Three articles in today’s Observer newspaper fire welcome broadsides at the authoritarian crime and terrorism obsessives, in the cause of restoring some of our lost liberties.
Sophie Radice, journalist and commentator, launches a vigorous attack on Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs), basing her criticisms on a victim’s vividly related case history, and concluding:
Whether it is because of the savings that could be made (each prisoner costs £40,000 a year) or because of a serious desire to change the penal system or perhaps a bit of both, I don’t care, just as long as the idea of indeterminacy is thrown out. Our limited resources should be concentrated on those who have committed crimes which show that they really pose an actual, rather than a possible, threat to the safety of the public.
That’s a neat way to make the central point: nearly half of the more than 6,000 IPP prisoners in our prisons have completed the punishment and deterrence element in their sentences: they continue to endure the harsh punishment of imprisonment, not for anything they have done — they have already been punished for that — but because our risk-terrified society is scared to release them for fear that they might one day, in some way, re-offend. They are being brutally punished for offences they haven’t committed and which they might well never commit if released. And it’s worse than an ordinary prison sentence because the IPP prisoner can have no idea when or even whether he will ever be released. This is not imprisonment as punishment: it’s preventive detention, which has no place in a just and democratic society. A report earlier this year revealed that only 94 of the 6,000 prisoners given an IPP sentence have been released. This is not just insane: it’s downright wicked. Full marks to Sophie Radice for exposing it so vividly in the mainstream media.
The second broadside is a report by Anushka Asthana in the same issue of the Observer of an equally withering attack on IPPs by the chairman-elect of the Bar Council, Peter Lodder QC. Mr Lodder is reported as saying that –
there were fears prisoners could face a “Kafkaesque” situation where they had no idea when they would be released. He warned that the growing numbers placed on indeterminate sentences threatened the “contract” between prison staff and inmates that ensured the smooth running of jails.
“One can see how for prisoners in this situation, where there is no light at the end of the tunnel, there is little incentive and a great deal of frustration, and that is what leads to the harm to emotional and mental wellbeing,” Lodder said.
“If you have an ordinary sentence – a determinate sentence – then one-half of that sentence will not be served upon the basis that you are well behaved. That is an understanding – a contract – that makes sure prisons run smoothly. On these [indeterminate] sentences, there is no such provision.”
… “The government needs to accelerate the parole reviews for prisoners [who have served their tariffs but are still in prison. It] needs to consider whether once these prisoners have served the minimum term they can be released, and what appropriate and speedy mechanism there can be to facilitate that,” he said.
He appreciated there would be concern if those who were released reoffended, “but what should not happen is that there is a disproportionate fear of one of these prisoners reoffending or a disproportionate reaction when one of them does. In other words, [the government] need political nerve.”
One of the problems was a “risk-averse culture” on parole boards, Lodder said, because of the difficulty in proving that someone was no longer a danger.
Others warned that prisoners were suffering from mental health issues as a result of uncertainty over their sentences. A report by the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health found that more than half of IPP prisoners have problems with “emotional wellbeing” and almost one in five receive psychiatric treatment. Many told researchers the lack of a release date to work towards had damaged relationships with family and friends.
Dominic Williamson, chief executive of the charity the Revolving Doors charity, which offers support to offenders, said many felt left in “limbo”.
Paul McDowell, the chief executive of Nacro, the crime-reduction charity, said of his time as governor of Brixton prison in south London: “I have a vivid memory that one of the most common things was people coming up to me and saying: ‘I am an IPP prisoner – there is nothing I can do, I feel trapped in this cycle and I can’t get out of it.’ Those sort of sentences were ill-thought-out, rushed through, a kneejerk reaction to a media storm. They are grossly unfair and not in the tradition of British justice with its fair-play approach.”
The Ministry of Justice said it was carrying out a full assessment of sentencing and rehabilitation policy, including IPPs. A spokeswoman said: “There is no question that we must protect the public from the most dangerous criminals in our society. However, we must also ensure the courts have the power to make the right response to stop people committing crime.”
IPPs have been condemned in equally forceful terms by the civil rights organisation Liberty, by the Prison Reform Trust, and even by the president of the Prison Governors Association, who according to a recent Guardian report ‘will describe the situation of inmates serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) as –
“a blatant injustice”, and call for the “immediate release” of the 2,850 IPP prisoners ‘being held well beyond their “tariff point” – the minimum date after which the parole board can authorise their release.’ [Emphasis added]
Both the Justice minister and the responsible junior minister have acknowledged that IPPs are indefensible. The full weight of informed and responsible opinion has come out loud and clear for their complete abolition. We shall see whether those enlightened ministers are prepared to stake their political reputations and perhaps their careers on that urgently necessary reform when the review of sentencing policy is published in the next few weeks and ministers have to declare their intentions. As the chair-elect of the Bar Council quoted above rightly said, all that will be needed is for the coalition government to show some “political nerve”.
