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ROBIN AITKEN: The Tories are offering a
full-bloodied diet on law and order and asylum policy. Political red
meat of this sort satisfies the instinctive cravings of Tory Lionhearts.
Liberal commentators and political opponents accuse them of lurching to
the right; the party itself says the new policies are just common sense.
The Tory party has always had a hearty appetite for tough policies on
law and order and immigration so designing policies to please the activists
has always been straightforward. The problem is that what goes down well
with the core vote doesn't necessarily please a wider audience and the
critics are saying that what the party is now proposing will fail to win
back the mainstream voters they'll need at the next election and further
more won't work. We have the jails but the Conservatives say the system's
gone soft because of what they term the failed liberal post-war consensus.
They have a checklist to increase police numbers and reduce paperwork,
secure reception centres for all asylum seekers, increased mandatory
sentencing, more appeals against lenient sentences, no early releases
and possibly allowing certain crimes to be tried twice. But the measures
make some on the Tory left queasy.
ANDREW ROWE: One of the anxieties I
have is that we should not be allowed to be painted by our opponents as
being on the extreme right in British politics. We clearly aren't we've
never been there, we never win an election if we go in that direction and
we've got to stop doing it. I think that's one of the lessons of Romsey.
I think it's reasonable to suppose that some of the people we needed to
attract were put off us by a reputation that we're too right wing, too
hard line, too hostile to some vulnerable people. We've just got to change
the tone enough to make that no longer tenable.
AITKEN: The men at Norwich jail
are among Britain's sixty-five thousand prisoners. If the Tory proposals
become law there'd be a lot more people sitting down for their regulation
dinners. We already jail more people per head of population that any European
country bar Portugal. And yet our crime rates compare badly; though they
dropped in the mid nineties, they're on the rise again now. Critics say
that keeping people in jail is both expensive and ineffective.
PAUL CAVADINO: Many of the proposals which
the Conservative opposition are now putting forward appear to be based
on a desire to increase the number of people going to prison partly by
mandatory sentencing and partly by an approach which prevents prisoners
from getting out of prison earlier than the end of the face value of their
sentence. Looking at those proposals in combination I estimate that they
would increase the prison population to an extent that would require another
eighteen prisons roughly the size of Dartmoor; another three hundred and
seventy-five million pounds a year would be required to put those proposals
into practice and that is money which would, I think, better be spent
on many of the very effective preventive schemes and alternative community
sentences based on evidence about what works in reducing re-offending.
AITKEN: There's a common perception
that jail is too soft, sentences are too short and in part the Tories blame
the judges. Their remedy is to remove judicial discretion in certain cases
by imposing mandatory sentences. In doing so they'd be following current
American legal fashion - the "three strikes and you're out" school of
thinking and they would certainly be opposed by many in the legal establishment.
SIR MICHAEL DAVIES: I would be totally against
that. In fact I'd go further and I believe that discretion in the courts
should be increased. I am particularly thinking of the mandatory sentence
of life imprisonment in all cases of murder. Now every lawyer, let alone
every judge, knows that murder varies tremendously in its gravity and I
would like to see a judge in a suitable murder case being able to impose
a sentence less than life imprisonment, as happens in other countries such
as Australia.
AITKEN: Support for the police
is a staple of Conservative rhetoric and Mr Hague is currently offering
plenty for the party faithful to chew on. The officer on the beat, the
familiar guarantor of the public's wellbeing is a cherished icon for Conservatives;
increasing their number, supporting their work, these are the articles
of the faith. Since Labour came to power the thin blue line has become
even thinner. The Tories are now pledging to increase police numbers and
to free them from burdensome paperwork and other routine chores which they
say take them away from more useful police work. These are obvious and
easy points to make while in Opposition but the Tories' opponents say that
many of the problems the police service is now experiencing stem from the
time when the Conservatives were themselves in government. Bobbies on
the beat in Banbury offer a reassuring presence but police numbers have
fallen by more than three thousand since 1997. For the Tories that's a
useful stick with which to beat a government which has sought to establish
itself as the party of law and order. But the Tories' opponents say they
are open to exactly the same charge they lay at Labour's door.
SIMON HUGHES: In spite of John Major's
two promises that police numbers would go up from '92 to '97 they went
down. They continue to go down so it's at least partly the Tories' fault.
Of course the public, the police want more police. We have consistently
argued that for the last ten years. The Tories are right to argue it now
but it's being wise after the event.
PETER GAMMON: Well it's easy to make such
promises when you're in opposition and we have to look back and look at
the five thousand extra police officers that the last Tory government promised
and they didn't materialise. So, we will see I think - if they deliver
we'll be very pleased; but we will remember the promise that he's made,
if he ever gets back in government.
AITKEN: The Tory leadership
has also been feeding the party tasty morsels on asylum policy. The Tories
have set out a tough approach on asylum seekers designed partly to deter
people from coming to Britain in the first place. They want all asylum
seekers to be held initially in secure reception centres like this one
and the want to set up a special agency - the Removals Agency - which
would seek out and deport illegal migrants to the country. Their opponents
say these policies are xenophobic and unjust.
At the Tinsley House
detention centre at Gatwick Airport asylum seekers while away their time
waiting for official decisions. Many people here are judged likely to
abscond if allowed into the community. Numbers of asylum seekers have
been rising sharply more than 71,000 last year - up from 48,000 the year
before. The Conservatives say that detaining all arrivals will prevent
them from disappearing into society and will deter others from trying it
on. Their opponents say the language the Tories are using is stirring anti-foreigner
sentiment and damaging race relations generally
NICK HARDWICK: Of course these issues need
to be debated but the language they use, I am completely certain, is creating
a climate of fear for asylum seekers and refugees on the streets and I
think that's a very....I'm appalled that responsible, supposedly responsible
politicians are doing that.
AITKEN: And do you lay that
charge directly at the door of William Hague and Ann Widdecombe?
HARDWICK: I would say to Ann Widdecombe
I think you're making a very big mistake with the language you use. I'm
quite sure Ann Widdecombe doesn't intend to have this effect but I would
say to her when it comes back to us with all this filthy hate mail.
ANDREW ROWE: I'm concerned that the rhetoric
allows people who are a great deal further to the right than anybody in
our party to trade on the assumption that what they are saying is what
the Conservative Party agrees with. That's the danger. And I'm absolutely
dead against it. I mean if I thought that some of William's and other people's
rhetoric gave comfort to people who were engaged in racist attacks I would
be deeply alarmed. But the truth of the matter is that Ann Widdecombe and
William Hague are as hostile to racial attacks as I am.
AITKEN: This cannabis was seized
in Banbury. The Tories want to challenge liberal attitudes. Drug dealers
too - particularly those who sell to children - would face stiffer penalties.
But all these proposals have a price tag.
SIMON HUGHES: If the Tories were a party
which were saying never mind the cost we'll all just have to pay the taxes
there would be a logical, coherent public policy and economic policy but
that's not what they say. They're promising cutting public expenditure,
cutting taxes but increasing the bill. I can't see that that adds up and
they've never made it add up.
AITKEN: The Conservatives have
bared their teeth on law and order, social liberals say the new policies
are populist, expensive and tinged by racism. The party says their common
sense ideas challenge a failed progressive orthodoxy. In this high protein
political debate the participants may not yet all have had their fill.
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