So much for getting tough with criminals

Remember the outcry when Ken Clarke suggested doing deals with criminals to save money? If the criminals came clean, said Clarke, they would get lighter sentences. They would do less time and, in return, the state would save the costs of lengthy court cases and prison terms. His plan didn’t even get off the starting blocks. It was quickly scrapped in the face of public outrage.

But now George Osborne has offered a similar amnesty to tax criminals. He has struck a deal with Swiss banks which allows British tax evaders with Swiss accounts to remain anonymous provided they cough up some of the tax they owe. HMRC will get a lower rate of tax on this cash than that which would have been paid in the UK. In return, the tax evaders get to keep the rest of the tax they owe and their anonymity. Any further payments can, therefore, only be extracted with the agreement of the Swiss authorities. The tax will be collected and enforced by the Swiss, not by HMRC.

The agreement is essentially the same as that proposed by Clarke – help the government out of its fiscal hole and you get off with a lighter punishment.

Of course, there will be less of an outcry because the tax evaders are rich criminals and those most likely to be covered by Clarke’s deal were poor ones. It may even be that some MPs, media bosses and senior journalists have their own little stashes in Swiss bank accounts. We’ll never know because now their secrecy is guaranteed.

Worse still, though, this shoddy deal demonstrates the enfeeblement of the 21st century state. The deals that both Germany and the UK did with the Swiss are tacit acknowledgements of defeat. Both governments accepted that they could not chase down the tax evaders and so agreed to a compromise. They could have threatened to withdraw the Swiss banks’ licences in the UK and Germany but, no doubt, the Gnomes of Zürich threatened to move their operations from the City and Frankfurt to Singapore and Hong Kong, with the resulting loss of tax revenues, blah blah blah… Woooo, scary stuff! Better roll over and die.

Concerted international action by the EU and the USA could have avoided this. Swiss banks could call one government’s bluff but they couldn’t face down an entire continent. The threat of being shut out of all business in the EU would have concentrated their minds. They would have offered up the tax criminals eventually. But nothing of the sort was even tried. The EU, it seems, can act as one when it comes to implementing silly regulations or imposing contradictory employment rights on member states, yet it is incapable of taking on the really powerful vested interests.

If you want to understand the limits of the UK’s sovereignty, look no further. Swiss banks can toss our government a few scraps with one hand and give it the finger with the other. And our government is either unwilling, or unable, to fight back.

Back in the days when governments still had power, and leaders who were prepared to use it, President De Gaulle showed the world how to deal with tax havens. He forced Monaco to comply with French tax law and stop sheltering French tax evaders, by closing its borders and cutting off its water supply. Switzerland is totally encircled by EU countries whose citizens stash their money illegally and anonymously in Swiss banks. Why don’t we close their airspace and starve them out until they give us the criminals and their cash?

It would never happen, of course, because our leaders are far too timid these days. And, perhaps, many of them have too much to lose if the details of Swiss bank account holders became public.

So, a couple of weeks after its promise to crack down on poor criminals, the government has done a deal to let rich ones off the hook. Ken Clarke may have climbed down on his proposal but there will be no U-turn on this one.

This is not a sick society – it just has a few nasty people in it

Chris Dillow notes that the voice of old-style melancholy conservatism has been strangely absent in the aftermath of the riots. Had the old High Tories spoken, he thinks they would have said something like this:

Occasional riots are a feature of most societies, not just capitalist ones; the fear of the “mob“ is an ancient one. This alone suggests they are ineliminable.

So too does another thing. Whatever you think are the causes of the riots – poverty, neo-liberal consumer culture, bad parenting or some sort of moral decline – these cannot be swiftly removed, except by large sacrifices of liberty or economic efficiency. It could be, then, that sporadic riots are less costly than the redistributive policies that would remove poverty and disaffection, or the statist interventions (assuming them to be feasible) that would remove bad parenting or reverse moral degradation.

Nor can we expect the police to prevent riots. Arising as they do from poorly understood and perhaps genuinely unpredictable emergent behaviour, riots cannot be foreseen in advance. So they will catch the police unawares. And given that the police force is a hierarchical monopoly, it is inevitable that it will be a deeply flawed institution, prone to big errors.

Riots, then, are just something we have to live with.

