollyanna-ish. Then there’s a strange diversion on problem solving courts, where first of all is recognised that they've not been properly evaluated, but then that proposed as ‘ an exciting way forward’, someone’s hobby horse doing an extra lap. There is a great desire for an old style Lord Chancellor who is a lawyer but not Minister of Justice, possibly with wig, but there's no explanation why or how this would bring any benefit. We should make less use of prison – yes, yes, but how, given current politics, and the polarised, confrontational state of British society? Strangest of all is the passage on the management of prison and probation. There is first the proposition, which I've never seen convincingly argued, that probation must be ‘locally based’, and locally accountable - perhaps it should, but I haven't seen it properly argued. Then it suggested that there should be an Agency for prison and probation, or perhaps two agencies, which seemed to be centrally funded and controlled, not locally , as previously argued - this is left entirely unclear. It is to be accountable to an ‘eminent person’ as chairman, with horrid, horrid politicians excluded and certainly no attention paid to the Daily Mail. I’m not sure I agree with that: what happens in prisons is very much a political issue and it would be wrong, and futile, to try to regard his somehow technical management one, which the technicians could just get on with. But more to the point, the idea that we could move to such an arrangement given the political climate in which we unfortunately operate at present is simply ludicrously adrift from reality. Finally there are two passages which rob the book of any remaining credibility: First it is seriously stated that David Faulkner was ‘one of the wisest of civil servants in the Home Office’. This is taking him very much at his own estimation! And the CJA 1991 is supposed to be his ‘crowning achievement’. Legislation that fell to pieces before the ink was dry, largely because those required to operate it hadn’t been convinced, and achieved…what exactly? Second and even less forgivably, the 1990 White Paper is made to say “prison can be an expensive way of making bad people worse”. This is what it actually said: "Nobody now regards imprisonment, in itself, as an effective means of reform for most prisoners….. For most offenders, imprisonment has to be justified in terms of public protection, denunciation and retribution. Otherwise it can be an expensive way of making bad people worse." Meaning: prison has its uses, but not for cutting reoffending. The truncated version quoted by the authors has quite a different implication: prison is useless. Is it conceivable that the authors simply didn’t check the text? If you're not terrified, you must be mad.
For the first time since nuclear weapons were invented, the leader of one major nuclear power has threatened the other with a first nuclear strike. During the Cold War - what a cheery, comforting war that now looks like! - both sides understood and brought into the concept of MAD, mutually assured destruction. It meant that no matter who started nuclear war, the end result would be the total destruction of both countries. In other words, deterrence. No Cold War leader ever threatened a first strike. The only worry was making sure you spotted the others' first strike in time. By threatening a first strike if the West intervene militarily in Ukraine, r because he doesnt like the colour of Liz Truss's hat, Putin implies that he thinks Russia could win a nuclear war by striking first and survive, more or less. This means deterrence has failed. It means we are nearer nuclear war than at any time in history. Of course, Russia would not survive a nuclear war, as an organised state or society. Which leads to a second and even more terrifying thought. Supposed Putin recognises this. Is it possible that his mystical nationalism and his obvious love of war and destruction have merged, as did Hitler's in his final days, in a belief that the complete destruction of his nation will somehow be worthwhile, if at the same time he completely destroys the enemy? Is he or some part of him, deliberately willing the suicide of this civilization, in the name of revenge on the West? Putin is like a hostage taker, who has wired all his hostages to bombs, holds the button in his hand, and has already killed several. He says that any attempt to rescue and he will detonate the lot. But is it possible he means to do this anyway? Our one hope is that there is amongst the top Russian military and civilian leadership, or even Putin's bodyguard, a man who can see this madness in him even more clearly than we can, and is not in favour of the destruction of the world, and would quite