1 00:00:00,180 --> 00:00:10,080 The more specials we have. The sensitive criminologist own Professor Ian Lowe delivering the lecture in murder is professor of criminology and 2 00:00:10,560 --> 00:00:17,220 Professorial Son of All Souls College at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. 3 00:00:18,000 --> 00:00:24,840 In arrived in Oxford in 2005, having previously taught at Heal the University of Edinburgh. 4 00:00:25,350 --> 00:00:33,810 It has published extensively on policing, private security, public sensibilities towards crime, penal policy and culture. 5 00:00:34,910 --> 00:00:40,950 The last two years, Ian is focussed on exploring the politics of crime and the public roles of criminology. 6 00:00:41,400 --> 00:00:46,560 First Strand, which was brought together in his book called Public Criminology. 7 00:00:47,190 --> 00:00:55,829 The next stage of the project focuses on ideologies in crime control after the current academic year and has been awarded a 8 00:00:55,830 --> 00:01:06,030 mid-career fellowship by the Independent Social Research Foundation to pursue this research titled Insert the Politics of Crime, 9 00:01:06,570 --> 00:01:10,170 which feels a little more prescient and indeed necessary this week. 10 00:01:11,220 --> 00:01:15,629 Today's lecture is Crime Order Two Faces of Conservatism. 11 00:01:15,630 --> 00:01:23,550 And without further ado, I'll find you words. Thank you very much, Alpha, and thank you for that. 12 00:01:24,240 --> 00:01:29,580 Well, it's a great honour to be here, even though I spend most of my time here and. 13 00:01:29,660 --> 00:01:34,889 And to be delivering this final lecture and to the usual anxieties that attend these occasions, 14 00:01:34,890 --> 00:01:41,790 like when you've had to string together a coherent argument and all those things, I've managed to add an additional three of my own. 15 00:01:42,570 --> 00:01:44,639 So I just want to preface what I want to say by those. 16 00:01:44,640 --> 00:01:52,440 The first is, is as Alpers just kindly pointed out, this this lecture is part of a wider project, which I'm engaged in over the course of the year. 17 00:01:53,130 --> 00:01:59,720 So I've not suddenly developed an interest in conservatism. Per say, conservatism is one of the places on the map of political ideologies. 18 00:01:59,760 --> 00:02:02,820 I'm going to spend the year travelling around, 19 00:02:03,480 --> 00:02:10,799 and the assumption that kind of guides this project is that one of the things that gives crime control its kind of emotional charge, 20 00:02:10,800 --> 00:02:13,320 one of the one of the reasons that it kind of matters to us, 21 00:02:13,680 --> 00:02:18,809 one of the reasons why the question of crime is so difficult to reduce simply to questions of what 22 00:02:18,810 --> 00:02:24,120 works and what's effective is because when people come at that question or their series of questions, 23 00:02:24,570 --> 00:02:28,650 they do so from a particular place on the ideological map. 24 00:02:29,340 --> 00:02:34,620 And their location on that place changes the ways in which they think about the topic, 25 00:02:35,100 --> 00:02:42,630 the kinds of meaning and priority they gave to certain significant concepts order, authority, legitimacy, the state rights and so on and so forth. 26 00:02:42,900 --> 00:02:49,590 The kinds of institutions I think one might mobilise to to address crime and so on and so on. 27 00:02:49,800 --> 00:02:55,770 So the project is, in a sense, an attempt to kind of trace out and map those connections. 28 00:02:55,770 --> 00:03:01,400 It also has its policy title and our first just alluded to called In Search of a Better Politics of Crime. 29 00:03:01,410 --> 00:03:08,459 Let's start with some simple, which is that how are we might think about that project that it requires not merely 30 00:03:08,460 --> 00:03:12,750 better information about how criminal justice institutions work or do not work, 31 00:03:13,080 --> 00:03:16,710 but also requires new and better ideas. 32 00:03:17,010 --> 00:03:20,610 So my justification for this kind of tool of the political landscape is in part 33 00:03:20,790 --> 00:03:27,660 an attempt to try and mine resources for thinking about that a wider project. 34 00:03:27,930 --> 00:03:34,080 Now, on good days, this all seems important and worthwhile and a great thing to be spending this part of my life on. 35 00:03:34,620 --> 00:03:39,320 On bad days. It seems hopelessly ambitious and ridiculous and I wonder why even bothered. 36 00:03:40,290 --> 00:03:43,290 So the additional anxiety that attends this talk is the first outing the 37 00:03:43,290 --> 00:03:48,590 project has had is that my attempts to make sense of this will be a test case, 38 00:03:48,630 --> 00:03:52,830 whether I can do it anywhere else right now. 39 00:03:53,610 --> 00:03:56,009 Having said that, there's that anxiety. 40 00:03:56,010 --> 00:04:05,250 Number two is that conservatism presents particular kinds of challenges for trying to do this, which I'll come on to in a minute. 41 00:04:05,880 --> 00:04:09,390 I also feel a kind of double outsider to the task. 42 00:04:09,390 --> 00:04:12,900 So I'll fess up at the beginning that I never thought of myself as a conservative. 43 00:04:13,350 --> 00:04:17,760 And more importantly, for this purpose, I'm not a political theorist. 44 00:04:18,570 --> 00:04:23,940 So much of the time I feel myself scrambling around in unknown territory without the requisite, 45 00:04:23,940 --> 00:04:28,290 requisite skills to be able to navigate effectively or securely. 46 00:04:28,410 --> 00:04:34,170 And my hope is that the territory I think I'm trying to situate myself in is that 47 00:04:34,170 --> 00:04:38,670 under-explored terrain at the boundary between criminology and political theory. 48 00:04:38,670 --> 00:04:45,390 So if this project goes off well, I will at least most of illuminated some of that territory. 49 00:04:46,440 --> 00:04:51,030 Okay. The third anxiety was occasioned by the traumatic events of Tuesday. 50 00:04:52,200 --> 00:04:59,610 So my worry now is what I'm about to say for the next 45 minutes or so will be heard and interpreted through the lens of. 51 00:05:00,090 --> 00:05:03,399 Trump's triumph as president elect of the United States. 52 00:05:03,400 --> 00:05:06,690 And I was joking with Karen yesterday. I could have just spent the day rewriting it. 53 00:05:08,670 --> 00:05:15,540 I kind of hope that doesn't happen, not least because this paper was not written with that outcome in mind, 54 00:05:16,380 --> 00:05:20,550 nor do I think it will greatly help to understand what's going on. 55 00:05:20,640 --> 00:05:26,340 So for one or two reasons to come back to, in fact, there's another bit of this emerging book on populism and technocracy, 56 00:05:26,340 --> 00:05:34,870 which I think rather still tangentially gets at the question of what's going on in that dimension of contemporary politics. 57 00:05:34,890 --> 00:05:41,820 So I rather draw the hope that we don't reread everything I'm about to say through that particular prism, 58 00:05:41,820 --> 00:05:48,470 tempting that it may be the slight qualification to that goes something like this. 59 00:05:48,480 --> 00:05:55,049 I think that the scary and dangerous world that we now appear to be living in creates all 60 00:05:55,050 --> 00:05:59,700 kinds of responsibilities for us as academics and thinkers and researchers and writers. 