Instead, says Chris, the old school of conservatism has been supplanted by people who, like those on the left, want to mend things. For the left it is all about reducing inequality, not cutting facilities, stopping the police being so racist, not demonising the yoof, and so on. For the right, it’s about cutting welfare, bolstering the family, getting people back to church, and so on. From both sides, the explanation goes, if only we had/hadn’t done X then none of this would have happened. The old conservative ‘shit-happens sometimes’ view of the world has found little expression.

This is the same argument I was trying to make here. There is something very un-conservative about suggesting that social workers should be able, at all times, to stop all scumbag parents from killing their children. Likewise, it is also un-conservative to suggest that there is a foolproof way of stopping riots. They have happened before and they will happen again.

Most of the theories and silver-bullet solutions put forward to explain the riots fall apart under scrutiny. The rioters were not all poor and they were not all black. Some very poor areas didn’t have riots and some relatively affluent ones did. The rioters were mostly young but the majority of young people went nowhere near a riot. As for ‘putting ‘em all in the army’, well it didn’t stop him did it?

Riots blow up for all sorts of reasons in every country and every age. Even Denmark and Sweden, the two most equal countries in the world according to the OECD, have had their share of trouble. Only two months ago in Canada, a country relatively unscathed by the recession, an ice hockey game was the spark for a night of looting and car burning which took most people by surprise.

Tony Blair’s explanation of the recent riots is closer to the truth than David Cameron’s “broken society”.  His article in the Observer was typically self-serving but he was right to point out that the riots were caused by a relatively small number of people. The majority, including the majority of young, poor and black people, were appalled by what happened. Many of them turned out to help clear up the mess and most want to see the rioters severely punished. This is not a sick society, it is just a society in which a tiny group of aggressive criminals have been allowed to run amok for too long.

There is a small group of criminally inclined people who, as Blair said, are outside the social mainstream. There is a slightly larger group of hangers-on who will go along with the criminals for the ride, to enjoy the power trip or simply because mischief is fun. Then there is a much larger group of people who are attracted by the chance to get something for nothing. These are people who would never smash a window themselves but who are happy to help themselves to goods if the shop window is already broken. The first group, the hardcore criminal element, may hold the second and third groups in contempt but, to start an effective riot, it needs them. Numbers provide cover, intimidate the authorities and stretch resources.

These groups are present, to a degree, in most societies. Most of the time the threat of punishment keeps them at bay but, occasionally, something happens to embolden them.

Comparisons have been made between the recent riots and those of previous decades but perhaps the closest parallel is the Liverpool riot of 1919. This, too, was an outburst of co-ordinated looting rather than a political protest. The cause was simple. Half the police force was on strike and people saw their chance to go out and nick stuff.

Liverpool is in the grip of hooliganism. For two nights the city has been given over to riot and pillage. Scores of shops have been smashed and rifled, and at one place along the lines of docks gates were broken open and the mob stormed a huge food warehouse, carrying off stocks.

Sounds familiar doesn’t it?

And all this happened in a city where, compared to today, church attendance was higher, there were fewer single parents, fewer immigrants and, this being just after the First World War, a lot more people had been in the army. Yet still they had an orgy of rioting and looting, not because their society was sick but because a number of people realised that their chances of getting caught were suddenly much lower.

In any society there will be criminals and opportunists who will loot, steal and create disorder when given the chance. Most of the time, the threat of punishment discourages all but the hardcore villains from committing criminal acts. But when that threat is weakened more people weigh up the odds and decide that a bit of violence and looting is worth the risk. That’s what happened in Liverpool in 1919 and in Britain two weeks ago. In 1919, a police strike reduced the threat of detection. In 2011, a hamstrung police force, a weakened criminal justice system and the sudden discovery of the power of technology had the same effect. For a brief moment, the lid was loosened and the latent criminality, which has always been there and always will be there, burst out.

We can’t stop riots from happening again. The best we can do is detach the hangers-on and the opportunists from the hardcore of criminals. The most effective way of doing this seems to be a mixture of stick and carrot. If the experience of these anti-gang initiatives are indicative, half will respond to persuasion and incentives while the other half just need a good slap. It’s the good slap bit that has been missing for the last couple of decades.

This isn’t a sick society. It’s a country full of good people who wish their leaders would do something about the few who mess it up for everyone else. Riots happen in all societies and they will happen here again in time. We will never stop them. The best we can do is to contain them and that means making a few more people a lot more scared of the consequences. If that view makes me a ‘melancholy conservative’ then so be it.

