Mr Blair said he ‘powerfully disagrees’ with the liberal penal policies of Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Secretary. ‘You’ve got to put in prison those who deserve to be there,’ he said, adding Britain should look to developing countries that ‘just don’t accept’ criminality. He said ‘dysfunctional families who produced 14-year-old kids stabbing one another to death’ are ‘making people’s lives hell’. Some may find it strange or droll that Blair is thus positioning himself on what is commonly regarded as the right of the Conservative Party and accusing it of being too left-wing. It is not strange at all. There is now an enormous vacuum in Britain where conservatism once resided. This is because of the otiose and shallow conclusion by David Cameron that the Conservatives have to embrace left-wing ideology to become electable. It still does not seem to have dawned on the Prime Minister that this is actually why his party failed to win a general election last May which by common consent, as the result of Labour’s terminal weakness, could not be lost. It is an even more perverse conclusion since Cameron reputedly is obsessed by Blair and his achievement in keeping the Tories out of power for three successive elections. But the reason Cameron thinks Blair pulled off this feat is actually the preciseopposite of the truth. Cameron thinks it was because Blair was in tune with the supposedly socially liberal tenor of the times. But Blair won because he was perceived to be in tune with socially conservative anxieties about the atomisation and disintegration of social norms – particularly over law and order. Blair won the Labour party leadership in the first place, after all, because of the deep political chord he had struck by placing himself on the side of all those whose lives were being made a misery by delinquent youths and epidemic crime. It is no surprise that Blair has now homed in on precisely the same issue in order to bash the Tories – because the lazy and idiotic utterances of Ken Clarke about how prison doesn’t work encapsulate, in the most stark and brutal fashion, the profound contempt the Cameroon Tories are displaying towards the deep and entirely realistic and justified concerns of ordinary people, particularly the poor whose lives are disproportionately made a misery by crime. If anything shows that the new Cameroon Tories don’t give a stuff about those at the bottom of the heap, it’s this de haut en bas ‘enlightened’ liberal contempt displayed by Ken Clarke. Indeed, now Blair appears to be going even further even than his old ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ persona: ‘It's fascinating that some of the emerging market countries have tried to adopt law and order systems that get ahead of this. In some of those societies, they don't have these levels of criminality. They just don't accept them, and they're not going to accept them, and we need a debate about what we do about it here. It may involve being a great deal tougher. ... You've got to put in prison those who deserve to be there, but it’s a much bigger problem than that. I went through the same journey as the Conservatives, thinking this is a symptom of a broken society.’ Now his attitude has hardened. The truly dysfunctional must be ‘dealt with in a far tougher, more targeted way’. From which we may conclude that, if Blair were back in Number Ten, he would be trying to turn Britain into a kind of Singapore. Bien-pensant London may have a fit of the vapours at the thought; but those at the receiving end of Britain’s culture of thuggery and menace will doubtless be thinking ‘if only’... For all the years they spent in obsessive deconstruction of the formidable election-winning machine that was Tony Blair, the Tories still just don’t get it.Love him or loathe him. Tony Blair was, and remains, a class act. Why Tony Blair remains a class act
Fascinating interview in today’s Telegraph with Tony Blair in which, inter alia, he says the Conservative led coalition is ‘soft on crime’:
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
MELANIEPHILLIPS
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