Labour has unveiled its legislative
programme for the next year. At its
centre is a crackdown on the basic rights of the most vulnerable people.
There are three lines of attack:
An attack on the right to a fair trial. The right to jury trial will be curtailed in serious cases; the double jeopardy rule, which prevented the retrial of an acquitted defendant, will be scrapped for serious offences; juries will be allowed to hear hearsay evidence and about a defendant's previous convictions; and the defence will be forced to disdose more of its case prior to trial.
Chief Inspector of Probation, Rod Morgan, warned this strategy will fuel an ever more punitive trend that will spiral into a crisis for the probation service as well as. the prisons.
The Blairite Institute of Public Policy Research made similar criticisms this Summer in a report recommending the decriminalising of a vast array of the 8,000 criminal offences; helping petty criminals find work; raising the age of criminal responsibility from the current level of 10 years and cutting the jail population to the European average (which would take it down 23,000, almost a third).
Prison numbers already stand at a record high of 72,500 - double the figure 20 years ago and 10 percent up on the number at the time of the last election.
They are projected to rise to 83,500 by 2008. To appease critics, Labour has tacked on some sensible sounding sentencing proposals designed to encourage more sentencing in the community. But even government ministers accept that the new proposals will increase prison numbers by 10 perCEnT T he bill is a bid to boost public confidence in the criminal justice system by increasing the conviction rate. But well over 95 percent of those charged plead guilty or are convicted already. Pushing this figure towards 100 percent is to claim a degree of confidence in the infallibility of police, prosecutors and judges on a par with Saddam Hussein's election results.
This is an assault on the presumption of innocence for all those on trial - introducing prejudicial material to unfairly sway jury's verdicts. It is an erosion of the basic democratic principle behind juries - suggesting that judges are better able than the community to decide if someone is guilty.
Buried away on page 19 of the government's White Paper is an admission that a slump in victim satisfaction with the police lies at the heart of the crisis of confidence. Yet there are no proposals to ensure that police are accountable to and under the control of the community or to tackle police racism that is getting worse according to official statistics.
Three years after the Lawrence Inquiry pointed out that black people were five times more likely to be targeted in a police stop and search, that figure has gone up to eight. Yet only one-in-ten stops lead to an arrest. In July 2001, Amnesty International accused the government of sharing respon sibility for the racism plaguing the criminal justice system. behavor This sad to earner riminalisation 'anti-social
cutting the social security benefits of truants' parents and nuisance tenants and introducing fixed penalty fines for up to 50 different low level anti-social offences such as littering, graffiti and flytipping.
The quality of life is undoubtedly diminished by an accumulation of aggravating social and environmental problems, particularty in urban areas. But these are caused by growing inequality, a crumbling local infrastructure and bad housing.
A lack of youth facilities has combined with cuts in provisions for parks, libraries and other free public spaces. When Margaret Thatcher said, There is no such ••••• thing as society', this is what she produced. compulsory detention of the promiscuous, the sexually deviant, alcoholics and drug addicts.
As the report says, 'The history of the 20th century demonstrated that psychiatry is capable of being abused: Nazi Itching to get his hands on the working class ... Blair Germany and the USSR were probably not the only countries in which socially or politically unacceptable behaviour was regarded as a 'disorder of the mind' and treated accordingly.
This bill is a fig leaf for the loss of 3,400 psychiatric beds since 1997 not being matched by adequate provision for care in the community and for Labour's failure to repair the damage of the Tory years.
The principle behind it is a major assault on the basic rights and freedoms of not just the most vulnerable, but for all people: detaining without trial those who might commit a crime could logically be extended to unruly kids, people with a criminal past, alcoholics, drug-abusers and such like. Taken to its conclusion courts would be replaced by social scientists and doctors predicting behaviour on the basis of socia and psychological statistics. crackdown. These proposals wil here is nothing new about this
bring to 14 the number of 'anticrime' bills introduced since Labour's first term in 1997.
New Labour is deliberately outflanking the right. One surreal result is that leading Tories, who spent two decades trampling on basic rights, are now posing as defenders of civil liberties.
More seriously, Labour leaders have stated that the growth in support for the far right in Europe can only be combated by social democratic parties occupying the same political space - articulating a rightwing, populist agenda on asylum seekers and law and order.
This is a very dangerous lie. The continued resurgence in support for the BP in this country suggests that in fact Labour, with the tabloid media, is leading the way in making such politics acceptable.
Public fears about crime and disorder are in excess of the reality. Similarty, concern at the supposed leniency of the courts is misinformed. People feel anxious for all sorts of reasons - job insecurity, low pay, increasing pressure and the crisis in the pension system.
The traditional structures of social support are under stress or being dismantled. It
••.. is not surprising that many people's insecuri ty is projected onto a fear of their liability to be at risk. But by riding this bandwagon Labour stokes up this insecurity and fear.
Of course crime and social friction are a real problem. The victims
live in the areas of greatest dep rivation and social decay, particularly the inner cities.
The white paper admits that prisoners are 13 times as likely to have been a child in care, 14 times as likely to be unemployed and 10 times as likely to have been a regula truant. At least 43 percent have three or more types of mental illness.
• Yet under Labour the billions available for war, prisons and policing are not available when it comes to proper funding to deal with the real causes that these and other statistics about crime reveal.
What we need is an assault on inequality, job insecurity, low pay, bad housing and racism not on people's rights. Communities need funding for education, health and drug rehabilitation not yet more prisons.