The Intensification of Punishment from Thatcher to Blair: From conservative authoritarianism to punitive interventionism

« The Intensification of Punishment from Thatcher to Blair : From

conservative authoritarianism to punitive interventionism », La Clé des Langues,

2010.  http://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/the-intensification-of-punishment-

from-thatcher-to-blair-from-conservative-authoritarianism-to-punitive-

interventionism-90656

Introduction      Following the British criminologist, Joe Sim (2009), there

has been an 'intensification of punishment' in recent years

under successive New Labour governments. The trend toward

increasing punitiveness in the field of criminal justice is

not entirely new. Rather, it can be said to have its roots in

the neoliberal politics of Thatcherism. Even if imprisonment

rates actually decreased towards the end of the 1980s and in

the early part of the 1990s (1999), the beginnings of a more

authoritarian approach to the problem of law and order could

already be detected at this time. The 1980s saw the police

granted increasingly wide powers to stop, search, arrest and

detain those whom they suspected of criminal activity, and the

decade was also, of course, marked by the use of the criminal

law to control public order problems, most vividly during the

Miners' Strike of 1984-85. The 1986 Public Order Act was used

to limit the right to protest, and a series of laws famously

restricted the legal immunity which had traditionally been

1

granted to labour unions and their members when they became

involved in an industrial dispute. These policies fit with a

classically authoritarian approach to problems of crime and

disorder which, it could be argued, form part of Conservative

Party tradition. Yet, they were also informed by the

particular political conjuncture of the 1980s, namely the rise

to prominence of neoliberal ideas.

      The desire to liberate the market from restrictive

forces goes some way to explaining the use of the law to

severely curb trade union activity, but it also helped to

inform a number of other changes made to the criminal justice

system. For example, the decision to privatise prisons,

eventually embodied in the Criminal Justice Act 1991, was

largely informed by neoliberal considerations. It was the free

market think tank, the Adam Smith Institute, which first

mooted the idea in 1984 (Ryan, 2003, p. 83) and its 1987

Report, The Prison Cell, proved particularly influential (Young,

1987). In the 1990s, neoliberal ideas began to permeate the

functioning of the criminal justice system in more subtle

ways. As the social fallout from the Thatcher years became

more visible, notably on account of the rise of social

exclusion, poverty and inequality, the neoliberal project

began to suffer from a legitimacy deficit. 'Governing through

crime', to borrow Jonathan Simon's term (Simon, 2007), became

a useful strategy of governance, enabling the State to

'manage' the negative social consequences of neoliberalism

whilst simultaneously distracting attention from its causes.

Governing through crime involves the State redefining social

2

problems as crime problems; for example, problems such as

unemployment, educational failure and single parenthood are

now considered not just as social problems but often also as

the principal causes of crime. Crime has thus become the

legitimate sphere of state intervention as government's

capacity to effectively tackle social problems is increasingly

circumscribed by its economic policy. The inevitable

consequence is the growth of authoritarianism as the line

between social and penal interventionism becomes blurred.

      The Major government was the first to adopt a

particularly tough approach to crime control and to turn its

back on the welfarist approach which had characterised the

post-war years (welfarist ideology was still prominent within

the Home Office throughout the 1980s). The new approach placed

ever more emphasis on the responsibility of the individual

criminal rather than on the possible structural causes of

crime. However, it was only under New Labour that the British

government first ended up really ‘governing through crime'.

This was an ideal way for New Labour to tackle social

problems, allowing it to differentiate itself from the

Conservative governments of the past, whilst it continued to

follow the Thatcherite economic policies which had helped to

exacerbate them. There was a move away from pure

authoritarianism towards considerably more interventionism in

both the penal and social spheres. Social and crime problems

were henceforth to be tackled via a grand project of

remoralisation focusing on reinforcing individual

responsibility. It is increased state intervention in the

3

social sphere which has, in many cases, led to

criminalisation, resulting in what I have termed 'punitive

interventionism'. Punishment has been intensified as the reach

of the criminal law has been extended into the social sphere

and used to deal with mere problem behaviour. This is a far

cry from the 'punitive bifurcation' of the Thatcher era

whereby minor criminals were to be treated with more leniency

whilst the most serious offenders would receive ever-harsher

sentences. Under New Labour, the punitive thrust has pushed in

both directions. The aim of this paper will be to briefly

outline the key features of this punitive trend before

attempting to determine precisely how the neoliberal ideology

developed during the Thatcher years has continued to impact on

criminal justice policy today. It will be advanced that the

main legacy of Thatcherism has been the development of a

neoliberal hegemony which has severely limited the scope of

government action and its capacity to act independently.

