BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
Page 52
words of the 1992 Conservative election manifesto).
Blair’s tough talk put the Conservatives on the defensive, inaugurating
a new phase in the politics of law and order: deep consensus about tough
crime control but fierce conflict about which party is tougher. We will
explore the ‘Blair effect’ on crime and criminal justice policy, analysing
crime trends and patterns, the politics of law and order, the development
and effectiveness of criminal justice policy, and the extent to which
changes can be attributed to the Blair government.
14 Robert Reiner, Law and Order: An Honest Citizen’s Guide to Crime and Control
(Cambridge: Polity, 2007) pp. 122–3, 130–1.
15 Tim Newburn, ‘ “Tough on Crime”: Penal Policy in England and Wales’, in M. Tonry and
A. Doob (eds.), Crime and Justice 36 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
16 Tony Blair, ‘Why Crime is a Socialist Issue’, New Statesman, 25 January 1993.
17 Neal Lawson, ‘ “Reid”ing the Riot Act: New Labour, Crime and Punishment’, Renewal,
14(3), 2006: 1; Catherine Bennett, ‘Blair and Brown Keep Talking About Being “Tough on
Crime”. And By Tough They Mean, You Know, Tough-ish’, The Guardian, 29 March 2007.
Boom or bust? crime trends under New Labour
During the 2005 election campaign Labour’s literature postulated a
triumph in the war against crime. ‘When Labour came to power in 1997
we inherited a grim legacy. Crime had doubled [since the 1970s] . . .
Overall crime is down by 30 per cent on 1997 . . . violent crime by 26
per cent.’8 Michael Howard (as Conservative leader) attacked with
directly contradictory figures: ‘When I was Home Secretary crime fell by
18 per cent . . . Under Mr Blair . . . Overall crime is up by 16 per cent.
Violent crime is up by over 80 per cent.’9
Neither the Labour nor the contradictory Conservative claims were
lies: just different damned statistics. Labour’s success story was based on
the British Crime Survey (BCS); the Conservative rebuttal used the
police-recorded statistics. Not surprisingly, the validity of these different
data sets has become politicised. The public do not buy either good news
story – the BCS regularly finds that some two-thirds of the population
believe crime is rising nationally.10
So what has happened to crime under New Labour? The limitations of
the police-derived figures have long been known. There is a vast ‘dark
figure’ of unrecorded offences, because victims may not report crimes to
the police, the police may not record them, and many crimes occur with
no individual victims who could report them. So apparent trends in the
statistics may reflect changes in the reporting and recording of crime
rather than actual levels of offending. Nothing more could safely be
said until the advent of victim surveys, in particular the BCS, launched in
1981.
The headline story of crime trends over the last half-century is the
massive rise in the police-recorded rate. It rose from less than half a
million offences per annum in 1955 to a peak of 5.5 million by 1992,
falling back to 4.5 million in 1997 when Labour took office. But by
2003/4 the rate reached just under 6 million – the highest ever, declining
to just over 5.6 million in 2005/6.11 This supports the Conservative
charge that overall crime increased under New Labour. But contrasting the police-recorded statistics with victim surveys suggests a
more complex picture, putting the Conservative years in a much worse
light.
18 Tackling Crime (London: Labour Party, 2005), p. 2.
19 ‘Action on Crime’ in Conservative Manifesto, February 2005, pp. 1–3.
10 Alison Walker, Chris Kershaw and Sian Nicholas, Crime in England and Wales 2005/6
(London: Home Office, 2006), p. 35.
11 Ibid., p. 14.
Three distinct phases can be distinguished on the basis of the victim
survey evidence, within what otherwise appears to be a relentless rise in
the recorded crime rate since the mid-1950s:12
1955–83: recorded crime rise
Until the 1970s there was no other measurement of trends apart from the
police statistics. But during the 1970s the General Household Survey
(GHS) began to ask about burglary victimisation. Its data showed that
most of the increase in recorded burglary was due to greater reporting by
victims. Between 1972 and 1983 recorded burglaries doubled, but victimisation increased by only 20%.13 Victims reported more burglaries,
mainly because of the spread of household contents insurance. This
cannot be extrapolated necessarily to other crimes, or even to burglary in
previous decades, but the GHS indicates that the increased rate for this
highly significant crime was mainly a recording phenomenon, up to the
early 1980s. It is plausible that this applied to volume property crimes
more generally.
1983–1992: crime explosion
The BCS in its first decade showed the reverse: although recorded crime
increased more rapidly between 1981 and 1993 than BCS crime (111%
compared to 77%), the trends were similar. By both measures crime rose
at an explosive rate during the 1980s and early 90s, the Thatcher and early
Major years (see figure 15.1).
