The Long Fight for Britain’s Soul
And why 2019 will be a decisive year, one way or another
Brexit may have been sold as a tonic for Britain’s woes, but Europe was never the cause. The inequality and injustice we see here at home is all our own doing.
It began in 1979, with the ascendency of Margaret Thatcher. Before her, Britain had been a caregiver state, rebuilt after the war as a country where citizens were supported and made to feel valued by their government. But Thatcher changed all that. She introduced a new vision for society, neoliberalism, ordering the state to retreat from its active role in society and handing its responsibilities over to the free market by privatising a raft of public services.
For some 30 years we rolled steadily down this road. Then, with the financial crash of 2008, we lurched towards its end. David Cameron and his Chancellor, George Osborne, jumped on the crash as a vehicle to fulfil Thatcher’s vision, stripping away the last vestiges of government and the welfare state during an austere decade the Tories spun as an economic necessity. Funding was pulled from local councils, the benefit system, police forces and schools — vital social support systems, the crippling of which has directly contributed to rises in childhood poverty, homelessness, the use of food banks and violent crime.
It’s a pitiless view of the world, the Tory’s. The whole point of government is to look out for its people, to apportion resources fairly so that as many of us as possible have the opportunity to prosper. Handing those resources over to private businesses, whose only concern is profit, is neglect. All it’s led to is more and more people being unable to afford the market price for compassion and support.
You could take any one of Britain’s vulnerable groups as a case study for the injustices of Tory neoliberalism — the homeless, the disabled, the old, the young. But to understand the true callousness of the attitude they’re imposing on our society, I’m going to look at our prisons and our probation service. It’s as Dostoyevsky said: “the degree of civilisation in society can be judged by entering its prisons.” (And he’d only been to Siberia. Imagine what he’d have said if he’d done time in HMP Birmingham).
He was right. Unlike homelessness or elderly care, where charities and social enterprises bring a degree of relief, people in the criminal justice system are completely at the mercy of the state; how they’re treated is a pure reflection of the government’s view of the vulnerable members of our society. A view which, at the moment, seems particularly dim.
Here’s where we’re at: for a variety of reasons (though mainly due to politicians trying to look tough) the prison population in England and Wales has almost doubled since 1991. But the infrastructure didn’t grow to accommodate them. Quite the opposite. In 2010, Cameron’s government cut the prison budget by a quarter. The number of public sector prison staff was reduced by nearly a third. 18 prisons were closed. 14 (so far) have been handed over to private companies Serco, Sodexo and G4S who, with no background in social care and an aversion to wasting profits on providing a high-quality service, have been dangerously overwhelmed. Understaffed, overcrowded and poorly run, many of these prisons have become uncontrollable, the deterioration in conditions precipitating dramatic spikes in rates of drug use, violent assault, self-harm and suicide. Conditions in many prisons are so desperate, anyone walking through the gates on the first day of their sentence must wonder if rehabilitation was ever their government’s intention, or if they’ve simply been written off, their lives and potential deemed void.
If you think this all sounds a bit melodramatic, just wait until you meet the story’s central villain: Chris Grayling, architect of austerity’s criminal justice reforms.
Grayling is a neoliberal totem who in 2012 became the first non-lawyer to be appointed Justice Secretary for 440 years. He soon showed the value of his qualifications by deboning the prison and probation systems, cutting funding and privatising wherever he could (precisely what he was appointed to do). This wasn’t a case of a politician making the hard choices. Grayling’s reforms have revealed a bemusingly Victorian attitude towards ‘rehabilitation’. In 2014, he actually attempted to ban books from being sent to prisoners. It was, as author and subversive Philip Pullman put it, “one of the most disgusting, mean, vindictive acts of a barbaric government.” And a clear sign that there is something deeper at play than fiscal prudence. Acts like these reveal something about the Tory character that should trouble us all, because it doesn’t stop here. It’s when you look at what happens to an offender upon leaving prison that the inherent dangers of Tory ideology are revealed.
The moment when an offender re-enters society is a critical one. With the right support, they can start afresh and begin contributing positively to their communities. Without it, they can quickly slip back into the destructive patterns that first led them to crime, becoming a danger to themselves and others. The people entrusted to make sure they go the right way are probation officers. Theirs is a hard job. The offenders they supervise often have deep-rooted social and behavioural issues. Many are dangerous, and need to be tightly managed. Many, of course, are full of potential, and should be cared for. Either way, a good probation officer is part social worker, part therapist, and must have both the empathy and patience to untangle their offenders, as well as the hard edge needed to keep them in line.