The intensification of punishment      The so-called punitive turn' under New Labour has been

discussed at length elsewhere (Tonry, 2003; Pratt et al., 2005;

Bell, 2010) but it will be useful here to briefly summarise

its main characteristics. Under New Labour, there has been

considerable penal expansionism, largely facilitated by the

lengthening of prison sentences, the erosion of legal

protections, the strict application of alternative sentences,

and the creation of an increasing number of imprisonable

offences. In addition, the past decade has seen the

4

criminalisation of an ever-wider range of activities, many of

which would never have previously fallen under the aegis of

the criminal law. This trend has been exacerbated by the rise

of out-of-court summary justice, notably via the creation of

Penalty Notices for Disorder in 2001 which allow official

police officers, police community support officers or even

neighbourhood wardens to fine individuals (over the age of 15)

for any behaviour which they believe capable of causing

"harassment, alarm or distress". According to Rod Morgan, the

former head of the Youth Justice Board who refers to this

trend as "the quiet revolution", the rise in the number of

offences brought to justice in recent years can largely be

accounted for by the extension of summary justice (Morgan,

2009). Finally, social interventions have increasingly been

backed up by criminal sanctions such as parenting orders under

which parents of young delinquents are obliged to attend

counselling or guidance sessions - failure to attend can lead

to prosecution. 

There is no alternative      These tough policies have most probably been encouraged by

the fact that successive New Labour governments' attempts to

tackle the social causes of crime in a neoliberal context were

doomed to failure from the very beginning. Penal toughness has

enabled the government to be seen to be doing something about

both crime and social problems whilst diverting attention away

from the role that its policy may have played in creating them

in the first place. However, we must be wary of the degree of5

voluntarism we impute to government here. I do not wish to

suggest that government policy-makers actively sought to

‘govern through crime', using criminal justice policy as a

diversionary strategy, even if it may indeed have served such

a function. On the contrary, I seek to argue here that the

real impact of neoliberalism has actually been a severe

restriction on the degree of voluntarism that can be exercised

by government. The most lasting inheritance of Thatcherism has

been the gradual spread of neoliberal ideology to all spheres

of government policy-making to the extent that it has become

accepted as an unchallengeable orthodoxy - there is indeed no

alternative. As Bob Jessop has suggested, there has been a

routinisation of neoliberalism under New Labour which has

involved securing the neoliberal project through normal

politics and the development of 'flanking mechanisms' to

compensate for the negative social, economic and political

effects of the project (Jessop 2007). On account of New

Labour's failure to challenge its neoliberal inheritance -

indeed, in many ways it has actively embraced it - it has

found its sphere of action limited to protecting the free

economy and responding to the demands of the private sector.

Even if it has become more interventionist in the social

sphere, its freedom of action here has paradoxically been

severely curtailed as social priorities have been made

subservient to those of the market. This has also led to

increasing punitiveness on account of the fact that the

ultimate aim of social intervention has become

responsibilisation in order to encourage less dependence on

6

the state. Since such an aim can only be secured using sticks

as well as carrots, the criminal law has become an effective

tool in the service of neoliberal ideals as the line between

the social and the penal has become increasingly blurred. In

the sphere of criminal justice itself, the expanding reach of

neoliberal ideology has also led to increasing punitiveness as

government priorities have been limited to responding to the

imperatives of efficiency and competition, and to the

interests of the private sector and the 'consumers' of

criminal justice.

The new penology      The new emphasis on efficiency and competition in the

criminal justice system has resulted not only in the

restructuring of the system itself but also in a move away

from the philosophy which guided it throughout most of the

20th Century. Since the early 1990s, the criminal justice

system has, like all other public services, been forced to

accept the transposition of management principles from the

private sector and to open itself up to competition. The trend

began in 1993 when the Prison Service became a 'Next Steps

Agency' of government, meaning that the service, headed by a

director general chosen by open competition, would look after

its day-to-day operation, whilst the government would remain

responsible for policy. Derek Lewis, previously Chief

Executive and Chairman of the Board of Management of Grenada

Group Plc., was appointed to head the new service. The fact

that he had no previous experience of the criminal justice

7

system was considered irrelevant - he had presumably been

specifically chosen to apply his management skills acquired in

the private sector directly to the Prison Service. Such

management techniques were indeed introduced, such as Key

Performance Indicators (KPIs) to monitor performance (such as

regime improvements, escapes) and financial efficiency.

      This new trend, involving the application of private-

sector management techniques to the criminal justice system,

was described as "the new penology" by the American

criminologists Feeley and Simon as early as 1992. They

suggested that the new penology focused on offender management

rather than on rehabilitation and judged the efficacy of the

system on actuarial rather than on subjective outcomes.