1993–: ambiguously falling crime
From the early 1990s the trends indicated by the police statistics and
the BCS began to diverge. The BCS continued to chart a rise until 1995,
but the police data fell from 1992 to 1997. Insurance companies made
claiming more onerous, thus discouraging reporting by victims, and more
‘businesslike’ managerial accountability for policing implicitly introduced
incentives to keep crime-recording down. So Michael Howard’s success in
reducing crime was mainly a recording phenomenon (see fig. 15.1).
12 Reiner, Law and Order, ch. 3.
13 Mike Hough and Pat Mayhew, Taking Account of Crime: Key Findings from the Second
British Crime Survey (London: Home Office, 1985).
250
200
150
100
50
0
1981
1983
1985
1987
1989
1991
1993
1995
1997
1999 2001/02 2003/04
British Crime Survey
Recorded Crime (unadjusted)
Figure 15.1. Indexed trends in crime, 1981–2004/5.
After New Labour came to power in 1997 the two measures continued
to diverge – but in the opposite direction. The BCS fell from 1995 to 2005,
since when it has remained roughly at the level of the first BCS conducted
in 1981. The police-recorded statistics, however, began to rise again from
1998 up to 2004, since when they have declined a little.14
The rise in the recorded rate was due overwhelmingly to two major
changes in police procedures for counting crimes: new Hom
e Office
Counting Rules in 1998, and the 2002 National Crime Recording
Standard (NCRS). These reforms boosted the recorded rate substantially
compared to what would have been measured previously.15 This was a
predicted consequence of the changes, because the 1998 rules made ‘notifiable’ a number of offences (such as common assault) that hitherto had
not been included in the recorded rate, and the NCRS mandated the
‘prima facie’ rather than ‘evidential’ principle, requiring police to record
‘any notifiable offence which comes to the attention of the police’ even in
the absence of evidence supporting the victim’s report.16
14 Walker et al., Crime in England and Wales 2005/6, p. 19; Jorgen Lovbakke, Paul Taylor and
Sarah Budd, Crime in England and Wales: Quarterly Update to December 2006 (London:
Home Office, 2007).
15 This is shown by the alternative calculations using both methods in Walker et al., Crime in
England and Wales 2005/6, p. 19.
16 John Burrows, Roger Tarling, Alan Mackie, Rachel Lewis and Geoff Taylor, Review of Police
Forces’ Crime Recording Practices (London: Home Office, 2000), p. 31.
The counting rule reforms are explicable only by concern in the
early optimistic days of New Labour to develop evidence-based crime
policy, even at the price of a politically sensitive rise in recorded
crime. A further recent revision in 2006 restores some discretion to the
police not to record offences reported to them in the absence of supporting evidence.17 This would reduce the recorded rate, other things being
equal.
The BCS is free from the particular problems that make the police
figures unreliable as a measure of trends. However, it is not (and has
never claimed to be), a definitive index. It necessarily omits many
offences: homicide, the supreme example of personal victimisation;
crimes with individual victims who are unaware of what happened (such
as successful frauds); crimes against organisations or the public at large;
consensual offences such as drug-taking, and other serious examples. Its
sampling frame excludes certain highly victimised groups such as children under sixteen and the homeless. So the government’s tendency to
treat the BCS as definitive is as problematic as the earlier exclusive
reliance on the police statistics.
Within the falling overall crime level, murder and other serious crimes
of violence have increased. During the early 1990s there were around 650
homicides recorded per annum in England and Wales. Since 1997 this has
increased to over 700, and, in most years since the millennium, well over
800 (although the figures were inflated by specific cases such as the
Harold Shipman victims recorded in 2003/4), declining to 765 in 2005/6
(including those who died in the July 2005 bombings). In 1997 8% of all
recorded offences were categorised as ‘violent’ (roughly similar proportions had characterised the crime statistics for decades), but by 2005/6
this had increased to 22%. Recorded robberies have continued to rise, as
have drug offences according to the latest statistics.18 So the trends are
certainly not as rosy as the BCS suggests.
Cross-dressing: the turbo-politicisation of law and order
During the 1970s and 80s the parties were deeply polarised on matters of
fundamental principle concerning crime and criminal justice. Labour
embraced a species of Clintonian criminology – ‘it’s the economy,
17 Home Office, Counting Rules for Recording Crime, at: www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/
countrules.html, General Rule A.
