Henry Porter (London, writer): It is the triumphant vindictiveness of Jacqui Smith's speech today which leaves such a bad taste. That and the candid admission that new Labour has long given up being tough on the causes of crime and is instead prepared to let the Sun's editorial line dictate social and policing policy.
I now want the Action Squad to co-ordinate a new drive against the hard core of ‘hard nut’ cases.
- That car of theirs – is the tax up to date? Is it insured? Let’s find out
- And have they a TV licence for their plasma screen? As the advert says, “it’s all on the database.”
- As for their council tax, it shouldn’t be difficult to see if that’s been paid
- And what about benefit fraud? Can we run a check?
The speech, here in full, to professionals who deal with anti social behaviour problems was mainly designed to combat bad polls. It offered little new except the extension arbitrary powers. These amount to a charter of official harassment which, however pleasing to voters could allow the police to behave in an oppressive way to those they suspect of causing problems. Without being too fundamentalist about this, it is important to stress that this official harassment will take place without a person being found guilty of a crime in a normal court of law. It will be enough for the local authorities and police merely to suspect someone of causing anti social behaviour for them to act.
Many will argue that this is the modern equivalent of the clip round the ear: something we need in the real world to control the small number of individuals who are making people's lives intolerable. Still, important principles are at stake and these measures announced by Ms Smith go against our legal traditions. You can put it in the same bracket as the move to seize goods, money and property from suspected drug smugglers, who have not been found guilty of a crime. This has been correctly challenged in the High Court in Scotland under the Human Rights Act.
There is general drift in our values. With little dissent we accept that it is simply enough for the state or its agencies to suspect wrongdoing before taking action. This is exactly the principle that operated in the courts of East Germany twenty years ago.
Anti-social behaviour is a phrase that came into being under New Labour. It is one of the party's obsessions and with good reason. As more and more oppressive and disproportionate measures are introduced, the worse the problem seems to get. That surely must suggest to policy makers that they are tackling the problem in the wrong way, to say nothing of eroding our tradition of rights in the process.
Here is Henry Porter's submission to the Joint Committee on Human Rights from March this year.