The third Observer broadside in the cause of restoring our lost liberties is Andrew Rawnsley’s politics column, in which he discloses that there is a ferocious battle going on between the head of the Security Service and a group in the home office on the one side, and the LibDem members of the coalition plus Ken Clarke and other liberal Tories on the other, over the future of the deeply repugnant Control Orders régime and the obscenity of 28 days detention without charge. It has been a key feature of the coalition agreement between the Conservatives and the LibDems that under New Labour the balance between the need to counter crime and terrorism, and respect for our historic civil rights, has tipped too far in the direction of the former, and that the imbalance needs to be corrected by radical reform or repeal of some of the more extreme anti-terrorism and anti-crime measures of the past 13 or 14 years. Rawnsley explains:
When [the Conservatives and LibDems] reached government, they commissioned a review. To oversee this review, they appointed Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions, who is now a Liberal Democrat peer. That appointment was taken as a signal of intent to repeal or reform those laws that are most offensive to the principles of justice. The former DPP was a particularly potent critic of “control orders” and 28-day detention without charge.
Rawnsley quotes some of the unqualified commitments, given when they were in opposition, by both LibDem and Conservative spokespersons to the scrapping of control orders — indefinite virtual house arrest for terrost suspects without charge, trial or conviction, based on allegations often not disclosed to those subjected to them — and to the scrapping also of the rule that allows suspects to be detained for as long as 28 days without being charged with any offence. He continues:
The assumption was that the coalition would do this after it appointed Lord Macdonald. But here’s the rub. The review may be associated with him, but it has actually been conducted by the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism, a unit based in the Home Office staffed by active or former members of the security services. The head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, wants to keep control orders. He used a speech last month to lobby publicly for the governing parties to break their promises to the voters. One senior figure with a ringside seat for this battle remarks: ‘This is what they always do. When Jonathan Evans eyeballs the prime minister and says, ‘I can’t guarantee that the public will be safe from terrorism if you don’t give me this’, it is hard for the prime minister to stand up to that.”
When Theresa May, the home secretary, went to see the prime minister and Nick Clegg to warn them that a serious and difficult dilemma was looming, David Cameron (according to Rawnsley, who won’t have written this without an impeccable source) said:
“We are heading for a fucking car crash.”
It will indeed require a strong ‘political nerve’, as Peter Lodder called it, for Tory and LibDem ministers to do what they know to be right and what they have publicly promised to do, in the face of dire warnings from the head of the Security Service, the Daily Telegraph (house organ of the Conservative Party) and the Daily Mail, together with the reactionary Murdoch press and television and the cave-dwellers of the far right of the Conservative party, that the abolition of control orders and 28-day detention without charge will expose the country to undreamed-of danger from terrorism. The same ignorant pressures will be brought to bear on ministers not to abolish IPPs for fear of a wave of violent crime if 6,000 or so ‘criminals’ are freed to ‘roam the streets’, reoffending at will. But how can Nick Clegg and the other LibDem coalition ministers remain in a government that surrenders to such illiberal pressures after the clear and unambiguous promises they have given? To quote Andrew Rawnsley again:
There is a route out of [ministers'] dilemma. That is to stick to their promises, scrap control orders, charge those suspected of terrorism in open court and lift the ban on the use of intercept evidence to give prosecutions a better chance of success. To resistant members of the security agencies, the prime minister should say, and will have the support of many professionals in saying it, that they ought to concentrate on the intelligence-led approach to countering terrorism which has proved to be the most effective method of stopping bombers.
To do otherwise would be to betray their promises and the belief in liberty which is supposed to be the animating and binding value of the coalition. If they cannot hold true to their pledges on such fundamentals as justice and human rights, it will be hard to resist the conclusion that they can’t be trusted with anything.
Amen to that. If ever there is to be a test of LibDem willingness to uphold their liberal principles, quite possibly at the price of withdrawing from the coalition, this will be it. Expect an attempt at fudge over control orders, 28-day detention and IPPs, and perhaps other blots on our system of justice. Will the LibDems go along with a fudge? We shall soon see.
Brian
A blog post entitled “Lib Dem Ministers Complicit in Torture” appeared yesterday. It concludes:
I accuse Nick Clegg of complicity in torture. I am beginning to wonder whether the man has any connection to liberalism at all.
The author of this scurrilous piece is in some danger of being taken seriously, being (as he constantly reminds us all) a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who has achieved a certain fame through having insisted, I believe wrongly, that he was sacked from the Diplomatic Service for criticising the practice of torture by the Uzbek authorities and for having repeatedly denounced his own government for receiving, and sometimes acting on, information from the Americans but originating with the Uzbeks, some of which may well have been obtained by torture. He certainly did both these things, with characteristic gusto, but he was eased out of the Diplomatic Service — to put it politely – for other reasons.
Craig Murray, for it is he (you guessed?), is a friend and former Diplomatic Service colleague. I respect his moral passion and his furious energy and often admire his quixotic courage. But on the subject of the use of information that may have (and sometimes probably has) been obtained by torture, the main theme of his post yesterday, he is simply and straightforwardly wrong. The dozens of admiring and mostly uncritical comments appended to Craig’s post are in many cases even more misguided.
