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reduction in reoffending resulting from these74), and one has at least a
partial explanation of the crime decline under New Labour.
But this is far from the whole story. The very fact that crime rates have
been falling in most developed economies, although their criminal justice
and penal polices vary markedly, suggests that single, grand-narrative
explanations are implausible.75 Under New Labour there has been a series
of important socio-economic changes aimed at reducing ‘social exclusion’ which have had an important bearing on trends in crime. Falling
unemployment, reductions in child poverty, and a slight drop in income
inequality (but only back to approximately 1997 levels),76 are undoubtedly important factors in any explanation of crime trends under New
Labour. Indeed, a recent review by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit
concluded that 80% of the crime reduction was attributable to economic
71 Michael Tonry, ‘Determinants of Penal Policies’, in Tonry, Crime and Justice.
72 Zimring, The Great American Crime Decline, p. 151.
73 See, for example, Andrew Karmen, New York Murder Mystery (New York: New York
University Press, 2000).
74 Morgan and Newburn, ‘Youth Justice’.
75 Michael Tonry, Thinking about Crime (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Reiner,
Law and Order, chs. 4 and 5.
76 Mike Brewer, Alissa Goodman, Alistair Muriel and Luke Sibieta, Poverty and Inequality in
the UK: 2007 (London: Institute for Fiscal Studies, 2007).
factors, although this estimate is somehow omitted from the version of
the report currently on the cabinet website, which concentrates almost
entirely on criminal justice solutions.77
Conclusion: New Labour crime control: a success
that dare not speak its name?
The evidence reviewed above suggests that a raft of socio-economic
changes, together with some criminal justice reforms, account for much
of the crime decline under New Labour. Is this success in crime reduction
vindication of the pledge to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of
crime? Up to a point, but given the staggering explosion of crime under
the Conservatives, things really could only get better. Moreover, the
aspects of criminal justice policy that worked have been smarter policing
and prevention, rather than the hardening of punishment. And the sotto
voce, limited reduction of social exclusion, poverty and inequality by
stealth is better described as slightly stern, rather than tough, on the
causes of crime.
The paradox of New Labour is that it only appears comfortable with
the first half of its epochal mantra. Blair as Shadow Home Secretary in
1992/3 spearheaded a remarkable achievement for New Labour, capturing the law-and-order issue from the Tories. The lasting impact of this is
shown by David Cameron’s efforts to win it back with mellower rhetoric
than his predecessors as Conservative leader. Ironically, it has been New
Labour that shifted the balance increasingly to tough policy and practice,
away from the more complex approach it started with.
One consequence of the obsession with ‘tough-on-crime’ rhetoric and,
to a lesser degree, practice, is that the public appears largely ignorant of
the extent of the crime decline. Blair in particular has consistently
emphasised the bad news, the ‘need’ to repeatedly modernise the criminal
justice system to make it ‘fit for purpose’ in the twenty-first century. This
breast-beating is counter-productive, suggesting – against all the evidence of greater power, resources and targeting – that the system is badly
broken, thus stoking public anxieties.
Majoritarian electoral systems do require centre-left parties to capture
a substantial section of the middle-class vote. Arguably they must allay
middle-earners’ fears about redistribution at their expense by tough
77 Enver Solomon et al., Ten Years of Criminal Justice under Labour: An Independent Audit
(London: Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, 2007), p. 14.
leadership espousing middle-class values against the left of the party.78
Sun-worshipping law-and-order policies and tight central control follow
from this logic. Nonetheless it is arguable that the huge Labour majority
in 1997 indicated support for more liberal and just policies (still implicit
in some survey evidence) that could have been tapped by Labour to
modify law-and-order ideology rather than embed it.79 That this was the
path not taken owes more to Blair’s evident personal belief in the narrowest interpretation of his mantra, rather than a logical necessity imposed
by globalisation and neo-liberalism. The commitment to toughness
paradoxically made New Labour’s record in overall crime reduction a
success that dare not speak its name, for fear of tabloid attacks on it as soft
and out of touch. Increasingly ruthless and shrill assaults on civil liberties
have fed the fears that purportedly justify them, and undermined the
policies that succeeded in containing crime to some extent. In a kind of
Gresham’s Law, tough but only marginally effective policing and punishment tactics have elbowed out attacks on the causes of crime that could
provide more deep-rooted security.
78 David Soskice, ‘Follow the Leader’, Prospect, May 2007, pp. 48–51.
79 Peter Wilby, ‘Thatcherism’s Final Triumph’, Prospect, October 2006, pp. 28–31; Reiner,
Law and Order, pp. 171–2.
