So Professor Steve Carell has come up from the University of Sheffield to you come down to talk to us, as you can see by the title,
about the long term effects of Thatcherite social and economic policies since
the project he's been working on for a few years already and will continue,
I think, because I think he's about to work on that. And in the past is what's the system, some persistent longitudinal study of probation officers.
And for those of us who were in Oxford 100 years ago, Fair Fight was very much his thing.
And Steve was with us at the centre, I think it was then, and he might like to make three one to 6 to 29, 6 to 2000.
And I seem to recall being your internal examiner.
Yes, that's right. Yeah. Which makes me feel very old.
I can't remember which was one. So it's nice to see another photograph in Oxford and we're very much looking forward to this talk.
And a variation of this talk is published in the ABC Collection Council for Criminal Justice, which I had to sit with notables.
And so if you're up to 25,000 sessions, you've got to read about it in that book.
It's called Your Friends the Way.
Well, okay, lovely. Thank you very much for the invitation.
I'm going to be doing all of the talking. But so far, Mr. Cowling, it is.
And we're glad you also spoke to her so much. Played a part in this this project, too.
So what am I going to look at? The thing I'll never go. So I'm going to talk a bit about the motivations for the project,
and then I'm going to talk about the extent to which the social economic policies of the 1980s were related to crime,
particularly going to focus on property crimes in this case, well within 5:00.
Well, when we can explore what happens when crime rates rise, that's quick response.
And then I'm going to start to move towards a conclusion of of sorts.
So onto the motivations.
And I've got a bit of a beef really with not just criminologists but a lot of other social scientists as well,
about banging on all the talk about neo liberalism and all of the experts to some degree focus on neo liberalism,
not exclusively to dismiss, to disregard conservatism, but certainly highlight neo liberalism at the expense of neo conservatism.
And they become the best exemplar I can give of.
This is a book by Mark Hayes, which is for his book The Scientist,
and which is called something like the New Right in Britain, in America in the 1980s.
So no small book that deals with the way in which people are approaching the new right in the 1980s.
And the book has two parts to it, and the first part is neoconservatism, and the second part is called neo liberalism.
And we as a community of scholars, I think,
have focussed unnecessarily closely on neo liberalism and have kind of forgotten about the other aspects of that kind of new right approach,
which was the neo conservative aspects. Now that in itself is a bit of a shame, I think, to look at one side of the coin,
but I think that's particularly erroneous in the context of criminology because it's the neo conservative aspects of the
right thinking that I think really drive criminal justice policy because it's the neo conservative stuff that's it's about,
if you like, the Moral Majority, the respect for the law, the upholding of obligations and obedience with kind of norms.
So one of my motivations was really to to do something that would allow us to explore the degree to which neo liberal and
neo conservative aspects of new right thinking can decrease the kind of think you can teach them a thought philosophically,
but can you also teach them a part in a way that is relevant to an empirical project and that in some respects as well?
I'm not going to to to show you here, I mean, particularly with regard to David Garland's book and the book by Joe Young, there's actually very.
Little reference to any political administrations occasionally get a mention of Reagan or Thatcher,
but there doesn't seem to be any reference to particular policies below economic or social policies.
And there doesn't seem to be really any sort of focus on the kind of individual political actors who may
have been involved in drafting or developing those kind of policies and then putting them into practice.
One of the other things that are part of a slowly come to take more and more is the concept of like modernity,
because in some respects you can't know that it's late because we don't know that it's ended or when it's going to end.
So this talk, I gather, is scheduled to end. Is it five or plus?
This is what season five thought. So I'm going to guess because it's a five.
You will know he's later on in the talk, we'd like to say,
but we can't say that just because we don't know when it's going to end or even in some respects,
hopefully when it starts to happen, we can know that it's not paternity or why it should be late.
Does it strike you that this strikes me as being, well, unfathomable?
One of the other things which I find.
Ought particularly and every time every time I do this talk, I have to go back to Golden's culture, cultural control and just check.
But what I'm about to say is actually right. I did it yesterday and I was right,
is that there's a mention in the index in terms total control of the middle class and there's no mention of the working class.
Now, I'm not suggesting for one moment that all working class people can because of the middle class doing because I suggest that isn't true.
But it does seem strange to talk about a period of North American and British history, sort of the sort of the sixties through to,
I guess the early noughties in the late 1990, writing that book without mentioning the working class,
since in some respects they were the, the section of society for whom that period of change would have would have been,
would have felt most dramatic and I suspect probably worse.
So that's the kind of preamble as to what got me thinking about all of these things.
