Labour’s punishment freaks are hounding honest citizens

Ross Clark says that far from keeping our streets safer or cleaner, the government’s new force of amateur policemen are ignoring the worst offenders and pursuing law-abiding innocents instead

Political brands are constantly changing. For years Liberal Democrats were the party of the environment; now the Conservatives appear to have taken that title. For decades, until Black Wednesday, the Tories were the party of sound money, a role then assumed by Labour until the credit crunch began to bite a year ago. Labour supporters may cite bad luck and international economic pressures in losing that revered mantle. But there is another unwelcome shift in political branding for which the party is wholly responsible: almost overnight, Labour has become the new nasty party.

It used to be backbench Tory MPs who made up the ‘hang ’em and flog ’em’ brigade. Watching the crime debate at Conservative conferences used to be an excruciating business as one spotty activist after another tried to trump all who had gone before him by devising a still crueller and more unusual punishment. I have yet to hear Jacqui Smith or Jack Straw demand the return of the stocks, but exchange the words ‘hang ’em and flog ’em’ for ‘fine ’em and shame ’em’, and you have a potential podium speech at the Labour conference in the making.

I wouldn’t even be surprised if delegates at this year’s conference were invited to take part in the five minutes’ hate, with perhaps Amy Heaps as the subject. Ms Heaps, a mother-of-one from Essex, recently appeared plastered over the Colchester Gazette in the manner of a Western bandit. Her crime was to drop a single cigarette butt outside a shop in the town’s high street — within view, it turned out, of a ‘litter warden’.