I have tried repeatedly to contribute a comment to Craig’s blog setting out my reasons for accusing him (I hope in civil terms) of misrepresentation of facts and of drawing conclusions from a recent speech by the head of the Secret Intelligence Service (aka MI6) which the text of the speech does not support. My comment has not however so far been selected for publication on Craig’s blog (although at least one equally critical comment by another former DS colleague is there). So I offer it here, in the faint hope that one or two readers of Craig’s blog might find their way to it on this one:
I’m sorry to spoil the self-righteous party here, but virtually everything in Craig’s post and almost all the comments on it so far are based on assumptions that don’t bear examination and that have indeed been repeatedly debunked elsewhere. They gain nothing whatever from constant repetition. On the contrary, by deliberately ignoring the exposure of their false premisses, their authors inevitably lay themselves open to the suspicion of intellectual chicanery.
Much of the original post’s argument depends on this assertion:
‘Now parse [the speech of Sir John Sawers, head of SIS] very carefully. It says we do receive intelligence from torture, and we know we do. It says this happens all the time – “real constant operational dilemmas” – and that the decisions to receive intelligence from torture have specifically been approved by ministers.’
But if you read the full text of Sawers’s speech (freely available at http://www.mi6.gov.uk/output/about-us.html ) you will see that he says no such thing. The statement about the obligation to make use of intelligence from whatever source if it might help to save lives is unrelated to torture and doesn’t even mention it.
The comment by ‘Nextus’ above [i.e. on Craig's blog] asserts that –
‘Just after declaring that “Torture is illegal and abhorrent under any circumstances and we have nothing whatsoever to do with it”, Sawer [sic] muses, “Suppose we received credible intelligence that might save lives, here or abroad. We have a professional and moral duty to act on it. We will normally want to share it with those who can save those lives.”‘
But that’s quite simply untrue. Sawers’s sentence about the duty to act on intelligence that might save lives comes four paragraphs before, not “just after”, his statement that torture is abhorrent, and has no direct connection with it. This is argument by sleight-of-hand.
Contrary to what Craig and some comments imply, Sawers’s remarks about difficult decisions being referred to ministers are about decisions on the action to be taken on intelligence, not whether to “receive” it in the first place, and not whether it is acceptable to act on intelligence even if there are grounds for suspecting that it has been obtained by torture.
For the record, there is no legal, moral, ethical or practical ban on scrutinising information, and where appropriate acting on it, regardless of the way it has originally been obtained or is suspected to have been obtained. It is illegal and immoral to encourage or condone torture, for example by asking a foreign intelligence service known to use torture for information that it is likely to obtain by torture. But we have Sawers’s and ministers’ assurance that British services and ministers do not encourage or condone torture and that if individuals are suspected of doing so, their transgressions are investigated and, if substantiated, punished. Neither Craig nor anyone else, to the best of my knowledge, has ever produced a shred of evidence to the contrary.
Sawers’s statement that there is a clear duty to act on information assessed as likely to be reliable if doing so may lead to the prevention of terrorist or other crimes is clearly and undeniably true, just as any assertion to the contrary is self-evidently absurd. Expressions of disgust and anger about it say more about those who voice them than about the security and intelligence services or about ministers. Similarly, those who (presumably deliberately) misrepresent Sawers’s speech by juxtaposing what are in fact separate and unrelated extracts from it have some pretty awkward questions to answer.
Constant repetition of half-truths, misrepresentations and downright untruths doesn’t make them valid or reputable.
I respect and admire Craig’s moral passion and often his courage, as he knows. But it becomes fatiguing to have to keep on pointing out that in this particular segment of his familiar crusade, he doesn’t have a leg to stand on. It’s time to move on, Craig.
PS (30 Oct): I wrote this early yesterday, 29 Oct, and tried twice to post it as a comment on Craig’s blog post (before I had seen Charles Crawford’s comment covering some of the same sceptical ground). Each time I got a message that as this was my first comment on this blog (which it isn’t) it would be reserved for approval in due course by Craig. Meanwhile Craig has posted a comment on Charles Crawford’s blog saying that the ‘reserve comments for moderation’ function on Craig’s blog has been turned off. Weird. This is my third attempt. If this doesn’t work, I’ll have to put it on my own blog with a suitable link.
It would be a pity if this calumny were allowed to merge into the received wisdom about torture, the British government and the security and intelligence services, through lack of anyone prepared to spend some time pointing out that it’s rubbish. But every time on of us knocks it down, up it pops again. I suppose we just have to resign ourselves to knocking it down again, and again, and again. (Some time ago I wrote a much fuller critique of Craig’s main complaints that can still be read here, if anyone is sufficiently interested.)
Brian
According to LibDem Voice, at four local by-elections last week:
- The Labour vote was up by 17.7% compared with May 2010 in Camden LBC, Kentish Town (the LibDem came second with almost exactly half the Labour vote, 3.6% down on May; the Conservative came fourth (after the Green), 5.1% down).
