"One Thousand Days of Degradation": New Labour and Old Compromises at the Turn of the Century [1].

• Date: 22 June 2000
• Author: Sim, Joe
• Published date: 22 June 2000
• Author: Sim, Joe

We haven't opposed a criminal justice measure since 1988 (Jack Straw, January 1997, cited in Anderson and Mann, 1997: 269).

I would trust Jack Straw's judgment. He is a very fair man (Margaret Thatcher, cited in The Guardian, January 12, 2000).

ON JANUARY 26, 2000, THE LABOUR PARTY COMPLETED 1,000 DAYS IN government. In a century dominated by the Conservatives, who between 1905 and 1997 were out of power a mere 29 years (Seldon, 1996: 17), Tony Blair looked forward to the next general election and a second successive five-year term as prime minister. For Labour, this was a feat that was unprecedented in its political history. In a mirror image of the Tories' years in government, Labour had held power for only 22 years in its century of existence. Central to the party's popular legitimacy and consolidation, according to Blair and Home Secretary Jack Straw, was its new, "third way" realism concerning crime, punishment, the economy, social welfare, health, and every other government responsibility. In keeping with its leader's evangelical spirit, the party's spiritual baptism in the soothing waters of the third way had transformed the nonbelievers of old Labour into the born-again, free-market zealots of New Labour (NL). In the process, the party had s hifted politically from being an unelectable pariah to a force in which the voters of "Middle England" could place their trust to deliver a promised land built on prudent accumulation, thrift, and prosperity free from the ravages of the degenerate, deprived, and depraved. "Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" had become the incessant mantra that was chanted in the build-up to the 1997 election. By the time of the election and in the febrile context of a rise in the rate of reported crime, criminal justice mismanagement and inefficiency, and Tory political and moral sleaze, NL was claiming in its manifesto that it was "the party of law and order in Britain today" (The Labour Party, 1997:23). In the next three years the manifesto's comment was to prove prophetic.

This article explores a number of themes in relation to NL's law-and-order strategy. First, it sets this strategy in the context of the two decades of near-Conservative hegemony and the impact and legacy of that hegemony on the government's conceptualization of crime and punishment. Second, it explores the extraordinary events that occurred in the first months of the new millennium. These events -- from the refusal to extradite Augusto Pinochet to Spain to face charges arising from the 1973 coup in Chile to the 22 life sentences imposed on an armed robber whose collective haul amounted to £1,500 -- provide a penetrating case study of who are "the proper objects of power" (Fiske, 1993: 235) in NL's globalized world. Finally, the conclusion critically analyzes New Labour's commitment to human rights through the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into U.K. law. Although this development is to be welcomed, our article argues that the government's narrow, legalistic conception of human rights could lead to the obfuscation and marginalization of the material social processes that are central to the delivery of democratic accountability and social justice in a society where "the richest 10 per cent of the population own 65 per cent of the marketable wealth, excluding dwellings, while half the population between them have only 6 per cent" (Jones and Novak, 1999: 19).

The Roots of New Labour's Law and Order Strategy [2]

The Conservative Legacy

The period of Conservative hegemony that began in February 1975 with the election of Margaret Thatcher as Tory leader ushered in an epoch of "iron times" built on the corrosive discipline of "authoritarian populism" (Hall, 1988a). There are four important points to note about the often searing law-and-order strategy pursued by the Conservatives between their first election victory in May 1979 and their crushing defeat (at least with respect to the number of Parliamentary seats they lost) in May 1997.

First, the capacity of the state for coercive, militarized, and authoritarian intervention into the lives of those constructed as ideologically and socially problematic -- a central component of its institutional armory since the early 19th century -- was intensified during those two decades. As Stuart Hall (1980: 5) succinctly noted in 1980, a year after the Tories' first election victory, "make no mistake about it: under this regime, the market is to be Free; the people are to be disciplined." Between 1981 and 1995, the British Parliament passed 17 major acts that had precisely that effect. As Anderson and Platt (1995: 15) pointed out in November 1995, "since 1979 [the Tories] have consistently strengthened the surveillance-and-control institutions of the state, introducing along the way a vast amount of legislation restricting civil liberties."