like to carry on living, his family also, and is brave enough to shoot him.. That's ironic. A Russian is threatening to destroy the world, and only a Russian can save us. Now tell me, why are you not terrified? “A party which cynically encourages people to think the crime is rising when in fact it is falling, which preys on and encourages public fear of crime for party political advantage, which agitates for ever longer prison sentences is despite the total lack of evidence that this does any good, and which supports an unending increase in the size of our prison system, already the largest in Europe, at vast cost of the tax payer, and so prevents any progress in reducing prison overcrowding or closing insanitary old prisons." No, I'm not referring to the Tory party. This is ‘New’ New Labour. Which has in recent years outbid the Tories in legislating to increase the length of prison sentences, which created the hideous cruelty of the indeterminate sentence of imprisonment for public protection (IPP), and which has never, ever mustered the courage to criticise the fact that we are the highest user of imprisonment of any western European state (to find politicians who have had that courage, look to the SNP). And which has the proud boast, under Blair, of presiding over the steepest rise in the prison population in history, and the fastest prison building programme in history. Out Howarding Howard. We have now Labour’s cynical, damaging plan to fight the forthcoming local elections on the issue of crime. Cynical, because it seeks to make a nonsensical link between the PMs personal contempt for law as revealed in the ‘partygate’ scandal, and the issue of crime on your street. Damaging, because it rests on the deceit that crime is a rising problem for our people. It is not. Crime is, demonstrably, a much lesser problem than at anytime in the past 50 years. Here are the figures. There are two measures of crime. Until the 1990s, the only measure was the crime that the police recorded. Painstaking investigation expose this to be very unreliable, because heavily influenced by how far people bothered to report crime, and how far the police chose to record it. It was shown that there were huge variations in both, over time and locally. In its place was developed that British Crime Survey (BCS) which rested on annual sample surveys of the general population to ask people what their actual experience of crime as victims had been in the previous year. It was quickly established that this was a far more accurate measurement of crime then police data, except for so called ‘victimless’ crime such as drug abuse, and small volume crimes such as homicide. Note: figures for 2020 on affected by lockdown. Changed methodology in those years means comparison with previous years requires adjustements. What this data shows is an astonishing reduction in crime in this country over the past quarter century. Astonishing in the size of the reduction, astonishing in the sustained fall over such a long period. There has been a much speculation about the course of this fall. Suffice it to say, no one knows why, but the since it occurred in many different countries with entirely different crime policies, it is clearly a deeply seated cultural and social change, and not the result of government policies. The result is that you are less likely to be a victim of crime no then at anytime since, probably, the 1960s. Even better than that: although the public tend to believes that crime is rising even when it is in fact falling, and that the risk of falling victim of crime is greater than it is in reality, and that sentencing is more lenient than it actually is - all results of the wonderful work done by right wing politicians and their right wing tabloids over many years - this fall in crime has been so great, so sustained, that fear of crime has fallen dramatically. Crime has dropped off the list of issues which the public tell pollsters are causing them concern. The public is even becoming more satisfied that the courts are imposing appropriately tough sentences. Polls asking what are most important issues facing country, % mentioning 'crime', IPSOS and YouGov. Note: for IPSOS, two lines are given, the highest level recorded in any one year, and the lowest Hurray! You might think. But not if you're a politician. For fear of other people, criminals or immigrants, and a general sense of insecurity and dread, are vital tools for politicians. You're much less likely to notice huge growth in inequality and poverty in this country, for example, if you're made to be terrified of going out into your street, and therefore grateful to the government for appearing to ‘crackdown’ on crime, even if the crackdown can be demonstrate to be useless.