61 00:05:59,700 --> 00:06:03,930 And the Board of Criminology blog that was posted yesterday kind of articulated some of that. 62 00:06:04,290 --> 00:06:14,820 One of those tasks, it seems to me, one of our tasks in this world is to try and understand what makes or what something about the social world, 63 00:06:14,850 --> 00:06:23,460 the cluster of sensibilities, the accumulation of fears and fantasies that could lead millions of people to put a cross next to the name Donald Trump. 64 00:06:24,090 --> 00:06:29,730 And some of those people are just angry white men. Some of them are women, some of them are Hispanics, some of them were Muslims. 65 00:06:30,150 --> 00:06:37,100 And it seems to be beholden to try and understand that worldview and that sensibility. 66 00:06:37,110 --> 00:06:45,270 And in a sense, I think what I'm trying to do rather closer to home in relation to conservatism is something akin to that. 67 00:06:45,540 --> 00:06:46,500 Right. I can start now. 68 00:06:50,930 --> 00:06:56,989 I think it's safe to say that during the this is a 50th anniversary lecture, during the 50 years that this centre has been in existence, 69 00:06:56,990 --> 00:07:02,480 in one form or another, conservatism has been this country's dominant political tradition. 70 00:07:02,720 --> 00:07:09,020 And I think one can also safely say that conservatism has been one of the political traditions that 71 00:07:09,020 --> 00:07:17,510 has most fully animated and contributed to the rise of a certain kind of a motif and heated up. 72 00:07:17,870 --> 00:07:28,339 Law and Order politics is a cliché of British politics to say that law and order or crime and punishment are somehow naturally conservative issues, 73 00:07:28,340 --> 00:07:36,829 by which is usually meant some version of the claim that somehow voters implicitly trust the Conservatives to know what to do about crime, 74 00:07:36,830 --> 00:07:42,950 to be tough on it, to back the police, to be tough on offenders, to sympathise with victims and so on and so forth. 75 00:07:43,340 --> 00:07:48,680 And some of the most influential accounts of the politics of crime over the last three or four decades. 76 00:07:48,680 --> 00:07:55,790 You think of Stuart Hall, the town's policing the crisis or the culture of control or some of O'Malley's work have attended to the ways in which, 77 00:07:56,300 --> 00:08:05,720 in a sense, crime got wrapped up with the kind of remaking and resurgence of a certain kind of conservative politics. 78 00:08:06,500 --> 00:08:17,840 Now, despite that, I mean, I think it's also the case that one is hard pressed to think of many influential conservative writers on crime. 79 00:08:18,230 --> 00:08:22,070 And the fact that James Q Wilson will pop up once or twice in the next 45 minutes, 80 00:08:22,610 --> 00:08:28,670 gets so frequently mentioned in this context is because to some extent he stands as the exception. 81 00:08:29,330 --> 00:08:33,440 I think it's also true to say, especially in this country, less so in the States, 82 00:08:33,440 --> 00:08:38,540 but also to some extent in the states that there is no vibrant tradition or paradigm 83 00:08:38,540 --> 00:08:44,330 of conservative criminology to which one can point to or analyse or identify. 84 00:08:45,230 --> 00:08:52,700 And indeed. Most provocatively, you could say that conservatism kind of functions as criminologist. 85 00:08:52,730 --> 00:08:57,770 Other, in other words, is a kind of external, emotive, common sense about crime. 86 00:08:58,010 --> 00:09:04,940 Which criminology kind of sets itself the task of demystifying and seeking to contest? 87 00:09:05,450 --> 00:09:10,490 Now, I think it's an interesting question why that antagonistic relationship might well have developed. 88 00:09:11,120 --> 00:09:17,700 I think one plausible answer to it is that liberalism sorry, criminology is a kind of creature of enlightenment liberalism. 89 00:09:17,720 --> 00:09:23,480 It sees as one of its constituting tasks, putting reason to use in the service of social betterment. 90 00:09:23,810 --> 00:09:29,780 Whereas, as we shall see, conservatism in many ways is best understood as a counter enlightenment tradition, 91 00:09:29,780 --> 00:09:37,070 one that refuses to be seduced by the idea that we're always capable of making social and moral progress. 92 00:09:37,790 --> 00:09:43,880 But nonetheless, the result, I think, is that conservatism has become one of criminology buzzwords. 93 00:09:44,390 --> 00:09:48,080 It gets bandied around as if we all somehow know what it means. 94 00:09:48,350 --> 00:09:54,290 We all know what's wrong with it, and we all know we need to spend no serious time thinking about it. 95 00:09:54,760 --> 00:10:02,240 That therefore one struggles in criminology, I think to find many or indeed any serious or systematic or sympathetic accounts 96 00:10:02,510 --> 00:10:08,570 of what conservatism actually is and the ways in which it operates in our field. 97 00:10:08,780 --> 00:10:18,230 Still less why some of its ideas and concepts and claims can resonate so powerfully among so many of our CO citizens. 98 00:10:19,040 --> 00:10:23,059 So my aim for the next how long? Keep an eye on the time, 99 00:10:23,060 --> 00:10:32,690 because I haven't got any kind any any kind of timekeeper anywhere near me is to offer some kind of rational reconstruction of. 100 00:10:34,850 --> 00:10:40,429 What it is to be a conservative and what kinds of arguments and beliefs and values and claims 101 00:10:40,430 --> 00:10:45,560 have been marshalled around the court in question by people who travel under that label. 102 00:10:45,920 --> 00:10:51,770 And I want to do this with an orientation which is, in the first instance, anthropological, by which I mean, 103 00:10:51,770 --> 00:10:59,020 I try and want to try and recover and clarify from the inside what it means to be a conservative. 104 00:10:59,030 --> 00:11:06,200 A more conservative take on crime looks like with a view to offering something that might look like a kind of best case account of that position. 105 00:11:06,680 --> 00:11:11,120 One fully committed conservative would at least recognise, if not fully agree with, 106 00:11:11,810 --> 00:11:21,260 as well as to try to understand its emotional and cultural appeal and engage in some kind of dialogue with its central claims. 107 00:11:22,790 --> 00:11:27,770 Now, this task is is not without its challenges. 108 00:11:28,100 --> 00:11:35,000 Three of which I just want to mention by way of extent, finalising this extended introduction. 109 00:11:35,520 --> 00:11:43,430 And the first of this is the claim pressed by many who think of themselves as conservatives. 110 00:11:43,700 --> 00:11:46,370 The conservatism isn't really an ideology at all. 111 00:11:47,510 --> 00:11:54,470 The idea here is not simply that conservatism lacks the kind of founding texts and authors that you would find in liberalism, for example. 112 00:11:55,040 --> 00:12:04,250 But to try and reduce conservatism to a set of abstract principles and concepts is in some sense to distort it and therefore to fail to understand it. 113 00:12:04,640 --> 00:12:09,170 On this view, conservatism is a kind of sensibility, a kind of way of being in the world. 114 00:12:09,770 --> 00:12:16,970 It's just the disposition of those who are not minded to surrender a known good for some kind of unknown better. 115 00:12:18,300 --> 00:12:22,230 Now, I think one fully has to grasp this kind of what you might think of as this kind 116 00:12:22,230 --> 00:12:26,190 of aesthetic dimension of conservatism is part of what that tradition means, 117 00:12:26,670 --> 00:12:31,830 while also remembering that it has an attendant political character. 118 00:12:31,860 --> 00:12:34,710 In other words, what conservatism does offer, among other things, 119 00:12:34,950 --> 00:12:41,760 is a very distinctive account of the activity and tasks of governing and by extension, of trying to govern crime. 