Indeed, the criminal justice system is now judged not just on

its capacity to prevent crime or to reform the criminal but

also on its financial efficiency. As the Ministry of Justice

has declared, "A fair and effective criminal justice system

must provide collective benefit: justice for victims and local

communities, punishment and reform for offenders and value for

the taxpayer" (Ministry of Justice, 2008). It would perhaps be

going too far to suggest that the reform of the offender has

been abandoned as a key aim of criminal justice: the reduction

of recidivism rates is often cited as a KPI (Key Performance

Indicator) for criminal justice services and the government

does continue to invest considerable amounts of money in

rehabilitation programmes. Yet there is a danger that the

welfare imperative which has traditionally been associated

with the need to reform the offender has been overshadowed by

8

concerns of profitability, resulting in what Cavadino and

Dignan have described as "punitive managerialism" (2006). An

examination of the structural changes which have taken place

across the criminal justice system since New Labour came to

power will help determine to what extent this has proved to be

a reality.

      The principle means of achieving the declared objectives

of the Ministry of Justice is, it claims, through competition

which it regards as "driving efficiency and innovation within

public services" (Ministry of Justice, 2009). Increased

competition was introduced into the Prison Service when it was

merged with the Probation Service to create a single executive

agency known as the National Offender Management Service

(NOMS) in 2004. Based on the recommendations of Lord Carter

(Carter, 2003), founder of Westminster Healthcare, NOMS aims

to "commission" what it calls offender services to the

organisations that it considers "best placed to deliver" them

with the aim of improving efficiency (NOMS, 2009). In

practice, this means that the public sector has been opened up

to contestability - it now has to compete with the private and

the voluntary sectors for government funding to run key

criminal justice services.  The private sector had already

been playing a significant role in the prison service since

the enactment of the Criminal Justice Act 1991 which enabled

the government to contract out the management of prisons.

Under the Major government, two prisons were built by the

public sector and then managed by the private sector (HMP

Wolds and HMP Doncaster). All the others - there are now 11 in

9

total in the UK (out of 140) - were financed, designed, built

and managed by the private sector under PFI contracts. They

accommodate approximately 10% of all prisoners in the UK. The

current government has recently announced that the management

of five existing prisons (two of which are already in the

private sector) is to be put out to competitive tender

(Ministry of Justice, 2009a). It has also announced that five

new prisons to accommodate 1,500 prisoners each are to be

built under PFI contracts (Ministry of Justice 2009b). Only

seven major consortia have been invited to bid for the

contract (G4S, the GEO Group, Kalyx, Mitie, Reliance, Serco

and Wates Construction) (Ministry of Justice 2009b).

      The private sector is also involved in running training

workshops for inmates in certain publicly-run prisons. For

example, a data cabling workshop has been set up at HMP

Wandsworth, run by Cisco, Panduit and Bovis Lend Lease. These

employers often provide job opportunities for inmates on their

release. Training prisoners up for the workplace is of course

to be welcomed, especially given that half of all prisoners do

not have the skills necessary for 96% of all jobs (House of

Commons, 2005). However, there is a danger that rehabilitation

programmes will be tailored to meet the needs of the private

sector rather than those of individual offenders who may end

up leaving prison with the skills necessary to find employment

but still affected by a whole host of other problems,

emotional, psychological or otherwise, which will in any case

make it difficult for them to survive in the workplace.

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However, the main problem lies with the involvement of the

private sector in the running of prisons.

Punitive managerialism      Despite claims made by the Ministry of Justice that

competition "has led to service improvement across the board"

(Ministry of Justice, 2009a), there is a significant amount of

evidence to suggest that the "pains of imprisonment" (Sykes,

1958) are exacerbated in privately-run prisons. Even the

Ministry of Justice's own figures show that the overall score

obtained by private prisons in England and Wales was 10% lower

than that of public sector prisons (Ministry of Justice,

2009). There are of course many public-sector prisons which

often come under the criticism of the Prisons Inspectorate but

there are specific reasons why conditions are likely to be

worse in private-sector prisons. For example, there is

evidence that prison officers have been encouraged by

privately-managed prisons not to report incidents which might

break the terms of their contract with the Prison Service so

as to avoid incurring financial penalties. Private companies

also pay their staff considerably less than those who work in

the public sector (Centre for Public Services, 2002).

Consequently, their staff are often young and inexperienced,

which may of course affect the quality of care they provide to

prisoners.