16
Immigration
Immigration, in the run-up to the 1997 election, was not an issue Labour
was keen to discuss. Critical of the impact of Conservative measures, it
was nevertheless convinced that immigration was an issue on which it
could only lose votes. Labour did, moreover, agree with the Conservatives
that tough immigration controls were essential for good race relations. Its
intention was simply to mitigate some of their harshest effects. Labour’s
manifesto commitment was thus modest, affirming the importance of
‘firm control’ while promising to remove certain ‘arbitrary and unfair’
results: just six lines addressed the issue which would later preoccupy the
Prime Minister, asylum, promising ‘swift and fair’ decisions to tackle the
backlog and crack down on fraud. There was no mention of labour
migration where Labour was fundamentally to change the parameters of
policy and debate. In contrast to other major policy areas, Labour thus
came to power with no vision, no policy goals, no anticipated ‘third way’.
The Conservatives’ legacy was a backlog of 52,000 asylum cases and a
tabloid press convinced that the vast majority were ‘bogus’, drawn to
Britain, in the language of Michael Howard, because it was a ‘soft touch’.
For the public, immigration was not a salient issue in the 1997 election,
just 3% rating it among the top three concerns facing Britain.1 The
opportunity to give the backlog cases the right to stay, when the mistakes
of the previous administration could
have been blamed, was nevertheless
rejected. A major computerisation failure and pre-election staff cuts
in the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND), coupled with
rapidly rising asylum applications ensured that the backlog grew rapidly
to 125,000 by 1999. Asylum numbers would dominate the Home Office
agenda and preoccupy the Prime Minister until, by 2005, he was finally
satisfied that they were under control.
11 Ipsos Mori Political Monitor: Long Term Trends www.ipsos-mori.com/polls/trends/
issues.shtml#2007.
Meanwhile, with little public acknowledgement, the Conservatives
had quietly overseen a steady increase in the number of work permits to
meet skill shortages in the health service, teaching and parts of the private
sector, including a growing number of multinational inter-company
transfers. Big business, however, was critical of a bureaucratic, slow and
unpredictable work-permit system, later to prove ripe for reform by an
incoming administration with a business-friendly deregulation agenda.
The limited ambition in the 1997 manifesto was reflected in a
White Paper, Fairer, Faster, Firmer, the following year.2 The subsequent
Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 continued the path the Conservatives
had set, extending measures to prevent and deter asylum-seekers from
reaching the UK. Only at the margins, in the removal of the much criticised ‘primary purpose’ rule,3 and later in cutting waiting times for families wanting to come to the UK, did Labour alleviate some of the negative
impact of entry controls, responding to pressure from ethnic minorities,
not least in the Home Secretary Jack Straw’s own constituency. While the
number of migrants arriving for family reunion and marriage continued
to rise, this early focus of reform was quickly eclipsed by the two groups
of migrants which dominated Blair’s period in office, asylum-seekers and
migrant workers.
Asylum
The nightly TV pictures of asylum-seekers from Calais’s Sangatte refugee
camp scaling fences to board trains bound for Dover in 2001 was a visible
symbol of government’s inability to control migration. But the pressure
began much earlier, with disturbances in seaside towns and complaints
from local authorities in the south-east that they were shouldering an
unfair burden in welfare provision and electoral risk. Applications rose
from 32,500 in 1997 to a high of 84,000 in 2002 (ranking sixth, per capita,
across the EU).
Media pressure to act was relentless, egged on from 2002 by the ‘thinktank’ Migration Watch, and often misinformed; the debate polarised
between those convinced all applicants were abusing the system and
those convinced they should all be allowed to stay. The Opposition
rammed home its advantage, proposing extreme, unworkable ‘solutions’.
12 Home Office, Fairer, Faster, Firmer, A Modern Approach to Immigration and Asylum, Cm.
4018 (London: TSO, 1998).
13 The primary purpose rule put the onus on those seeking entry on grounds of marriage to
show that the primary purpose of the marriage was not to gain entry to the UK.
Ministers and special advisers speak of this period as ‘extraordinarily
tense’ and ‘consistently problematic’, with the ‘media onslaught unrelenting’. Only in such a climate could asylum have remained on the
agenda of the cabinet meeting held two days after 9/11 in 2001.