But most of all, being a good probation officer is about experience. It’s a subtle art, managing offenders’ often erratic lives. What does it mean if they come for a reporting session on the wrong day, or if they don’t turn up at all? If they fall into conversation with the wrong person in the waiting room, what could that mean? And what about if they just seem…off? On the surface all seem totally innocuous, but each one is a red flag that the risk of an offender harming themselves or others is escalating. And yet, if you didn’t know what to look out for, they’d be easily, understandably missed. This is why experienced probation officers are so vital. Dangerous situations don’t always make themselves obvious, and you need to have seen it all before if you’re to spot it again. But, like in any organisation, experience is expensive. Too expensive, it turned out, for Chris Grayling. When his plans to privatise the probation service came into force in 2014, the experienced staff were the first to go.
He called his plan Transforming Rehabilitation. Under it, 70% of offenders — those deemed low or medium risk — were placed in the care of private Community Rehabilitation Companies (CRCs). Companies like the French firm Sodexo, whose previous expertise was in catering. The other 30% — those deemed high risk — would stay under state supervision, which tells you a lot about Grayling’s confidence in his own plan.
If he didn’t already know his meddling would end in tears, he was sufficiently warned. Probation officers told him loud and clear that working under the pressure of a private company’s financial targets would undermine their ability to do their jobs. Grayling’s Shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan, called it a “reckless gamble with public safety.” Even Parliament’s own Justice Committee expressed “apprehensions about the scale, architecture, detail and consequences of the reforms.” Grayling wouldn’t listen.
So far 2,714 staff have been cut by CRCs. There are just as many offenders as there ever were of course, so this simply means less experienced staff and even temps have been forced to carry the entire case load. (200 cases each, in some instances. The maximum any officer can manage properly — safely — is 60). In some CRCs, the only supervision 40% of offenders get is a phone call once every 6 weeks. In others (run by Sodexo, the caterers), probation officers were replaced with defective digital kiosks, meaning offenders would sign in, answer some questions on screen and leave, without ever seeing a human being.
This is the face of Grayling’s privatisation crusade: the systematic undermining of “a central tenet of effective probation work — a consistent, professional, trusting relationship between the individual and their probation worker.” (A quote from the Probation Chief Inspector’s 2017 report, which you can read here). And these are the consequences: since 2014, the number of offenders committing a serious crime whilst under supervision — murder, manslaughter, rape — has risen by 20%. Domestic abuse has been highlighted as a particular danger area, as perpetrators go unsupervised by overwhelmed CRC staff.
This was always the tragic flaw in Grayling’s logic. Yes, the 70% of offenders handed over to private CRCs may have been medium or low risk when first assessed, but without enough experienced staff to watch over and manage them there was nothing to stop them graduating to far worse. Still, it seems we’re not so far gone that rape and murder don’t still count for something, so it’s good news that in July of last year English and Welsh CRCs had their contracts ended early. But then on the other hand, despite the abject failures in our prisons, the government is about to hand two more over to private companies. Perhaps that’s because the only ones suffering in prisons are the prisoners.
We’ve known for a long time in Britain that privatisation doesn’t work. The trains don’t turn up. Energy costs too much. People can’t even get their post, let alone decent housing. But this is different. The way the Tories tore apart the only services we have for people who’ve reached the bottom should worry us all. People died because Tory neoliberalism allowed the systems that protect us to be classed as an unnecessary expense. They may be drawing back from that particular folly now, but the fact that they even tried says a lot about their view of British society and its people. If thousands of offenders can be written off and the safety of our communities sold for profit, what else can? How much worse could it get?
Quite a lot, if the Tories get their way. Their eyes are on the Brexit prize. For the hardcore neoliberals in the Tory ranks, Brexit is the endgame. It’s a chance to cap 40 years of state-shrinking by casting out the last socially-minded authority in Britain: Brussels, which still stands against the worst tendencies of the free market with is banking regulations, competition laws and respect for workers’ rights. For Tory Brexiteers, Brexit isn’t the tonic for the Britain we’re becoming, it’s the confirmation.
But it doesn’t have to be. So far, Brexit has been absolute chaos, but all that means is anything can happen! There’s no reason at all why the status quo should survive such a cataclysmic turn. Why keep grimly trudging down this road which has led only led us to inequality, bitterness and division? When the dust settles, there’ll be nothing left to do but turn towards one another and have a really good look. Why not take this opportunity to ask ourselves what we actually want Britain to be. And why not use a general election — as likely an outcome of Brexit as any other — to begin building that Britain.
Opposition MPs have set out a credible path to re-nationalisation which would see our public services serve the public once again. There are many economic arguments in support of such a move, but its real power is in the signal it sends. The Britain that has emerged over the last 40 years has woven within it the implication that society is not sacred, that it can be carved and sold because money is more important than community, than compassion. Re-nationalisation won’t fix Britain all by itself, but it would at least signal to us all that the government taking us forward from Brexit still sees the value in the people of Britain. Perhaps that will encourage the rest of us to see it, too.