What I want to do now is to look at the way in which those things that you might
refer to as Thatcherite social policies were related to quite small society,
particularly poverty, crime. I mean, none of this would be news to any of you, I hope,
but this is the kind of thing for the period that we're most most interested
in that comes in 79 leaves in late 1999 and John Major for about seven years.
And at the peak, I suppose in the in the period with John Major's in office,
and that's kind of mirrored in both official statistics and the British Congress, which doesn't start at 92, that therefore we have lots of people.
So that's that's well, that's that's in some ways the kind of profile that we've been trying to explore.
And the things that you as a, as a,
a project we've focussed on have been really four big areas of policy and policy change and I'm going to take
them in this order because sequentially this is a chronologically this is the order in which they took place.
So Thatcher comes in 79 and we have a focus on really two big policy areas that we're interested in, economic policy,
which you have to you have to focus on economic policy because winning the 79
election was based on sorting out the economic mess that the country was in.
Housing policies, that is to say extending the right to buy scheme was essentially about showing up the contrast with working class votes.
We then have a kind of a period in the last year of the second term of office,
the Tories expected to lose the last 83 general elections in the United States in an election manifesto to massively
de-radicalize conservatives referred to as the second term of office from 83 to 87 the lost administrations in this election,
which they won't be able to do much because it's a massively de-radicalize their policies.
Well, you know, there was still a minor strike that took place in 2011.
So it's not as if they were sitting there twiddling their thumbs for years.
Then early, early on, we had in the middle place we have the Social Security Act.
Then we have right towards the end of Thatcher's played in office, changes in education policies particularly well.
There was really we're interested in other ones which relate to compulsory education,
but of course there were lots of changes in university funding as well at around about that time.
So let's take these thing in order, starting with the economic changes.
So we have, although this was already starting to happen on the old labour,
for want of a better word, we have a movement away from a commitment to full employment to more.
It's a commitment to full unemployment, as I think it was.
Norman Fowler puts it in a slip of the tongue.
So we have a movement away from, if you like, Keynesian economics towards something that was kind of a bit like monetarism,
but they didn't do monetarism for very long and that really only lasted to allow this to actually walk,
but certainly a move away from the aspiration of full employment and state ownership of.
Numerous different sections of the economy most famously buses, trains, steel, coal, housing, etc. But even Thomas Cook was once state owned.
So we see this kind of massive restructuring as a result of those policies.
And it wasn't surprising to know or maybe it will surprise you to learn.
We see a shift in or change in levels of unemployment.
So I think this is a camel's back in folklore.
So you mentioned the stunning sight on two counts of two loves.
So some of them are named walks of life. So we see a huge lump of unemployment, if you like, during such as period.
So that is mainly blue collar workers from the Midlands.
So from about 60 miles north of the county upwards.
And of course, whilst you have widespread unemployment, the most sharp peak in Major's period is results of what's referred to as the loss of.
So basically the economy overheats,
its interest rates hit about 15% and I think also there was a restructuring in the financial services to walk away from them.
Kind of like a pyramid shaped management structure to one that was much flatter.
So lots of white collar workers in the southeast are caught up in bad growth and unemployment and lack of them.
I grew up in the south east, a dreadful little commuter town for business, which is still dreadful with a long commute to town.
And I have friends whose parents lost their jobs, and I suspect they were working in the city.
I suspect that was that was driven by part of those kind of processes.
So we have an increase in the unemployment rate and of course, a decline.
Now, what this does is this increases levels of economic inequality, but it does it in two ways to begin with,
the increases in levels of economic inequality, that is to say, for the first part of the 1980s, are driven by levels of unemployment.
So more unemployed people equals a greater level of economic inequality.
And that's fairly common because unemployed people get benefits, but they don't get as much as they would do if they were working.
It's not a French model where they give you 90% of what you were looking for, particularly at the top.
However, levels of economic inequality continue to grow throughout the 1980s and the growth.
The second part of the 1980s is driven knock out levels of economic outlook to not quite levels of unemployment,
but rather by changes in the tax system away from a progressive tax system whereby wealthy people were on the tack,
were taxed more towards a regressive system. What people pay are similar levels of taxation.
So we see the shift from taxation that point K towards VAT too, which is at the point of consumption.
So with that, we then see an increase in levels of economic inequality.
What's in this is the Gini coefficient, which is the standardised measure of economic inequality.
If you if I traced this back using this back to the 1990, the 1920s, which are somewhere over there,
the curve is basically dropping all the way down until you get to 78.
And at that point it starts to come off. I read something in the newspaper yesterday and this morning we've now reached levels of economic
inequality under Theresa may that were similar to those that we experienced with such a success.
But probably now round about here.
They came down on the on the Gordon Brown excuse me came down under Gordon Brown, but not to mention it very much.
