POLITICS
How twice the crime is twice as much reason to play the law and order card
SIMON HEFFER
With a bravery that might better be seen as recklessness, the Conservative party will shortly turn the election campaign towards law and order. So far this touchiest of subjects has hardly been mentioned, except by Labour, whose pronouncements have not been given wide coverage in the Tory press. That, though, is hardly surpris- ing. The Conservative government inherit- ed a rate of 2,561,000 recorded crimes in the year before it was elected, 1978. In the most recent 12-month period for which fig- ures are available, to September last year, 5.1 million were recorded. There have been great improvements in the recording of crime in the last 13 years, but not that great. No wonder the party elected in 1979 on the law and order ticket should, by 1987, have settled for a promise in the manifesto that 'we do not underrate the challenge'.
Nor, though, does Labour. In the last couple of years Mr Hattersley, the Home Secretary in Waiting, has tried to sound more royal than the king on crime and pun- ishment. From being widely perceived as an anti-police party in the early 1980s, in the heyday of the loony leftists, Labour now wants to be the copper's friend. Labour is officially keen that genuine criminals be locked up. At the last Home Office Ques- tions, on 23 January, Mr Hattersley taunted the Government for presiding over an 18 per cent rise in crime in the last two years. It will 'be interesting, to say the least, to see how the Tories use law and order in the coming fight for power.
It is not hard to see why they must stick out their necks on the issue. Although most victims of crime (so MPs say) live in inse- cure houses on under-policed council estates, the average middle-class Tory activist still regards himself (or, more often, herself) and his or her like as the main tar- gets of lawlessness. Anyone doubting the passion this subject inspires among the faithful should remember the annual dis- plays of emotion on the matter at the Con- servative party conference. Moreover, most urban Tory MPs will gladly reveal the way their constituents hound them not merely about burglaries, mugging and car crime, but more particularly about drugs.
The last Tory manifesto blamed crime on moral decline, erosion of traditional values, inadequate parents and (from the party that abolished corporal punishment in schools) teachers failing to maintain disci- pline. Yet this was not the whole story. Failure to catch criminals, or to punish them properly if they are caught, also feeds crime, especially in this era of prosperity. When most houses have videos, and most cars have stereo systems, incentives for larceny are higher than ever, particularly if there is a high chance of getting away with it. Only then do philosophical factors, like the inability of many youths to distinguish between right and wrong and the corrupt- ing potential of welfarism, start to matter.
There are severe political limits on the way in which the Government can play the law and order card. Reliance on the moral deficiencies of the Labour party invites charges of dragging up ancient history, and ignores the ground Mr Hattersley has tried to win back in recent years. The populist measures that would placate the fundamen- talist wing of the Tory party and help Mr Major sweep the country (like the reintro- duction of hanging, flogging, the stocks, the hulks, the pillory, transportation, slitting of noses and cutting-off of hands) are not, and are unlikely to be, on the agenda. Those alarmed by rising crime, and by the threat they perceive it to be to their safety and happiness, will not be impressed by yet another round of rhetoric about longer sen- tences and more policemen. The longer sentences and more policemen already sup- plied have succeeded only in doubling recorded crime. This is the despair against which the Tories must play their card.
Since it cannot rely on saying that Labour would be worse at dealing with crime, the Government must prove to the people that it intends to be better. When, in the past, Tory home secretaries tried to tackle crime, they were restricted by the devotion of their civil servants to theories of liberal penology (all society's fault, and so on) and by their own fear of breaking the consensus view of 'treating' and reha- bilitating criminals rather than punishing them. This has changed, though without anyone really noticing. Lord Waddington, in his all too brief reign at Queen Anne's Gate, put the old ideas in the bin. His suc- cessor, the much-maligned Mr Baker, has not taken them out again. Most of the poli- cies that failed the Tory party on law and order in its first 10 years in office (similar to those that had failed the Wilson, Heath and Callaghan governments before) have been abandoned, stealthily and subtly, but abandoned nonetheless.
For example: the new Government cam- paign against joyriders, depicting these offenders as hyenas and scavengers crawl- ing over their vehicles, proves it is now all right for the Home Office to show crimi- nals as rotten. Four or five years ago minis- ters would have been dissuaded from such a tactic. Whenever he describes malefac- tors Mr John Patten, the Minister of State at the Home Office, talks about them being 'bad' and 'wicked'. The Government has supplied stronger sanctions to be used against all levels of criminals, but is frus- trated that many judges and magistrates do not use them. The Bench is independent and cannot be forced to use such sanctions.
Rather than interfere, politicians are instead complaining unsubtly about magis- trates who bail or put on probation offend- ers who should he locked up. The politi- cians argue that, by its leniency, the magis- tracy brings itself into disrepute and facili- tates futher crime waves.
Nor can magistrates say that, as under Mr Douglas Hurd's rule, prisons are so overcrowded that they must avoid sending criminals there. Mr Baker has provided 5,000 new places this year, and 5,000 places may well be provided every year until all are locked up who need to be (even if, to the dismay of some hard-line MPs, the cells are on a par for comfort with the average NHS ward). Mr Patten has also just announced `awayday' trips to jail for those on probation to show them what they are missing; a trick like that used by Dr Fran- cia, Dictator of Paraguay in the 1830s, who would take recalcitrants for a walk under the gallows as a warning to them to mend their ways.
As long as the Government is not too shy to proclaim its change of heart, it can match the new moral Labour party on the law and order question, despite its abysmal record. But the change must be signalled uncompromisingly, no matter how many liberals and anti-authoritarians it offends. Mr Kenneth Clarke, the Education Secre- tary, has done just that with his policy, and with great success. If Messrs Baker and Patten can convince the electorate (particu-
larly all those poor, over-burgled C2s. on their council estates) that theory on crime and criminals is reverting to pre-1960s robustness, the Tory pack might throw up a new trump card after all.
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