After the riots – A letter from a copper

An old friend, who has been a police officer for many years, wrote to me after reading my posts about the riots last week. Here’s what he said: 

The last year has been unlike any other in my two decades as a cop; morale has been knocked occasionally in the past, but now it’s at an all-time low. Traditionally the majority of cops have been Tory voters (the party of law & order etc), many because they see the real effects of years of liberal bleeding-heart social policies in the viciousness directed against them by an underclass who think they are owed a living. To have the Tories turn against them has been a shock. 

Personally it was no surprise, I have to say that Cameron represents to me the worst kind of politician, and I still can’t believe it when I see him introduced on TV as “the Prime Minister”! We seem to be suffering from a rash of young, career politicians with no actual experience of the society they govern, and Cameron is the archetype. 

In our force, we have lost around 100 experienced officers in the last few months, forced to leave by something called ‘A19’, a regulation which can force an officer who has accrued 30 years pensionable service to leave “on the grounds of efficiency” . Until very recently we were trying to retain experienced officers using a scheme called 30+. Obviously some of these officers were happy to go, but by and large when you are talking about people who may have joined at 18, many will have been expecting to have stayed until they were into their 50s. With the recruitment freeze in place our numbers are declining quite noticeably. 

The grass-roots feel at the moment is that our bosses think that we are all pulling together in the face of the rioters; in actual fact we are supporting our colleagues and the towns and cities we still love, not our bosses, who are seen as cut from the same cloth as the expenses-claiming politicians and the greedy bankers. Incidentally our glorious commanders are exempt from A19. 

The media lost no time in criticising the Police, (wrong tactics used in an unprecedented situation – tell you what, we’ll just go and open a few tins of “Riot Police” we have in the pantry, 16,000 of them – a spooky and prophetic number). I see the latest editorials on the news are already turning back towards the bleeding hearts and the poor offenders being given harsh sentences for conspiring to burn the world. We – the police – are damned if we do, damned if we don’t, and guaranteed to be the national scapegoat for anything which has gone wrong. 

Eventually it grinds you down. Eventually you begin to realise the organisation’s leaders will be happy to throw you to the media wolves if you are caught on someone’s phone camera hitting some poor misunderstood youngster with your baton (never mind the fact that he’s just spent the last 15 minutes spitting the words “F*&king pig” in your face). Eventually you begin to realise that, unlike 25 years ago when police commanders had some backbone and stuck up for their officers, your current commanders are more interested in watching their own backs, expenses and pensions, than serving the society we live in.

I could go on and on as I feel quite strongly about all of this, and I’ve not even touched on the effect on my civilian colleagues! The only good to come out of the riots is that it has forced the debate. Take away 20% and see what you get left with!

Sentencing – some consistency please

I’m all for giving stiff sentences to those involved in last week’s rioting.

Nicking stuff from a shop during a riot is not the same as shoplifting.  If you are part of the crowd, you are part of the force that intimidates the shopkeeper and prevents others from intervening. Even if you only steal a Mars Bar, you provide cover for those who steal the TV and the cash till. Therefore, you get a tougher sentence for nicking a Mars Bar during a riot than you do if you shoplift one on your way to school.

Having said all that, four years for trying to start a riot that never happened seems a bit harsh, especially when, on the same day, two university students (so so poverty excuses whatsoever) were only given three-and-a-half for threatening people at knifepoint and robbing them.

OK, perhaps four years for inciting a riot on Facebook is fair but, in that case, these two pieces of shit should have been given at least six.

Rioting and rape

I don’t always agree with Tim Worstall but he’s spot on with this:

We are told, endlessly, that only the rapist is to blame for rape. Nothing that the victim does, has done, where they go, how they’re dressed, nothing at all changes the fact that the rapist is solely and completely responsible, in and of themselves, for the crime.

So why isn’t this true for rioters?

I’ll leave that one with you too.

Crime fell because we threw money at it – now there’s no more money….

The 10,000 extra police officers drafted into London on Tuesday night seem to have done the trick. The Met swamped riot-risk areas with cops and there was a lot less trouble. This makes sense. All other things being equal, if you put more police officers in an area there will be less crime. According to a recent study, a 10 percent increase in the number of officers leads to a 3 percent decrease in crime. Interesting implications for police productivity there but let’s leave that one for another day.

