'Causes of crime' come back to haunt Labour

For 1993 read 2010. For James Bulger, read the Edlington victims. And for Tony Blair's "tough the causes of crime," read David Cameron's "broken society." Here's today's Journal column.

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It seems a long time ago now, but there was a time when law and order - or ‘Laura Norder’ as it was more commonly known - was regarded as what political commentators call a ‘Tory issue’

By that they meant that, whenever crime featured as a big issue in the public consciousness, the Tory vote would tend to go up – just as Labour’s vote tended to rise whenever the health service was in the headlines.

One dramatic news event, however, changed all that. The horrific murder of toddler James Bulger in 1993 understandably sparked a bout of national agonising about the kind of society the Tories had created over the preceding 13 or 14 years.

The beneficiary was an up-and-coming Labour frontbencher by the name of Tony Blair, then Shadow Home Secretary, whose famous soundbite “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime,” encapsulated the changed national mood.

The repercussions are still being felt today. It is arguable that without the higher profile afforded him by the Bulger case, Mr Blair would never have eclipsed his older rival Gordon Brown in the subsequent battle for the Labour succession.

Be that as it may, tackling the causes of crime and anti-social behaviour has remained a core part of the New Labour agenda ever since.

Nearly two decades on, though, the political wheel has turned nearly full circle. Now it’s Labour that has been in power for 13 years, and Labour that must try to explain the deeper social malaise behind an almost equally horrific case.

David Cameron has often been accused of modelling himself on Mr Blair – but
commentators can surely be forgiven for drawing the comparison again after yesterday's speech by the Tory leader on the Edlington attacks.

Ever since he became Tory leader in 2005, Mr Cameron has attempted to paint a picture of what he sees as Britain’s “broken society,” casting himself in the role of healer.

However Labour has tried to dismiss the idea as, at best, a caricacture, and at worst, a slur on the decent hard-working, law-abiding families who make up the vast majority of the population.

Yesterday’s political exchanges saw that debate played out in microcosm. Mr Cameron said the case of two young boys tortured in Doncaster was not an "isolated incident of evil" but symptomatic of wider social problems.

Openly comparing the case to that of James Bulger, he said it should cause people to ask themselves: “What has gone wrong with our society and what we are going to do about it?"

Labour, in turn, accused Mr Cameron of "tarring" the people of Britain by "seizing on one absolutely horrific crime, with Treasury minister Liam Byrne branding the speech “unpleasant.”

Part of Labour’s objection to the phrase “broken society” is that it is, in a sense, a contradiction in terms, that the word “society” implies the existence of the kind of shared values and community spirit that Mr Cameron is suggesting is absent.

But the biggest question Labour has to answer is why after 13 criminal justice bills and the creation of more than 3,000 additional offences since 1997, we appear to be no further forward than we were in 1993.

For the first time in three elections, it looks like the Tories once more have a chance to make the ‘law and order issue’ their own.

In the midst of life....

Shortly after 9.30am on 3 August 2007, I held my new-born baby girl Clara Eloise in my arms for the first time.

It was one of the most joyous moments of my life, and ever since then my beautiful daughter has continued to delight all around her with her sunny personality and winning smile.

But we now know that on that very day, 130-odd miles away in North London, another father was having to cope with very different emotions.

On the day the evil killers of Baby Peter were finally jailed, the victim impact statement by the child's father makes somewhat harrowing reading.

Describing his arrival at the hospital he says: "I saw his little, limp body just laying there, naked except for a nappy. I could not believe what was happening, I could not believe that was my son.

"He appeared to be asleep and I just wanted to pick him up and take him home. There was nothing I could do for him … all I could do was kiss his forehead and say 'goodbye'. My son was gone forever."

"Having a boy meant the world to me, the thought of having a son to continue the family name was a source of great pleasure …He was such an adorable, lovely little boy, he loved to be cuddled and tickled, his laughter and smile could not help but make anyone in his presence feel happy."

"Like all fathers I had imagined watching my son grow up, playing football with him, taking him to see Arsenal play, watching him open his Christmas and birthday presents and just develop as a person. All that has been taken from me."

I would like to think that in the years to come, as I watch my own beloved child open her birthday presents every 3 August, I will spare a thought for that poor bereaved father.

This appalling case has stirred deep emotions in the hearts of millions, but for me, it has been a humbling reminder not just of the fragility and preciousness of human life, but of just how much I still have to be thankful for....