Second, the Tories also pursued what Hall (1988a: 152) has called an "antistatist strategy." This strategy was particularly influential in the policing of the powerful:

If the powerless continued to be the "proper objects of power" (Fiske, 1993: 235) through the retributive interventionism of the strong state, then, for other more powerful groups, the eighteen years of Conservative rule meant that their activities remained relatively invisible, comparatively unregulated, and effectively decriminalized. The deregulatory discourses that underpinned the politics of the free market had a precipitous impact on those agencies responsible for ensuring that the powerful, both organizationally and individually, were subject to some degree of regulation, however contingent and fragmentary, under bourgeois legal arrangements (Sim, 2000: 324).

In areas such as deaths at work, deaths in state custody, income tax evasion, and racial, gender, and homophobic violence, the capacity and indeed motivation of the state and its servants to intervene, police, and punish these activities were legally and ideologically severely circumscribed.

The third element in the Tories' strategy was to mobilize the community (and within the community, the nuclear family) as a bulwark against crime and disorder. This concept has a deep hegemonic appeal across the social classes in England and Wales, triggering as it does an ideological orientation toward a mystical present and mythical past (Sim, 2000). The idea of community:

was employed by the Conservatives to emphasize the responsibility of private citizens for personal and public safety.... [They] managed to integrate the community-based approach into their ideological framework whilst retaining a commitment to "hard" policing and retributive penal regimes (Benyon and Edwards, 1997: 12).

This was underpinned by a "responsibilization strategy," whereby responsibility for crime prevention was devolved "on to agencies, organizations, and individuals which are quite outside the state and to persuade them to act appropriately" via "partnerships," "multiagency" interaction, and "active citizens and communities" (Garland, 1996: 452).

Finally, from the early 1990s, the Thatcher and Major governments introduced significant elements of privatization into the criminal justice system. This development, which was legitimated by the managerialist discourses of "efficiency, effectiveness, and economy" (McLaughlin and Muncie, 1994), included allowing private companies to build and manage penal institutions, contracting out state services to the private sector, and expanding the CCTV camera network to the point that the country had become the world leader in the use of this technology. The shift toward managerialism and privatization was intensified by quangoization, a process involving "the large range of bodies of appointed, nonelected, non-civil service people running things, overseeing things, or advising about things, and usually spending or controlling public money" (Marr, 1996: 77). The important phrase here is "nonelected," and the mushrooming of these bodies under the Tories (and carried on by NL) raises profound questions about the further marginalization of already existing, but immensely feeble, structures of democratic accountability in relation to criminal justice and other institutions. By 1995 in London, there were 1,675 members of this "new magistracy," as John Stewart has called them, and only 1,900 elected councilors (cited in Hutton, 1995: 38-39). [3]The shift toward managerialism and privatization was intensified by quangoization, a process involving "the large range of bodies of appointed, nonelected, non-civil service people running things, overseeing things, or advising about things, and usually spending or controlling public money" (Marr, 1996: 77). The important phrase here is "nonelected," and the mushrooming of these bodies under the Tories (and carried on by NL) raises profound questions about the further marginalization of already existing, but immensely feeble, structures of democratic accountability in relation to criminal justice and other institutions. By 1995 in London, there were 1,675 members of this "new magistracy," as John Stewart has called them, and only 1,900 elected councilors (cited in Hutton, 1995: 38-39). [3]

These developments were consolidated in May 1993, when the populist and authoritarian Michael Howard became home secretary. In his four years in office, Howard pursued a strategy whose defining characteristic was "prison works," a doctrine he supported by referring to the USA' s "success" in reducing crime through its incarceration policies. His strategy intensified the already existing coercive capacities of the panoptic state toward the conventional lawbreaker, extended the process of criminalization with respect to the legal activities of a range of groups particularly in the area of public protest and civil disorder, and minimized interventions into the illegal activities of the powerful, whether they were state servants, corporate...