120 00:12:42,090 --> 00:12:47,280 It necessarily has a kind of ideological map which enables people who think of 121 00:12:47,280 --> 00:12:51,479 themselves as conservatives to know what they what they approve of and disapprove of, 122 00:12:51,480 --> 00:12:56,190 who their friends are, who their enemies are, and what direction they want society to go or not to go, and so on and so forth. 123 00:12:56,580 --> 00:13:01,950 And conservatism has to be analysed in those terms as an ideology. 124 00:13:03,210 --> 00:13:06,930 The second challenge, pressed often by conservative critics, 125 00:13:07,560 --> 00:13:17,520 is that conservatism is little more than the ideology or political program of privileged groups trying to cling to their power and privileges. 126 00:13:17,970 --> 00:13:24,930 On this view, conservative ideas now in inverted commas, are typically pressed in bad faith. 127 00:13:25,200 --> 00:13:30,300 They are the motivated justifications of people who are trying to cling to their privilege. 128 00:13:31,680 --> 00:13:38,760 Therefore, what is required in analysing conservative ideas is some attention to the context out of which they emerge, 129 00:13:39,150 --> 00:13:43,680 and not so much the analysis of ideology in the terms I am trying to present here, 130 00:13:44,010 --> 00:13:47,879 but a kind of ideology critique in the kind of critical theory sense of that term. 131 00:13:47,880 --> 00:13:58,170 In other words, a kind of unmasking of those claims to a masking of those ideas and their relationship to existing structures of power and inequality. 132 00:13:59,400 --> 00:14:06,720 Now, I kind of have some sympathy with that view. I think it's I think the view the idea, for example, that equality is natural, 133 00:14:07,440 --> 00:14:12,209 is more likely to appeal to people who benefit from existing distributions of society's 134 00:14:12,210 --> 00:14:16,230 benefits and burdens than those who are at the bottom end of that distribution. 135 00:14:17,100 --> 00:14:21,750 But I think that connection between interest and ideas is not unique to conservatism. 136 00:14:22,950 --> 00:14:33,120 And I also think that reducing conservatism to self-interest in those ways should not free us of the burden of actually trying to examine. 137 00:14:34,110 --> 00:14:39,840 Conservative claims about the world, the kinds of questions they posed, the answers they gave, and as importantly, 138 00:14:40,050 --> 00:14:45,060 why they appeal not only to the the the entitled and the privileged, 139 00:14:45,330 --> 00:14:50,640 but to significant proportions of the downtrodden, the fearful, the fatalistic and so on. 140 00:14:52,000 --> 00:14:57,220 Challenge to challenge three what conservatism, which conservatism you're talking about. 141 00:14:58,110 --> 00:15:06,270 The question here is a kind of question about particularity, a question about whether it when trying to understand something called conservatism. 142 00:15:06,780 --> 00:15:13,230 There is some kind of entity that you can grasp that has travelled through time and across jurisdictions, 143 00:15:13,650 --> 00:15:19,640 whether you're really confronted with analysing a particular kind of plural and multiple conservatism. 144 00:15:20,370 --> 00:15:23,639 And that challenge is particularly acute in relation to conservatism precisely 145 00:15:23,640 --> 00:15:28,350 because it's become clear it's a kind of philosophy of attachment to place. 146 00:15:28,620 --> 00:15:31,650 It's always has a kind of rootedness in particular locations, 147 00:15:32,040 --> 00:15:39,179 and no one has more recently put it as ever chanted, Conservatives of all nations unite so and so. 148 00:15:39,180 --> 00:15:47,009 In analysing conservatism, one needs, I think, to attend to its particular kind of historical rootedness while also being alive to the 149 00:15:47,010 --> 00:15:53,250 kinds of family resemblances that might exist between different kinds of conservatism. 150 00:15:53,460 --> 00:15:59,880 Now, my way of solving this problem and putting some boundaries around what I'm attempting to do is to make the principal 151 00:15:59,880 --> 00:16:08,040 focus of my analysis that tradition of sceptical and British and voice to some extent European conservatism. 152 00:16:08,580 --> 00:16:12,780 And to make that my focus and to think about its connections to and points of 153 00:16:12,780 --> 00:16:17,880 departure from the allied traditions with which it has travelled in recent years, 154 00:16:17,910 --> 00:16:22,830 notably American neoconservatism and neo liberalism. 155 00:16:23,850 --> 00:16:30,990 So what follows is my attempt to give a kind of plausible rendition of. 156 00:16:32,680 --> 00:16:39,370 A concern that that that that sceptical British conservative worldview and what it is has to say about 157 00:16:39,370 --> 00:16:45,640 questions of crime and punishment is not the only way that you can think about conservative takes on crime. 158 00:16:46,330 --> 00:16:54,760 But it seems to me to be a plausible one and one that deserves more serious scrutiny and attention than it typically is received within criminology. 159 00:16:54,940 --> 00:17:02,560 And the argument in some, for those of you like to drop off and reappear at the end is this that one finds in that tradition? 160 00:17:04,330 --> 00:17:10,840 This is too crude. I don't know how committed I am to this, both a source of penal aggravation and a source of penal restraint, 161 00:17:11,140 --> 00:17:19,600 by which I mean a kind of moralistic conception of crime and an attendant conception of order which 162 00:17:19,600 --> 00:17:29,170 is concerned with ultimately the reassert the reassertion of sovereign authority and control, 163 00:17:30,460 --> 00:17:37,180 but also at the same time a kind of scepticism towards the state that always leaves conservatives being. 164 00:17:40,190 --> 00:17:50,540 Reticent, ambivalent about certain practices of punishment and in the end, seeking to find non-peaceful forms of socialisation and social regulation. 165 00:17:51,530 --> 00:17:56,780 And for the next 40 minutes or so, I'm going to try and elaborate on all that. 166 00:17:59,720 --> 00:18:05,510 Right. It's become a kind of orthodoxy of the literature on the politics of crime. 167 00:18:05,510 --> 00:18:09,290 To say something along the following lines that the. 168 00:18:13,060 --> 00:18:18,520 Thank you. I have to say something along the following lines. 169 00:18:19,170 --> 00:18:26,620 The the rise and resurgence of conservative politics in the 1970s had something to do with the break that it made, 170 00:18:26,620 --> 00:18:30,520 not only with a general post-war consensus about economic and social governance, 171 00:18:30,790 --> 00:18:36,100 but a more particular liberal consensus about the management and governance of crime, 172 00:18:36,670 --> 00:18:41,709 which kind of held that crime was an issue to be managed off the political stage by experts, 173 00:18:41,710 --> 00:18:50,060 by by senior practitioners, by government officials, without much public fuss, as it were. 174 00:18:50,890 --> 00:18:56,049 The break with that tradition enabled effectively conservative politicians to tap 175 00:18:56,050 --> 00:19:02,170 into and articulate certain public fears and anxieties about rising levels of crime, 176 00:19:02,350 --> 00:19:07,510 and to plug them into a wide, wider narrative about the crisis of social authority, 177 00:19:07,780 --> 00:19:11,650 about a crisis of government, about questions of race and so on and so forth. 