Punish the poor 1930s style back with a vengeance

Fake data claiming that the majority of those who took part in the recent riots had previous records is behind the government’s plans for a new, punitive regime.

Actually, the figures only show that those who were caught had previous, and since the police have been knocking on the doors of everyone “known” to them in the weeks since the riots, that’s hardly surprising.

Now the Coalition wants to give the courts powers not only to fine people but also to withdraw their benefits or tax credits. Both the government and Labour accept the unsubstantiated claim that a small number of families in every area are the source of most of the problems in society.

They have brought in the architect of New Labour’s “anti-social behaviour orders” or Asbos, Louise Casey, to tell them how to “sort out” these “problem families”. As well as withdrawing benefits, they are looking at evictions, parenting orders, making people work for free in the community, and other measures.

On the basis of unscientific prejudice, teachers are asked to identify children who, whilst not a problem now might BECOME a problem because of what is known about their home circumstances. There is growing pressure on the NHS to abandon the principle of patient confidentiality, so that doctors and district nurses could identify families that MIGHT at some point in the future become “problem families”.

Also to be announced is a proposal that people leaving prison without a job to go to - i.e. almost everyone - will not be given time to find work but be automatically registered on a government “work for benefits” programme.

From next year, everyone unemployed for more than six months will have to either join a “volunteer” work programme or a “work experience” programme, which means, for example, working for a company for 13 weeks for Job Seekers’ Allowance plus £10.

And right now, thousands of sick and disabled people are being forced through a humiliating new testing regime, operated by private companies, in order to prove they are well enough to work – even though there isn’t any work for most of them.

This pretence that the poor and the unemployed are the state’s biggest problem is not new in Britain. History shows that in Britain, the criminalisation and punishment of the poorest people - the unemployed, sick or desperate - is the so-called democratic government’s knee-jerk reaction to economic crisis, and the situation is no different today.

During the 1930s depression, the state was obsessed with the imagined inability of the unemployed to take up work. From 1929 to 1938, thousands of unemployed men were sent to be “reconditioned for work”, with physical exercise and work projects at British Instructional Centres which were, in practice, labour camps.

At the same period the fake science of eugenics was common currency amongst the ruling class and in 1932, the Brock Committee was formed to make recommendations on how “feeble-minded people” in England and Wales could be sterilised. Voluntary sterilisation never got off the ground in Britain - as it did during the same period in the United States - but as a result of so-called “medical” decisions, many hundreds of men and women incarcerated in long-stay hospitals and asylums, were sterilised without their knowledge or consent.

In 1931 the means test was introduced, where government inspectors entered people’s homes and if anything was left worth selling, its value was deducted from their benefit. Cooking pots, chairs, tables, bedding - all were at one time or another classified as unwarranted luxuries.

Housing, education and health workers should refuse to join Lib-Tory-Labour attack on the poor. They should instead use their skills to work, through local People’s Assemblies, towards an employment, training, housing, education and support system that enables the disadvantaged instead of punishing them for being poor.

Penny Cole

The 'Tsar' of Downing Street

Louise Casey is an archetypal New Labour apparatchik. She doesn’t care too much about human rights (if at all) and believes that the state’s priority is to identify and punish people as a way of changing behaviour. Listening to her is enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

Casey is a classic case of a poacher turned gamekeeper. She made her name in the housing world, rising to deputy director of Shelter. Recruited to New Labour in 1997, Casey was appointed to head the government's rough sleepers unit and earned the title, "homelessness Tsar". She immediately declared that handing out soup and sleeping bags to those living on the street was merely perpetuating their misery.

The government was determined to rid the streets of the destitute and claimed a great success. Her old employers disputed her claims. The charity points out that the number of homeless people is at record levels and now stands over 100,000. "Homelessness is now a hidden problem. We want the government to build more affordable homes," says Shelter.

After this great achievement, Casey was appointed “respect Tsar” and headed the Home Office’s so-called anti-social behaviour (ASB) unit. This immediately set about criminalising young people by handing them ASB orders (Asbos) through the civil courts. When the orders were invariably broken, the teenagers were often jailed. Other “undesirables” also became targets, leading Harry Fletcher, from the National Association of Probation Officers (Napo), to say of Casey. "She seems to be defending every Asbo ever made. We are concerned that the original purpose of the legislation has been exceeded."

Napo is one of 30 organisations, including Liberty and the Howard League for Penal Reform, that banded together to form "Asbo Concern". Fletcher adds: "[The orders] are being used to sweep anybody off the street who is deemed to be undesirable: the mentally ill, those with Asperberger's syndrome and so on. People are being locked up for breaching orders imposed for offences, such as prostitution or begging, that are not imprisonable.” While she was “respect Tsar”, Casey famously made an expletive-ridden speech to senior police officers which joked about binge drinking.

After the respect issue was taken care of, Casey turned her attention to the criminal justice system. Now A cabinet office adviser and would-be “crime Tsar”, Casey today announced that the system is "distant, unaccountable and unanswerable". Her analysis was typically brutal and authoritarian: "We're all a little tired of hearing about the human rights and civil liberties of people who break the law. For years we have been listening to that - who is speaking up for the rights of law-abiding decent people?" she told BBC Breakfast. She recommends that offenders serving community sentences be made more "visible" to identify that they are being punished for breaking the law.

Casey said: "Once these people commit crimes they disappear into the system. We need to get over some of the hand-wringing that says we cannot put them in a uniform." She also suggests the government should consider contracting out enforcement of community work from the probation service and that probation officers be given powers to extend the time served by offenders on community service.

So now Britain is set to become a sort of Guantanamo Bay camp, where the unfortunate inmates at the notorious Camp X-ray wear orange jump suits so that they can be more easily identified. When you see someone in the street wearing an offender’s “uniform”, you will have Casey and New Labour to thank for the latest in a long line of human rights abuses that resonate with some of the darkest days of European history.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor