Ross Clark shows that Tony Blair’s new theory of justice is both sinister and historically illiterate
I don’t know whether Maria Otone de Menezes, the mother of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot by police at Stockwell underground station on 22 July, has hired the services of a PR firm, but even Max Clifford could not have timed better her arrival in Britain. As Mrs Menezes and other members of her family surveyed the spot where her son was summarily executed on suspicion of being a terrorist, the Prime Minister was on a stage in Brighton saying this:
‘We are trying to fight 21st-century crime — antisocial behaviour, drug-dealing, binge-drinking, organised crime — with 19th-century methods, as if we still lived in the time of Dickens. The whole of our system starts from the proposition that its duty is to protect the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Don’t misunderstand me. That must be the duty of any criminal justice system. But surely our primary duty should be to allow law-abiding people to live in safety.’
All law-abiding people, that is, except for the poor buggers who, like Mr Menezes, just happen to be on the receiving end of a bad call on the part of Mr Blair’s new, tougher 21st-century police force. And except for all the other innocent people who will be put behind bars because Tony Blair’s new, improved 21st-century criminal justice system can’t quite decide, on the balance of evidence, whether or not they committed their alleged crimes and opts, just to be on the safe side, to bang them up regardless. Never mind the ‘don’t misunderstand me’ bit; there was only one reasonable interpretation of the Prime Minister’s words: that the government intends to adjust the law so that from now on the criminal courts will be run on the utilitarian principle that the protection of the majority takes precedence over the liberty of the accused. Of course we will try all we can to get the right man, Mr Blair might have added, but y’know, you can’t take chances with public safety.
Was it just me who experienced a shiver when the Prime Minister uttered these words, and who expected, come the morning papers, Mr Blair’s proposals for the criminal justice system to be denounced? Where was the headline ‘Tories condemn Blair plan to abolish principle of innocent until proved guilty beyond all reasonable doubt’? Nowhere to be seen. I ploughed on, hoping to read of an outraged Charles Kennedy accusing Tony Blair of seeking to abolish ancient freedoms in a fit of paranoia: the same charge, you may remember, levelled at Margaret Thatcher by Neil Kinnock when she erected gates to block public access to Downing Street. Yet there was barely a whiff of protest at Blair’s astonishingly authoritarian tone. It wasn’t until the following day, when the Labour party demonstrated how its new law and order policy will work in practice by manhandling 82-year-old heckler Walter Wolfgang from the chamber and using the Terrorism Act to prevent him re-entering, that the government’s growing authoritarianism became an issue.
We have become used to Tony Blair, and New Labour in general, using ‘Victorian’ as a byword for everything they believe to be stuffy about British society. We know that the Prime Minister doesn’t like Victorian schools, Victorian attitudes towards women and probably even turns his nose up at Victoria sponge. But one might have expected him to possess an ounce more historical knowledge than to lay into 19th-century law-enforcement in the way he did. Contrary to his assertion that the courts of Dickensian England were too busy fussing over prisoners’ innocence to tackle crime effectively, the mid-19th century saw a steady and prolonged reduction in crime. By 1900 the footpads who had plagued the highways a hundred years earlier, the gangs of urchin pickpockets who had operated throughout our cities in the 1820s, and the garrotters who had terrorised the dimly lit streets of London in the 1860s had all but gone. Violent crime was probably lower than it had ever been before or has ever been since: the social reformer Charles Booth noted that although burglary had not disappeared, the violent element had subsided greatly, physical attack being regarded by police and criminals alike as ‘breaking the rules of the game’. Had those early Labourites Sidney and Beatrice Webb been able to attend last week’s conference they, like Mr Wolfgang, would have been hustled out of the chamber for shouting ‘nonsense’ at Blair’s poor grasp of 19th-century criminal history. They echoed most commentators of the period when they wrote, ‘It is clear that the proved criminality of the 18th century was enormously in excess, both absolutely and relatively, of that which prevails at the opening of the 20th century.’
The plunging crime rate of the 19th century was certainly not due to what Mr Blair now prescribes for the crime problem of our own age: a loosening of the principle that a prisoner is innocent until proved guilty. Quite the reverse: falling crime was in large part due to the growing respect for law and order engendered by the construction of a principled legal system. In the 18th and early 19th centuries the practice of law and order had been arbitrary, draconian and corrupt. There were 200 capital offences, covering anything from pig-rustling to sending threatening letters. Under the Parliamentary Reward Scheme, abolished in 1818, witnesses were paid anything up to £40 — enough in those days to buy a cottage — if their evidence led to a conviction. The result was that juries distrusted witness accounts and, even if they did believe a prisoner to be guilty, tended to acquit rather than send a man to the gallows for a minor offence.
By 1837 the number of capital offences was down to four. By the 1850s the parish constables who used to provide policing, and who used to dispense summary justice in any way they saw fit, had been replaced by organised police forces which were expected to maintain high and uniform standards. What helped, too, was the introduction in the 1850s of reformatory schools, the forerunners of borstals, to which children were consigned after a second conviction. This broke up the gangs of unruly youths which had hitherto ruled the streets, and obliged them to follow a proper education. If Mr Blair really wanted to take a lesson from 19th-century law and order, he might consider the re-introduction of something close to reformatory schools; instead young thugs are left on the loose, collecting Asbos as badges of honour.
It is the Prime Minister’s conceit that long-cherished liberties are no longer relevant because the threats faced from criminals and terrorists are suddenly so much greater. That is a dodgy thesis when applied to terrorism: what about the anarchists of the 1890s who killed just as indiscriminately as al-Qa’eda? But the Prime Minister’s assertion that antisocial behaviour, drug-dealing, binge-drinking and organised crime are 21st-century problems unknown to Victorian law-enforcement is absurd. What about the opium-dealers, the sozzled masses of Gin Lane, the fraudsters who inflated the South Sea Bubble? There is nothing new about our crime problem, and indeed nothing new about the disregard for liberty contained within Tony Blair’s speech last week. It is just that we haven’t heard a British politician in modern times propose to interfere with the principle of a man being innocent until proved guilty — only Third World dictators.
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