Something like this has happened at a national level over the past ten years or so. Crime statistics are notoriously unreliable, partly because the government keeps changing the rules, but the figures from police reported crime and the British Crime Survey show a similar pattern. Allowing for the changes in definitions, crime went up in the 1990s and then reduced again during the mid to late 2000s. Depending on whether you accept the BCS or the police figures, crime is now roughly at the level it was in the early 80s or late 80s.

That’s something to cheer about isn’t it? Well, yes and no.

The drop in crime has been achieved by a massive increase in police numbers and spending. The Labour government effectively did what the Met did on Tuesday night, only on a larger scale. It swamped the country with extra police, backed up by extra community support officers and civilian staff.

Source: Parliamentary briefing 7 September 2010 (PDF)

There are some 20-30,000 more police officers now than there were in the 1980s. Figures for police spending only go back to the early 1990s but these, too, show a significant increase.

It’s not just the extra police officers that crank up the price of policing. PCSOs, extra civilian staff and technology all add to the costs. To achieve roughly the same crime rate we had in the 1980s, we have to spend much more on policing costs alone. Add to that the amounts spent on youth programmes, interventions by social workers and other attempts to steer youngsters away from crime, none of which existed in the 1980s, and the cost would be higher still. It would take a Freedom of Information request and lots of time to calculate the total increase in the amount we have spent trying to reduce crime. We can be sure, though, that it would be a big number.

Society is simply more expensive to police today than it was a quarter of a century ago. There are a number of reasons for this and everyone will have his or her own favourite. A more demanding public, the decline of deference, the breakdown of the family, rising inequality, immigration and the collapse of discipline in schools will all be cited and may, indeed, be contributory factors. The burden of increased regulation adds extra costs too. To comply with extra rules and reporting requirements, police forces need more civilian staff and IT systems. The restrictions on what frontline officers are allowed to do means that it now takes more officers longer to make an arrest than it did in the 1980s. Together with the extra 5 million people, it is these social factors which account for the extra spending on the police service.

Maintaining this level of spending will become increasingly difficult, given the UK’s current fiscal position. It is now beyond all reasonable doubt that the cost of the state will continue to rise over the next couple of decades. Accountancy firm PwC estimates that by 2020 another £20bn will need to be found, either in spending cuts or tax increases, on top of George Osborne’s planned £81bn cuts. Consequently, the government has already started to cut the number of police officers and support staff. Labour may well criticise but, if they were in power, they would almost certainly be doing something similar.

The trouble is, this is happening at a time when, materially, most of us are going to be a lot poorer. During the debt-fuelled boom of the last decade, people got used to being able to get the stuff they wanted. Designer clothes, TVs, computers, phones and other electronic gizmos were all relatively cheap. High employment levels, a strong currency, cheap credit and the Chinese all combined to enable us to go on a buying spree. Now the party is well and truly over. Big Merv reckons it will take years before we get back to pre-recession livings standards. That’s if we ever do. All of which means that people are going to have to do without things that they had become used to taking for granted.

Events of the past few days have shown that some people are unwilling to do that. They’ve had expensive products pushed at them for years. A culture has grown up where, without the latest trainers and phones, you are nothing. People still want the stuff they have been conditioned to want and, realising that strength in numbers could overpower the police, some of them went out and took it.

So we are well on the way to a perfect storm. A hamstrung police force, overcrowded prisons, high material expectations and a section of the population with seemingly little fear of the law and in possession of technology which enables them to organise at frightening speed. All at a time when the traditional answer to such problems – throwing money at them – is no longer a viable option. The latent crime has only been suppressed because of high spending on policing. As that spending falls and the economic conditions worsen, the likelihood of the lid blowing off increases.

We can expect, therefore, more crime and lawlessness. The rioting in London over the past few days was more widespread than that of the 1980s. It is worse than anything the UK has seen since the nineteenth century. And we probably haven’t seen the last of it. 

We are left with few options. The Daily Wail and others will blame the  decline of religion, the breakdown of the family, absent fathers, single mothers and, ironically, materialism for the collapse of law and order this week. Whether or not any of this is true, it still doesn’t help us. We can’t stop people from divorcing or kids wanting the latest must-haves. We can’t make parents and children to sit down together at mealtimes and have meaningful conversations about morality. We certainly can’t force people to believe in God again. And even if we could do any of these things it would take a hell of a long time before they made any difference.