178 00:19:11,680 --> 00:19:15,970 That much is familiar to anyone who's ever read. Policing the crisis, for example. 179 00:19:17,230 --> 00:19:17,440 Now, 180 00:19:17,440 --> 00:19:25,719 much of the analysis of that tends to focus as either on the kind of consequences of that in terms of what then happened in terms of criminal justice, 181 00:19:25,720 --> 00:19:28,330 politics, or on its kind of electoral dividends, 182 00:19:28,330 --> 00:19:34,510 the ways in which conservative conservative party use crime, as it were, to leave a working class support. 183 00:19:34,930 --> 00:19:39,190 But I think that claim is it's also worth trying to situate conceptually. 184 00:19:39,610 --> 00:19:45,489 And then what by which I mean that there is something about the kind of morphology or 185 00:19:45,490 --> 00:19:51,790 architecture of conservative ideology that means it is able to capitalise on and have 186 00:19:51,790 --> 00:19:59,079 things to say about crime that flow from its conceptual ordering and in particular 187 00:19:59,080 --> 00:20:04,960 from the centrality of the concepts of order and stability to its general world view. 188 00:20:05,620 --> 00:20:14,889 This makes conservatism kind of at ease when questions of crime are under discussion in a way that liberals and social Democrats, 189 00:20:14,890 --> 00:20:22,240 I think, are just never quite at ease. And it means that they have a kind of a for conceptual as well as political reasons, 190 00:20:22,570 --> 00:20:28,000 have a capacity to kind of get on the front foot, to be attuned to the uses of fear, 191 00:20:28,780 --> 00:20:37,570 to be able to kind of very easily tell a story about crime that can kind of connect with a broader set of questions about social discipline, 192 00:20:37,600 --> 00:20:41,559 breakdown, governmental authority and the like. 193 00:20:41,560 --> 00:20:43,600 And I want to elaborate on that claim. 194 00:20:45,460 --> 00:20:54,210 Now, perhaps the best way in to that is to think about the crisis of rehabilitation, is that mid to late 1970s, as is as is well known, 195 00:20:54,970 --> 00:21:01,390 some version of the rehabilitative ideal or what David Garland calls penal welfarism had become by the mid 1970s, 196 00:21:01,390 --> 00:21:08,740 a kind of governing orthodoxy of U.S. and U.K. criminal justice policy, the organising rationale of the system. 197 00:21:09,550 --> 00:21:15,730 And it came under both a critique of the kind of technocratic coins that none of these programs appeared to work in the 1970s, 198 00:21:16,120 --> 00:21:23,710 as well as a liberal critique focuses on questions of due process, suspects, rights, the control of discretion, and so on and so forth. 199 00:21:24,100 --> 00:21:29,710 But there also emerged at that time a distinctive conservative version of the critique of rehabilitation, 200 00:21:31,090 --> 00:21:36,100 which largely was launched from outside the system and its governing premises, 201 00:21:36,760 --> 00:21:46,300 and which challenged in the wholesale way all the assumptions that held that view of what crime management without together. 202 00:21:46,870 --> 00:21:50,200 And there are three central claims that just briefly want to articulate. 203 00:21:50,210 --> 00:21:58,480 The first is the kind of critique of the idea that crime should be considered a kind of presenting system of other problems, 204 00:21:58,480 --> 00:22:01,900 whether they be sociological or whether they be social or psychological. 205 00:22:02,110 --> 00:22:09,370 And therefore, we need principally some kind of remedial treatment or intervention on the grounds that what this does is 206 00:22:09,370 --> 00:22:17,350 deny the responsibility and moral agency of offenders and their need to account for what they have done. 207 00:22:17,740 --> 00:22:24,220 And, of course, this went alongside and kind of married very closely with a kind of broader but connected account, 208 00:22:24,430 --> 00:22:28,659 a critique of the welfare state in its capacity to generate perverse outcomes, 209 00:22:28,660 --> 00:22:34,600 welfare dependency, to simply not take account of individual responsibility and the like. 210 00:22:35,230 --> 00:22:42,700 Secondly, the I think the rehabilitation, at least in that kind of grand organising rationale for the system terms, 211 00:22:43,120 --> 00:22:54,010 struck conservatives as a kind of as resting on the unwarranted assumption that you can use government to kind of engineer better outcomes. 212 00:22:54,220 --> 00:23:00,190 It was a kind of example of governmental overreach or what Michael Oakeshott calls rationalism in politics. 213 00:23:00,670 --> 00:23:05,350 And it also rested on a series of erroneous assumptions about the basically benign nature 214 00:23:05,350 --> 00:23:11,470 of human impulses and the kind of know what conservatives to talk to be the naive hope. 215 00:23:11,970 --> 00:23:19,200 That you could use state intervention of various kinds to straighten out what camp once called the crooked timber of humanity. 216 00:23:20,220 --> 00:23:29,160 And this required, thirdly, a kind of reckoning with certain kinds of realities about human behaviour, 217 00:23:29,370 --> 00:23:35,129 and it's resistant to manipulation, which is where James Q Wilson enters our story, 218 00:23:35,130 --> 00:23:44,730 because in the very influential book originally published in 1975, starts with the then arresting claim that public policies need to be designed, 219 00:23:44,910 --> 00:23:49,740 according to what he called a clear and sober understanding of human nature. 220 00:23:49,980 --> 00:23:56,520 And in case anyone was in any doubt what he meant by that, he closed the book 200 odd pages later. 221 00:23:56,850 --> 00:24:01,770 With this, wicked people exist. I mean, this is now become fairly well known. 222 00:24:01,980 --> 00:24:04,560 Nothing if I was you can you can read it behind you. 223 00:24:05,790 --> 00:24:14,730 This was nothing short of a kind of tearing up of of 50 or so years of both criminological orthodoxy 224 00:24:16,050 --> 00:24:21,600 and a large amount of kind of orthodox and official assumptions about crime and its causes. 225 00:24:21,600 --> 00:24:30,719 And what we need to do about it. And what it ushered in was both a very different conception of how we ought to think about crime and a 226 00:24:30,720 --> 00:24:36,900 rather different conception of the kinds of instruments are required if we are to adequately respond to it. 227 00:24:39,770 --> 00:24:46,490 Right now, conservatives are often derided by their critics for moralising about crime. 228 00:24:46,690 --> 00:24:54,950 And I think if you're a conservative, this charge makes no sense, because for conservatives, crime simply is a moral issue. 229 00:24:55,640 --> 00:25:02,780 And to forget about or neglect that fact is just to ignore something constructive about the 230 00:25:02,780 --> 00:25:08,030 nature of crime that involves some kind of crossing of a line between right and wrong. 231 00:25:08,690 --> 00:25:16,099 I also think that helps to explain further explain conservatives in a rather difficult and antagonistic relationship, 232 00:25:16,100 --> 00:25:20,660 both with criminology in particular and social science in general. 233 00:25:21,320 --> 00:25:29,660 Because conservatives have a distaste for forms of causal explanation of of crime, which appear to face individual responsibility, 234 00:25:29,990 --> 00:25:38,060 condone bad behaviour, complicate the question of punishment, surround the offender as Margaret Thatcher once, nicely put it, with a fog of excuses. 