The claim that Labour is "soft on crime" is a
hardy Tory perennial and Labour has usually been torn between two responses.
One is to argue that being "tough on crime" in the
manner that the Tories say they are - recruiting more police and making the
penal system more severe -does not actually do much to stop crime: it is far
more effective to address the causes of crime* introducing measures to reduce
unemployment and poverty, to prevent the fragmentation of families and
communities, and to improve the urban environment. The other response is to protest
that the Tories are simply maligning Labour, which is just as tough as anyone
else.
The first response has all too often opened Labour to the
charge that it does not really want to punish criminals, while the second has
always seemed somehow unauthentic.
In the past week, however, Tony Blair, the shadow Home
Secretary, has come up with the wheeze of employing both responses at the same
time. "We need to tackle this problem in a concerted way," he said.
"Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime."
In a week in which the whole country has been shocked by the
death of James Bulger, the toddler allegedly abducted and then murdered by two
ten-year-old boys, few will dissent from the urgency of Mr Blair's conviction
that something must be done about crime.
But unless he does a lot more to explain how Labour would be
"tough on the causes of crime", it will be difficult to avoid the
conclusion that his brave new formula is, at best, a neat piece of rhetoric.
Although much of what the law-and-order lobby wants would be
utterly undesirable in any civilised society, there is a case for some
measures that are "tough on crime". A rather better example than locking up
persistent young offenders, on which Mr Blair says that he has been misrepresented,
would be changes in the law to make it impossible for crack dealers to operate
openly on the streets.
This, however, is the easy populist part of Mr Blair's big
idea. The difficult bit is persuading people that Labour knows what the causes
of crime actually are, let alone how to deal with them.
Of course, poverty and unemployment are part of the story,
but by no means all of it. As Mr Blair has said, the breakdown of a sense of
community is just as important.
Yet this breakdown is not something that can easily be
reversed. It has resulted from some of the most profound changes that
capitalism has undergone in the past 40 yean. As Britain has become
more affluent, people have increasingly led essentially
private lives. They tend to stay at home and watch television rather than
socialise. They use a car rather than public transport and change jobs frequently.
Meanwhile, the family has changed dramatically. Women are
far more likely to work than before, marriages are less stable and the way in
which children are socialised has been transformed by television.
Add to this the way our cities were wrecked by the
disastrous housing policies of the sixties and seventies, when human-scale
housing was replaced by tower blocks, and it is clear that dealing with the
causes of crime involves nothing less than re-inventing society, the family and
the city, with a view to transforming the way we live our lives.
If that is what Mr Blair means by being tough on the causes
on crime, his interventions of the past week can only be welcome. He should be
warned, however, that it commits Labour to a great deal of imaginative policy
work. As things stand, Labour's thinking about reviving a sense of community
and dealing with the crises of the family and the city is at best pedestrian
and at worst non-existent.
More importantly, it is also radically at odds with his own
enthusiasm for aligning Labour with the private, consumerist aspirations of
middle England and with Labour's more general acceptance of the leading role of
the market in shaping our lives.
