Gordon Brown’s responses to the failed terror attacks, the floods and foot and
mouth disease left him looking stronger. But his reaction to the death of
Rhys Jones, the latest young victim of teenage gang killers, makes the prime
minister look merely foolish.
Brown promised “tougher enforcement”, “a crackdown” and more police. “Where
there is a need for new laws we will pass them,” he blathered, as though
murder were not a crime. Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, promised to
quadruple the number of acceptable behaviour contracts, claiming they would
nip disorder in the bud.
Brown is discovering that prime ministers are obliged to speak even when they
have nothing sensible to say. Every ludicrous promise he makes adds to the
pile of vacuous commitments given by his predecessor.
If tougher enforcement and cracking down were the answer, the morgues would
not now be receiving the shot and knifed corpses of murdered boys.
Governments have been cracking down since time immemorial. If 25,000
acceptable behaviour contracts have failed to do the trick, 100,000 will not
secure the breakthrough.
Two decades ago Charles Murray, the American social analyst, contended that
over the decades the American black community had steadily climbed the
ladder of opportunity but its progress was brought to an abrupt end in the
1960s by the well intentioned but foolish welfare policies of presidents
Kennedy and Johnson. Out-of-work payments destroyed the work ethic among men
and subsidies to unmarried mothers undermined the traditional authority of
those women’s mothers.
Brown will not say that he thinks violence in the black community is rooted in
the welfare system, but it would make more sense than promising extra
policemen. David Cameron, for the Tories, hints that welfare is at the heart
of the problem by advocating policies that strengthen families. Encouraging
marriage through fiscal incentives may seem like a nonsequitur to a spree of
child and teenage killings, but Cameron might argue that you have to start
somewhere. At least the state must shift from welfare payments that
encourage couples to split towards incentives for staying together.
Disappointingly, the Rev Jesse Jackson on his current visit to Britain offered
no solutions, although he called for better prenatal care and more education
and urged blacks to empower themselves by going into business. He and Trevor
Phillips, chairman of the Commission on Equality and Human Rights, urged
black senior army officers to mentor young men. But there are so few black
officers that such a scheme would merely condemn them to being full-time
mentors and only token military commanders. Jack Straw called on the black
community to do more to sort out its problems.
Evidently nobody has the answer but Cameron, Jackson and Straw managed at
least to sound more intelligent than the prime minister and his hapless home
secretary.
There is a strategic danger for Brown in feeling obliged to say silly things
on serious subjects. He has claimed to be more honest and transparent than
Tony Blair. To a surprising extent the media have accepted that at face
value and this is a key reason why his first two months have gone so well.
But his reaction to the killings is not honest. “Cracking down” is beside the
point. A straight answer might be that the government can do nothing. Or
that the problem is so deeply rooted in modern political and popular culture
that society needs to be overhauled, a painful process in which government
can play an important but limited role.
It was unlucky for Brown that last week the case of Learco Chindamo reminded
us that new Labour has always been a government of spin. A tribunal decided
that the Italian passport holder, who murdered Philip Lawrence, the head
teacher, in 1995, cannot be deported to his country of birth on completing
his prison sentence.
Straw fulminated against the tribunal, but it is hard to see how it could have
reached another view. It based its judgment on European Union law dated
2004, introduced into UK law last year by this government. That would be
around the time that Blair was promising that foreign convicts would be
deported on release.
It is unfortunate, too, that the case provides an excellent example of the
unintended consequences for British governments of European legislation.
Home Office ministers have repeatedly cursed the day that Labour
incorporated the convention on human rights in UK law. But the point is
broader. European laws creep into Britain’s constitutional fabric. In the
fullness of time they turn out to be no respecters of the defensive “red
lines” that Blair or his predecessors claimed to have won at European
summits. The European Union is, after all, a process and the decisions of
its courts push member states towards “ever closer union”, as enshrined in
successive treaties.
Yet Brown reiterated last week that Blair’s red lines, secured at last June’s
summit, are one reason why he will not grant the British people a referendum
on the new draft treaty. Thanks to those lines, no vital British interests
are at stake, he says. But the Chindamo case is not reassuring. Brown’s
other reason is that the treaty agreed by Blair is, he says, different from
the draft constitution on which Labour promised a referendum in its election
manifesto.
Nobody can believe that, least of all Brown. Numerous European leaders have
stated that the old document and the new are extremely similar and according
to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, author of the original, the changes are
cosmetic, designed only to avoid the need for referendums.
Our European leaders have connived to produce a document so long and opaque
that voters cannot understand it. An English translation has been delayed
until the autumn, presumably hoping that, too, will frustrate debate in
Britain. The leaders’ behaviour is cynical and even tyrannical.
The prime minister could indeed open a new era of transparent government by
denouncing the whole plot. He could say that a Europe built in fear and
defiance of its voters is the wrong sort of Europe. Or he could claim simply
that his party is committed to a referendum and now that other leaders have
made plain that the old and the new drafts are in effect the same, Brown’s
famed integrity obliges him to keep Labour’s manifesto promise.
Instead he is falling victim to the lure of European camaraderie, as his
predecessors did, including Margaret Thatcher who signed the Single European
Act and installed sterling in the exchange-rate mechanism. Although at close
quarters I have watched this syndrome repeatedly, why it happens remains a
mystery.
Conrad Black, former owner of the Telegraph newspaper group, observed acutely
that over the Maastricht treaty John Major behaved like the British colonel
in the film The Bridge On the River Kwai, who defends the railway that
British prisoners of war have been forced to build for Japan, even when our
commandos try to destroy it. Major defended Maastricht, an edifice not
designed to further UK interests, choosing solidarity with his European
counterparts over keeping his party intact.
Brown surely has no wish to see a European foreign minister usurping Britain’s
policy-making autonomy (which is what the treaty’s French and German backers
intend). But he defends the treaty and by refusing a referendum he
jeopardises his claim to be honest and transparent, the rock on which his
success to date is based.
His European policy is also the one thing that complicates a decision on
whether to call an early election. Much of the press is hostile to the
treaty. Blair thought it too difficult to call an election and have to
explain daily why he was refusing a referendum, which is why he promised one
in 2005.
Whether there is an election or not, by the time the new European treaty has
made its way through parliament, where its similarity to the old document
will be made wholly apparent, it is unlikely that anyone will think Brown
more honest and transparent than Blair. It is a pity for him, because the
prime minister could choose a much easier path.
michael.portillo@sunday-times.co.uk
