The scandal of foreign national prisoners freed from jail without being considered for deportation might have been devised by some malign genius actively seeking to damage the social fabric of this country. So much has been undermined by this devastating disclosure: public confidence in the criminal justice system, the fight against racist bigots such as the BNP, and what little respect remains for politicians and their capacity to govern us competently.
Charles Clarke has been right about one thing: there is much more at issue in this case than his own political fate. The fact that more than 1,000 convicted foreign criminals including killers, rapists and paedophiles have been let loose in this way reflects more than personal incompetence, gross as that has been. This awful statistic is also a symptom of a fundamental failure of governance: a yawning gulf between reasonable public expectations and the capacity of the state to respond to those expectations.
All systems break down from time to time. In this case, however, the alarm bells were shamefully ignored. Last July the National Audit Office warned ministers that the procedures to remove foreign prisoners from these shores should begin much earlier and not be left until the end of their jail sentences. In October the Commons public accounts committee expressed its own anxieties. The Prime Minister was informed of the problem by Mr Clarke before Christmas. Why has it taken six months for the full extent of the scandal to become public? Why were 288 prisoners released even after the problem came to light? Tony Blair failed conspicuously to answer these questions and others posed by David Cameron at Prime Minister’s Questions.
Aneurin Bevan said that ‘the language of priorities is the religion of socialism’. We know more now than we did a week ago about the priorities of this particular Labour government. It finds time — and plenty of it — to ban hunting with hounds, drive smokers from pubs, tinker endlessly with the constitution, hold forth about ‘respect’ and issue countless nannying directives on how we should live our lives. Yet the release of foreign murderers, rapists and child abusers on to the streets was not, apparently, regarded as a matter of urgency.
At the heart of this debacle is — as so often — a failure of communication between the different agencies of government. The Prison Service did not liaise properly with the Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND). Home Office ministers and their officials did not oversee the flow of information. There are depressing echoes here of the recent failure of the probation service properly to monitor the former prisoners under its supervision.
In particular, this scandal recalls the furore in January over the vetting of teachers on the Sex Offenders Register. Again, what emerged in that case was an unbelievable thicket of bureaucracy, failed communication and plain idiocy, a system apparently tailor-made for the cunning child abuser in its provision of helpful loopholes. There were, it transpired, seven lists on which such offenders might appear. In his findings on the Soham murders, Sir Michael Bichard called in June 2004 for a ‘new register …administered by a central body’. Yet it was only after the media firestorm earlier this year that Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, promised urgent action.
In the case of the single vetting agency for sex offenders, the problem — allegedly — has been Whitehall arguments over ‘resources’. Home Office spokesmen have been making similar pathetic excuses, arguing that the Prison Service and Immigration and Nationality Directorate have hitherto lacked the ‘resources’ to address the problem of foreign prisoners and their release.
It is very hard to stomach such nonsense from a government that, according to OECD figures, has now driven Britain’s tax burden above Germany’s to 42.4 per cent of GDP. The problem is not that the Prison Service and the IND need more money from the taxpayer. The problem is that these agencies and their political masters are grossly incompetent. The Home Secretary’s comparison of the bureaucracy over which he presides to an oil tanker that takes a long time to turn is absurd. Why, in an age of advanced information technology, should it take so long to resolve such a straightforward problem?
The stakes in this scandal are extraordinarily high. One of the great lessons of the 20th century is that the state cannot run the economy: for this reason, the best thing that New Labour has done is to grant the Bank of England independence.
What, then, is government for in the 21st century? The public looks to the state for high-quality public services that deliver value for taxpayers’ money, and — increasingly — for the maintenance of security and law and order. New Labour is failing in both areas. Patricia Hewitt’s claim that the NHS ‘has just had its best year ever’ would be hilarious if the issue were not so serious. Standards of education in this country remain an international disgrace, driving ever more parents to spend the money Mr Brown lets them keep on school fees.
Violent crime, meanwhile, is at record levels — yet this government remains committed to the early release system that reduces the cost of the prison services but self-evidently imperils the public. There is huge public concern over border control and the administrative chaos that engulfs the asylum and immigration systems. Yet the response of ministers is macho rhetoric rather than effective action.
When New Labour came to power in 1997, it promised ‘joined-up government’. What it has delivered is precisely the opposite: a government whose common characteristics are poor communication, lack of urgency in the face of crisis, and a feeble insistence that a shortage of ‘resources’ is the root of all failure. Meanwhile, foreign murderers, rapists and paedophiles roam our streets with impunity.
Comments