With the skill of experienced ballet dancers, the Tories have deftly avoided any serious criticism on the issue of 'law and order'. And yet they ought to stand most exposed on this question.
From beginning to end, they made it a centrepiece of their policy. But long term statistics over the period show that, despite massive increases in spending reported crime has to power. On top of this there have been years or growing crisis in the criminal justice sys. tem.
The police are increasingly literally. Only recently the official inquiry into the West Mid lands Serious Crimes Squad described it as being. 'out of control . And North London police officers are being investigated for selling cocaine and framing people up.
acquittals in political trials - Irish men Kevin Dessie Ellis and William McKane; Randle and Pottle; and numerous Poll Tax riot defendants - do not reflect massive public cynicism in it.
There have been waves of prison riots and strikes. Deaths in custody whether black people in East London police stations or young offenders committing suicide on remand - have become a major issue. So has police violence, again particularly against black people.
years of monetarist Tory law and order policy are no better symbolised than by the Metropolitar: Police having an annual budget of pounds for paying out settle for wrongtul arrests, assaults and malicious prosecutions.
Privatising the police would soaring wage demands and the money that needs doling out to keep their victims quiet, itcould never be made profitable.
Then there are the courts - a major wing of the British state that remains countable, elitist and tied to highly conservative values. it too faces increasing criticism towards the police and its refusal to accept that it can be mented departure of Lord Chief Justice Lane - who's reign substantially overlapped that of Thatcher and Major - has symAfter holding the line for decades on the anachronism that crime is created by bad peopie, the tories nad to ackle when the police were officially describing it as caused by socio-economic factors. Of course the police would. They wanted to deflect the blame.
But for the Tories it involved a U-turn on a question of tun damental ideology. It was also an implicit admission that the more or less continuous social disintegration since they came to power is linked precisely to persistent economic crises they helped to create. and it served its function. The political debate on the causes and remedies of crime could not be won.
So the solution was to stop the debate by agreeing with the opposition. At the same time they were able to rely on Labour's bipartisanship on the issue to degenerate into a headlong slide into Tory-style policies.
Rov Hatterslev has studiously courted the reactionary Police Federation. Labour local authorities are now promoting police-council-business partnerships in place of the demand for accountability and support for oppressed groups that found limited favour ten years ago. Police pay and numbers would increase under Labour.
Labour's commitment to civil liberties will skewise stretch little beyond cosmetic law reform. Gone is the opposition to the 1986 Public Act or parts of the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act.
There has been silence on the large-scale police operations ronowca by chitinal prosecutions to harass and convict gay mi on gross indecency and other charges. Even Labour's scrap Prevention of Terrorism Áct has been diluted to a promise to 'replace it.
And so the escalating crime wave (from which the working class suffers most: both as victims and per etrators) has gone undebated. The concept of law and order' loses its meaning when the party that championed it has presided over 13 years of inner city riots, mass law-breaking over the Poll Tax, the discrediting of the police force and the pronomenal 5ocial cost of the highest prison population per capita Europe.
It's time for socialists to chal lenge the underlying consensus by fighting for ideas of social solidarity and democratic con-