- Labour also held South Lanarkshire UA, East Kilbride West, increasing its May 2010 vote by +0.8% (SNP second, down 2.4%; Con third, 5.7% up on May but still with fewer than half Labour’s vote).
- The LibDems held Cheltenham BC, Springbank with their share of the vote down by 2.9% (Con second, 13.4% down; Labour third (13.1% up), and the Green fourth (3.2% up).
- Labour held Great Aycliffe Town Council, West (“Ind” second, LibDem third; no figures for May 2010 available).
Rather encouraging for Labour, considering that the coalition’s cuts have not yet begun to bite and Labour’s new leader has not yet begun to make his full impact after an impressive start. But it’s a very small and unscientific sample.
Brian
I responded to an invitation to send a letter about the coalition’s spending review last week by sending this to the London Evening Standard (which, as far as I can discover, didn’t publish it):
Sir,
George Osborne’s cuts represent a triumph of panic and reactionary ideology over economic literacy. Saving money by reducing the inflated prison population (Ken Clarke’s idea, not Mr Osborne’s) is the one good move in an otherwise thoroughly ill-conceived package. The priority should be jobs and growth: both depend on stimulating demand in the economy, which only government spending can do while the private sector remains prostrated. Instead, Tory policies will actually throw thousands more out of work, perversely reducing instead of stimulating demand, requiring higher spending on unemployment and other benefits and reducing tax revenues, thus increasing the deficit which so irrationally obsesses Messrs Osborne and Cameron. Swingeing cuts in welfare hit the most vulnerable the hardest; housing benefit cuts will cause numerous evictions of families who’ll have nowhere else to go, especially given the cut in affordable house building. My old department, the FCO, takes a 24% cut (mainly because public opinion won’t defend it): will Mr Hague readily accept a 24% or any other reduction in the service it provides to ministers? The greatest threat to our country is not a cyber-attack, nor al-Qaeda, nor climate change, but a Tory-led government determined to slash the welfare state and the public sector while they have a dishonest, class-based pretext for doing what they have always wanted anyway.
Brian Barder
20 Oct 2010
Actually, there was one other positive feature of George Osborne’s spending review statement, a dog that didn’t bark in the night: there was no backsliding, so far anyway, on the government’s pledge, inherited from Labour, to continue to increase UK development aid for poverty reduction in developing countries to the UN target, 0.7% of GDP, by 2013. This is a modest enough target but if we hit it on time we shall be the first major western country to do so, joining Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Owen Barder’s blog post on the subject, saluting the political courage of the coalition leadership in sticking to its guns on maintaining progress towards the aid target while almost everything else apart from bankers’ bonuses is being cut to ribbons, includes an interesting graph showing how UK development aid has generally been increased by Labour governments and cut, sometimes sharply, by Conservative ones. This is one break with tradition to be welcomed without reservation, assuming that the pledge is not blown onto the rocks by emetic barracking from the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the primitives on the far right of the commentariat and the Conservative Party. Still, we shall have to keep an eye on Tory ministers’ apparent inclination to divert large chunks of UK aid to conflict-related countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan and Somalia, at the expense of more peaceful and better governed countries whose need for help in poverty reduction may be even greater.
But the overwhelming impact of the Osborne spending review statement has to be negative: not only for the reasons summarised in my abortive letter to the Evening Standard, but also because of the unremittingly party-partisan character of the Chancellor’s statement. Conservative and even LibDem ministers and spokespersons are evidently under instructions never to open their mouths in front of a microphone or a reporter’s notebook without reciting the spurious mantra about the “mess inherited from the Labour government”. It calls for a special chutzpah, especially for a Tory, to seek to blame the Labour government for “reckless over-spending” before the banking crisis and recession, when the Tories in opposition had promised that a future Conservative government would not just match Labour’s public spending levels but actually raise them. It takes unusual audacity to claim that through reckless and profligate spending throughout its time in office Labour had run up and bequeathed to its successors unprecedented levels of public debt, when public debt after Labour had been in office for ten years was 49th highest in the world, lower as a percentage of GDP than, for example, that of Switzerland, the Netherlands, the US, Portugal, France, Canada, Germany, Hungary, Norway, Belgium, Greece and Japan (see more supporting facts and figures here). It requires extraordinary nerve to castigate the Labour government’s rescue, first of the banking system and then of the whole economy, by pumping billions of pounds into both, inevitably incurring massive debts and an enormous budget deficit, when the Tories in opposition opposed both emergency actions at the time but have never explained what preferable alternative they would or could have adopted, nor acknowledged that Gordon Brown’s prompt and determined actions were welcomed, praised and replicated by governments throughout the western world. It’s shameless to seek to discredit Labour’s record for its failure adequately to regulate the financial sector in the period before the crisis when the Conservative opposition at the time had consistently clamoured for more de-regulation, not tighter controls. Hindsight is a fine thing, rewriting history rather less so: the Tories have elevated both to a fine art.