David Blunkett, Home Secretary from 2001 to 2004, saw the threat not
as asylum-seekers per se but as their impact on a public already unsettled
by the pace of change, fearful of crime and resentful of newcomers accessing resources which they themselves needed. Mindful of the surge in
right-wing parties elsewhere in Europe, he saw tough measures as essential to prevent such a drift in the UK. He felt ‘grossly misinterpreted by the
liberal left’, who failed to support him in that approach.4
The evolving strategy was threefold: to raise the barriers to asylumseekers reaching the UK; to restrict access to work, benefits and healthcare as a deterrent; and to increase the through-put of cases at IND
while limiting access to appeals. A senior adviser to the Prime Minister
during this period says, ‘The Government realised that if you want
to get numbers down you have to prevent people arriving in the first
place. You can do what you like to try to make life more unpleasant for
people once they got here but that was never going to reduce the overall
numbers.’5
The 1999 Act had extended penalties on transport providers which
delivered passengers with no right of entry to the UK, and visas were
introduced for countries from which numbers of applicants were rising.6
The measure which had the most immediate impact, however, was the
closure of the Sangatte refugee camp. Talks with the French government
achieved minimal cooperation until Nicolas Sarkozy, with whom David
Blunkett had an immediate rapport, took charge. Agreement to close the
camp was reached in December 2002.
Convinced that asylum-seekers were attracted to the UK in part by
access to welfare benefits, the 1999 Act had replaced benefits with a controversial voucher system. TGWU leader Bill Morris led a successful coalition of protest, damning a ‘cruel’ system that had ‘deepened the misery of
14 Rt Hon. David Blunkett MP, Home Secretary 2001–4, interviewed by the author on
17 April 2007, from which other quotes in this chapter are also taken.
15 Interviewed by the author on 23 March 2007, from which other quotes in this chapter are
also taken.
16 The number of countries from which visas were required was extended from 19 in 1991 to
108 in February 2005. Joint Refugee Council and Oxfam Response to the Home Affairs Select
Committee Inquiry into Immigration Control (London: Refugee Council and Oxfam,
2005), p. 4.
those in need while lining the pockets of supermarkets and black marketeers’.7 Cash benefits at 70% of regular income support were restored for
those who would otherwise be destitute but legislation in 20028 withdrew
support from asylum-seekers who did not apply on arrival (‘S55’, later
overturned by the courts) and the ‘concession’ that asylum-seekers were
allowed to work after six months was withdrawn in July that year.9
Although numbers were falling by 2004, another Act10 further limited
access to an appeal, while regulations excluded failed asylum-seekers
from accessing secondary healthcare.
Reducing the backlog of cases could only be tackled by faster processing at the IND. Critics argued that ‘front-loading’ the system to
enable case-workers to make fast but also fair decisions would prove the
best deterrent to those without a strong claim to refugee status. The IND
was, however, singularly ill-equipped to provide it. When Barbara Roche
took over as Immigration Minister in July 1999 she was told that there
were only fifty case-workers trained to handle asylum cases, in a year
when there were 71,000 applications.11 Public expenditure controls had
been deemed to
prevent rapid investment in this area, though Maeve
Sherlock, former Treasury adviser and later head of the Refugee Council,
is convinced that a well-argued case to the Treasury to ‘invest to save’
would have proved convincing. The cost of maintaining asylum-seeker
families, and of funding appeals, was hugely counter-productive in terms
of cost, loss of political capital and the effect on the lives of the families
concerned. ‘If you had front-loaded a lot of those costs you would have
ended up with a much fairer, faster, and more efficient system. The business case was overwhelming.’12
In practice, reform was slow. As the number of applications rose, so did
the backlog, and it was brought down only by fast-tracking cases at the
expense of quality of decisions, the number of successful appeals rising to
more than one in five by 2002. A fundamental overhaul of the case-handling
system was finally initiated in 2005. Meanwhile, a series of ‘backlog clearance’ exercises had quietly processed long-standing applications through to
17 Bill Morris, ‘Are Civil Liberties at Risk? Yes, Says Bill Morris’, The Observer, 30 September
2001, http://observer.guardian.co.uk/libertywatch/story/0,,561488,00.html.
18 The Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002.
19 Later restored for those still waiting for a decision after twelve months, in line with EU
Directive 2003/9/EC.
10 The Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004.
11 Barbara Roche, interviewed by the author on 5 April 2007, from which other quotes in this
chapter, except where stated, are also taken.
12 Maeve Sherlock, interviewed by the author on 4 April 2007.
a discretionary right to stay. Fiona Mactaggart, Race Relations Minister
from 2003 to 2005, is convinced nevertheless that this humane solution to
the backlog was not an option until the government had restored a level of
public confidence in its capacity to deal with unfounded claims. ‘The
salience of immigration and race issues was so high it had the capacity to
take off. It didn’t because we didn’t do things like amnesties.’13
Blair’s preoccupation
Blair was mindful of asylum as a growing issue during the first term but by
2002 it absorbed an increasing amount of his time. ‘By the end of 2002 the