Last good. So in a paper which relied on officially reported data.
Well, Jennings at Southampton, I talked to Sean Statham,
and I found a number of this insignificant relationship between unemployment and poverty problems.
We're only talking about 45, so we find a strong relationship, busy times to walls between the unemployment rate and poverty crime rate.
That's fairly standard. You get that in lots of different countries.
But what we find using and that's a little thing called rolling windows regression,
which allows you to take, if you like, 25 years worth of data, just move forward one year at a time.
So you've got blocks of 25 and you may think, for example, a 50 year period we find that the coefficient the relationship between unemployment and.
Property rights strikes. The coalition gets small.
So not only was there a relationship, it was a relationship that was becoming stronger.
We find economic inequality just outside levels of significance that would be prepared to accept.
I don't think that means we kind of qualify. It's the unemployment rate that's driving both economic inequality and the property crime rate.
So it is about economic policy doesn't fit inside the model doesn't worry me
terribly much to talk about the fact that both being driven by unemployment.
Okay, let's talk about unemployment. Let's look at housing because that's often one that well, you know, well,
six actually what we were interested in things our housing policy and school policies.
People look at me and scratch their heads. My interest in that sort of stuff, you know, what was this anyway?
But then what? It's a housing policy.
Now, the, the not quite the majority, but an incredibly large proportion of houses in the UK, even as late as 1979, were owned by local states.
So I grew up in a in a council house. For example, some local authorities were running what was known as a right to buy scheme.
So in fact, actually, everybody had the right to ask their local authority if they could buy the house.
And the local authority had had the rights to say, no, sorry, we're not selling it to you.
In some places, Birmingham City Council, I think was one of them, were starting to sell off some of their council stock.
In fact, it soon became a Labour Party policy after a fire in either 7775 that that, you know,
people should have the right to buy their council house property and that should be no more.
It's one of the things that Thatcher kind of left off in order to do a number of different things.
First of all, it shored up political support from the actual working class.
And secondly, of course, it too eroded the power of local sources.
What happened over time, however, was that this created a residual ization in existing council owned stock,
and that happened for a number of different blocks. So the kind of housing the local authorities aren't.
Well, they had some totally detached houses on some of the best estates.
There weren't many of them. They had a reasonable amount of semi-detached houses again and some of the better estates.
But, you know, there were more of them, but not terribly many.
And then they had rows and rows and rows, literally rows and rows and rows of low rise terraced houses.
And I think what they also had, particularly in some of the bigger cities like Glasgow and Manchester and some parts of London,
and typically in the inner cities like Glasgow, there were corners, lots and lots of high rise flats that nobody really much like living in.
So when people when people want to buy a house or when they want to buy accommodation, they want to buy a house,
they want to buy a house a deal on its own with a small garden, and they want a bigger garden at the back for the kids to play.
Okay. So that housing stock was semi detached and the fully detached houses that fitted that model.
Wait, you have to remember that New York style loft living in a flat wasn't really very popular in the 1970s and 1980s because we had it was France.
Okay. But France comes in things check. The next set of houses that went in terms of the popularity were the houses.
But the ones I grew up in which were kind of small, three bedroom, if you like, modern terraced houses.
Okay. Nothing particularly exciting about them at all. And they went fairly quickly as well.
The stuff that didn't go well was high rise flats or indeed any flats or maisonettes.
And that's partly because Councillor Mason acts particularly designed for disabled or elderly people.
And the House of Lords injected into the 1918 Housing Act a subclause that meant the
houses that had been specially adapted were exempt from the right to buy scheme.
So we had a massive selloff of houses, but not randomly higgledy piggledy particular types of housing.
Which particular types of housing didn't go. There was also upon the pump a follow your neighbour effect.
So places where lots of people bought houses, lots of people bought houses and places where nobody was buying houses, nobody's buying houses.
And that's probably driven by the fact that we were moving to a situation following economic
changes whereby you had lots of people in one place earn money because there were lots of places,
people somewhere else who were earning money because they were unemployed and therefore couldn't afford to buy their houses.
So we have a, if you like, residual ization of housing over time, at least a sort of containerisation of housing over time.
The other thing that happened just before this in 1977 was a thing called the Homeless Persons Act,
which massively extended the definition of homelessness and actually brought
lots more people into local authority house and made them more eligible for it.
So it's a massive growing game of need, if you like, massive acceleration in need or increase in need.
And then if you are turning off of what was there because it was being sold off the receipts from the sales.
Local authorities were not allowed to put back into housing.
So the housing was there. Over time, aid wasn't replenished because the new ones were there.
Theresa may now seems to be rethinking that policy.