18 Lovbakke et al., Crime in England and Wales: Quarterly Update to December 2006, p. 3.
stupid’: crime was attributed primarily to economic deprivation and
injustice. Tory policy was to toughen deterrence. New Labour sought to
triangulate these poles. The 1997 Labour manifesto made this plain: ‘On
crime, we believe in personal responsibility and in punishing crime, but
also tackling its underlying causes – so, tough on crime, tough on the
causes of crime, different from the Labour approach of the past and the
Tory policy of today.’
By the time Labour came to power in 1997 they had developed a raft of
crime control policies, combining toughness with smart, evidence-led,
joined-up, workable measures, and even some significant gestures towards
Old Labour attachment to civil liberties (above all the 1998 Human Rights
Act). This was epitomised by the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, a quintessential ‘third way’ synthesis. The Act’s Janus-faced tough/smart policy
combination was encapsulated in its restructuring of youth justice: systematic, evidence-based attempts to address and prevent offending by
early prediction of risks and appropriate remedies, coordinated by interagency local Youth Offending Teams, and centrally by the Youth Justice
Board.19 Alongside this, however, were a variety of new powers for the
police and the courts to control youth crime and disorder, such as ASBOs,
child curfew schemes, abolition of doli incapax, detention and training
orders. The net result was an increase in the use of custodial penalties for
young offenders.
From 1992 onwards New Labour transformed the political landscape,
reflecting broader shifts in world politics. During the 1970s and 1980s
neo-liberal and neo-conservative political parties, ideas and policies had
become dominant in the Western world, but they were fiercely if unsuccessfully contested. On a world scale the New Right’s ascendancy was
completed by the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union. But what really embedded
the global hegemony of neo-liberalism was the acceptance of its economic and social policy framework by the erstwhile social democratic or
New Deal parties of the West. The embrace of the ‘third way’ by the
Clinton Democrats and New Labour marked a new consensus, sounding
the death-knell of the post-war mixed-economy Keynesian settlement
that conservative parties had accepted in the early 1950s. Blatcherism was
Butskellism in reverse. This was epitomised by the new deep consensus
about law and order, a fundamental acceptance of what can be called the
crime-control complex, with these core elements:
19 Rod Morgan and Tim Newburn, ‘Youth Justice’, in Maguire et al., The Oxford Handbook of
Criminology.
Crime is public enemy no. 1
Crime, disorder – and since 2001, terrorism – are seen as the major
threats to society and to individual citizens, by the public and politicians.
MORI has conducted polls on what people see as ‘the three most important issues facing Britain today’ for more than thirty years. In the early
1970s, when law and order was emerging as a political issue, less than
10% rated it amongst the top three. By 1977 this had increased to 23%,
and as high as 41% during the pre-election months in 1979. In the 1980s
and early 1990s it generally fluctuated between 10% and 20%. But after
1993 – despite falling crime levels – the pr
oportion putting crime in the
top three issues was often above 30%. Since 2001 crime has consistently
been rated a leading concern, rivalled only by ‘terrorism’ and ‘race relations/immigration’ – cognate issues in the tabloid world of law-andorder discourse, and merging into a new all-encompassing obsession
with ‘security’.20
Individual not social responsibility for crime
In the crime control consensus, crime is seen unequivocally as the fault of
offenders, stemming from their free choice, individual or cultural pathology, or intrinsic evil. It is certainly not caused by social structural factors.
This was expressed most bluntly in 1993 by the then Prime Minister John
Major: ‘Society needs to condemn a little more and understand a little
less.’ Tony Blair has frequently echoed these sentiments, as when he
regretted that ‘the left, by the 1980s – had come to be associated with the
belief that the causes of crime are entirely structural . . . we had eliminated individual responsibility from the account’.21
Foregrounding victims over offenders
The victim has become the iconic centre of discourse about crime, idealtypically portrayed as totally innocent. Crime discourse and policy are a
zero-sum game: concern for victims precludes understanding – let alone
sympathy for – offenders. This has become a central theme of Blair’s
speeches on criminal justice.
20 Ian Loader and Neil Walker, Civilizing Security (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
21 Tony Blair, ‘Our Citizens Should Not Live in Fear’, The Observer, 11 December 2005,
p. 30.
The purpose of the criminal justice 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 . . . our first duty is to the law-abiding
citizen. They are our boss. It’s time to put them at the centre of the criminal
justice system. That is the new consensus on law and order for our times.22
Crime control works
Since the early 1990s can-do optimism has reinvigorated law enforcement
agencies around the world. Policing and punishment work. Criminal
justice professionals and conservative politicians celebrate this as a
triumph of common sense over the ‘nothing works’ pessimism and oversensitivity to civil liberties that are said to have hampered crime control in