It’s disappointing to see an obviously intelligent and capable Chancellor of the Exchequer in his first major parliamentary performance cynically sacrificing honesty to party advantage in the way George Osborne saw fit to do last week. In doing so he has thrown away any hope of a serious, objective, bipartisan approach to the country’s financial crisis inherited by the coalition, not from the Labour government but from the very bankers who bank-roll the Conservative party and whose interests Conservative governments unfailingly represent. Alan Johnson, Labour’s shadow Chancellor, made all the right points in rebuttal of Osborne’s defamatory accusations. But the grounds of rebuttal are mainly technical and sometimes impossible to condense into a simple pithy reply, while the Tory slanders are a many-headed Hydra compressed into a single mendacious but easily remembered sound-bite. No wonder that Labour’s answers to this deliberately phoney charge-sheet have so far failed to gain any real traction, especially when coalition ministers naturally exploit their ministerial status to get maximum coverage for their multiple fictions in the print and electronic media. There’s no obvious solution to this for Labour except to keep on gamely repeating the facts and figures in rebuttal – and increasingly to go onto the attack by exposing the rank injustice and the recklessness of the coalition’s crazy gamble with ordinary British people’s lives and fortunes. If Labour can establish the reality of its priority for jobs and growth over the government’s irrational but self-serving obsession with the deficit and debt, the public mood may eventually begin to move towards it as the harsh reality of the coalition’s slash-and-burn strategy begins, alas, to hurt.
Brian
The human rights organisation Liberty has authorised me to publish here the text of a letter from a Liberty solicitor in reply to a message from me urging Liberty to support the campaign for the abolition of Indeterminate Sentences. The Liberty letter read as follows:
Imprisonment for Public Protection
Thank you very much for your email dated 21 September. I read your message with great interest. I note your considerable concerns about the operation of the IPP system generally, a system that was brought in without proper planning, resource allocation or any consideration as to the procedures needed to ensure that IPP prisoners would be reasonably able to apply to be released at the expiry of their tariffs. You will no doubt be aware of the extremely critical but ultimately disappointing judgment of the then House of Lords in the case of James (formerly Walker) Lee and Wells v Secretary of State for Justice [2009] in which the Government was very heavily criticized for its lack of planning and treatment of IPP prisoners whose tariffs had expired.
We have had many letters on this issue from prisoners serving IPPs. I also understand that an IPP campaign has been set up by [.....], a solicitor at Emmerson’s Solicitors (52 John St, Sunderland, SR1 1QN). We have been in contact with one of his clients very recently, who is himself serving an IPP.
Liberty has made submissions to the Government about various aspects of the Government’s sentencing policy (including IPP sentences) and all of our submissions to the Government at the various stages of the Criminal Justice Act 2003 and Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 are available on our website. We are currently preparing submissions to the Government as part of its proposed Freedom Bill.
You will not be surprised to hear that we have a considerable number of queries about this issue from people subject to IPP sentences. We will continue to advise them and refer them on to specialist prison law lawyers for specialist legal advice.
Thank you very much for contacting us.
Yours sincerely
LIBERTY [E. N.], Solicitor
6 October 2010
Footnote by Brian: For extensive information about IPPs, advice to IPP prisoners and their families, comments from families of IPP prisoners about their experiences, and factual case histories of people sentenced to IPPs for quite minor offences attracting very short tariffs but who are still in prison years after srving their tariffs, please see the following (including extensive comments appended to some of them):
http://www.barder.com/696#comments
Brian
Predictably, whenever a Tory (or even a coalition-tipsy LibDem) sees a microphone or a television camera, he or she goes onto automatic pilot about the ‘economic mess’ they claim to have inherited from Labour. Now that Labour has a new leader and is about to have a revitalised and energetic shadow cabinet, it’s time to expose some fantasies and falsehoods with a few hard facts and figures.
Myth no. 1: Labour mismanaged the economy right from the start, plunging the country into massive, unsustainable debt. Here’s what Mr Cameron said to his party conference:
I want to say something to the people who got us into this mess. The ones who racked up more debt in 13 years than previous governments did in three centuries. Yes you, Labour. You want us to spend more money on ourselves, today, to keep racking up the bills, today and leave it to our children – the ones who had nothing to do with all this – to pay our debts tomorrow? That is selfish and irresponsible. I tell you what: these Labour politicians, who nearly bankrupted our country, who left a legacy of debts and cuts [sic], who are still in denial about the disaster they created. They must not be allowed anywhere near our economy, ever, ever again.
Fact no. 1: So far from denouncing the Labour government for what they now call its mad and irresponsible spending spree, the Tories in opposition supported Labour’s expenditure patterns and promised to maintain them if they were returned to office. Their condemnation now is an exercise in misrepresentation after the event: cheap and dishonest party political point-scoring. Not surprising, but nasty.