And secondly, the housing that was still owned there wasn't as much for the budget to maintain it in terms of the the the condition of the housing.
So over time, using data from the British Fire survey which us what it is it's already oh this is a British
time survey these are the owners these are the renters I appreciate and probably says,
well, you see unemployment levels rise and then decline for the people who own the houses,
those people who are social renters, which does include people in housing associations,
but there wouldn't have been very many of them social renters that they say it really does mean council tenants.
It starts higher and it just keeps on going.
Of course, that's the sort of thinking unemployment we saw earlier, but it doesn't fade out as quickly.
When you look at British social attitudes, data for owners and social assistance for low income households,
you see similar trends adjusted to run down stock.
Question from the British Funds Survey. Short run.
Not particularly discernible, but there's clearly shifts there.
And living close or living in a high turnover area, you see similar trends in terms of renters and.
So housing over time will cancel. Housing stock becomes ritualised and effectively becomes the accommodation of last resort.
For many people, it also, if it starts to become accommodation that has increasing levels of ethnic minority concentrations.
And of course at this point ethnic minorities were amongst the lowest paid in the UK
and it has all sorts of other kind of problems which been documented in the past,
but it's also a definition of criminology.
So think Britishness. What does all of this do to domestic property crime?
Well, because the British concept, it didn't start until 1982.
The government says, well, we can't rely on the British chancellor.
However, the general household survey, which is fair, did ask a question about theft from home in 72, 73 and 80.
And you can see for the owners, this is has it ever happened to you in the past year or has it happened in the past year?
It's a pretty standard, pretty, pretty stable one. About 2% of owners have had something stolen from their houses for the avensis.
So the social renters, it's about about 3% and again pretty staggering when you look,
it's not just whether it has happened or not, but the number of times it has happened.
You see again a fairly standard pattern, so very small number of average thefts from the home values and a small number but back
double back for the social rented as those those differences are statistically significant.
But what you can see from that, it's pretty much a steady state. So we have inequality excuse me, but we have steady state inequality.
It's not getting better. It's not getting worse. It's just that when we move to using the British concept of data and of course the British Council,
the data is a much better measure of these sorts of things.
I think that's just one question that we're looking at there from a general household survey.
But women, it's the first months that I think we can have lots of like five or six different domestic property crime type things,
having a shed by between 200 to half broken into and stuff like that.
So those sorts of things we see a different picture.
So again, the onus at the top, you can say an increase decrease so that an associates is at the bottom.
I always they start behind the think is there so a lot of difference there in terms of has
it happened to you in the past year but when you look at the counts data at the bottom,
yeah. So this is the average for each group. You see for the owners, it is at about .13 at the start of the run and doesn't change much by the end.
Yeah. Okay. Those you expect fairly fast outlook for the social renters.
It rises and it gets a little bit higher.
But here look at the difference here in the proportions it's almost you're almost twice as likely to be a victim of
some kind of domestic property crime if you are in rented accommodation than if you were an owner of your own house.
And we've explained why that might be the case in the in the BJC article.
So of course we have a complex situation at the beginning of the period because there were some
castle housing estates that were used by council housing officers as basically dumping grounds.
The one in Basingstoke was a place for Copley, so I'm glad to say I didn't list,
but it was widely known that that was not in state that you wanted to, to, to, to move to.
But we see a concentration over time of social and economic need and then, rather unsurprisingly, a concentration of crime over time as well.
Social Security. So the Social Security system is incredibly complicated, but it is even more complicated.
In the late seventies and early 1980s, I'm always staggered at the sorts of stuff you could get grants or money from the local government for.
When you look back at that stuff, you know what was on offer at that particular time.
It's not to say that it shouldn't be an offer. It's just I'm surprised that there was well, I was prepared to do that.
The Conservative Party knew what they wanted to do,
but the system was so complicated that actually they weren't really able to produce the effects that they wanted.
And so there were a number of different acts early on in the Thatcher administrations,
which were actually rather benign or in fact actually quite generous to welfare recipients.
Partly that's the kind of legislative hangover they were passing to acts.
So they were tidy up acts that had been drafted by civil servants working under labour.
But eventually the arsenal of failure to undertake a review of Social Security, which they completed by 1984.
And it's known as the Founder Review.
Not a lot of thought went into that, but I suspect that then became the 1986 Social Security Act.
But that didn't actually become law until the 1st of April 1998.
So there's actually an incredibly long lag in terms of turning around a tanker.
Okay. It's not turning around the minute you are turning around the supertanker.
And so it is going to take literally years to understand what's going on, to legislate,
to get that through the House of Parliament and then to actually get that operationally working.
Now, what happens was that although Social Security spending went through the roof throughout the 1980s, there were far more mouths literally to feed.