235 00:25:39,710 --> 00:25:44,600 I think conservatives are also or if there is a conservative sensibility which is also rather 236 00:25:44,600 --> 00:25:49,879 offended or at least bemused by the kind of criminological posture in relation to crime, 237 00:25:49,880 --> 00:25:58,970 which has the capacity to step back and just think in rather distance and analytical ways about crime as a social problem. 238 00:25:59,060 --> 00:26:03,920 And and I know this because I've encountered it in TV studios and various other places 239 00:26:04,220 --> 00:26:08,300 where the offence that is being given by doing that is not what you have to say. 240 00:26:08,480 --> 00:26:18,170 But the mere fact that you can think about crime in such abstracted rationalistic, seemingly morally, in different ways. 241 00:26:18,800 --> 00:26:20,900 Now, the reason for mentioning it, I think, 242 00:26:21,290 --> 00:26:28,069 is that it's there is the capacity to think about crime as a moral problem, which also enables conservatives to, 243 00:26:28,070 --> 00:26:31,190 as it were, get on the front foot, to be assertive, 244 00:26:31,190 --> 00:26:36,769 to have things to say that connect with public sentiment in relationship to broader public discourse. 245 00:26:36,770 --> 00:26:43,969 A point I'll come back to shortly. So what elements of the conservative story about crime enable it to do that? 246 00:26:43,970 --> 00:26:53,480 Yet we briefly run through three of them. First, a critique of structural explanations of crime and why it happens, why it might go up and down. 247 00:26:53,510 --> 00:26:57,170 I've written here disconnecting crime and social justice. That's a mistake. 248 00:26:57,200 --> 00:27:01,370 But because no conservative would think of what they doing in quite those terms. 249 00:27:02,510 --> 00:27:08,240 And that was a critique of the idea that crime is somehow a product of poverty, of inequality, of unemployment. 250 00:27:09,080 --> 00:27:16,069 One finds this the hope, the whole point that James Cooper was made in thinking about crime, about the paradox of crime in the sixties, 251 00:27:16,070 --> 00:27:23,450 being the coexistence of rising crime and rising living standards, and was a was a kind of case in point. 252 00:27:23,870 --> 00:27:31,250 And there is both a kind of there's a kind of empirical objection that gets made to this, but also a basic a more basic objection. 253 00:27:31,490 --> 00:27:38,000 The thinking about crime in those terms is to some extent, to make some kind of a category mistake. 254 00:27:38,480 --> 00:27:42,470 Secondly, in the conservative style, if crime is about poverty at all. 255 00:27:42,740 --> 00:27:52,549 It's about moral poverty. The starting axiom of of of a kind of conservative account of human nature is that left to our own devices, 256 00:27:52,550 --> 00:27:58,250 without our impulses being controlled and regulated, human beings will, on the whole, behave badly. 257 00:27:58,820 --> 00:28:04,910 They therefore need to be taught to be instructed to have their impulses controlled and so on and so forth. 258 00:28:05,360 --> 00:28:09,290 And the story about the rising levels of crime in the second half of the 20th 259 00:28:09,290 --> 00:28:13,010 century for conservatives is therefore principally a cultural and moral one, 260 00:28:13,190 --> 00:28:19,250 not an economic and social one. It's about what James cubism called the triumph of self-expression. 261 00:28:19,520 --> 00:28:23,720 It's about the dismembered families. It's about the erosion of discipline. 262 00:28:24,110 --> 00:28:29,390 It's about the triumph of rights over entitlements and so on and so forth. 263 00:28:30,110 --> 00:28:35,660 And this relates thirdly, you know, come back to this much more at the end to an important aspect of the cause of this, 264 00:28:35,960 --> 00:28:39,830 which isn't ultimately about police and punishment, 265 00:28:40,220 --> 00:28:47,030 but is about the collapse or failure of certain kinds of agencies of social and moral instruction in civil society. 266 00:28:47,270 --> 00:28:49,489 It's about the failure of churches, parents, 267 00:28:49,490 --> 00:29:00,380 teachers and others to provide the the appropriate forms of moral instruction, inculcating responsibility and restraint. 268 00:29:00,620 --> 00:29:09,890 Now, we'll come back to that at the end, but just two points about about the kind of broader cultural resonance of that. 269 00:29:11,230 --> 00:29:19,160 Well. One. Okay. Firstly, I think what concern what this kind of conservative story does about crime in broader public discourse, 270 00:29:19,310 --> 00:29:28,670 it was kind of was kind of a license and inject into into discussions of crime a certain kind of emotionality. 271 00:29:29,090 --> 00:29:36,500 In other words, it in a way that the all forms of liberalism and social democracy cannot do. 272 00:29:36,530 --> 00:29:39,790 In other words, it said that is. Perfectly okay. 273 00:29:41,280 --> 00:29:51,300 Or we should stop thinking about crime just in the kind of arid language of cost benefit or using abstract theories of social causation. 274 00:29:51,720 --> 00:29:52,260 But instead, 275 00:29:52,260 --> 00:30:01,079 it's perfectly proper and legitimate to treat crime as an occasion for certain kinds of emotional utterances for thinking about indignation, blame, 276 00:30:01,080 --> 00:30:09,270 censure, stigma and the like, and for thinking about the are all solutions to crime using a language of responsibility, 277 00:30:09,570 --> 00:30:12,510 virtue, duty, and so on and so forth. 278 00:30:12,810 --> 00:30:22,440 And it's that moralising move that gives conservative ideology the capacity to tap into a certain strand of popular sentiment about these issues. 279 00:30:23,490 --> 00:30:31,260 Secondly, it also means it becomes very easy for conservatives to speak about crime in a kind of idiom of common sense, 280 00:30:31,620 --> 00:30:37,410 which which can kind of say we are saying things that are just obviously things that you obviously know to be true. 281 00:30:37,650 --> 00:30:38,790 We are on your side. 282 00:30:38,970 --> 00:30:47,660 We are here to speak for the concerns of the silent majority, against the indifference of experts and elites and so on and so forth. 283 00:30:47,670 --> 00:30:54,060 Hence this this quote I found from Norman Tebbit in 1986, which is on the tape behind me. 284 00:30:54,360 --> 00:31:01,350 I mean, those of you who've been paying any attention notice that Theresa may said something extremely similar, both about this and about migration. 285 00:31:01,620 --> 00:31:06,330 In her first conference speech as conservative leader several weeks ago. 286 00:31:08,070 --> 00:31:16,650 And we're doing fine. Okay. So I'm conservatism, if you like, as it were, 287 00:31:16,660 --> 00:31:25,320 locates crime as a kind of moral question that is a product of certain kinds of failures, of a web of institutions in civil society. 288 00:31:25,330 --> 00:31:34,060 And I'll come back to that point and things. I think it matters. But this does not detract conservatives from the idea that when crime is rising, 289 00:31:34,390 --> 00:31:42,850 that it calls for the firm hand of sovereign authority and the reassertion of control and discipline. 290 00:31:43,270 --> 00:31:50,500 And they seem to me to be two core components of conservative ideology which enable it to grasp the importance of that task. 291 00:31:50,770 --> 00:31:56,349 Firstly, an account of the primary responsibilities of the state, and secondly, the dominant place, 292 00:31:56,350 --> 00:32:03,250 the order and a particular conception of order has within the conservative world view. 293 00:32:03,280 --> 00:32:05,260 So let me take each of those things in turn. 294 00:32:05,710 --> 00:32:16,150 And the aforementioned Michael Oakeshott thinks about governing, as he puts it, as a specific and limited form of activity, 295 00:32:16,510 --> 00:32:25,150 which he thinks should be concerned with attending to society's arrangements in order to trying to regulate conflict and ensure peaceable behaviour. 