Waking up to a fiscal nightmare

Immigration and law and order top all the plans for home affairs - but no one's mentioned how they will be paid for

By Jon Silverman

If the Conservatives do win the election and form a government, an intriguing question arises. Who will be the next Home Secretary? The current shadow, Chris Grayling, is no shoo-in – even before his remarks about B&B owners and gay guests. His appearance as little more than an “extra” at the launch of the party’s manifesto may be further evidence of a waning star. If Grayling is the Tory bludgeon, his predecessor as shadow, Dominic Grieve, is an elegant rapier but too much of a civil libertarian to please the faithful. Hence a potential quandary for David Cameron.

But the party’s manifesto contained few surprises. Identifying immigration as the most important election issue after the economy, the Tories promise an annual limit on the number of non-EU skilled migrants, thereby hoping to staunch an outflow of defectors to either UKIP or the BNP.

On the law and order battleground, they plant their standard behind police reform, in the shape of elected commissioners to oversee forces and a rather unspecified form of “non-military national service” for 16-year-olds, paid for by diverting money from the current government’s somewhat tarnished Prevent programme, aimed at addressing extremism and radicalisation. Also promised are instant sanctions, such as “grounding orders”, to tackle anti-social behaviour.

The pledge to introduce a mandatory prison sentence for carrying a knife addresses one aspect of David Cameron’s “broken Britain” crusade, while the “payment by results” incentive for prison governors answers criticism that there is too much emphasis on punishment and too little on rehabilitation. (However, the difficulty in grounding such a piece of “blue skies” thinking in the reality of a prison population nudging 85,000 and kept functioning only by regular transfers between establishments, may leave it floating somewhere in the penal stratosphere.)

On civil liberties, the Tories have adopted a pick‘n’mix programme. Those alarmed by Labour’s authoritarianism will be attracted by the promise to scrap ID cards and reduce the length of time the DNA of those arrested but not convicted can be held on the national database. But while replacing the Human Rights Act with a UK Bill of Rights, and the resulting necessity to derogate from parts of the European Convention, will appeal to Little Englanders, others will be alarmed that Britain is re-winding the clock on individual rights.

In keeping with its heritage, the Liberal Democrats offer a portmanteau of civil liberties measures, including a Freedom Bill to regulate the use of CCTV and safeguard the Human Rights Act; scrapping ID cards; abandoning plans to monitor email and internet traffic and reducing pre-charge detention to 14 days. The only concession to tabloid “populism” is the pledge to recruit 3,000 more police officers but even this is tempered by stopping any more prison building to pay for the swell in numbers.

The proposal to introduce a regional points-based immigration process for migrants is an idea imported from Canada and Australia but there is some scepticism about its applicability to a country as small and densely populated as the UK. It also may leave Nick Clegg open to a variety of charges, including being illiberal (and probably impractical) in seeking to restrict freedom of movement. But rather more emotive is the offer of an amnesty to illegal migrants who fulfil certain conditions, such as having no criminal convictions and having lived and worked in the UK for a certain number of years. The fact that some Tories, such as Boris Johnson, are attracted to the idea may only reinforce the opinion of many voters that it is scatter-brained.

Gordon Brown’s early foray into the immigration debate during the campaign ended in tears with a rebuke from the UK Statistics Authority for misusing figures about net inward migration. And for his party, the only glimmer of entirely fresh thinking on home affairs after 13 years in power is the plan to allow failing police forces to be “taken over” by their more successful neighbours. Of course, this is another way of achieving the reduction in the number of forces which became a Holy Grail for the former Home Secretary, Charles Clarke, and which was scuppered by the reluctance of many chief constables and police authority chairs to sign their own death warrant.

Tony Blair’s iconic – though largely unfulfilled – pledge to be “tough on the causes of crime” is addressed through a long overdue expansion of the number of family intervention programmes and the issuing of “social impact” bonds to encourage private investment in crime prevention. But Labour long ago set off on the path of the lockdown state and there’s no turning back now.

In truth, the home affairs programmes of all the contenders will be overshadowed by the fiscal nightmare that awaits the winner. After 2012/13, there almost certainly will be fewer warranted police officers, fewer chief constables, fewer freshly signed contracts for new prisons and, conceivably, some radical re-thinking about the parameters and costs of the surveillance society. Little of this has been heard during an election campaign dominated by the leaders’ debates – but, after it, it will be.

26 April 2010

Jon Silverman. Professor of media and criminal justice at the University of Bedfordshire,