And so people were getting an increasingly small slice of that pie.
So the actual payments to individual welfare recipients went down.
Now there's evidence to suggest that when you take those social skills payments,
you see increases in crime while in which paper actually relates to Scotland and is based on housing expenditure of the federal expenditures.
It's a bit of a bit of an awful lot,
but it's not a lot coming from the paper that well challenged supermini growth suggests using Social Security spend.
So when you increase Social Security spending, you see a decrease in property crime.
And similarly, when you cut social spending, you see an increase in property crime like we did have a figure if you wanted to spend in order to
reduce one third or you need to spend X pounds or comparable is but it's it's it's in the paper.
So this too was passed.
If what is too strong a word but denuded people in need of further income which would have increased the levels of economic inequality.
Also, we would all be driven up politics and our return to education.
So one of the things that Margaret Thatcher and the governments were really, really keen on was choice.
So people were to be given choice in all sorts of different things.
But the problem with choice is that you need some benchmark by which to make a choice.
So you walk into the walk into a local restaurant or sandwich shop, and all they have on sale is ham sandwiches.
You have no choice. You have to buy a ham sample book out, I guess. So they needed to create choice in the education agenda, in the education sector.
And the way to do that was to publish information about how well each school
was doing in terms of getting people through the GCSE set a certain benchmark.
Okay. So I think it's a percentage of children at that school with five or more GCSE.
Is it great agency? Is that correct? They created this league table.
And of course, anyone that has been involved in the rest, which is essentially a league table.
Right. Anybody who's involved in the ref knows if a league table, you know, will come forward, but you will come towards the top,
even if there's no chance of getting relegated, it doesn't really matter if you can bottom with the ref in any particular sense.
It's not like somehow you have to go and play. Being an academic in Bolivia or somewhere, you know, you don't get relegated.
You just look a bit silly in front of your mates. So you want to get to the top of the table.
So that means there's a whole lot of game playing.
Of course it's all of the game playing and we're good at it, but like it doesn't really know how to massage things.
People will make careers on this stuff and the same thing happens with school they take.
That's not to say that the results falsified,
but rather what happened was that the focus on league tables gave head teachers a ready made purpose to exclude unruly kids.
Because the unruly kids of the ice rink. It's a concern really.
Well, that there are some of those.
The unruly kids are the kids who are probably in the lower school, a lot of students who are causing trouble in schools.
That's why you can throw them out and be, hey, they won't.
I think it's because we've excluded them. So what you see is a massive increase in school exclusions.
Now, prior to the 1980s, I haven't got authority.
There were so few exclusions, legitimate exclusions here, not truancy, so few exclusions in England.
Wales, that nobody bothered to count them. The best guesses are that there may have been a few hundred, but nobody really knows for sure.
But there were so few that nobody bothered to count.
We start counting school exclusions in the academic year 1991, and it's around about three or 4000.
In England and Wales, it reaches a peak in 9697 at about 13,000.
There was a massive increase in less than a decade's worth of exclusions from school.
Now, the great thing about sitting kids in school, if you had a teacher, is that they're not your problem.
But kids don't just vanish. They still exist as entities.
Where do they go?
Well, they kind of hang around the local area, which is what's Home Office report number 71 found that actually kids hanging around on the street,
getting into trouble was a major increase of anti-social behaviour,
which is hardly really particularly surprising because they were doing this stuff in school and it wasn't getting recorded by the police.
Nobody was finding out that teachers were caning them, but it wasn't getting into the criminal justice system as soon as they're in a public space,
which of course they would be, because a lot of the school certainly not sit at home because they didn't have Xboxes, anything to play with.
And daytime telly in the 1980s was atrocious. They went out, quite frankly, around that place and got into trouble.
And you can detect that in the British concert.
There's a dramatic jump from 8% of people in 2001.
So the local kids hanging around were a problem, too, 30%.
The teacher that I look today, she's not so well. They must be wrong.
We've changed the question wording. They changed the scale from a four to a five.
They put it in a different part. The question we can find none of those things. None of those things.
It would make you say, oh, they just stuffed up the question. You know,
don't believe the data that seems I think that calls it's three or fourfold almost fourfold increase
then actually seems to be a real thing rather than a mythological artefact of dodgy concepts.
Lots to some anyway. Which ones are they visiting? Now of course, all these kids hanging around was manna from heaven.
For Tony Blair to use that as the flagship or least as the basis for the flagship companies all about,
because that would tackle anti-social behaviour.
And of course we do have, we did have I think an increase associated with this concept of anti-social behaviour.
