Other traditional anxieties, though still troubling for some, have become less acute, and no longer occupy the primary political agenda.  These “Big Five” loom large, in the daily experience of the overwhelming majority of our fellow-citizens.  And the political rationale for action is much more than a matter of individual fulfilment, the realisation of individual potential.  We now understand that fear, or lack of confidence in the future, is a crucial component in overall confidence, in particular consumer confidence.  An anxious people, without the confidence to plan ahead and to remain active, is a poor people, unable to generate the forward momentum of a prosperous society.  We now know that fear is, quite simply, bad news for the economy. 

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The fear of civil disorder and crime

It is sometimes argued that, because the UK crime statistics do not objectively confirm the rapid rise in levels of subjective anxiety, these anxieties are somehow insubstantial, to be disregarded.  That is wrong.  Fear is in the mind, and if children, women and old people feel fearful, their fears must be seriously addressed by Government. And it would be idle to suggest that criminality is not a serious social problem.  Football hooliganism, drug dealing, racial tension, car theft and abuse, resentment of immigrants, disruptive teenage behaviour, all coupled with the manner of their tabloid coverage, constitute a real source of anxiety for many of our fellow citizens.  Where terrorism is a factor, in Northern Ireland and other parts of Europe, anxiety is further heightened: public places in England still bear regular warnings not to leave baggage unattended, upon pain of its being removed and destroyed.  TV programmes like Crimewatch compound public fears, for all their protestations to the contrary.   

All these anxieties are compounded by the speed of change in all communities.  Rates of residential turnover are much higher, and one is less likely to see familiar faces in local public places.  Changes in the mode of local policing have made their own contribution to anxiety, with the closure of local police stations, the decline of the peripatetic Bobby, and the proliferation of impersonal CCTV cameras.  Even those ubiquitous “Neighbourhood Watch” signs may compound the anxiety for some, because they act as a standing reminder of their own necessity. 

What should we do?  We should first reduce our dependence on “prohibition”, on criminalisation, as an instrument of civic order, of “social control”.  We now have the dubious distinction of imprisoning a higher proportion of our civilian population than any other European country.  This year, we have overtaken Portugal, in our zeal to incarcerate our fellow-citizens.  This represents an excessive use of physical force against our fellows. 

Yet coercion generates countervailing aggression in those against whom it is used.  Nor is the use of alternative punishments (electronic tagging, community orders) any real answer, for they also represent the manifest use of State force against the individual.  We are laying the ground, I suspect, for a more virulent and committed criminal fraternity than we have known in the past.  And we are ourselves to blame for that.  As socialists, we must seek alternative modes of organising our civic life, methods more respectful of human dignity.  Part of the solution is to replace those systems which rely too heavily upon coercion by the State.   

ü      Drugs Prohibition  Our use of blanket criminalisation, in an attempt to manage the consumption of narcotics (“drugs”), is misconceived and ineffective.  It originates in the misguided deployment of Prohibition in 1920s America, and should now be superseded.  The Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 should be repealed, and replaced with a system of regulated supply, decriminalising the whole process and assisting addicts to combat their addictions, as we do with alcohol and tobacco.  There are many senior Police officers now calling for decriminalisation, because they recognise that present methods are ineffective, gratuitously provocative, and wasteful of public resources.  By changing our strategy, we would reduce the incidence of violence and crime in our society. 

ü      Gambling Illegality  Although gambling is now a popular contemporary pastime, the enforcement of gambling contracts through the Courts is still forbidden.  The time has come for Labour to remove that bar, and allow normal judicial enforcement. The enforcement business should be brought into the public arena, and taken away from professional criminals.  Gang warfare and crime would be decisively reduced. 

ü      Compulsory Education   We should remove statutory compulsion from our secondary schools.  Compulsion was introduced initially, by the Victorians, for primary education, and seems to have crept into secondary education without serious challenge.  Yet today, disruption is caused in many schools simply because the State is using force against teenagers who would prefer not to be in school at all.  Force breeds force, and the State should end the use of compulsion in  secondary education.  If all teenagers attended school voluntarily, the teachers’ disciplinary problems would be greatly reduced, and the incidence of violence in our society would be reduced. 

