Straw….first of the great New Labour manipulatorsSLOG SPECIAL:
When it comes to crime stats, New Labour and the police are the real habitual criminals.
One of the very first examples of target-mania was the determination of New Labour from 1997 onwards to live up to ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. Upon taking office, it was quickly made clear to Jack Straw that there simply were not the funds to act upon the causes – and anyway, despite the Alistair Campbell-created soundbite, there was no strategy at all to realise it.
The idea was dumped in short order, and Straw began looking at efficiencies in the justice system, alongside a crackdown on petty crime, as a means of ‘proving’ Government success.
Says a senior Labour MP, a backbencher with Home Office ambitions at the time:
“Jack wanted a quick win, but there wasn’t one – so he went for the easy win. This was the arrest-to-sentence system, which had become a shambles under the Tories”.
Sitting unreasonably at 142 days, the time-lag for Magistrates’ Courts related to relatively minor crime and petty drugs offences. The key problem was persistent offenders going AWOL, and here too Straw had no idea (and nor did anyone else) how to stop absconding. The plan therefore became one of ‘cracking down’ on easy detection, and getting petty miscreants both under surveillance and in front of Magistrates at the double.
“The order came down as another of those ‘catch and lock up’ initiatives” says a retired police officer, “but with the accent very much on minor offences. Where I was based at the time, it changed the focus of police work dramatically.”
The time-lag rapidly halved by 2001 – oddly enough, exactly the Government target set in 1997. A Home Office/ONS graph of 2007 shows dramatically how this happened…and how equally dramatically it then levelled off. It looks at first like a case of ‘job done’ – but there were other more important factors behind the graph flatlining there. The Labour source again:
“It screwed up the dynamics of the prison system, because it was based on a rate of inflow and outflow. People wound up in prison to make Jack look tough on crime, but most of them shouldn’t have been there. The numbers flooding in went up, and pretty soon we were getting heat from the prison service. By the time Gordon came to power, the prisons were bursting at the seams, serious criminals were having to be let out early, and far too much resource was going into easy crime. I think you can safely say that, by sticking these petty offenders inside, the Government was actually breeding criminals.”
Another reason for the flat graph after 2001 was that slippery Straw had moved on and left the problem for another to inherit. David Blunkett was apparently quick to realise what was going on, but after putting a stop to cannabis-related prison sentences, he was soon under the spell of the security services and senior Met officers. The focus on minor crime was quickly dropped as they filled his starry head with fears about organised crime and terrorism, but gently skipped around growing financial, computer and white collar crime, as they didn’t understand it. Blunkett then become enmeshed in trying to pass ever-more dictatorial legislation, such that even the New Statesman was moved to declare him ‘the most illiberal Home Secretary in history’.
A CID officer between 2003 and 2009 takes up the story:
“The nature of more serious crime was changing rapidly at the time,” he asserts, “and we simply lacked the resources, experience and manpower to tackle it. Meanwhile, in the Crown Courts where the real villains were being tried, the absconding and inefficency continued more or less unchecked.”
The statistics back him up: the ONS data from 2008 shows arrest-to-sentence in the Crown Courts sticking stubbornly at 202 days – nearly seven months.
Gordon Brown ascended the Throne and did the obvious thing: he stopped the time-lags being recorded, and focused instead on ‘proving’ that Labour had ‘cut crime by half’. CID man continues:
“The fall in serious crime is a fiction as far as I’m concerned. It changed in nature, and it didn’t get detected anything like as much as previously…..and of course, middle ranks came under pressure to ‘change’ the definitions.”
The former detective is referring to credit card, identity and internet crime. He goes on:
“It was unbelievable. There we were in an electronic crime wave, and the rug gets pulled out from under the SFO [Serious Fraud Office]. It was a case of ‘we can’t solve it, so lets make it disappear’. I took early retirement after that. The dishonesty was sickening.”
In fact, the emergence of Jacqui Smith was central to this development. The PCeU (Police Crime e-Unit) established in 2008 was abruptly told just a year later by the new Home Secretary in a Parliamentary answer that it was ‘unlikely to get any increased funding’. Smith was keen to keep the unit low-profile, for she and the senior mandarins around her knew that further information would blow the gaff on the real nature of sky-rocketing technology crime.
A final word from our retired Labour source:
“The irony is that burglary and street crime have fallen, and most neighbourhoods are now safer than they were when we came to power. But it had little or nothing to do with our actions…it’s quicker and safer for a villain to run a bank account ripoff than break a window in broad daylight, and then have to sell at a big discount to a fence. Crime as a term is meaningless, really. Petty crime dropped because there were easier, less detectable ways for criminals to make a turn. Serious non-violent crime has gone through the roof – but we don’t know by how much, because the police don’t detect it much of the time, and nobody is gagging to suddenly start auditing the true scale of e-crime.”
In fact, crime hadn’t fallen at all….it had changed. And neither Labour nor the police were ready for it.
The Slog 