296 00:32:25,420 --> 00:32:29,319 And that theme echoes throughout conservative philosophy the idea that government is a kind of 297 00:32:29,320 --> 00:32:35,740 limited task and that its principal job is not endless social improvement and social betterment, 298 00:32:36,100 --> 00:32:44,260 but the staving off, as John Grey puts it, of ever present evils, foremost among which is the avoidance of civil strife. 299 00:32:44,620 --> 00:32:49,179 And you find the same kinds of things throughout the kind of conservative pamphlets, 300 00:32:49,180 --> 00:32:55,659 ladies speeches and all the kind of things I've spent the last few weeks in the Western Library analysing this 301 00:32:55,660 --> 00:33:03,220 kind of echo of the idea of a limited but strong state whose first duty is the protection of its citizens. 302 00:33:03,970 --> 00:33:11,350 Now, this seems to me, is entangled in interesting ways with the priority that conservatives gave to the concept of order. 303 00:33:12,400 --> 00:33:13,510 And to understand that, 304 00:33:13,510 --> 00:33:21,250 I think you need to recognise that while conservatives believe in freedom and they believe in the they believe in the individual. 305 00:33:21,760 --> 00:33:28,450 Conservatism is not first and foremost, unlike liberalism, a philosophy of individual freedom. 306 00:33:28,870 --> 00:33:37,070 So in relation to. So in relation to questions of freedom, the conservative view of these things is yes, no. 307 00:33:37,160 --> 00:33:41,190 The balance between order and freedom requires constant vigilance and attention. 308 00:33:41,210 --> 00:33:43,460 And that's what politics is ultimately about. 309 00:33:43,880 --> 00:33:51,200 But we should be clear the order comes first that takes priority where there's a dispute between the two of them. 310 00:33:52,220 --> 00:33:57,490 And similarly, we need to remember that conservatism isn't first and foremost a philosophy of individualism. 311 00:33:57,500 --> 00:34:08,750 It's a philosophy of attachment to place, of belonging to families, neighbourhoods, communities, nations, to some conception of a home. 312 00:34:09,110 --> 00:34:13,640 And John, as a quote from John Grey, where he says very nicely before anything else, 313 00:34:14,120 --> 00:34:21,020 he says, before even even freedom, human beings need a home, a sense of home. 314 00:34:21,500 --> 00:34:29,989 Now, the reason why I think this matters, because it both accounts for the both the priority that conservatives give to a concept 315 00:34:29,990 --> 00:34:35,480 of order and the particular way in which they get that concept gets fleshed out. 316 00:34:35,960 --> 00:34:45,410 Because I don't think in the conservative worldview, order reduces to anaemic and operational sounding terms like safety or protection. 317 00:34:46,040 --> 00:34:48,830 There's always something much more going on, 318 00:34:49,160 --> 00:35:01,729 and that much more has to do with the attachment to and preservation of certain kinds of valued places and valued sources of belonging, 319 00:35:01,730 --> 00:35:09,740 whether they be whether they be home or family or neighbourhood or nation or some conception of the people and so on. 320 00:35:10,160 --> 00:35:17,870 And I think that makes order for conservatives in some really deep and important sense, a kind of boundary drawing exercise. 321 00:35:18,110 --> 00:35:24,499 When you think about order, you're thinking about questions of who we are and what we believe in, 322 00:35:24,500 --> 00:35:28,670 what are the boundaries of us, who threatens us, and so on and so forth. 323 00:35:28,670 --> 00:35:35,270 So it becomes a very rich and resonant and always symbolically loaded question, 324 00:35:35,570 --> 00:35:41,930 which has which circulates around the idea that has something to do with our shared home. 325 00:35:43,490 --> 00:35:47,570 Now, there are all kinds of things I'll say about that. I just want to say one, 326 00:35:49,070 --> 00:35:54,020 and that is I think this helps to explain something that if you if you read 327 00:35:54,020 --> 00:36:00,080 conservative publications on these over years strikes you very immediately, 328 00:36:00,380 --> 00:36:06,440 which is the kind of primacy the conservatives give to the police and the special 329 00:36:06,440 --> 00:36:13,250 affection that that institution possesses within the conservative conception of order. 330 00:36:14,600 --> 00:36:16,100 So when crime is at issue, 331 00:36:16,880 --> 00:36:27,800 it seems that there's something the Conservatives instinctively reach for this institution and that that idea that we must that we 332 00:36:27,800 --> 00:36:34,730 we must back the police is a kind of resonant and recurring theme of all kinds of conservative literature manifesto statements, 333 00:36:34,730 --> 00:36:37,879 pamphlets from the 19 well, from 1964 onwards, 334 00:36:37,880 --> 00:36:44,209 when I first noticed that it appears and it generally means two things firstly that 335 00:36:44,210 --> 00:36:49,490 we can be trusted to give material backing to this institution and in the end, 336 00:36:49,490 --> 00:36:56,540 only we as conservatives can be trusted to this to provide more, more officers, more power, more equipment, more training and so on and so forth. 337 00:36:57,320 --> 00:37:02,060 But as importantly, that they can be relied upon for our support. 338 00:37:02,270 --> 00:37:06,620 We will attend to questions of their morale. We will protect them from their critics. 339 00:37:06,950 --> 00:37:12,110 We will reassure them that they are doing a value job on our behalf and so on and so forth. 340 00:37:12,770 --> 00:37:16,220 And those are that is also a kind of resonant theme. 341 00:37:16,610 --> 00:37:19,910 Now, as anyone who's thought about these for 2 minutes will realise, 342 00:37:20,480 --> 00:37:25,190 that hasn't stopped Conservative administrations from being virulent critics of 343 00:37:25,190 --> 00:37:28,399 the police at various points in the last two decades and in various places, 344 00:37:28,400 --> 00:37:34,070 various times, also making attempts to take them on, to change them, to modernise them, and so on and so forth. 345 00:37:34,430 --> 00:37:38,300 All that is true, and I've written about that somewhere else. 346 00:37:39,650 --> 00:37:44,450 But it remains the case that that sits alongside a kind of effective commitment 347 00:37:44,450 --> 00:37:49,459 to what you might call the idea of policing or to what an animal kingdom 348 00:37:49,460 --> 00:37:55,520 may call the police force of the imagination which operates which continues 349 00:37:55,520 --> 00:37:59,840 to possess a kind of special place within conservative conceptions of order, 350 00:38:00,320 --> 00:38:11,389 but precisely because what it is imagined, as is both a line between civilisation and chaos, or slightly less dramatically as a kind of comforting, 351 00:38:11,390 --> 00:38:19,310 reassuring source of authority in everyday life and an institution that seems to have a kind of essentially conservative mission, 352 00:38:19,670 --> 00:38:30,440 i.e. to protect and preserve things that we value, whether they be our safety, our streets, our homes, our communities, our nation and so on. 353 00:38:30,530 --> 00:38:34,850 So for. Right. Okay. 354 00:38:36,020 --> 00:38:41,930 Up until this point, the underlying paper looked like that. From this point onwards, it looks like that. 355 00:38:43,520 --> 00:38:47,870 Which doesn't mean I haven't thought about it. It just means I'm really all down each sentence sentences yet. 356 00:38:47,870 --> 00:38:53,740 But still. We're also face to face. 357 00:38:54,520 --> 00:39:02,739 I think it would be a mistake to think that conservatives lack enthusiasm for the other institutions, 358 00:39:02,740 --> 00:39:08,590 which they instinctively reach for at times of social crisis and rising crime and violence and so on. 359 00:39:08,860 --> 00:39:14,530 Namely, the institution of punishment, and in particular the prison. 