Fact no. 2: The crisis of 2007-08 that almost overwhelmed the entire global economy was precipitated by the greed, dishonesty, incompetence and folly of the international bankers; it affected almost every developed country in the world; it had absolutely nothing to do with the levels of government spending under Labour. Even if the Labour government, in its first decade in power, had run a massive budget surplus and squirrelled it away in the reserves for a rainy day instead of spending what was needed to rescue the social services from the years of Tory under-investment and neglect, there could not have been enough money available to make even a dent in the colossal bill for bailing out the banks and then injecting a fiscal stimulus big enough to save the economy from collapse. Labour saved the economy from the bankers — who themselves are the Conservative party’s paymasters and whose interests the Conservative party unfailingly represents.
Fact no. 3: With hindsight, it’s easy to see that the crisis might have been averted if there had been more effective and more stringent regulation of the enormous UK financial sector. Gordon Brown made several efforts to get international agreement on better regulation. The Tories invariably clamoured for less regulation, not more: and when Brown won international praise for his leading role in orchestrating coordinated international action by governments to save the global economy from complete collapse, the Tories opposed his measures at every step of the way. Reform and tightening of regulatory procedures could never have been effective if undertaken by one country or small group of countries in isolation: evasion is too easy if, say, the US and Switzerland continue to regulate with the traditional ‘light touch’ that brought us to the brink of the precipice.
Myth No. 2: Feckless over-spending by the Labour government, even before the 2007-08 crisis, lumbered Britain with a mountain of unsustainable debt.
Fact No. 4: Throughout Labour’s first decade in office, UK government debt remained at historically low levels. This graph illustrates how the level of public debt as a percentage of GDP (the standard measurement) in the period from 1997, when Labour took office, compared with the whole of the 20th century:
[Source: http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/uk_national_debt_chart.html]
Labour’s legacy an unprecedented level of public debt? Hardly.
Economic authorities invariably place the UK among the countries with a low level of public debt (until the 2007-08 crisis):
The rise in public debt has been seen not only in countries with a history of debt problems – such as Japan, Italy, Belgium and Greece – but also in countries where it was relatively low before the crisis – such as the US, UK, France, Portugal and Ireland. [http://www.gfmag.com/tools/global-database/economic-data/10394-public-debt-by-country.html ]
[Emphasis added]…over the past three years public debt has grown rapidly in countries where it had remained relatively low before the crisis. This group of countries includes not only the United States and the United Kingdom but also Spain and Ireland.
[Bank for International Settlements, The future of public debt: prospects and implications, March 2010, http://www.bis.org/publ/work300.pdf ] [Emphasis added]
Here, for the record, are the figures, year by year, throughout Labour’s time in office:
UK public sector net debt as % of gdp
(excluding temporary effect of financial
interventions):
| 98-99 38.4 |
| 99-00 35.6 |
| 00-01 30.7 |
| 01-02 29.7 |
| 02-03 30.8 |
| 03-04 32.1 |
| 04-05 34.0 |
| 05-06 35.3 |
| 06-07 35.9 |
| 07-08 36.5 |
| 08-09* 44.1 |
| 09-10* 53.9 |
*Onset of the banking and general economic crisis, depleting tax revenues and boosting welfare payments.
(Source: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/public_finances_databank.xls)
Compare these figures with those for the heyday of Thatcherism: 1981-82, 46.2%; 82-83, 44.8%; 83-84, 45.1%; 84-85, 45.3%; … and so on, to 42.5% in 1996-97, the level of public sector debt that the Major government bequeathed to the new Labour government in 1997. I don’t recall the Conservatives at the time declaring this level of public sector net debt a public emergency demanding instant painful surgery and the immediate butchery of the welfare state, nor as evidence of gross economic and fiscal mismanagement throughout the Thatcher and Major years.
Myth No. 3: Because of Labour over-spending throughout its time in office, Britain’s level of debt is the highest of all developed countries.
Fact no. 5: In 2007, when Labour had been in office for ten years, and immediately before the banking crisis forced governments all over the world to borrow money to avert a total collapse of the world economy, UK gross [?] public debt as a percentage of GDP (43.6%) ranked 49th in the world, lower than Switzerland, Netherlands, the US (60.8%), Portugal, France (63.9%), Canada, Germany (64.9%), Hungary, Norway, Belgium, Greece and Japan (170%).
(Source: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/eco_pub_deb-economy-public-debt )
Total debt for OECD countries went from 76% of total OECD GDP in 2005 to almost 96% in 2010 (projected). Individual countries within the OECD ranged in 2009 from a low of 18.2% of GDP in Luxembourg to 192.9% in Japan.
[http://www.gfmag.com/tools/global-database/economic-data/10394-public-debt-by-country.html ]
Myth no. 4: Labour mismanagement of the economy caused Britain to be hit harder by the economic crisis than any other comparable country.
