Toughing it out: From labour opposition to labour government

Abstract

Labour's criminal justice policy has remained strikingly consistent in the move from Opposition to Government. That policy was fashioned in the break with key aspects of past Labour policy after Tony Blair's Tough on crime; tough on the causes of crime’ statement of 1993. The tensions implicit in this approach flow from the relatively short‐term demands of the first part of the phrase and the longer term requirements of the second part. In the context of punitive populism, being tough on crime came to mean being as tough as (if not tougher than) the Tories on crime. And the need to head off a repetition of the Conservative ‘tax bombshell’ in the 1992 defeat for Labour seems to have meant (despite the Comprehensive Spending Review) an excessive caution on public expenditure. These tensions now threaten to undermine the most positive aspects of Labour's programme, not only in criminal justice, but more broadly in relation to social exclusion and the labour market. They have generated perverse incentives to over‐heat the penal economy, to blow the prospects for restorative justice off‐course, and to repeat in different guise some of the mistakes of the 1970s. As a result, Jack Straw remains somewhat imprisoned by the agenda set by Michael Howard.