Crime and Punishment in the United Kingdom

Journalist Neil Clark has written in the First Post that,

Justice Minister Kenneth Clarke's dramatic reversal of the Tories 17-year-old 'Prison Works' policy has not only left grassroot Tories fuming: it's upset Labour too.

Writing in the Daily Mail, former Home Secretary Jack Straw accused Clarke of returning to the flawed liberal "hand-wringing approach to crime", which marked a succession of post-war Home Secretaries before Michael Howard.

Straw praises Howard, a one-time bogeyman of the liberal left, for ushering in a new get-tough era where an increased number of offenders were sent to prison and, according to Straw, crime rates consequently declined. Now it seems those days are gone.

While David Cameron tries to persuade Tory voters that not much has changed, there's no denying that Kenneth Clarke's anti-prison pronouncements amount to a massive U-turn.

As yesterday Daily Mail's editorial reminded us, during the election campaign, the Tories repeatedly spoke of the need to put more offenders behind bars and pledged to create 5,000 more prison places.

Building more prisons is an expedient measure reflecting a deeply dysfunctional society in Britain which coincides with its neoliberal forms of doctrinnaire political economy. The larger picture is always omitted from tabloid sensationalists and smug liberal-left 68ers

The Elite, living a life apart from most ordinary people, play politics with crime in the UK to get support via the media by playing 'tough on crime' when necessary. Or as Blair's lame soundbite had it "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime". It was hollow rhetoric

For in the long term neoliberalism and cruder utilitarian ideas encourage crime as they see it either only as the product of the environment or as intentional Evil. That depends on what political line is to be taken as attitudes to crime have been based on expedient political gain since the 60s.

The Power Elite in Britain ( the "liberal -left) are uninterested in victims of crime as it rarely affects those protected behind gated communities. They make a fuss just to grab votes. As Anthony Burgess made clear in his A Clockwork Orange.

Yet the rapacious criminality of the elites , the tax evasion and flouting of the rule of law for material gain encourages gangsters to feel they are less powerful versions of the same. In Yeltsin's Russia or Latin American states where oligarchs rule this is the norm.

That plus criminal psychopathologies unleashed by nihilistic ideas, an environment increasing dehumanised and alienating and the state being itself tainted with criminality hardly encourages virtue as opposed to vice.

Dostoevsky knew that when he wrote Crime and Punishment in 1866 after retuning from Western Europe. No mere reactionary conservative as often depicted, he remains a master of criminal psychology.

Think about ultimate crimes of terrorism. Blair was more or less driven by psychopathological drives, the idea that as a Napoleon, as with Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, he could make sacrifices of human beings to attain a goal in which more lives might be saved.

This was done with the consent of those who commit state crimes in the view that state sanctioned murder, not as defence as a last resort, is a historical necessity. Raskolnikov discovered he had a conscience after murdering the useless pawnbroker who stood in the way.

Blair only knows how he feels about deceiving the British public about the invasion of Iraq which has led to 1.3 million dead. But his view that by smashing away the old Iraq, with a quick dash of the blood it would incur, was nihilistic. God was Success. And he was a God.

Those who convince themselves of their own delusions are dangerous. Blair never exactly lied. He believed deception was a route to a Higher Goal. Much greater evil flows from that rather than mindless brute violence.

Yet as Dostoevsky makes it clear psychopathological strongmen can also delude themselves that what they are doing is really for the good of the people. Not even the Evil like to think of themselves as Evil. Even that is too much for them to bear.

Moreover, as Dostoevsky found out in Siberian exile in the Tsarist labour camp, simple psychopaths can have a spark off a potentially rekindled moral sense that those who clothe themselves in ideological rationalisations do not as he made clear in Memoirs from the House of the Dead.

As regards prison the liberal-left's crude idea that man is a function of his environment is bound to create an upsurge in criminal pathology, as it means an individual can blame it on his genes or background. By "leftist" this refers to the 68er generation of cultural radicals.

Wise conservatives know that in man in the inherent capacity for evil. Prisons are there to reform but must have an element of punishment in them: people need to suffer, though not by physical cruelty. Meaningful work, education, stern admonition and deprivation of TV are essential.

The liberal-leftists of the 68er generation ( not traditional social democrats or Old Labour ) tend to see crime in stopgap protective terms: not as crime which deserves punishment. Prevention is a pragmatic measure. Uncruel punishment has atonement as its goal

But as for outraged and seething Islamist terror cells, their members can simply witness the deceptions of the British state and turn to nihilism-"if they can do that, then nothing we can do can rival it in criminality"

So they plot and hatch schemes. London has always been a place of violent confrontation, plots,riots, uprisings and crime. It was reaching epidemic proportions in the eighteenth century when the elite from Walpole onwards was a venal, corrupt and rapacious elite.

Highwaymen saw them as moneybags to be thieved from in their stagecoaches. That's why in London lore, those like Dick Turpin and other criminals had an element of popular support as they made their way to Tyburn to be hanged.

For the eighteenth century had a rentier finance capitalism which had higher crime rates and equally draconian punishments. Thatcher brought that aspect of British history back once more by destroying life opportunities for millions through destroying gainful employment.

Thatcher destroyed nineteenth century Britain and the attempt to overcome the horrors of early industrialisation and dispossession. Labour politicians believed in the dignity of labour not just in using working men as a means to an end and in terms of exchange value on the market.

The return of an unstable hire and fire "free" market economy dominated by monopolising huge corporations who dictate policy to the nation state explains the erosion of trust in British public life.

It encourages the collective action problem which is precisely this: the feeling amongst some that if "they" can "get away with fraud , tax evasion etc ,there's absolutely no reason why less powerful individuals cannot do so too if it puts them at a comparative disadvantage.

This is why we are where we are now. And it breeds criminality, a decline in civic responsibility and the older idea held in common before the 60s that we are free beneath the law so long as the state does not interfere too much in our lives where it is not necessary to do so.