Such cynical tactics are generally associated with the Right. However Labour under Starmer reaches a new low with the launch of a campaign to mobilise crime as an issue in the forthcoming local elections. To do so, they must pretend the crime is increasing. They are able to do so only because of the growth in computer crime and fraud. With those figures included, crime has increased by 8%. But without those specialised form of crime, we would be reporting a fall of 8% (which is what Johnson and Patel trying to claim come up before they were found out). I'm not suggesting that fraud or computer crime are unimportant, though in many cases there is no loss or the loss small, or if not small is borne by banks. But in terms uh the sort of crime that principally worries people, such as rape or other sexual offences, robbery, burglary, serious assault, crime is not rising. And what is Labour's big idea to deal with this artificially inflated problem – apart, that is, from outbidding the Tories in ever increasing use of imprisonment and in every expanding prison system? According to this article it is ‘police hubs’. What's that, you ask? Well it's not terribly clear, but this other article suggest that it's our very old friends, neighbourhood policing, special constables, more crime prevention, 'more coppers on the beat'. In other words, doing again what has been done so many times before, without any new ideas at all. Oh that's not entirely fair. Video door bells. Hurray! In this field, as in so many others, neither Labour nor any other politician has had any significant new ideas for years and years. Perhaps, given the unspeakable cruelty of Labour’s IPP sentence, we should be grateful for that lack of ingenuity. But there is scope for new approaches - for example the lamentable arrangements for reporting and dealing with fraud, under which no one does anything much to investigate 99% of frauds, ensures that hardly anyone is ever brought to justice. That would be easy to change, by making someone responsible for dealing with fraud (extraordinarily, they aren’t, now.) On computer crime, there are technical and other solutions which could reduce risk. But the problem, politically, is those crimes don't generate enough fear to be useful to politicians. While other radical ideas, such as partial decriminalisation of possession of drugs, adopted in other European countries, or diversion of petty offenders into types of ‘social resolution’, are thought too risky. And in preference Labour concentrates on encouraging fear of crime, that is completely out of sync the actual state of our streets and of our society. Bereft of new ideas, intent on apeing the Tories on many issues, afraid of seeming radical, its mindset stuck firmly in the 1990s, Labour do not deserve to win power and if they do, will achieve very little. This country has so many terrible, deep seated and intractable problems, end with a constantly declining rates of economic growth, less and less scope to fund solutions. But the real tragedy of this country is that we no longer produce leaders of courage, thoughtfulness and integrity. And sadly, that's just as much true of Labour as of the Tories. uA political simpleton of my acquaintance keeps insisting that because I loathe the current Government, I must 'therefore' be a supporter of Labour. Mind you, he then goes on to attack one 'Jeremy Corbyn'.
It is the most tiresome of all political tropes, and quite possibly the root cause of many present evils, to assume that politics is essentially a game of football, and this if you aren't a supporter of Tweedledum, you must be a supporter of Tweddledee, else why attend the match? That was true fifty years ago but it hasn't been true of many people, perhaps the majority of this country, for a long time, and is less true every year. In fact I would say that the views of people who do have cast iron loyalty to one party or another are probably not worth paying attention to. What I desperately want, and pay attention to, is decent, well-informed, well-intentioned, thoughtful, articulate, courageous and responsible people in power. I'm less interested in the colour of their scarves. At the last election I voted for the Lib Dem here but trod the streets of Beaconsfield in support of a decent Tory liberal, Dominic Grieve, who is a sad loss to politics. Today I am incredibly cheered by this searing speech against Johnson by another liberal Tory. The Government I'd like to see doesnt have to have a tribal label on the front of it. A Coalition would please me most because then we'd have to accept problems are complex and views diverse, and that solutions involve intelligent discussion and compromise. But recovery from, today, the lowest point in British politics for hundreds of years, must start with the dismissal of Johnson, that lying, cheating, lazy, corrupt, narcissistic, irresponsible, disloyal, smug, over-privileged, self deluding, sociopath. Who has not a single shred of Tory DNA in him, who is a disgrace to that once great party and who has done it, and the country, such terrible damage. Every Tory MP who sustains him in power for another day or week or month is forever tainted by that decision. Full speech here https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10497997/Lies-breed-contempt-Former-Tory-PM-John-Major-says-Boris-Johnson-broke-Covid-lockdown-laws.html#v-6703682312196700745 |
I was formerly Finance Director of the Prison Service and then Director of the National Offender Management Service responsible for competition. I also worked in the NHS and an IT company. I later worked for two outsourcing companies.
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