Starmer's imprisoned by his budget. (Dan Kitwood/Getty)
In his inaugural speech as Prime Minister, Keir Starmer promised to govern in a sober way, befitting the challenges of the day. He anchored his opening address in Britain’s small-c conservative, order-loving majority, promising “secure borders”, and “safer streets”.
And yet, the removal vans had scarcely pulled away from No. 10 before news crept out that Britain’s prisons are full, and the Lord High Chancellor, Shabana Mahmood, may be obliged to release some 40,000 criminals less than halfway through their sentences, to ease overcrowding. The domestic violence charity Refuge has already warned that this means domestic abusers may walk free having served barely 40% of their supposed sentence.
To Starmer’s haters, the report is evidence of a broader far-Left utopianism: the ideology that wants police defunded, borders opened, and drug addicts “treated” with free drugs. His defenders, meanwhile, retort that the Tories created this problem. And it’s true that Britain’s prisons were at capacity before Starmer took office; last year, judges were being told not to hand down custodial sentences because there was no room to incarcerate the prisoners. Then, back in May, Sky reported that Sunak’s government had quietly introduced further early-release measures to ease pressure on prisons, even including inmates deemed “high-risk”.
Then, ahead of the election, Sunak reportedly turned his own inaction into a trap for the new administration. In May, he blocked a request to release up to 500 more offenders early, leaving the problem for Starmer to deal with instead. Taken all together, the headlines read more like a Tory landmine than incontrovertible evidence of Starmer being soft on crime.
But even if he isn’t, his problems go deeper than just prison capacity. A glance at law and order in Britain since the last Labour administration reveals that the Tories did little to improve on Blair’s approach, and much to make things worse. And also that the New Labour policy on law and order had its own roots in a long-term trend of declining social trust and growing values pluralism. While the Tories’ record as inheritors to this approach leaves much to be desired, Starmer will find it tricky to do better: he has a far harder hand to play than Blair.
As the last Labour leader to secure a landslide, Blair threaded the needle between aspirational, liberal-leaning, middle-class voters and his more authoritarian Old Labour base by strategically emphasising law and order in measures such as the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act — even as he liberalised many other aspects of the country. This Act took aim especially at “antisocial” behaviour, and introduced new forms of non-custodial surveillance and control such as Asbos. As well as legislation, Blair also turbocharged funding for criminal justice, including a 21% real-terms spending boost for the police. This was all designed to operate alongside increased spending on welfare and social services. The rationale was alleviating the poverty that contributes to crime, while punishing wrongdoers: “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime.”
Did the package work? It depends who you ask, and how you count. As one study reports, in 2005, the Blair government bragged about presiding over a 30% fall in crime; in opposition, meanwhile, Michael Howard accused Labour the same year of enabling a 16% rise. Both were right — just drawing, respectively, on the British Crime Survey and recorded police statistics.
Meanwhile, even as competing statisticians bickered over the data, Britain under New Labour continued to grow more intentionally multicultural and socially liberal — a pluralism in turn contained by Blair’s proliferating infrastructures of surveillance, social regulation, and para-judicial control. No one could tell you what to do, the “modern” British norm declared; but if you were too expressive in your individualism, you might end up with an Asbo, or an electronic tag, or a bevy of social workers to “support” you insistently until you did as you were asked.
These new architectures of social control served as a replacement for the shared moral codes that were already thinning under the hot winds of “there’s no such thing as society” Thatcherism, when New Labour were first elected. And arguably they worked well enough, enabling the continued pursuit of pluralism — at least until the money ran out. Then, after the global financial crash, we got Tory austerity plus some mumbling about “the big society”: in other words, much the same society-wide liberal individualism as during the Blair years, only now accompanied by cuts to the public services that had held things together in the previous decade. Blair-esque bureaucratisation of public space advanced, for example in the 2014 introduction of Public Spaces Protection Orders — but now such developments came without the blank cheque. Indeed, both the police and the Labour Party accused the Conservatives of real-terms cuts, by as much as 33%. Certainly, officer numbers fell by around 20,000 between 2009 and 2016, undoing the New Labour police workforce expansion.
In other words, Blair’s legacy of suffocating social regulation has mushroomed, but enforcement has grown increasingly patchy. The corrosive cumulative impression has become that burglars can rob your home with impunity, and shoplifters can help themselves, but mean tweets will get you arrested.
But will matters improve under Starmer? It’s hard to say. So far, Starmer’s law and order approach sounds reassuringly Blairish: he is, for example, a longstanding critic of Tory prison policy, has promised 20,000 new prison places, and also pledged to prioritise antisocial behaviour and recruit 13,000 neighbourhood police officers. But Starmer’s choice of Minister for Prisons hints at some of the pitfalls he may face. James Timpson is CEO of the Timpson shoe repair chain, which makes a point of employing ex-prisoners, who comprise some 10% of Timpson’s workforce. Timpson is also former chair of the Prison Reform Trust, in which role he previously declared that “only a third” of prisoners should definitely be there.