ü      Harmonisation of Excise Duties   The Government should adjust our systems of product taxation so that there are no major cross-border differences giving rise to tax-rate smuggling.   The very existence of such opportunities encourages the criminal fraternity, and helps to finance their evil trade.  The elimination of such disparities is simply a matter of commonsense in the management of contiguous states. 

ü      Management of Migration   The February 2002 destruction of the Yarls Wood Detention Centre should stand as a warning to us that we cannot continue to use force on the present scale in the control of immigration, merely to pander to xenophobic public opinion.  We must find an alternative mode of public administration.  On the specific issue of asylum-seekers, I advocate extending the remit of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, and adopting a new international Asylum Convention to regulate the annual rate at which signatory states could be expected to accept asylum-seekers, expressed as a common percentage of their resident population.   

These remedies are all in our own hands.  We can simply enact them, by legislative means.  But that would not be enough.  We should also give priority to tackling the social issues which are the immediate causes of civic disorder.  The campaign against football hooliganism should be maintained: in my view, this is essentially a public order crowd-management problem, without distinctive economic or social roots.  Football games are merely convenient occasions for mayhem, enabling disparate discontents and “troublemakers” to congregate for a fight.   It is otherwise with neighbourhood “gang warfare” between teenage mostly-male gangs, particularly where shot through with racism and racist conflict.  Recent race riots in our Northern cities are a reminder of the disruption that can be caused by racism.  We should strengthen employment training and job creation initiatives in these areas, in a deliberate drive to address the jealousy, resentment and envy which are the root causes of racial tension among young males. 

Such measures will, however, not be sufficient without a positive drive to create new communal institutions. We could do much more to ensure that every community has its own, empowered, community (or parish) council, encouraged to undertake local initiatives.  These Councils, in England and Wales, are fully-fledged “local authorities”, with the right to raises their own tax-income by rate precept. Labour should initiate a drive to ensure that UK “local council” coverage is greatly increased, if possible pushed to 100%. Labour should grant to Scottish Community Councils the same tax-raising powers as those enjoyed by comparable councils in England and Wales.  Labour should introduce legislation to give Londoners the right to form community councils.  Londoners are the only group of UK citizens currently denied that elementary democratic opportunity.   

In the voluntary sector, Labour should encourage the formation of local development trusts and other charities, and should amend company law to permit the formation of non-charitable public interest companies, dedicated in perpetuity the pursuit of public interest objectives, and statutorily protected from privatisation.  In my experience, it has been common for Labour Party loyalists to disdain the efforts of the voluntary sector, fearing that the deployment of “charity” will blunt the edge of political reform to secure enforceable rights.   I understand that concern: in the struggle to banish fear, there is no better weapon that the enforceable right.  Absolute, non-means-tested entitlements should be extended, not diminished, for they constitute the bedrock of long-term confidence, for everyone. But Labour should nevertheless widen the scope of opportunities open to social entrepreneurs, and should encourage innovation in the voluntary and not-for-profit sectors.  These institutions all strengthen a sense of participatory democracy, enriching the public life of every local community. 

Finally, Labour must address the problems caused by the great distance that has emerged, between local residents and their local Police forces.   A primary function of civil policing has always been the alleviation of fear.  Yet over the last twenty years, Police authorities have grown much larger, managerially more efficient, and personally more remote.  The abolition of the institution of the Watch Committee, through which Councillors kept in democratic touch with the management of local Police forces, was a profound error of judgement by the 1980s Tory Government.  This whole process of Police withdrawal has itself contributed to the growing anxiety over civic disorder.  For most citizens, no “law & order presence” is now perceptible, in the hurly-burly of everyday life. 

That process cannot be reversed.  But we should strengthen local policing by developing new systems of local community police forces, very local in their scope and responsibility, relying on the resources of the larger national squads wherever necessary, but remaining in the closest possible touch with the communities which they serve.  What is at issue is much more than “the Bobby on the beat”.  We must develop new forms of self-policing, of close cooperation at local level between local residents and “their” Police.  The effects, in terms of the reduction of collective anxieties, would be dramatic.  Labour should initiate this process, and take this card out of the hands of the Tories. 

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