One of the other things that we've been doing as part of the project,
and this is the size I'm going to show you now, we've kind of superseded by thinking about it slightly differently,
but I wanted to show you them anyway because I think that just quite interesting is to think about the period of change
that we're talking about from 73 to the to the or from legislatively to well into the noughties as a kind of social storm.
This is a term I stole from Dan George when he used to work Oxford.
He now is here in geography.
And so what we try to do is to think about what kind of things a social storm.
So this is, if you like, massive societal disruption of all sorts.
Okay, that might be associated with crime. So we produced a this is game time.
Susan Morgan says a dynamic factor analysis of the retail price index, the level of unemployment,
the Gini coefficient, and the rates of suicide, divorce and abortion,
housing repossessions, and the number of children taken into care, which interestingly,
there was data going back to back to 1952, all those things we found.
We've changed the model slightly.
We talk about social and an economic storm, but those things, when we put them into the two to a model, explains all of this.
Okay.
So the number of all crimes recorded in British courts over the number of property crimes, the number of all violent forms, the number of victims,
all of them, the number of property forms and the number of sort of property evicted and the number of violence victims as well.
So this thing seems that the social storm, at least for that model, seems to have to all sorts of different levels of crime.
We would say that that wasn't coincidental.
So I talked about, well, showing you the stuff that you do, the crime.
And then that fellow I tried to explain how that might be related to four different areas
of social and economic policies pursued by the governments of the 1980s and early 1990s.
What then happens when crime rates rise?
It's not as if people just sit there and do nothing.
So we find that there is not just a rise in crime, as he has demonstrated, but also there's a rise in the fear of violence arising from,
again, a rise in the fear of crime, which makes up so let's call it a street crime, but not quite in the same axes.
But you can say that the fear of crime tracks pretty closely the rise of crime.
What we also have, which I think is interesting, but I'm not sure many other people have necessarily thought about this,
is we have an increase in punitive opinion now.
We take it out of debt. That's it for this one because when you put in the death penalty, so the model you mention is punitive,
let's just kind of flat down because over time in the UK, people have been becoming less and less convinced the death penalty is appropriate.
Interestingly, we've used the British social attitudes data, which is book.
So what we've done there is a genuine vulture effect, the last straw, I think you might say, around about 20 years.
So support for the death comes. It's coming down this ten fold day and then it goes up and then it comes down and it takes about
20 years to get it down again to where it was before turning culture was abducted and murdered.
So you let restrict out the death penalty from this.
And you can see that there is a fairly strong relationship to a punitive opinion such as the Dark Line and the Coorong,
which is the Dutch one that's been published in a paper in government.
So increase in crime, increase in fear of crime, increase in punitive measures.
We've also tracked in the Government's paper an increase in the attention devoted to law and order in the Queen's Speech.
So the whole of the scientists who calculate the percentage of the Queen's Speech is always about 1500 words.
They calculate percentage of outputs related to law and order limits criminal law, administrative law, housing, all those sorts of different things.
And you can see a relationship between what the Queen talks about when she's given that Queen's speech,
if she is doing what it says she feels if you take off.
The Queen doing it. She told me that the Bible says, one son says, find them up.
And so in the case and we can find a relationship between the, let's say, executive, legislative partner, the expressed executive legislation,
especially the Queen's Speech, and finally also finds that in hands off as well, you can search hands off from sunlight 1841 to mostly March 2007.
It just stops the problem. So why should stop? Maybe they just haven't got any further movement at the moment.
But you can you can you can track all these trends and lots of different concerns as well.
So what happens, of course, is that we see, Michael, how he rather unexpectedly he gets ahead, becomes home secretary.
He talks up for Michael Howard had never spoken about fight in the House of Commons at all.
And he we interviewed him the past of the project.
He told us that he was sat down by the senior civil servants at the home office and said, look, it's going to go up 5% per annum each year.
Don't raise expectations, don't say you're going to get it down, just hold on and try not to get fired.
In those days, the Home Office had a Ministry of Justice that were separate entities.
I think it's interesting to think that actually we see far fewer home secretaries have
to resign or get sacked since the Ministry of Justice got taken out of the Home Office.
I don't know that that's a coincidence. So I just wondered, is the Minister of Justice for Home settling the fate of the Home Office?
Let me try to administer. Justice was, in some respects a bit of a hostage to fortune.
It could have it could all go horribly wrong and cause them to Tony to resign.
And for it was after Eddie Howe talks tough on crime as at 27 or 28 point list
of things that he's going to do well at the Conservative Party conferences.
And just by saying things like prison works, we have an increase in receptions into prison, which is probably because that's a is on hypothesising.
This one last question. I thought what he says it was supposed to be was and so for the seven more people to prison,
we also have rises or increases in the average prison sentence length,
which appears to be due to strict enforcement of time and mandatory minimum sentences.