Timpson’s advocacy of rehabilitation over jail time was echoed by Starmer following his election, when he vowed to cut the numbers reoffending and roll out a “tough love” programme focusing on “youth futures”. This proposal, dubbed “Sure Start for teenagers”, promises to bring together law enforcement, mental health specialists, and youth workers, in order to tackle knife crime. Elsewhere, Starmer has pledged to create “community and victim payback boards” involving “local communities” in dispensing justice for low-level offences.
All this suggests that Starmer — or perhaps the party behind him — places great trust in the power of non-carceral measures to address misbehaviour. And this, in turn, implies considerable trust in his government to be able to roll out enough of the social infrastructure this requires, to make such measures work. We will have to hope, then, that Labour can scratch together enough loose change to pay for it all. With post-1997 boomtime funding, “Sure Start for teenagers” might have been both compassionate and hard-hitting. Amid a fiscal crisis, shrinking tax base and stagnant economy, though, it runs a grave risk of winding up as a toothless half-measure: just the “more youth clubs” meme so often parodied on the Right.
Then there’s the pluralism. The mass immigration inaugurated by New Labour, in part “to rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, has now delivered a society so very diverse it’s becoming openly sectarian in some places, with white identity politics on the rise in retaliation. Indeed, His Toniness has already descended from plutocratic Olympus to advise Starmer to rein in immigration, in order not to fan the flames of “populism” any further.
In blithe disregard of these developments, Starmer’s proposed “community payback boards” will, we are told, bring together “community leaders” with other officials to determine community service sentencing locally. It sounds cuddly and decentralised; but is Britain still cohesive enough to devolve power in this way? Perhaps not; just recently, Labour MP Jess Phillips had her election speech booed by local pro-Gaza Muslims, in a context of such ferocious harassment and intimidation she didn’t even dare acknowledge its drivers directly, instead pretending to blame it on misogyny. In the context of such ethnic and religious fragmentation, anything that further empowers “community leaders” risks being an open door for tribal institutional capture, and even more accelerated fracturing of the polity.
Let’s hope none of that happens. Who knows? Perhaps Starmer will dredge up enough money to fund the police properly, build enough prisons to keep dangerous offenders off the streets, give “Sure Start for teenagers” the resources it needs, and roll out effective local institutions able to impose and enforce appropriate community service. Perhaps none of this will get politicised, or captured by sectarian “communities”. Perhaps all the muggers and loiterers and shoplifters will either be taken off the streets, or cured of their waywardness, and our streets really will get safer.
I hope they do. But I suspect that policing a radically pluralistic polity requires either hard authoritarianism, or a lot of money for the soft, Blairite kind. Starmer has an ebullient, freshly elected party of Left-wingers behind him, making the former politically difficult. And he has very little fiscal headroom for the latter. In that context, we risk ending up with the worst of all worlds: the same fissiparous polity and squeezed funding as under the Tories, just this time with a rueful grin and a side order of progressive humbug.
If that’s so, no amount of noble rhetoric about rehabilitation will disguise the truth for long. And it won’t really matter whether the label on the bottle says vintage social justice, or just sparkling anarcho-tyranny; the sour taste will be the same.
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Subscribe“Britain voted Brexit because of austerity”. I take it you didn’t vote for Brexit James, or you’d know that wasn’t true.
To be fair to James, he is quoting the views of others.
Thank you, Howard.
An excellent essay, in which the last three words of the first paragraph neatly encapsulate Vince Cable’s life in the political arena : “almost entirely pointless”.
VC is not pointless. He recently tweeted this;
“You don’t need to be a Communist or even a Socialist to recognise the positives as well as the evils in Lenin’s rule. Not least, his New Economic Policy established pragmatic market socialism which eventually succeeded in Deng’s”
He and his ilk are dangerous.
Sadly I have to agree. Far, far too many of his generation held similar deluded opinions, in fact in many ways they are the progenitors of today’s ‘woke’ sub-culture.
At the time (the 60’s) it was so fashionable to espouse liberal/socialist views, that even the so called Conservative Party was infected with the poison. Just at look at Ted Heaths and a plethora of other feeble Tory cretins.
For me, the seminal moment was the suspension of capital punishment in August 1964, and the subsequent atrocity perpetrated almost exactly two years later in Shepherds Bush. The State had abrogated its power to chastise with utterly predictable and foretold results.