Fact No. 6: See the quotations in Fact No 4 above. And:
Total debt for OECD countries went from 76% of total OECD GDP in 2005 to almost 96% in 2010 (projected). Individual countries within the OECD ranged in 2009 from a low of 18.2% of GDP in Luxembourg to 192.9% in Japan. […]
The 2007-2009 financial crisis led to a dramatic increase in the public debt of many advanced economies, with many of them experiencing their highest levels of debt since World War II. This was in large part due to the huge stimulus programs in countries around the world, in addition to government bailouts, recapitalizations and takeovers of banks and other financial institutions. Another contributing factor to the increased debt was the decrease in tax revenues. […]
Public debt as a percent of GDP in OECD countries as a whole went from hovering around 70% throughout the 1990s to more than 90% in 2009 and is projected to grow to almost 100% of GDP by 2011, possibly rising even higher in the following years. It could already be higher, as potential costs of aging populations may not be entirely reflected in the budget projections of some countries. [http://www.gfmag.com/tools/global-database/economic-data/10394-public-debt-by-country.html ] [Emphasis added]
Compare these figures with those for the UK throughout Labour’s time in office as quoted above (Fact No. 4).
Myth No. 5: The size of the UK’s public debt is so great and so unsustainable that reducing it, urgently and at whatever cost to public services and to loss of more jobs and damping down of demand in the economy, must take precedence over further stimulating and supporting economic recovery through resumed growth.
Fact No. 7: The additional borrowing necessitated by the bank bail-out and the fiscal stimulus to the economy should not be exaggerated:
It is important to realise that, while the direct costs of financial crisis on governments may appear large, they are in fact relatively small compared to indirect costs arising from losses of tax revenues and increased expenditure to provide demand stimulus. Financial rescue programmes, including capital injection, treasury purchase of assets and lending as well as upfront government financing (but not debt guarantees), amount to 13.2% of GDP in advanced economies so far … and a significant part of this is likely to be recovered.
[Bank for International Settlements, The future of public debt: prospects and implications, March 2010, http://www.bis.org/publ/work300.pdf ] [Emphasis added]
Thus restoring government tax revenues by reducing unemployment and protecting the most vulnerable from eviction and destitution, boosting demand in the economy by concentrating support on those with the highest marginal propensity to spend (i.e. the poor and pensioners), and reducing welfare payments by getting people back into work, are the right way to reduce the budget deficit and, in slow time, to reduce the level of public debt.
Myth No. 6: The level of UK public debt is so high that [until the new coalition government embarked on its panicky policy of slash-and-burn] the credit rating agencies and international investors were liable to down-grade Britain’s credit rating, forcing the government to raise the interest rates which would be required to induce the financial institutions to continue to lend money by buying government bonds — thus further aggravating the deficit by raising the cost of borrowing.
Fact No. 8: At no time has the British government had any difficulty in borrowing at almost unprecedentedly low rates of interest. Bond yields have remained extremely low and the cost of borrowing is accordingly minimal. Britain holds more medium- and long-term debt than most comparable countries, which means that the need for re-financing most of it will not arise until the economy is, or should be, well on the way to recovery, by which time tax revenues will have risen and welfare payments fallen, making the servicing and ultimate repayment of debt much more affordable. Moreover Britain, more than most other comparable countries, borrows a high proportion of its debt from domestic lenders, and is therefore less dependent on the international finance houses with their well-known propensity for irrational panic. Smart investors know perfectly well that the risk of a default on its sovereign debt by any British government is zero, whatever threats the credit rating agencies might utter.
Fact No. 9: The international financiers and the credit rating agencies are currently less bothered about the UK’s level of debt and ability to service it, and more worried by the risks to Britain’s economic recovery and resumed growth posed by the coalition government’s obsession with instant deficit reduction, resulting in increases in unemployment, further increases in welfare payments and reduction in tax revenues, making the deficit even wider and the need for additional borrowing even greater.
Fact No. 10: Tory recitals of myths about Labour’s legacy do more harm to Britain’s international reputation and to confidence in our capacity for recovery than they do, for now anyway, to the revived and already detoxified Labour party. It’s certainly the case that the budget deficit is too large and must be reduced over time, and that with hindsight it should have been kept under better control, principally by increasing direct taxation on high earners and profitable, bonus-happy companies (measures which New Labour allowed Mr Murdoch and the Daily Mail to veto, and which the Tories would have vociferously opposed). But the Tories’ constantly parroted claim that the deficit has forced Britain into unprecedented, unsustainable and internationally unique levels of public debt is simply not borne out by the facts, and they should not be allowed to go on saying that it has.
The reality is that for ten years under Labour Britain enjoyed an uninterrupted and unprecedented period of prosperity, combining low inflation with full employment, mounting costly rescue operations in health and education without raising borrowing levels even to the OECD average, and substantially reducing child poverty. At the end of this period Britain was still almost at the bottom of the G8 as regards the proportion of GDP represented by public debt. Gordon Brown was almost universally respected throughout this period as one of the great Chancellors of the Exchequer. Internationally he further added to his reputation by his active role in global action to avert wholesale economic collapse across the western world and beyond. For the Tories now to accuse Labour in general and him in particular of economic mismanagement and failure must be one of the most cynical and reckless exercises in re-writing history for party political advantage ever undertaken.
On the Goebbels principle that if a lie is repeated often enough, people will come to believe it, the six Tory myths are in danger of becoming the received wisdom, and if that happens Labour will struggle to recover its well deserved and hard earned reputation for economic competence. It’s time to counter-attack with some well-aimed facts.
