The foreign prisoner saga is politics as hysteria. For over a decade the Home Office has been goaded into behaving like the sheriff’s office in Tombstone. It takes daily orders from the mob, the press and their proxy, Downing Street. Chaos reigns. Nothing works. The boss sits wailing for reinforcements before he is either kicked out into the street or shot.
In Britain ministers do not resign for incompetence. Did Ruth Kelly resign over the sex offender scandal? Did Gordon Brown resign over Railtrack or the tax credit fiasco? Has Margaret Beckett resigned over the farm payments shambles? Will John Reid resign if soldiers die on his Afghanistan exploit? Of course not. They resign only when caught with a dodgy mortgage or a clerk in a limo. That is the British government ethos. You go only for upsetting the prime minister, as John Prescott may yet find.
Charles Clarke should not resign. The manifest collapse of the Home Office as a department of state is too serious to be made victim of Westminster’s favourite game, “sack the minister”. If home secretary were a job open to competitive tender, a better one might be found. Instead Clarke’s resignation would have two effects. The office would be frozen into terror for six months while a less experienced person crouched under the desk. Every prisoner would be locked in his cell, all police leave cancelled, every dark-skinned suspect shot on sight and every sane reform abandoned. Far worse, Westminster would walk away, dusting its coat and crying “problem solved”.
Stripped of its prancing and posturing, last week’s foreign prisoner story was coded racism. It depicted a thousand dark-skinned Magwitches hiding in village churchyards, roaming country lanes and lurking in Tesco car parks waiting to rape and murder defenceless women and children, all thanks to Clarke’s supposed liberal tendencies. The truth was that a thousand convicts (85% non-violent) who had completed their sentences were merely treated like ordinary Britons. They were released. Many, possibly most, were British residents.
Those released were not awaiting deportation but awaiting “consideration for deportation”. Foreign prisoners already tend to be held for longer than their sentence while waiting a decision on deportation. It is clear that some of those released under licence have broken their parole, been lost from the records and disappeared. This is deplorable.
It is equally deplorable, but was equally predictable, that some of those released would reoffend. That is what most British prisoners do, without anyone resigning or even raising it in parliament. Every victim of crime merits sympathy but to turn the story into another “killer flu” scare is absurd.
The inadequacies of the prisoner release, monitoring and resettlement regime are among the worst features of Britain’s primitive criminal justice. There is nothing uniquely casual in its treatment of foreigners. What is scandalous is the neglect of this area of policy by the smart-aleck MPs and editorialists who rant and howl when it finally collapses and thus drive it back to the dark ages. They think reform is the same thing as a political scalp every now and then. Parliamentary terrorism has rarely been an aid to reform.
Clarke has been a weak home secretary, frightened of his boss and insecure towards his lobbies. The result has been a daily stream of “tough on crime” initiatives, from asylum to drugs, terrorism to Asbos, longer sentences to “shoot to kill”. Image is all. The bizarre assault last week by Blair and Clarke on media liberalism was crafted to publicise their toughness in advance of the local elections. They now respond to every court case with some transient initiative. Last week they threw “super-Asbos” at the gathering pack, a gesture that will only pack more people into prison and increase the reoffending rate.
A law and order ministry, tough or tender, cannot be run as if it were a tabloid newsdesk. Coherent management goes by the board. In Britain it has produced the largest prison population in Europe, a terrible record on recidivism, rising violent crime and the outrage of 10 to 15-year sentences for foreign “mules”. These pathetic young women, mostly illiterate mothers ignorant of British law, are Britain’s contribution to the medieval barbarism of the global “war on drugs”.
There are too many people in prison in Britain, 77,000 and rising. There are too many non-violent offenders in prison (80% of the total); too many women and children in prison; too many people imprisoned for petty crime and offences against red tape; and too many foreigners who should just have been deported. Roughly two-thirds of prisoners have fallen foul of two substances freely traded on Britain’s streets, alcohol and drugs, the latter because of the dangerous and outdated 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act. Some 10% of the “thousand foreigners” were in prison for simply possessing drugs.
This government has made alcohol cheaper and more freely available and is so terrified of the tabloids that it dare not reform the drugs laws. This has made Britain the most lucrative market for the world’s drug dealers. Consumption and arrests have risen, the latter by 21% last year. The ultimate hypocrisy is that the easiest place to get drugs is a government jail.
If Clarke cannot control drug use on his own property, how can he lecture teachers, social workers, the police or parents to curb it in the community? Until this market is properly legalised and controlled, this madness will continue indefinitely. That Britain has the worst record in Europe on both drugs and imprisonment is not coincidental.
The prison service is plainly unable to cope with the burdens imposed on it. No home secretary has dared stand up to the prison officers’ union, the toughest and most outrageously right wing in Britain. Liberal governors get no support from the top. Education, psychiatric care and resettlement are penny-pinched and the government’s only answer is Victorian, to go on building more jails. The horrors recorded by the Prisons Inspectorate and the Prison Reform Trust are beyond excuse in a civilised community. Yet whenever an inspector says so, the Home Office response is, as now, to curb his or her independence.
The Home Office cries out for dismemberment. It is a ministry of too many things. The permanent secretary largely responsible for its present state, Sir John Gieve, had his 2004-5 accounts qualified by the National Audit Office for having “lost” £3m. Like the outgoing head of the NHS, he was richly rewarded, in his case with the deputy governorship of the Bank of England.
The department is said to be under-resourced. But it is hard to see why good graduates should work there when they can earn twice as much as the management consultants on whom Gieve spent a staggering £150m over the past two years.
Rather than dismember, the Home Office intends to grow. It means to bring all police forces in England and Wales under its new regional structure, on the laughable grounds that they are too small to be “competent”. The least efficient force, historically, is already run by the Home Office, London’s Met. The office must be the least qualified, and least deserving, organisation in the land to become Britain’s ministry of police. Blair should cancel force regionalisation immediately, a reform he called “paranoid” in opposition.
The constant playing to the political gallery only boosts public expectation of what a Home Office can achieve, and increases the resulting disillusion. It crams prisons with society’s failures and releases them as society’s risks. There are bound to be dangerous foreigners wandering the ghettos through Home Office incompetence, but that is the least of its crimes against humanity. A department driven by the lowest common political denominator is not a public safety but a public menace.
Clarke dislikes the phrase police state, even as he strives to create a state police. He dislikes his department being called right wing as Blair dislikes it being called left wing. Such terms are meaningless in the face of incompetence. It is incompetence that feeds the public’s fear and unreason, and has it crying out for a true police state. That is the real danger. Clarke’s punishment for last week’s fiasco is simple. He should not be allowed to resign, but be manacled to his job until he clears up this mess.