To compare Lenin’s NEP to China’s economic policy is absurd, just absurd. The NEP was very small scale and did little more than enable a few entrepreneurs to make various goods avaialble for a couple of years. China’s capitalism is on a vast scale.
oi tosspot we did not vote brexit cause of austerity..we voted cause we have witnessed yrs of repression from the EU that differed from the economic union we voted into in the 70s and watched successive gvmts take from us over the yrs..do not put ur bile to our lips
beautifully put, Steve, Thank You.
An interesting article containing a lot of truth. I am slightly surprised that Cable seems unable to see that there might be more important things than economics. He always struck me as having a little more depth than that, although I believe he was an economist for an oil company.
Having said that, the triumph of money and the economy has been with us for some decades now and has swept up almost everyone in, say, the top 50% of the population. I include myself to some extent, before I started to wake up over the last 15 years or so.
My first fegree was economics. The classical definition of which is the study of how a society allocates scarce natural resources to one of a number of possible uses.
Towards tye end of my studies, I came to the notion that economics is really about providing an intellectual justification for a political objective. Usuallywhere the political objective was the advancement of those who ere supporting the economic idea.
Afam Smiths invisible habd was no more than a justification to shift power from the landed aristocracy towards commercial enterprise. Likewise, Marx argued to take power from those who had it by dint of owning factories etc in order to replace power with those without such ownership.
Call me a cynic if you will.
Cynic then !The very clear difference between positive and normative economics was drummed into me at A level and then at the LSE..I focused on the former and very much took the view that it was a source of research for political science-not the other way round.Having said that,most economic debate currently appears to be characterised by sloppy thinking and an absence of any scientific method.
So the author is quite convinced that property assets – he means houses – should be taxed. He makes no attempt to explain why this wealth tax – which is what it would be – should apply to just one asset. A person with a million pound house is taxed on their wealth. A person with a million pound share portfolio is not. This is sensible? How does this economics expert propose that his tax will work with legal partners, for example husband and wife, each owning half the asset? It makes no sense and has never worked anywhere. And in any event, we already have a wealth tax called IHT. To raise more revenue, the Government, any Government, is going to have to look at the big number taxes: income tax, National Insurance, and VAT.
The Author obviously hasn’t heard of Council Tax,or death duties on Income /inheritance of £240,000 or above
I’d favour internet sales. And a tax on FATGA.
I used to be one of the naive souls that thought a strong economy (which meant a good chunk of free market economic policy) could only be grounded in a reasonably free and open political system. I am older now, and I know that for a fiction – not because of China (or somewhere smaller, like Singapore) proving me wrong, but because I now understand the power of the modern state to dictate how people think, quite frankly to manipulate it, through and with a media which is for its own reasons allied to it. The current propoganda on Covid is just the latest example – but based on opinion polls there doesn’t seem any doubt that it is highly effective in exerting control.
So, no, to the extent that a strong economy gives rise to a strong state, a state which is capable of dominating any communication medium it chooses to, I am quite certain that the example of China is not an aberration, it is quite capable of being the future for all of us.
‘China is not an aberration, it is quite capable of being the future for all of us.’
And that future is approaching fast. The US and the EU are clearly heading in the direction of a China-style society, while literally handing over their assets and markets to China. The same is true of Canada. Whether or not countries such as the UK and Australia can somehow hold out as islands of democracy and some sort of freedom will be one of the great questions of the years to come. As you say, our mainstream media is now in lockstep with the state, so the omens are not good.
Sadly I believe You are mostly Correct! ”Bladerunner” Style of Woke Capitalism and Chinese communism Societies , awaits the next Debt ridden generation?….”There is hope.”.thought Winston as he entered ‘Victory mansions’…
Did project fear fail because people thought other things were more important than personal wealth and wealth of the nation or was it because many saw it for the utter bullshit it was.
Where is the economic logic of staying tied to 7% of the worlds population – a 7% that sees its share of global GDP decline year on year, compared to sacrificing some of the benefits of being part of the 7% in order to seek new and better opportunities with the other 93%? Those who argue for staying with the 7% are defeatists that have no pride in or ambition for their country.
Taxing housing assets? Do you mean taxing people out of their houses? Where are they to go? We aren’t exactly flush with spare flats.
Mr. Kirkup is broadly right about China, but:-
“(And I still do: the sooner we start taxing housing assets to fund social care the better.)”
As if Britain does not tax “housing assets” already! And that a particular “new” tax can be reserved for a particular purpose.
Not only does HMG already tax houses, but VAT is levied on building repairs. That is a huge tax on essential annual maintenance which should be encouraged, not discouraged.
One supposes stamp duty doesn’t count as a tax either.
“Effective economic policy is trumping politics.” Except that no-one to my knowledge says that there is no politics in China. In fact I am sure that the CCP itself would say that ‘the leading role of the party’ guarantees that ‘politics is in command’. Deng’s turn toward ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ was prompted by politics; the prospect that the party would lose power if it did not improve the people’s standard of living in an East Asia which was on the march, developmentally. South Korea and Taiwan show that China’s particular brand of party-state is not the only political route to prosperity, even in Asia. What should stimulate our concern is not China’s success, but our own current failures, both economic and political.