Footnote: I normally try to respond to serious (and even occasionally unserious) comments on my blog posts, whether critical or supportive. For the next ten days or so, however, I’ll be travelling, with only sporadic internet access. I hope writers of comments on this post will forgive me if my responses to their contributions are either delayed or missing altogether. I hope things will be back to normal soon. Meanwhile, the cat’s away…
Brian
Last week I sent a letter about Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection to the Sunday Times. I wrote:
Prison Overcrowding and Indeterminate Sentences
You report that the Justice Minister is pressing the Home Secretary to help reduce the cost and overcrowding of our huge prison population by releasing or deporting more than 600 foreigners who have served their sentences but are still locked up (“Clarke seethes at cost of foreigners in British prisons”, September 19). Similarly, more than four times as many prisoners (some 2,500) have served the “punishment” part of their Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) but are still kept in jail indefinitely because of the inherent impossibility of proving that they won’t reoffend if released: and the number increases all the time. Releasing them forthwith, perhaps on licence, would remedy a grave injustice (especially if the whole pernicious IPP system were to be abolished at the same time) as well as saving a huge amount of taxpayers’ money and contributing significantly to the relief of the prison overcrowding that shames us all.
Brian Barder
I was glad that the Sunday Times duly published my letter — a version of it, anyway. I can’t take a copy of the published version from the Sunday Times website, because Mr Murdoch has put it behind a paywall, and I’m not going to pay to see a newspaper website. So here is a picture of my letter instead:
I doubt if one in a hundred of the readers of the Sunday Times will have had the foggiest idea what I was on about, and even fewer of those paying to read it online will have had any clearer an idea. So I decided to put it here instead.
It’s puzzling that the great injustice of IPPs has attracted so little attention or concern, certainly compared with other scandals such as control orders, abuse of stop-and-search powers, prolonged imprisonment without charge or trial, and sweeping powers to intercept our private correspondence. How many British people know that we run a system of preventive detention in this country, under which thousands of men (and a very few women) are incarcerated in harsh penal conditions, indefinitely, not as punishment for anything they have done but because a few men in suits are scared that they might commit offences if they are released? It’s surprising that neither the English courts nor the European Court of Human Rights have so far declared this pernicious system to be in contravention of the European Convention on Human Rights. Tom Bingham, thou shouldst be living (and still on the Bench) at this hour!
I have tried to make a tiny contribution to the effort to publicise the evils of IPPs by periodically posting pieces about them on my blog, such as here and here. Some of these have attracted numerous ‘comments‘ from the families of people serving IPPs (almost as much victims of this cruel régime as the prisoners themselves) and from various experts in the field. These exchanges of messages as blog comments have become a kind of clearing-house for advice and appeals by those most closely affected by IPPs. They make salutary reading by anyone who doubts the mental agony suffered by the wives, sisters and children of men who have been incarcerated for sometimes relatively minor offences, who have served the ‘punishment’ element of their sentences, but who can’t be released because they can’t prove that if released, they won’t offend again. Many begin to fear that they will never, ever be released: that they will grow old and die in prison, all for having had a tussle with a neighbour or some such offence.
Ministers at the Ministry of Justice have gone on record as recognising the injustice involved in IPPs. All the major prison reform and civil liberties organisations have campaigned against them. The Ministry is currently reviewing sentencing policy and will publish a green paper for discussion in November — just a few weeks’ time. Is it too much to hope that the review will resist the temptation merely to recommend minor adjustments designed to make IPPs marginally less objectionable, and go instead for outright abolition of an inherently pernicious system? If it does, what are the chances of even the most liberal of Conservative ministers facing down the hang-’em-and-flog-’em punishment freaks on the right wing of their party, and the screams of the tabloid hysterics, in order to sweep away this ugly legacy of a misguided Labour home secretary?
It’s a pity that my letter in the Sunday Times was so mangled that its point was largely lost. Perhaps the responsible MoJ ministers might be shown this blog post by one of their Google-literate officials. It might help a little to strengthen their resolve to defy the opposition of the know-nothing tendency, and to do what they already know urgently needs to be done.
Update, 12 Oct 2010: I have put the following postscript on this post as now published in LabourList:
As a postscript to this post, I urge anyone interested to read the article in today’s Guardian at http://j.mp/cD6HbQ, reporting the forthcoming speech by no less an expert on prison policy than the president of the Prison Governors Association, who ‘will describe the situation of inmates serving a sentence of imprisonment for public protection (IPP) as “a blatant injustice”.’ Eoin McLennan-Murray will call for the “immediate release” of the 2,850 IPP prisoners ‘being held well beyond their “tariff point” – the minimum date after which the parole board can authorise their release.’ The Guardian notes that of the ’6,130 serving indefinite IPP sentences, so far only 94 have been released.’
This is cast-iron evidence from the representative of those best placed to know what a ‘blatant injustice’ IPPs inflict on thousands of prisoners. All the penal reform and civil liberties organisations take the same view of IPPs. It’s really time to end this blot on our system of justice.
Brian