Fear of the fear of crime

I don't often use this blog to promote my current day-time interest HoldtheFrontPage but this story which we ran today courtesy of the Oxford Mail really touched a nerve with me, as well as raising a wider political question.

I too was one of that generation of local newspaper reporters who would spend literally hours each week talking to local police sergeants and inspectors on the phone or sometimes even in person as they reeled off scores of local misdemeanours for use in the paper.

Since the "professionalisation" of police press offices began in the mid-90s, that source of information has dried up, with the Mail's investigation revealing that just 22 out of more than 6,000 reported crimes during July were being passed on to reporters.

At first, I assumed this was sheer laziness on the part of police PROs who thought they had bigger fish to fry. In fact it seems it's part of a deliberate police spin operation to reduce the fear of crime by not telling the public it is happening.

This of course has wider political implications. If all the crime that takes place in any local area was reported in the local paper, as it used to be, would not the government be coming under greater pressure to do something about it than is currently the case?

It's probably beyond the scope of the Oxford Mail's investigation, but it does beg the question whether in this case the police were acting on their own initiative, or whether they were themselves under pressure to reduce the fear of crime for political reasons.

Rough justice

The BBC drama Criminal Justice completed its run last night after having me and around 4.8m other viewers on tenterhooks for most of this week. If this doesn't win Baftas galore next year, I'll be amazed.

Basically the premise behind the programme appeared to be that everyone in the criminal justice system is bent except the defendant, Ben Coulter, and his gorgeous, idealistic 26-year-old barrister Frances Kapoor, played by Vineeta Rishi. I for one find this premise entirely believable.

Some found it too hard to watch in its searing portrayal of prison life and the evil that men are capable of. Watching a prisoner trying to conceal a smuggled mobile phone up his arse during a low squat I could probably have done without, likewise the scene in which heroin is forcibly injected into Ben by the other prisoners.

This was one of the less believable aspects of the production. I'm no expert on smack, but I would have thought that directly injecting it into the veins of a first-time user would more than likely be fatal.

The highlight of the whole thing for me was the performance of that marvellous actor Pete Postlethwaite. His character Hooch was the real hero of the piece, and his ultimate decision to put himself on the line for Ben carried shades of Sydney Carton's "far, far better thing."

Ben's ultimate fate was left hanging in the air. Would he be able to move on with the rest of his life, or would his experiences inside leave him irreparably damaged? This programme was something of a mind-fuck, but it was Ben's mind that was being fucked with as well as ours.

Justice for Scarlett

I was pleased to read this morning that the Goa Police now appear to have accepted that their original finding that 15-year-old Scarlett Keeling died from drowning despite having no water in her lungs was wrong and that she was in fact brutally raped and murdered - although it remains to be seen whether they have yet got their man.

I never met Scarlett, but her father, uncles and grandmother lived in the house next door to us when I was growing up and although it is many years since I have seen any of them, the family is very much in my thoughts at the moment.

Tough on crime victims...

"Laura Norder" has leaped back to the top of the political agenda this week following the Learco Chindamo controversy and the Rhys Jones killing. Here's what I had to say in my weekend column published in the Newcastle Journal and Derby Telegraph this morning.

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Every so often, an individual crime takes place in Britain that is seen as so horrendous and which provokes such a degree of public outrage that it actually shifts the political consensus.

The death of Liverpool toddler James Bulger in 1993 was one such instance. It produced some in us deep soul-searching as to what kind of country we had become, and a new emphasis on the need to mend our “broken society.”

It was shortly after this that the then Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair, first displayed his infallible ability to capture the zeitgeist by coining his memorable soundbite "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime."

It is arguable that the Bulger death played at least a part in Mr Blair being elected leader of the Labour Party the following year ahead of Gordon Brown, who up until then had been the senior of the two men.

A similarly seminal episode was the Dunblane Massacre, in 1995. It resulted in the Labour ban on handguns introduced after 1997 and, with the Tories having opposed the move, was a small but significant issue in the general election of that year.

Then there was the murder of the London teenager Stephen Lawrence, which led to the Macpherson Report into “institutional racism” in the Metropolitan Police and a huge change in the culture of UK policing.

Few crimes, though, have generated as much public debate and as many political repercussions as the 1995 murder of the London headteacher Philip Lawrence while trying to protect one of his young pupils.

This week, the case was dominating the political agenda again, following the judgement that Lawrence's killer, Learco Chindamo, should not be deported to Italy if, as expected, he is released on parole next year.