      Setting these concerns about private prisons aside, the

Ministry of Justice claims that "public prisons have improved

in the face of competition" (Ministry of Justice, 2009a). Yet

11

it is of course rather difficult to pinpoint the precise

reasons for any improvements in prison regime. Indeed, many

major improvements were made before competition became a major

issue for the Prison Service, in the wake of the Woolf Report

from 1991 (the ending of slopping out, for example). The Human

Rights Act has also helped to ensure that conditions do not

fall below such a standard that they cause the prison service

to breach the law. In any case, it is questionable to what

extent conditions in public prisons have actually improved in

recent years. Indeed, the growing problem of overcrowding has

made it extremely difficult for prison authorities to provide

positive' prison regimes.

      The Probation Service has also been restructured in

recent years in a drive for increased efficiency, leading to

an erosion of the welfare role of probation officers. The

Offender Management Act 2007 opened up the Probation Service

to contestability but changes had already been underway since

1991 which were to lead to a profound change in the philosophy

which had guided the service since it was founded in 1907. The

1991 Criminal Justice Act redefined the role of the probation

officer from one in which he was to advise, assist and

befriend offenders and ex-offenders to one which was to

prioritise crime reduction, public protection, rehabilitation

and "punishment in the community". In 2000, the boundaries

between social assistance and punishment were further blurred

when probation officers were required to work with the police

in order to develop Multi-Agency Public Protection

Arrangements to manage dangerous offenders outside prison and

12

to keep their victims informed of key developments concerning

their supervision in the community. Probation officers have

also lost their powers of discretion over whether or not to

inform the court when offenders breach the conditions of

community sentences (now known as Community Payback). The

distinction between social assistance and punishment was

finally removed altogether when the prison and probation

services were brought together under NOMS in 2004. The

government's aim was clear. As Paul Boateng declared when he

was a minister at the Home Office, "We are moving away from a

social work type of befriending model, no one should be under

illusions about this [...] we intend to form the national

probation service on law enforcement" (cited in Pratt et al.,

2005). Law enforcement and financial efficiency, it would

appear. The Ministry of Justice has announced that certain

probation boards will become trusts, empowered to deliver key

criminal justice services (Ministry of Justice, 2009). The

requisite qualities are defined as the capacity of boards to

show local engagement, strong leadership and to demonstrate

effective resource use, meaning "value for money... economy,

efficiency and effectiveness" (Ministry of Justice, 2009).

Boards who do not demonstrate these qualities will have their

services competed for on the open market. Although reform and

rehabilitation remain a key aim of the Probation Service, it

would seem that cost considerations have become paramount

whilst those of welfare have been sidelined. Just as in the

prison service, the primacy of management philosophy is likely

to lead to the harsher treatment of offenders.

13

 

Responding to the consumers of criminal justice?      The government has claimed that the reform of prison and

probation services and indeed of the criminal justice system

as a whole has been informed by the need to respond to public

demands. As we mentioned above, the government claims to be

concerned with providing the public with value for money. It

has also repeatedly expressed the desire to render the

criminal justice system more victim-centered. Consequently,

victims are increasingly involved in the criminal justice

process. At the policy-making stage, a new Victims Advisory

Panel was set up in 2006 to enable victims of crime to make

formal recommendations to ministers concerning changes to the

criminal justice system. In January of this year, Sara Payne,

mother of eight year-old Sarah Payne who was murdered in 2000

by a convicted sex offender, was appointed as the first

official 'Victims' Champion'. Last month, the Ministry of

Justice published a policy report written by Ms Payne after

she spent nine-months examining the current system and

speaking to victims and the organisations which support them

(Payne, 2009). Victims can also make their voices heard in

court via Victim Impact Statements which provide a written

account of the physical, emotional, psychological and

financial consequences of an offence on its victim.

      This desire to respond to victims' needs can be

explained in part by the decline of deference to government

authorities and the increasing involvement of the public in

14

political debate, pushing the government to be more responsive

to public demands. Yet it might also be argued that it is

driven by the new management philosophy according to which

public services should become more consumer than producer-led.

