Grayling speech: rewriting 1993 Blairism

Posted on Tuesday 25 August, 2009
Filed Under Society

 


AMBITIOUS shadow home secretaries can build an entire political career on the back of a single killer speech on law and order. Today’s offering from Chris Grayling could well go down as the best proof of that proposition since Tony Blair delivered his ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ declaration all the way back in 1993.

Forget the detail. If anybody reading this can remember the concrete policy proposals Blair was putting forward back then, I take my political anorak off to them.

What counts is finding a soundbite that encapsulates the public mood and consequently stays in the public mind. Comparing parts of Britain with television series The Wire does that in a way almost as succinct as TOC,TOTCOC.

I suspect the comparison is overblown. I have been to some of the major urban centres of North America, and witnessed block after block of devastation on a scale thankfully without parallel anywhere in this country.

However grim it is in Speke or Harpurhey – the ‘worst place in England’, apparently – neither neighbourhood is Southside Chicago just yet.

But to invert a jibe frequently used against journalists, why let the facts get in the way of a good rant? Efforts by pro-Labour commentators to counter Grayling’s message by citing statistics will inevitably be in vain.

The other notable aspect of the speech – and the text is worth reading in full – is the way it outflanks New Labour from the left. At times the message is laid on with a trowel to such an extent that brickies’ union UCATT should probably consider a demarcation dispute:

When the Wire comes to Britain’s streets, it is the poor who suffer most.

Whose lives are blighted.

People who this Government promised to help, but has abandoned along with the progressive politics it once claimed to champion.

It is the poor who are the victims of Labour’s decade of failure.

It is the poor who are the ones who have borne the brunt of the surge in violence under this Government.

It is they who struggle to live their lives against a constant fear of crime.

It is those who need the most help in our society who have been left to face its most unpleasant elements.

It is the poor who are most likely to be the victims of crime, and it is they who this Government has failed time and again to help.

Certainly makes a change from hang ‘em and flog ‘em, doesn’t it. Sorry Chris, didn’t quite get your drift there. Run it past me one more time. Just remind me, which section of society are you most concerned about ? It’s on the tip of my tongue, begins with P …

As a Marxist, I endorse Grayling’s points 100%, of course. But I’ll never get my head round the idea that the Nasty Party gives a damn. I lived through the 1980s, you know. Only when we get to the money paragraphs is it apparent that we are being presented with nothing new.

It is all too easy – formulaic, even – for shadow home secretaries to point out that the government’s track record on crime is poor. That much can be taken as a given, whoever is in office.

What counts is the remedies on offer. If you want Grayling’s policy palette in a nutshell, it boils down to benefit cuts, workfare, and more powers for the Old Bill to facilitate zero tolerance policing. However flashy the packaging, the substance boils down to the same old same old. Grayling finds himself insisting that ‘the politics of New Labour have failed’, and then committing himself to repeating them.

He also avers that ‘the politics of the left have failed’. But that is just not true. Radical social change – the only policy option that truly would be tough on the causes of crime – is sadly the last item on any party’s agenda right now.


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Comments

6 Responses to “Grayling speech: rewriting 1993 Blairism”

  1. Bruce
    on August 25th, 2009 at 20:34

    The inhabitants of Moss Side, including one woman involved in an anti-gang organisation, gave Grayling a good going over on NW Tonight for comparing Moss Side with Baltimore. Then Gordon Burns did it again with the aid of murder statistics, leaving Grayling puffing ‘I’ve been there’, presumably for a morning, ‘and seen it’. [What?]

    Opportunism for a Daily Mail audience, nothing more. Calculating rightly that no one in Moss Side will vote Tory anyhow so he can say what he likes.

    And the residents of Northern Moor, another area of South Manchester have taken objection to being patronised and their area being done down by Fergie (the ex-royal one – whatever you think about the other one, he knows better). They have made a counter-film which I’m off to view, I think on the BBC NW site.

  2. Chris Baldwin
    on August 25th, 2009 at 21:45

    “But to invert a jibe frequently used against journalists, why let the facts get in the way of a good rant? Efforts by pro-Labour commentators to counter Grayling’s message by citing statistics will inevitably be in vain.”

    Presenting facts and reasoned arguments and being surprised when we fall foul of people’s cognitive biases is what we do on the Left. We are the Vulcans.

  3. Les Abbey
    on August 26th, 2009 at 03:13

    Didn’t I read somewhere that the Britain has a higher percentage of the population locked up than other EU countries? Unless they have far higher crime rates than us it looks like the ‘tough on crime’ bit isn’t working.

  4. Renegade Eye
    on August 26th, 2009 at 04:19

    Bill Clinton so overfunded police, that conservatives lost the crime issue in the US.

    Where is Leftwing Criminologist when you need him?

  5. badnewswade
    on August 26th, 2009 at 19:30

    The hilariously cruel thing is that they really do believe that somehow, mass benefit terminations and other cuts in social welfare will somehow translate into lower crime figures (never properly explained), when back in the real world the reverse is tragically – and obviously – true. So much so that personally I’m not longer afraid of benefit cuts per se but the inevitable skyrocketing crime that’s going to come with it.

    Then you’ll see The Wire, all right- thousands of people with no way of eating unless they go on the rob. You know how people who’ve been to Italy remind you that there’s tons of crime because they don’t have any dole? Coming to a town near you…

  6. frenetic
    on August 30th, 2009 at 11:58

    sadly, the lack of eefgective opposition by the left and civil society to Nl’s welfare ‘reforms’ will ensure that the implementation of the Tories scorched earth welfare cuts will run much smoother. Why no real opposition?, BNW is absolutely correct:, the withdrawal of basic benefits which the Tories have planned, now acceptable to a public softened up by a pliant media, inc the BBC, will means eventually we see the same levels of crime, disorder, poverty one sees in places like Naples, the US, and over time Latin America, and the Left must take some blame.