The Lawrence case was always one that pushed a lot of buttons. The extent of knife crime, the rise in gang culture, and the rights of victims were but three of the issues it threw up.

It gave rise to a knives amnesty at the time, and later helped lay the ground for the introduction of “victim statements” in which those most closely affected by individual crimes were allowed to address the court at the end of a trial.

But for all the Blair government’s oft-repeated hype about “putting the victim at the heart of the criminal justice system,” the system remains stacked against the victim as this week’s ruling showed.

It remains the prevailing legal view that the justice system is not about delivering the wishes of Mrs Frances Lawrence or any other victims, and that attempts to make it do so stem more from “tabloid hysteria” than ordinary common sense.

For what it’s worth, my own view of the case is that the focus on the row over the deportation of Chindamo has obscured an even more glaring injustice – the pitifully short sentence he has had to serve in view of the seriousness of the original crime.

This was also the case with Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, the killers of James Bulger, who were set free under new identities several years ago.

But the fact that Chindamo has become eligible for parole after just 12 years only serves to emphasise the extent to which the deportation tribunal decision has failed Mrs Lawrence, who must now live with the thought that her husband’s killer is at large in the same city.

If life could not mean life, the system could at least have ensured that Chindamo was sent somewhere a long way away from the people whose lives he has ruined.

So much for my views – what of the law? Well, the initial blame for the ruling attached to the Human Rights Act passed by New Labour in 2000, which holds that Chindamo has a right to a family life.

His Filipino mother still lives in London, and although his father lives in Italy, he is currently in jail for throwing acid in a woman’s face and has not seen his son for many years.

But as the week has gone on, it has become clearer that the real legal culprit was not the Human Rights Act but the 2004 EU Free Movement Directive, which makes clear that Chindamo cannot be deported unless he is a serious threat to public security.

Politically, this is something of a heady cocktail, encompassing not just concerns about youth crime and gang culture but also Britain’s whole relationship with Europe at a time when the EU constitution referendum row is raising its head once again.

Little more than 48 hours after the Chindamo ruling came the fatal shooting of 11-year-old Rhys Jones, a crime that carried more than a few overtones of the Bulger killing a few miles away on Merseyside.

It has also stirred similar emotions, with Home Secretary Jacqui Smith struggling to hold back the tears in a television interview yesterday after watching Rhys's parents talk about his murder.

Meanwhile, in a further shift away from traditional Tory concerns, David Cameron has insisted that the “broken society” would be a central theme of his party’s general election campaign.

Even before this week’s events, the youth crime issue was growing in importance as talk of that election continues to intensify. It is sure to be a key election battleground now.

It was one of Tony Blair's great political achievements in his 13 years as Labour leader to make crime a “Labour issue,” and it is still too soon to talk of it becoming a “Tory issue” again.

But simply by virtue of having been in power for ten years in which the problem of gun crime in particular has continued unabated, Labour is once again vulnerable on the issue.

The political impact of the James Bulger murder was to catapult youth crime to the top of the agenda and put Tony Blair in pole position to become Labour leader and later Prime Minister.

Fourteen years on, the combined political impact of the Chindamo ruling and the Ryan Jones killing might just be to put David Cameron back in the game.

Poor Frances Lawrence

I am coming very late in the day to this, I know, but having followed the original case quite closely back in 1995 I couldn't let the Learco Chindamo controversy pass without comment.

I don't care how much of a reformed character Chindamo has become - and as a Christian I'm a firm believer in the possibility of redemption - but the bottom line of all this is that Mrs Lawrence should not be expected to live with the thought that her husband's killer is somewhere "out there." If he could not be locked up for life as his appalling crime surely merited, then let him at least be sent somewhere a long way away from the people whose lives he has ruined.

Victim impact statements: credit where credit's due

Regular readers of this blog may be surprised to know that I think New Labour has done some good things in its nine and a half years in power - the minimum wage, devolution to Scotland and Wales, the restoration of London-wide governance, for instance. The problem is that most of the good things were done in the first couple of years and since then the Government's radicalism has been in short supply.

An exception, though, has to be made for the introduction of Victim Impact Statements, allowing those affected by crime to address judges prior to convicted offenders being sentenced.

I defy anyone not to be moved by the statement from Adele Eastman, fiancee of 31-year-old lawyer Tom ap Rhys Price, who was stabbed to death outside his home in North London. The scum who killed him were duly caged for life with minimum sentences of 17 and 21 years respectively.

Well done Tony. For once, you have managed to make good your oft-made pledge to "put the victim at the heart of the criminal justice system."