Reflections: the Respect Agenda

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Author: Patrick Crozier

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The Prime Minister has just (we are talking 10 January 2006 in case this gets substantially changed) announced his Respect Agenda to combat "anti-social behaviour", or something like that, I can't quite remember the title he's given it.

Here are my thoughts:

• I don't know precisely what it says but I can guess it will include the abolition of a few more ancient liberties plus the creation of jobs for a few more bureaucrats. This is a bad thing
• It won't work
• Unlike some of my libertarian buddies I don't hold that the formal legal abolition of a liberty means that it has ceased to exist
• It is symptomatic of the rather bizarre way that policy is formulated these days

Q&A

You don't like the term "anti-social behaviour"?

Well, I keep asking myself whatever happened to the term "criminal behaviour" or, I don't know, "breaking the law". Why this new term? It seems to be a bit of a trend these days what with the Lord Chancellor's Department being renamed the Department for Constitutional Affairs (or something) and the Royal Ulster Constabulary being renamed the Police Service of Northern Ireland. I am just a bit suspicious

What do you mean you don't know what has been announced?

What's the point of finding out? You kind of know the sort of thing that they're going to come up with

A bad thing?

Well, I am a libertarian and more bureaucrats means more taxes - also a bad thing

Why don't you think it'll work?

Because the state doesn't mean it. Hmm, I'll have to come back to this but my basic point is that the modern British state loves to look as if it is getting tough but never does. The offences the Prime Minister points to are already illegal. If the state can't enforce these existing laws what are the chances it will enforce a whole raft of new ones? The problem is that on a fundamental level the state just doesn't like dishing out pain. But if you want to stop the bad guys at some point you have to hurt them.

Can't you rehabilitate them, instead?

• Since when were the two incompatible? Germany (slightly different context, I accept) was much better for having several thousand tons of bombs dropped on it
• As long as I can remember the focus of sentencing policy seems to have been on rehabilitation. It has not been noticeably successful. Crime was much lower before

So, not the end of freedom, then?

No. There is always a difference between what the law says and what those charged with enforcing it actually do. My feeling is that the British state simply isn't nasty enough to enforce it's draconian laws

But it would be useful to a dictator, though, wouldn't it?

Generally speaking dictators don't find the existing law much of an obstacle. Hitler became Chancellor in a liberal democracy. The Soviet Constitution of the 1970s (and for all I know, before) guaranteed freedom of speech.

"...bizarre way policy is formulated..."?

Yup. If something was good and is now bad, surely the correct approach is to ask yourself what happened in the meantime. Now, I know the government has some sort of line on this about how in the old days we had small communities and that these have broken down but frankly I think it is a load of old nonsense. To say that that is relevant but the vast changes in the criminal justice system since the 1960s and the 50-year history of the Welfare State aren't seems to me to be bizarre.

You mean there weren't small communities in the past?

Of course, there were small communities but there were also lots of very big ones like London, Manchester, Glasgow and Birmingham. And yet there, too (to the best of my knowledge) crime was low

What sort of changes to the criminal justice system?

• Lighter sentences - thus lowering their deterrent value
• (Effective) abolition of the bobby on the beat again removing a deterrent
• The introduction of the Crown Prosecution Service. They're incompetent
• Hmm, not a long list. I suspect there have been a whole bunch of other changes down the years which I don't know about but which yet have made it harder to arrest, harder to prosecute, harder to convict and harder to punish. Further research needed

Comments

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