And the prison population grows quite, quite dramatically.
Now, we already have one clock for Carolyn.
Our foot is another. This is a slide which is in the book and the can't read should be good for science to deliver for this guy.
But what I've done here and you'll have to take a good it I see it these columns for years and the years of
different representing different acts so that the years of different acts were passed into legislation centre.
On the very far left we have the 1982 Criminal Justice Act and Case the Prosecution of
Offenders and Drug Trafficking Offences Act in 86 of the Three Criminal Justice Act.
And then somebody saying in the early nineties, oh,
was not going to get this one going to be another criminal justice act so long the minute
buses with so 8591 and 93 of all criminal justice act but not before we get four to them.
So it's called the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act.
Just for change. Then we have the really Modern Handbook of Criminal Proceeds and Investigation Act in 96 Crimes Sentences
Act passed in the dying days of John Major's administration in 97 and the latest block disorder at that.
The top half of the table is listed up here.
Charles attempts, if you like, to decrease primitiveness.
So if you like not to shine a light on to try to be nice to people.
Okay. So we see attempts in the IOC to limit the use of imprisonment, which actually works.
When Thatcher came into office, the daily prison count was 39,000.
Within a couple of years, an adult to about 37,000.
Jim Many people think to the 1982 Criminal Justice Act to be safe.
People have other accounts that. We have a price increase lots of suspects and limits to the police force that's also pulled out of this
glass box here in some respects represents a period during which this looks like none of these you know,
if if you did this that way, you'd probably find something similar, a period during which there's a there's attempts to reduce the punitive aspects
also of the punitive aspects of the criminal justice system that stops here.
I think also on this this big black line is simply to signify the point at which Thatcher is no longer in power.
And we see the highlight of the 91 act, which would have taken some time to draft the dark box,
which on some sites has written in red empty represents the fact that all of us were deputed to not.
What we're doing, you can talk about is not permissiveness. Try not to be punitive.
I'm not sure what the synonym for legal that costs stops around about.
Yeah. Now the bottom half the table represents increases in incidence and the gang of six represent the things that will happening.
That is just therefore not to suggest that we didn't see that sense of being punitive at that time,
but over time there is an increasing number of them, which is what the dashed line represents.
So we are seeing simultaneously, if you like, a moving away from being not punitive.
That term doesn't make it is possible and simultaneously an increase towards being more punitive then lots of different whites.
So if you like an attempt to to find new ways of smacking more or bottoms okay.
Which I think is kind of interesting in its in itself.
So what do the Labour Party do presented with all of this and the memory of the 83 general election?
They move to the political process starts fairly often, fairly early on.
So it's really up to Neil Kinnock but really comes to a head with Tony Blair and he's fighting this match of tough on crime,
tough on the causes of crime. We have a focus on young offenders.
I want to do the debates, which that's not related to the school exclusions that we discussed earlier.
Just, you know, people associated with school are under the age of 16.
And, of course, Labour didn't oppose the crime sentences, despite the fact that there were people actually, quote,
draconian measures in it, which they may at other points have elected to at least discuss rather than just acquiescing.
Wendy Carlisle Labour have to do something about crime, they have to do something about it for a number of reasons.
The crime place in 94. They've come in in 97.
It takes a while for the Home Office to turn around those numbers and turn them out.
So the initial inkling of a crime drop took several years actually to be widely recognised
and of course about 20 years for the public to notice that the control had happened.
So Labour needed to do something about it because it was still a problem, almost perceived to be a problem.
They also needed to do something about crime because they didn't want to be accused
of being soft on crime and left to later left equally had said tree huggers.
So they had to do something about finally hatch with void being seen to have gone soft on crime.
Okay, I'll talk a little so enough, but I'm going to persist at least a few more slots, so I'll move now towards.
Okay. So, I mean, well, the criminologist saw this in the social sciences, like it or not.
I think there's enough evidence. I'm thinking from political science that Thatcherism represented a mix of both liberalism and neoconservatism.
And in some times these things pulled apart.
So somebody trading, for example, some news for those of you who want to launch in the 1980s were tediously dull.
You couldn't buy a thing unless it was about to go off perishable goods so you could buy milk and eggs.
And that was about it. Everything else that the libertarian right, the neoliberals wanted to change some of the trading laws,
but none of the some of the trade rules so that we could throw stuff to people.
By the day of the week, you got all these fixed overhead costs, you got Woolworth's shut up for no good reason for people stuff.
The neoconservatives, on the other hand, thought that was absolutely appalling.
The song is a special letter going to church and praying for Margaret Thatcher's next election.
