Labour’s law and order summer
Workers Power 289 - September 2004
While crime is falling, Blair and Blunkett are locking up more adults and young people, Stuart King reports.

New Labour gave us a taste of its general election priorities over the summer. Blair and Blunkett competed to outdo each other on who was toughest on law and order questions.

1960s liberals, animal rights activists, youngsters on school holidays hanging around, all found themselves targets of New Labour’s wrath. As if the raft of anti-terrorism and antisocial behaviour legislation were not enough, Blunkett promised Middle England that more was on its way.

Blair kicked it all off in July with his attack on the 1960s rebellion, accusing a decade that broke the crushing conservatism of the 1950’s as being responsible for today’s antisocial behaviour. Labour’s new five-year plan on crime, Blair said, would signal the “end of the 1960’s liberal consensus on law and order”.

But the 1960s have nothing to do with it. Thatcher, with her attacks on working class communities, was responsible for many of the social problems that still exist in many poor areas. Mass unemployment, poverty wages, the destruction of swathes of industry and the jobs that went with them, the end of council house building, neglect of estates, the closure of youth clubs and projects, the cuts in local authority spending – these were the hallmarks of 1980s and 90s.

There is also the strange fact that according to the Home Office’s own figures crime rates in Britain have been falling consistently. The British Crime Survey shows that the risk of becoming a victim of crime has fallen from 40 per cent in 1995 to 25 per cent in 2004. Meanwhile, in the same decade the number of under-15s in custody has gone up by 800 per cent! Britain remains top of the league in Europe for locking people up – the prisons bulge at the seams and suicides in prison rocket.

This is clearly not enough for Blunkett and Blair. For every new threat, real or imagined, they want new repressive legislation. Each time they put new legislation on the statute book they tell their Labour MPs that they will only be used in very specific circumstances – then they use them in a blanket way to erode civil liberties and the right to protest.

Thus the Terrorism Act 2000 is now used regularly by police to disrupt peaceful protests – as anti-war protesters found out. Whole areas of London are designated stop and search areas under these powers that are then used to harass protesters. Coaches on the way to a demonstration at US Fairford airforce base were turned back on the supposition that the “law might be broken” when they got there.

The anti-stalking laws introduced to protect women against men harassing them are now regularly used more widely. So useful are they that Blunkett now intends to extend them, under the guise of dealing with animal rights. Demonstrations outside politicians’ homes, campaigns against oil companies like Shell and BP, student protests and occupations of administration blocks, strikes that protest outside their bosses HQs, could all become illegal, and targets for arrest under these laws.

Perhaps the most startling erosion of civil liberties under Labour has come from the widespread use of Antisocial Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) which Blunkett considers one of his great success stories. Introduced to deal with the “Neighbour From Hell”, they are now used by police and local councils in a huge range of circumstances. ASBO’s can be made against anyone over the age of 10 years, and once issued, continuing with the behaviour defined as antisocial can result in a prison sentence of up to five years.

Labour’s Manchester Council has led the way in the imaginative use of ASBOs, banning someone from riding a bicycle in the city centre, someone else from meeting more than three non-family members in public, and a 14 year old was banned from saying the word “grass” anywhere in England and Wales until 2010! In Camden, a prostitute was served with an ASBO banning her from a red light district after the police had CCTVed her – “taking potential clients’ money without performing a sex act in return” in the words of the police inspector in charge of the case. Ticket touts, flyposters, alcoholics drinking in public, beggars, drug sellers and many others have been subject to these orders because they have a lower standard of proof than is necessary for a criminal charge.

But it is young people who have felt the brunt of these orders. Police and councils, groups of elderly villagers, outraged residents have suddenly discovered a new weapon to use against youth. Sometimes they are used against real thugs that the communities need to be protected against but increasingly they are used as a method of social control, introducing curfews for youth and no-go areas in town centres and parks.

In Brixton, for example, police issued a leaflet called “A Red Card from the People of Brixton” which declared an area around the Ritzy Cinema an exclusion zone for under-16s after 9pm. A similar zone was declared in Leicester Square over the summer giving the right to the police to remove anyone under 16 back to their home.

Increasingly local councils proudly proclaim on their websites how they are dealing with the “antisocial youth” via ASBOs. Caradon District Council in Cornwall leads with the fact that in the British Crime Survey one in three people cited “teenagers hanging around on the streets as a big problem”. Clearly antisocial behaviour then. And Bristol proudly boasts how in one case “a gang was stopped from playing football and drinking on a green near shops”. Home Office minister Hazel Blears is quoted as saying “What has been achieved in Bristol is just about the best example of the new antisocial behaviour powers.”

Blair and Blunkett are engaged in a war on civil liberty: from the right to smoke a spliff in the privacy of a deserted recreation ground, to the right to protest against oil and arms companies, to the right simply to be a Muslim and walk near a government building. We are all under attack from New Labour.