The only options we have are:

1. Increase taxes to pay for increased policing costs.
2. Drastically reduce other services to pay for increased policing costs.
3. Do 1 and 2 but use the money to pay for youth programmes to discourage kids from crime (won’t work unless we do 1 and 2 as well).
4. Just accept the increased level of crime and lawlessness and everything that goes with it. (Hey, every couple of years shops get smashed and a few people are killed round here. Ain’t no big deal. Just chill, maaaaan!)
5. Encourage people to form vigilante groups and look after their own security.
6. Find some cheaper ways of policing and delivering justice.

I’ll leave that one with you.

Suddenly the penny dropped – we can do what we like…

More riots last night, this time outside London. The youths who were looting the shops are not daft – or, at least, some of them aren’t. They listened to the news. They knew that the rest of the country was being stripped of police to defend London. In cities and towns around the country they seized their opportunity.

A looter interviewed on Radio 4 this morning said that this was his big chance to get lots of expensive stuff for nothing. He also knew that it was unlikely that he would get caught and that, even if he did, not a lot would happen to him because the prisons are full. As I said, some of these boys watch the news.

Much will be written over the next few days about the causes of the riots, mostly by left-wing and right-wing partizans seeking to blame it on Tory or Labour governments. But the roots of this go back a long way. What happened over the last few days was a sudden realisation that, if you can get enough people out in a small area, there is very little the police can do to stop you. For a couple of hours, you own the streets and you can do whatever you like. The lad interviewed on Radio 4 was one of those for whom that penny dropped.

Of course, many of these kids have known for years that it is difficult for the police to nail them. In their own areas, where they know the streets, they have been given a pretty free rein for some time. They know that the police can be disciplined for assaulting them, especially if they are under 16. They know that the coppers’ bosses are scared of the media and that political activists will create a storm if a teenager gets hurt. They know that, even if they are found guilty, a hamstrung judiciary, apologist lawyers and a creaking prison system almost guarantee them a light punishment.

It was the same at school. The teachers couldn’t discipline them either. Corporal punishment was abolished more than two decades ago by ‘the most right-wing government in postwar history’. Major’s child protection legislation went further, literally preventing teachers from touching children at all. The kids knew that all they had to do was shout ‘paedophile’ and a teacher’s career was in ruins. For the past fifteen years or so, there have been few sanctions for bad behaviour in schools. Children came out of schools where the teachers could not touch them onto streets where the police could not touch them.

Over the past few days, with the help of technology and social media, criminally inclined youngsters have discovered that they can magnify this invincibility by flocking together. Sheer weight of numbers enables them to turn a shopping area into a giant school playground, where the bullies and thieves rule and where cowed teachers are replaced with cowed police officers.

As with all playground gangs, many kids are along for the ride. The interviewee on Radio 4 had no criminal record. That is probably true for many of the looters. Youngsters sense when there is some fun to be had, free from adult interference, and they are quick to join in. If you can get some free trainers and an iPod into the bargain, so much the better. Some of the youngsters are criminals but many are just materialists. They want to get as much stuff for as little as possible. A temporary suspension of law and order enables them to do just that.

The chaos we have seen this week has deep roots. It is the result of a low punishment, high entitlement culture that started with the breakdown of discipline in schools but was fuelled by materialism and celebrity culture. What changed over the past few days was the sudden realisation of power and the euphoria that goes with it. It is a heady and dangerous emotion and it makes people fearless.

We are not only untouchable at school, or in our own streets. If there are enough of us, we are so untouchable that we can take what we like, whatever it costs.

And so they took the stuff they had been taught to love; the designer clothes, the big TVs and the high spec computers.

Cameron’s cuts may have made things slightly worse. Labour’s share of the blame has more to do with its debt fuelled consumer boom than any social engineering it might have done.

But recent governments have only carried on with something that has been going on for years. Both parties colluded in the decline of the education system and the castration of the police. Now, we are seeing the results.

This week, the criminals and their hangers-on have discovered just how much power they have and how little the authorities now have left. Rolling this back is going to take a long time – that’s if any politicians actually have the nerve to do it.