So I just had a post. So there were times when the neo liberals and the neo conservatives face different ways.
Same thing happens for soft judges. Well, if you like the cross hairs a line, then it was very strong.
And there was there was a reason for for the effort for pursuing the same agenda when the neoliberals and the neo conservatives,
as it were, sort of agreed on the vanities.
Now, I think that in some respects, a lot of the changes brought about by the Conservative government, the 1980s,
which were, if you like, neo liberal or mainly neo liberal, it's not just the cold clear the water between the two.
Was it a mainly neo liberal about housing, about employment, about Social Security?
Were the factors which helped contribute to the rising crime, particularly, for example, unemployment for if not the rises in crime,
then the concentration of crime amongst particular social sections, which is what you get with housing policy changes.
You then see a rise in fear and punitive loss amongst the general population,
which is latched on to by particular politicians who political scientists have a term for which is policy entrepreneurs.
So if you like Howard and Blair were policy entrepreneurs in terms of the crime or criminal justice agenda,
and they articulate solutions and we enter that, if you like, an arms race of nastiness between those as opposed to individuals in particular.
But generally that leads to increased levels of punitive mass number.
The side that you couldn't see or complete over time, which resulted in actually are more than suggests crime falling down.
So the things in our model for property crime like the credit card increases,
portfolio increases and subsequent decreases decreases of the economy and the incarceration rates.
So actually sending more people to prison did help reduce crime, but we weren't just sending more people to prison.
We started off sending. Well, when Margaret Thatcher came in, just under 40,000 people in prison in one day,
that rose to about 46,000 on any one day by the time Michael Howard came into office to write these figures down and may not be absolutely correct,
but they're now at around about 87,000 per day in England and Wales, but never seven or 8000 in Scotland, I believe.
So this isn't just prison works.
This is massively increasing the number of people, doubling the number of people in any one day that you are holding in prison.
Now, I think it's pretty harsh.
I can't think of very much in terms of social policy that if you didn't double wouldn't have to some discernible impact.
So if you double the number of GP or nurses, that's going to have some impact on health care policy.
That's Labour had a waiting time watching this drive in the late 1990s,
but basically everybody got as much over time as they wanted to try and bring down quite
soon that if you increased the number of security guards working in particular devices,
that's going to have some kind of impact. If you doubled the number of teachers that you have, that would have some kind of impact.
Might take you 15 or 16 years to spot that.
But doubling things is going to do something to whatever it is that you're you're, you know, the kind of key output.
So it isn't to suggest that prison works, but rather.
If all you care about is reducing crime and no other interests in any of the social and economic policies,
then sending an awful lot of people to prison. He's going to do something to you or your crime, right?
Of course, there are huge consequences socially and for the individuals involved.
If you go to court, if you go down that route.
So I would argue that Thatcher did have a legacy, but he does have a legacy for the criminal justice system and crime.
We saw huge increases in crime throughout the eighties and nineties.
We had changes in public sentiments about crime and about the way in which we should respond to crime.
And then we had a clearly toughened criminal justice system as a response to that.
We have the creation of a new consensus on crime and how we should treat offenders.
But as I think I have repeatedly said, neo liberalism is only part of that story in some respects.
You need the kind of neo conservative elements, as well as with other social attitudes, which we model this kind of need plans.
We need these New Labour governments to come along and basically accept and in some
respects deepen the Thatcherite settlement for this stuff to pass and purchase.
Well, offside is to tell you about another.
It's also policies which will generally be soft in a few months time.
We're going to be analysing the influence on crime amongst two first cohort.
So the UK has a number of different first cohorts.
The first was in 1946 called the 46th birth cohort, which you can't actually really get access to anymore because it's got so much medical data.
The next one is the 58 first cohort, the National Child Development Study.
All of these were designed to be 12 years apart. The one that we're particularly interested in is what's called the birth cohort study 1470, which,
if you like, of Thatcher's children, at least these couples in some respects, all of us as children.
There should have been another birth cohort in 1982, but I guess she tells me that that conference.
And then, of course, we have the Millennium Cohort much, much more recently.
So we explore the extent to which individuals in those cohorts is about.
There were about 17,000 births in those two cohorts.
And I think I followed up the question which economic policy statement, the social policies that we have discussed.
Can be found, 11 of them. In fact, the next phase of the crime can be found amongst those those groups.
We're also going to run a survey in Chicago to assess the relevance of Thatcherite ideologies.
Today we've got 236 on about a school of law they will be associated with.
That's over a two year research assistant post.
All of which should be advertised by soon, since the paperwork's sort of lost because I like doing it because it's kind of fun.
We're going to make a short film for Teacher first. Okay.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much.