Today, the Prime Minister was filmed spraying a wall in the hope of removing graffiti. As the Downing Street website illustrated, our dynamic leader had these words of wisdom for anti-social elements: "Don't do it!". During his walkabout, local residents are quoted by the Downing Street website.
Mr Blair listened to local resident Brian Tildesley, who for the past twenty
years has suffered from misbehaviour on his estate.
Mr Tildesley said of the government's plans: "Respect has to go some way to
help. It's all going in the right direction. The tide is turning."
Would this Brian Tildesley be the same Brian Tildesley who was and maybe still is the secretary of the South-West Regional Council for the trade union, Amicus MSF. If this is the case, he is probably also a member of the Labour Party and more than just a "concerned resident".
Not an uncommon form of press management but one that failed to reach any newspapers. Nulab spin is atrophying as badly as its master.
Blair's speech echoed Hayek's warnings that managerialism bypasses the checks and balances designed to prevent the erosion of liberty and miscarriages of justice. Like any good communitarian, the Prime Minister defined liberty as the balance between freedom and security, a political equation that is often on the lips of our tyrannous leaders. The fragile institutions of criminal justice and the common law were dismissed with disdain:
The theory is basically treating Britain as if it were in the 19th
or early 20th centuries. The practice however takes place in a
post-war, modern, culturally and socially diverse, globalised society and
economy at the beginning of the 21st century. The old civic and family bonds
have been loosened. The scale, organisation, nature of modern crime makes the
traditional processes simply too cumbersome, too remote from reality to be
effective....
Yes, in theory, that is what is supposed to happen through the traditional court
processes. In practice it doesn't. We are fighting 21st crime with
19th century methods.
Blair criticises the traditional court system for protecting the accused and takes great pride in "reversing the burden of proof". To deal with the communally defined 'anti-social behaviour', the tool of social engineering is summary justice with a right of appeal, presumably to the same inefficient, cumbersome courts that, according to our Prime Minister, do not work in the first place.
Blair and New Labour take pride in smashing the checks and balances which protect civil liberties in this country. If you have misunderstood the man and still believe that he is located in the liberal tradition as some of the comrades do, think again. His first instinct is order, social and authoritarian, covenanted by the community and upheld through the state, in a mantra of rights and responsibilities, derived from Hobbes and cemented by Blair's favourite socialist, R H Tawney.
Respect is a way of describing the very possibility of life in a community.
It is about the consideration that others are due. It is about the duty I have
to respect the rights that you hold dear. And vice-versa. It is about
our reciprocal belonging to a society, the covenant that we have with one
another.
More grandly, it is the answer to the most fundamental question of all in
politics which is: how do we live together? From the theorists of the Roman
state to its fullest expression in Hobbes's Leviathan, the central question of
political theory was just this: how do we ensure order? And what are the
respective roles of individuals, communities and the state?
Legal stricture will never be enough. Respect cannot, in the end, be conjured
through legislation. Government can provide resources and powers. It can do its
best to ensure that wrong-doing is detected, that its powers against offenders
are suitable, that its systems are expeditious and its enforcement strong. And
the British system, like others, in the modern world, has not been good enough
against these standards.
Despite the loathsome outcome of this campaign and the manifold injustices that will result, one can pity Blair as an agent who follows the path laid out before him. The transition from a high-trust society to a low-trust society is a consequence of the welfare state and the expansion of moral dependency on the part of many individuals. The state lacks the tools to remedy and offset the pernicious consequences of its systems. It returns to the mindset that has served it so well: controls, shortcuts and arbitrary regulations designed to solve the defined problems. If existing systems like the courts are outside the executive control, they are bypassed for more malleable solutions.
Blair treads the path that has been written for him.