Lord Turnbull, who addressed Clare Politics earlier this evening, spoke about the difficulties of co-ordinating policies and administration across departments and organisations. This brought to mind the policy announced by John Reid last month to split the Home Office into a security department and a Ministry of Justice. Unsurprisingly, Lord Turnbull thought this would be counter-productive; it did seem bizarre to me that in response to severe criticism over the failure to consider whether foreign criminals being released from prison (the responsibility of HM Prison Service) for deportation (run by the Immigration and Nationality Directorate) Reid proposed to split the Home Office. The lack of effective co-operation between two Home Office sub-departments would now be solved by widening the gulf between them.

This confusing solution is typical of a wider New Labour disease: the desire to appear to be acting with headline-garnering measures, when frequently what is needed is better application of the current system or legislation. This has been most in evidence in recent years in their repeated changes to the criminal justice system, not coincidentally an area where they have traditionally been perceived as weak compared to the Tories: in last month’s ICM poll the Conservatives’ lead was largest, at 6%, on law and order, and asylum and immigration. I’m hardly alone in this view, a quick browse through the last year’s political comment threw up John Humphrys at YouGov, to name but one.

When attacked on similar grounds last year, the Telegraph reported Blair’s response:

There is a myth that we have legislated 50 times, the problem still exists, ergo we don’t need more laws. I disagree. These laws have made a difference.

I know what large numbers of such people believe. They believe that we are on a populist bandwagon; the media whips everyone up into a frenzy, and if only everyone calmed down, the issue would go away.

Whether Labour’s law and order legislation has worked or not can be debated, but Reid’s compounding of the failure of inter-departmental co-operation just looks like the panicked response of the ‘tough’ man sent in to fix the Home Office. Lord Turnbull further criticised Reid’s handling of the department, saying no private-sector executive would publicly criticise his staff, and beginning his tenure by condemning the Home Office as “not fit for purpose” was bad for the morale of all those he must now lead.

In attributing this tendency to New Labour, it is very likely that I am being unfair. A surfeit of legislation, aimed as much at media coverage as the issue in hand, can be a fault only of the governing party. My political memory does not stretch back to the Major Government (I distinctly remember wanting to stay up to watch the 1997 election coverage, I must have been a very strange eight-year-old) but simply googling “too much legislation” brought up a speech on Hansard from November 1995, where the now retired Sir Patrick McNair-Wilson said, “The problem with Parliament is that there has been far too much legislation, with the result that too much of it has been ill thought out and needs to be scrutinised a great deal more carefully. The mere passing of legislation cannot be a solution to our many problems.” Like Anna, I don’t know if politics can be different, but it should.

Filed under: crime, labour, ukpolitics on February 22nd, 2007