It is not just V. Cable – the international establishment is generally in love with the Communist Party dictatorship of the People’s Republic of China.
Listening to Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum fawning over “President” Xi’s speech to the international elite about “freedom and democracy” would be funny if it was not so tragic. The international establishment assume that a Social Credit system of censorship and control (denying people with the “wrong” cultural and political opinions, employment or the ability to trade) will only be used against people they dislike – never against them themselves.
As for Donald John Trump – yes the election was rigged, but he seems to have had no plan about what to do if it was rigged (even though many people warned him that the election would be rigged), Not planning out what to do if the election was rigged, was a massive failure.
On trade the policy of President Trump was straightforward – free access to the American market IF a trading partner gave free access to its market. President Trump was not interested in one-way-trade (with America importing but not exporting) – he wanted two way trade (open both ways). Hardly rocket science – so I am surprised that V. Cable does not understand that the objective was always to “make a deal” – get access for American exports.
Idiots like Cable have no comprehension of sustainability, resilience and sufficiency whether on economic, political, cultural or ecological levels.
Similarly, very little is understood in terms of the economy being an energy system and how the rising energy cost of accessing and distributing energy is increasing. This is reducing the supply of surplus energy to create meaningful prosperity which is why living standards have laboured since before the Financial Crash.
Consequently, QE and other forms of monetary stimulus are effectively subsidising the increasing energy cost of accessing and distributing energy in order to avoid a prosperity crash.
Essentially, Western economies have reached secular stagnation and monetary stimulus is life supporting a system that has reached peak prosperity in relation to fossil fuels.
https://surplusenergyeconom…
This puts greater emphasis on ecological, cultural and political wellbeing.
Idiots like Cable think they know best but it is always the working class who are experiencing reality on the ground.
Vince cable is a numpty, as is James Kirkup.
..
If we want an economy like Germany or Switzerland then perhaps 70% of the population is going to have to change it’s attitude to trade and technology. One take a horse to water but one cannot make it drink. What proportion of the British population have the same attitude and academic attainment as the Swiss entering their various technical institutes?
An interesting review of both the book and its author.
Politicians (and others) who live by the “economy is all” theory are taking a rather psychopathic view. I think that this applies to many modern politicians and, indeed, it may be a necessary qualification for long term political success. More and more, their ideology (including this particular ideology) seems to trump every other consideration.
One sees plentiful displays of ostentatious humanity, but I think most of us are capable of seeing the difference between the true and the false in this regard – in fact, I think that most of us see that rather more clearly than our politicians do.
Having just watched the brilliant documentary on the BBC about the Delorean affair, anyone who thinks that economics can ever be divorced from politics shouldn’t be seriously involved in either.
I’m not convinced that China is proving much of anything wrong. They have about 4 times the population of the US, yet are still behind it in GDP. It’s always easier to play catch up when you’re well behind than it is to continue making fast progress when you near the target. Assuming there’s no revolt against the regime for losing the Mandate of Heaven, we’ll have to see what they can do in the next few years. I’m not as concerned as the author or some of the commenters here. Of course, I may be wrong.
The role of quantitative easing is to finance budget deficits when the tax base is too low. It funds welfare and while the bond market is dysfunctional it is a free ride off the surplus countries. The last thing that is needed is populists or ignorant members of the public interfering with it with their views reflecting their vested interests. Its adverse distributional consequences are best deal with by using fiscal policy to tax the windfall gains it produces.
It is fascinating to me as growth has slowed over the last 45 years (blame EU loony Tories Brown all deserve credit) in the UK and indeed seems to have got slower by the decade if I could put a chart here I’d demonstrate…. Yet we saw Labour win 2 re-ections and accepted from a coalition Conservatives win 3 re-elections twice.
a 10 years line is better i.e mapping last 10 years but this does it note fewer but deeper recessions and no actual booms lately
I was minded by the Labour leaders debate where I saved time and did not watch and read someone comment on the Trans discussion and I said did anyone ask their economic ideology or discuss economics? Nope. Not a factor.
As Austerity (OK pedants it’s not what you define as austerity but to question terms is a fallacy argument as you know what I mean) showed in 2010-Pandemic really people do not blame slow growth more unevenly spread necessarily even if decent economics would make things better. 1% or 2% growth can be seen on a graph and maybe if you live in side by side countries that differed but clearly does not hit people in the eyes. TBF some of it is timing Clinton was a disaster and led to 2008 but he was long gone and his pointless budget surpluses (seriously they served no purpose in the 90s USA) etc were not obvious to all but economics professors.