360 00:39:14,770 --> 00:39:18,750 And its. There is a further cliché about British politics. 361 00:39:18,760 --> 00:39:26,169 The Conservative Party members, backbenchers, Daily Mail readers can salivate excitedly at the thought of some of their citizens 362 00:39:26,170 --> 00:39:30,240 getting punished and are extremely enthusiastic for there to be more of it, 363 00:39:30,250 --> 00:39:35,320 for it to be harsher, more austere and nasty and so on and so forth. 364 00:39:35,980 --> 00:39:44,860 And I don't want to say that that kind of visceral, emotional enthusiasm for punishment hasn't been part of contemporary conservative politics. 365 00:39:45,490 --> 00:39:49,959 It's true to say that the return of the Conservatives to power in 1979 coincided with, 366 00:39:49,960 --> 00:39:55,600 among other things, the return of a language of retribution and deterrence to discussions of punishment. 367 00:39:55,990 --> 00:40:00,040 To return to debates about capital punishment in Parliament for a few years. 368 00:40:00,370 --> 00:40:04,960 To the reintroduction of short, sharp, short regimes in young offenders institutions. 369 00:40:05,590 --> 00:40:12,100 In the 1990s, Michael Howard, when he was in times actually enthusiastically declared that prison works, 370 00:40:12,130 --> 00:40:20,020 as he liked to say, and set about making penalties stiffer, making prison regimes more austere, and so on and so forth. 371 00:40:21,370 --> 00:40:30,250 So I don't want to. Everything that follows needs to be prefaced by the claim that no, at times of rising crime and violence and crisis, 372 00:40:30,970 --> 00:40:41,080 conservatives will be resolute and stern in the idea that one of the things that such crises require is the imposition of sovereign penal control. 373 00:40:42,580 --> 00:40:50,200 That having been said, I think, to to to leave the conservative account of punishment there is to is to produce an 374 00:40:50,200 --> 00:40:57,070 account with these which is kind of partial and risks forever lapsing into a caricature. 375 00:40:57,400 --> 00:41:04,150 Because alongside those enthusiasms, I think you're also finding conservative writings about about prisons and punishment, 376 00:41:04,420 --> 00:41:09,460 a kind of ongoing ambivalence about the institution of the prison in particular, 377 00:41:12,910 --> 00:41:23,500 which has often made conservatives in practical politics critiques of the prison system and advocates of penal reform. 378 00:41:24,830 --> 00:41:28,209 Is also the case that the kind of moralising story about crime, 379 00:41:28,210 --> 00:41:37,120 which conservatives tell has as one of its implications the idea that there is something futile about thinking you could do anything 380 00:41:37,120 --> 00:41:46,330 about crime using the institutions of police and punishment because its sources lie in the socialising institutions of civil society, 381 00:41:46,480 --> 00:41:50,260 and therefore that's also where its remedies need to be located. 382 00:41:50,470 --> 00:41:58,060 In other words, there are things in conservative philosophy that kind of temper, that enthusiasm for punishment, 383 00:41:58,600 --> 00:42:04,450 and which are both specifically criminal ones and have also something to do with a kind of scepticism about 384 00:42:04,450 --> 00:42:11,140 the state and about government as a solution to social problems which animates conservative thought. 385 00:42:11,590 --> 00:42:15,790 And I want to say a few words about both of those things. 386 00:42:17,170 --> 00:42:17,890 So I'm. 387 00:42:20,320 --> 00:42:29,710 It's kind of close to being an axiom of conservative philosophy that government should not be considered to be a kind of source of social betterment. 388 00:42:30,310 --> 00:42:38,980 An institution trying constantly to engineer progress should not be the source of endless innovation and so on and so on, 389 00:42:39,490 --> 00:42:47,880 but should be an institution about which we should train ourselves to think sceptically and expect expect less of. 390 00:42:47,890 --> 00:42:51,760 In other words, this an institution is somehow mired in cluelessness, 391 00:42:52,000 --> 00:42:57,910 is consistently fails to deliver, is beset by unintended consequences of various kinds. 392 00:42:58,150 --> 00:43:06,010 In other words, the what is required in relation to our thinking about governments is a certain kind of lowering of all expectation, 393 00:43:06,100 --> 00:43:13,870 which is why this kind of quote from Michael Oakeshott, which is on the board behind me, kind of rather captures that kind of. 394 00:43:14,170 --> 00:43:18,340 Stop thinking. Stop thinking that things are going to get better. 395 00:43:18,670 --> 00:43:28,719 We need to quiet you all down. Philosophy of government, which I think is central to conservative philosophy and why this matters in this context, 396 00:43:28,720 --> 00:43:34,810 I think because it does help generate what you might describe as a certain a certain kind of 397 00:43:34,810 --> 00:43:40,300 penal prudence in conservative thinking about punishment in general and prisons in particular, 398 00:43:41,560 --> 00:43:48,910 which which kind of manifest itself in the constant iteration of both the futility of prison, 399 00:43:49,210 --> 00:43:52,270 the sense that there really should be an institution of last resort, 400 00:43:52,540 --> 00:43:56,709 the idea that it really is no place for people with mental illness and so on and so forth. 401 00:43:56,710 --> 00:44:05,470 And that that is a kind of recurring subtheme of lots of conservative political writing about prisons in the last 30 or 40 years, 402 00:44:06,340 --> 00:44:11,830 which is occasionally found its expressions in an actual government policy. 403 00:44:11,860 --> 00:44:14,709 There was a to at least two periods in the 1980s, for example, 404 00:44:14,710 --> 00:44:20,230 when reducing the prison population became the explicit aim of conservative administrations 405 00:44:20,230 --> 00:44:24,459 attended in the late 1980s in a government white paper by the famous phrase, 406 00:44:24,460 --> 00:44:28,090 Prisons are an expensive way of making bad people worse. 407 00:44:28,990 --> 00:44:36,130 This also generates, I think, a kind of routine and recurring attention to what's going on inside prisons, 408 00:44:36,640 --> 00:44:39,190 on the understanding that from a conservative perspective, 409 00:44:39,190 --> 00:44:46,960 what's wrong with prisons is that they are places of irresponsibility and enforced, demoralising idleness. 410 00:44:47,620 --> 00:44:54,219 Hence, again, a constant recurring concern to try and both limit the damage that prisons can do and 411 00:44:54,220 --> 00:45:01,450 try and make them places in which offenders can engage in work can be treated decently. 412 00:45:01,660 --> 00:45:10,090 And in his latest iteration under Michael Gove can be opened up to certain forms of change and redemption. 