The truth was that immigration controls were irrelevant to the million Eastern Europeans who had settled in Britain — all the Polish plumbers and Latvian labourers were free to come and go as citizens of the European Union. Nevertheless, anxiety driven by EU arrivals, about which the major parties could do nothing, prompted promises to crack down on non-EU immigration, about which a good deal had already been done — it had been the case for a number of years that no unskilled or low-skilled workers could legally come to Britain from beyond the EU, and there was little evidence that significant numbers of illegal migrants were still sneaking into the UK. The only way left to allay the public’s concerns, therefore, was to limit the arrival of those non-EU migrant groups that included people the country arguably needed and wanted — high-skilled workers and fee-paying students.
An attitudes survey conducted in 2011 for the Migration Observatory at Oxford University found close to two thirds of British people wanted to restrict low-skilled immigration in the UK, but less than a third were concerned about students or high-skilled workers coming. As the accompanying report noted, this has important implications for public policy debates because effectively all low-skilled labour migration to the UK comes from within the EU, over which the government has no control.
Political debate about immigration has always been about balancing principle and popular prejudice — realpolitik some might say. But history shows us that it has often been the opposite of ‘real’. The way the debate has been framed has sometimes been plain fraudulent, a conjuring trick exploiting our most atavistic fears.
J is for Justice
The British suffer from an obsessive-compulsive disorder when it comes to crime and justice. No other country counts it, categorises it, debates it and worries about it quite as much as we do. It is not that we are a particularly lawless nation, but rather that the fight against crime has become a channel for anxiety about the state of our society. We probe and poke and pick away at every arcane detail, believing that within the piles of data, painstakingly collected and compiled, are the clues to understanding and solving our community’s ills.
The figures actually demonstrate that the risk of being a victim of crime is at its lowest level for at least thirty years, and offences have been falling consistently since the mid-1990s. But Britain doesn’t believe it. Most people are convinced the country is becoming a more frightening and dangerous place.
This unease translates into a demand for the state to ‘do something’ about crime and, typically, the answer from government ministers is to pass yet more laws and promise to get tough. The criminal justice system has come to be regarded as the mechanism for sorting out our social problems. If only police and probation officers, magistrates and judges did their job, we complain, all would be well.
One could argue that this is a thoroughly un-British attitude. The principles of our liberty and justice were founded upon an accepted community responsibility for keeping ‘The King’s Peace’ that has its origins in Anglo- Saxon days. People didn’t look to the authorities for answers — crime was a matter for local citizens to deal with themselves.
From the fourteenth century, it was the obligation and privilege of unpaid Justices of the Peace, selected from the local gentry, to direct the parish constables and watchmen in a system dating back to 1285 and the Statute of Winchester. For more than 500 years, the streets and gates of walled British towns were patrolled and guarded by a ‘watch’ of men from a roster of volunteers. Their main role was to arrest strangers when they found cause for suspicion and deliver the accused to the parish constable in the morning.
If a stranger resisted capture, then a ‘hue and cry’ was made, and the entire town was required to help apprehend the villain. Every man between the ages of fifteen and sixty had to keep in his house ‘harness to keep the peace’. For men of superior rank that meant ‘a hauberke and helm of iron, a sword, a knife and a horse’. The poor were obliged to have bows and arrows to hand. A person accused of stealing would be privately arrested, privately prosecuted and, if found guilty, would pay compensation and the costs of the case. Crimes were local, civil matters to be resolved by local civilians.
Gradually, over time and in the face of fierce resistance, some offences became ‘crimes against the King’ as English monarchs asserted state power over their subjects. But it was not until the huge social and economic changes that swept across Britain with the Industrial Revolution that security and justice were effectively nationalised and the criminal justice system as we now know it was created.
Capitalism and urbanisation together changed the dynamics of social behaviour. The ‘watch and ward’ system of security broke down in rapidly expanding cities, and both personal and property crime soared. Activities that were once accepted or tolerated became criminal as the rich and powerful sought to protect their wealth and influence by means of state intervention.
For example, in the early eighteenth century it was common practice for workers in a range of industries to take the scraps from manufacturing processes. These were the original ‘perks’ or perquisites of the job. However, a series of new laws was introduced criminalising this activity — the Clicking Act of 1723 made it illegal for shoemakers to take scraps of leather; the Worsted Act of 1777 turned mill workers into potential criminals if they took home snipped weft-ends or fragments of yarn. During the eighteenth century, Parliament enacted fourteen statutes relating to fifteen industries which turned previously lawful ‘gleaning’ into unlawful ‘embezzlement’. Some academics have gone so far as to argue that our concept of ‘crime’ dates from this period, a state-fabricated illusion that justified the capitalist exploitation of the lower orders.
When wealthy Scottish merchant Patrick Colquhoun became anxious about the large amounts of valuable cargo being pinched from the Pool of London in 1795, he published a book entitled
He calculated that there were 115,000 people within what he identified as London’s ‘criminal class’. This population was then divided into twenty-four subgroups beginning with ‘Professed Thieves, Burglars, Highway Robbers, Pick-pockets, & River Pirates’ and concluding with ‘Gin-drinking dissolute Women, & destitute Boys & Girls, wandering & prowling about in the streets & by-places after Chips, Nails, Old Metals, Broken Glass, Paper Twine, etc. etc.’ The cause of the crime wave, he suggested, was that ‘the morals and habits of the lower ranks in society are growing progressively worse’. Broken Britain, he might have said. It is a narrative that persists to this day — the idea of a distinct criminal minority threatening the law-abiding majority and requiring ever more authoritarian controls to protect the virtuous from the sinful. After the English riots in the summer of 2011, the Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke wrote of a ‘feral underclass’, which needed to experience the ‘cold, hard accountability of the dock’.
Colquhoun got his police force. The Thames River Police began operating in 1798 and two years later the Marine Police Bill transformed it from a private to public police agency. The legitimacy of this rapidly evolving criminal justice system — the enforcement of law, the application of justice and the management of sentence — was dependent upon the people. Unless the citizenry accepted the special powers conferred on state police, judges and gaolers, the whole edifice would have collapsed. Enter stage left: the gentlemen of the press.
The forces of law and order wooed the news media. Reporters were granted special status at trials; unlike those tucked away in the public gallery, they were free to chat to lawyers, to take notes and even ask questions of the judge. The courts were designed with a dedicated area for members of the press. They would get the best seats in the house to ensure that justice was ‘seen to be done’.
The scribblers didn’t take much wooing — the news media thrive on stories about crime and disorder. Journalists like to justify their fascination in terms of their responsibility as surrogate watchmen, metaphorically patrolling the city walls and ready to issue a hue and cry if they identify threats to individual or collective welfare. But crime’s main attraction to the press is that it is a money-spinner. Like popular folk and fairy tales, the best crime stories reflect the endless struggle between good and evil and are cast with monsters, angels and heroes. We can’t get enough of them.
Lawyers and journalists, wig and pen became partners in crime — neither could operate effectively without the other. Both feed on what Colquhoun dubbed the ‘criminal classes’ living outside ‘civilised society’: the greater the apparent external threat, the better for business. This symbiotic relationship is not unique to Britain, but the nature and intensity of the relationship here has had a powerful effect on public attitudes. As a result, huge