413 00:45:20,720 --> 00:45:28,690 The second element of. Conservative philosophy, which I think kind of tempers this enthusiasm for punishment. 414 00:45:31,430 --> 00:45:40,280 And so and kind of demands of conservatives that they kind of look beyond the penal field for sources of order and control. 415 00:45:40,370 --> 00:45:47,240 And also, I think, flows from it from a kind of axiom or central concept of conservative thought. 416 00:45:47,570 --> 00:45:54,650 And this is basically the twin idea that we ought not to think of government as the solution to problems. 417 00:45:55,130 --> 00:46:03,650 Often we should think of it as the problem itself. And that what government has done over the course of the 20 latter half of the 20th century is take 418 00:46:03,650 --> 00:46:11,030 responsibility for things that ought properly to be left to the institutions of a civil society, 419 00:46:11,030 --> 00:46:15,950 whether they be families, neighbourhoods, voluntary effort of various kinds. 420 00:46:16,190 --> 00:46:19,660 So one finds in conservative philosophy a theory of politics. 421 00:46:19,670 --> 00:46:21,830 This, which is Scruton as recently articulated it, 422 00:46:22,130 --> 00:46:32,000 which thinks of the toss to kind of limit the size and scope of the state and expand the size and scope of civil society. 423 00:46:32,630 --> 00:46:38,780 Now, this has to payoffs to recurring payoffs in relation to conservative discourse about crime. 424 00:46:39,080 --> 00:46:48,140 First is the idea that the causes of crime and the sources of order lie beyond the control of government and criminal law and the penal realm. 425 00:46:49,040 --> 00:47:01,729 The second is the idea, which I flagged up earlier, that when we think about how to prevent or socialise or inculcate individuals with with restraint, 426 00:47:01,730 --> 00:47:04,700 with impulse control, with character, or if you want to describe it, 427 00:47:05,150 --> 00:47:10,309 the appropriate institutions for doing that, all the intermediate institutions of civil society, 428 00:47:10,310 --> 00:47:19,130 not the agents of the agents of control in the state, families, churches, neighbourhood groups, teachers and so on and so forth. 429 00:47:19,400 --> 00:47:25,160 And at various points, again, in the last several decades, some variants of those themes have occurred, 430 00:47:26,120 --> 00:47:33,709 both in relation to what Pat O'Malley, brother pejoratively called responsible ization in the 1980s, 431 00:47:33,710 --> 00:47:42,260 when we were all being encouraged to believe that the responsibility for prevention of crime was somehow a requirement of all of us as citizens, 432 00:47:42,260 --> 00:47:45,770 as people of work in universities or hospitals and schools and so on and so forth. 433 00:47:47,170 --> 00:47:54,840 And in the recent and iteration of the Big Society, which some of you may remember, was the enthusiasm of David Cameron's for several years. 434 00:47:54,860 --> 00:48:01,220 Well, it now remains, though, in his new job and arguably also in relation to police and crime commissioner. 435 00:48:01,280 --> 00:48:04,760 And what you find in relation to all those things is, in a sense, 436 00:48:06,740 --> 00:48:13,970 a kind of a set of practices about which many people have been sceptical because they look like cover for things like austerity, 437 00:48:14,180 --> 00:48:23,420 but actually have deep roots in a kind of anti statist localism, which is a central part of a conservative ideology. 438 00:48:24,410 --> 00:48:29,830 Right. I want to end with a question. 439 00:48:29,840 --> 00:48:36,890 I Alfa commonly points out in the beginning why the project to which this is a part is called In Search of a Better Politics of Crime. 440 00:48:38,510 --> 00:48:44,030 And I should it should now become apparent that there's something about the searching for better politics of crime, 441 00:48:44,030 --> 00:48:47,150 which is a fundamentally non-conservative thing to do. 442 00:48:48,890 --> 00:48:52,129 And therefore, the question that I've been posing in the middle of in the context of writing 443 00:48:52,130 --> 00:48:57,500 all this is what what is a project whose ambition is to search for resources, 444 00:48:57,500 --> 00:49:05,750 for a better politics of crime, to do with or capable of finding in conservative political ideology. 445 00:49:06,380 --> 00:49:15,840 Now, I was sorely tempted, hence the question box, and I was sorely tempted about 2 hours ago just to sit down at this point and say, help you. 446 00:49:16,300 --> 00:49:21,200 You answer that question for me. But I will say one or two things. 447 00:49:23,030 --> 00:49:30,700 The first. The first takes me back to the point I was making in relation to Donald Trump's election as president. 448 00:49:31,060 --> 00:49:37,360 In the beginning, the one that the one reason why you might want to wrestle with conservatism and 449 00:49:37,360 --> 00:49:40,599 the kind of emotional and cultural appeal of certain kinds of conservative 450 00:49:40,600 --> 00:49:45,490 stories or nostrums or concepts around crime from a non-conservative perspective 451 00:49:45,910 --> 00:49:50,290 is just to engage in the task of trying to understand what is the nature, 452 00:49:50,650 --> 00:49:58,210 what is the nature of the appeal of those ideas and claims for so many millions of people? 453 00:49:58,870 --> 00:50:02,830 And I don't think I necessarily got a good answer to that, though. 454 00:50:02,860 --> 00:50:11,200 One of them might just have something to do with the capacity of conservative ideology to tap into some deep rooted. 455 00:50:14,930 --> 00:50:21,590 Needs that human beings have to belong to feel attached to something greater themselves, to feel that they have a home. 456 00:50:22,040 --> 00:50:29,659 And the capacity of conservatism to to mobilise and to mobilise and think about crime and 457 00:50:29,660 --> 00:50:35,450 more likely migration in relation to those series of concerns have not put that very well. 458 00:50:36,140 --> 00:50:39,260 But I think that so trying to just understand. 459 00:50:41,670 --> 00:50:46,890 The appeal of a certain set of sensibilities seemed to be one one answer to that question. 460 00:50:47,130 --> 00:50:52,950 And the second is that we could just go I can just now go into fully fledged critic mode and point 461 00:50:52,950 --> 00:50:59,670 out all the old order to go into a kind of critical dialogue with with that set that world view, 462 00:51:00,270 --> 00:51:09,239 which points out some of its consequences and blindspots, its constant tendency to over identity, 463 00:51:09,240 --> 00:51:14,760 over identify with authority, to not speak very much about questions of race and gender and so on and so forth. 464 00:51:14,770 --> 00:51:20,910 One could do that. The third possibility, and I guess the most challenging one, 465 00:51:21,270 --> 00:51:29,910 is to wonder actually whether anything positive that you would extract from conservative philosophy for that wider project. 466 00:51:30,930 --> 00:51:33,270 And I'm not sure I know have a good answer to that question, 467 00:51:33,930 --> 00:51:42,690 but it might have something to do with wanting to hold on to some of that kind of scepticism about state projects, 468 00:51:42,690 --> 00:51:47,280 about the capacity of punishment to achieve its goals and so on and so forth, 469 00:51:47,760 --> 00:51:55,829 without lapsing into the materialist idea that you can never put reason to the service of making the world a better place, 470 00:51:55,830 --> 00:52:08,680 because I'm not ready to give up on that. Thank you. Thank you, Leon. 471 00:52:09,100 --> 00:52:09,970 We have time.