However, it would appear that victims are not the only

interested parties driving policy reform. Indeed, it is

debatable to what extent these reforms actually meet their

needs. For example, victims of corporate crime are largely

ignored despite the fact that they are most probably more

numerous than victims of violent crime. Although they do not

appear in official crime statistics, research has shown that

investors, consumers and workers are all widely affected by

corporate crime. For example, it is estimated that accidents

at work and work-related illnesses cause more deaths per year

in Britain than murder (Tombs and Whyte, 2008). In addition,

the obsession with cost reduction in the criminal justice

system is likely to make it more difficult for service

providers to effectively protect the public from non-corporate

violent crime. For example, just last summer, the head of the

London Probation Service, David Scott, claimed that the

chronic lack of resources provided to his service had been a

factor leading to the mismanagement of an ex-offender who was

convicted of killing two French students whilst under the

supervision of the probation services (Scott, 2009). It is

also doubtful whether the drive for financial efficiency

across the criminal justice system has actually provided the

public with value for money. For example, contrary to

government claims, research has shown that projects financed

15

under PFI contracts are often more costly for the government

in the long-term than projects financed directly by the public

sector: there are extremely high consultation costs linked

with such contacts (Centre for Public Services, 2002, p. 30);

the State is still obliged to assume much of the risk whilst

the private sector collects the profits (Harvey, 2007, p. 77);

government may be left to pay for services long after they

have ceased to be useful; and it may be obliged to pay a

premium to a private company to ensure that the contract is

completed on time without exceeding its budget.

      It would consequently appear that government concern for

victims is motivated more by electoralist populism than

anything else. Interest groups other than the public and

victims of crime evidently hold more influence over government

policy-making. Indeed, the notion of evidence-based policy-

making is rather narrowly defined to predominantly include

evidence which is produced by interested parties, namely by

the private sector. For example, a report produced by the

Department for Trade and Industry, since renamed the

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, on the use of

market-based approaches to public policy, relied almost

exclusively on evidence produced by representatives from the

private sector when vaunting the cost-efficiency of

competitive tendering in the prison service (DTI, 2005). Its

overall conclusion was that "procurement of prison services

has been successful". It based its claims on cost efficiency

exclusively on a CBI report on the effects of competition in

the prison service (CBI, 2003). This latter report was written

16

by Gary Sturgess, executive director of Serco, which manages

four contracted-out prisons in the UK. Unsurprisingly, the

UK's experience of the contracting-out of prisons was

described as "overwhelmingly positive" (CBI, 2003, p. 47). The

DTI failed to adopt a critical approach to the CBI report,

ignoring evidence to the contrary. Even though it also claimed

to draw on a National Audit Office report, the concerns raised

by this report, notably that private prisons do less to reduce

recidivism than those in the public sector (National Audit

Office, 2003, p. 19), were overlooked. Nevertheless, the

Ministry of Justice cites the DTI Report as evidence of the

cost savings provided by the competitive tendering of prisons

(Ministry of Justice, 2009a).

Partners in (the fight against) crime      That government is influenced by the private sector when

formulating policy is also evidenced by the fact that the

business lobby has been welcomed as a key partner in the fight

against crime. At a local level, members of Crime and Disorder

Reduction Partnerships are empowered to consult local

businesses when developing their anti-crime strategies, and

the creation of Business Improvement Districts has enabled

local businesses to work with local authorities in order to

create the conditions favourable to commerce. In some cases,

control of entire areas in city centres has been handed over

to private business. In practice, this has meant business

proscribing certain behaviour that is considered to be

detrimental to profit and using private security guards to

17

enforce their rules. These developments essentially involve

businesses playing a significant role in the definition of

what may and may not be considered to be criminal and/or

disorderly behaviour. Private business appears to be less

interested in excluding criminals than in excluding those who

are unlikely to consume. Once control of public space is

handed over to private business in this way, government

effectively loses control of policy as it become increasingly

difficult for it to challenge established interests.

      At a national level, senior figures from the private

sector are regularly drafted in to help government formulate

policy. We have already mentioned Lord Carter - he has been

responsible for carrying out a number of policy reviews on

issues related to criminal justice, notably on prisons

(Carter, 2007), legal aid procurement (Carter, 2006) and the

management of offenders (Carter, 2003), all of which have

advocated market solutions. In addition, many government

policy advisers on penal policy and reform have links to the

private security industry. For example, Malcolm Stevens,

manager of G4S Secure Training Centres (STCs) for 12 to 17

year-olds, used to be a government adviser on STC contracting

(Corporate Watch, 2000). The first director of Medway STC, Sue

Clifton, was an adviser to the Youth Justice Board (Corporate

Watch, 2000). Consultation also works in the other direction:

Labour peer, Lord Filkin, is employed as a consultant for

Serco (Serco, 2009). Lobby groups also undoubtedly exert

considerable influence on government. The CBI, for example, as

the largest lobby group for the private sector in the UK,

18

enjoys a privileged position in the policy-making process,

frequently contributing to government consultation exercises

and networking within Parliament. The private security

industry is particularly well-represented by the CBI: key

members of the Public Services Strategy Board, set up

specifically to campaign for an increased role for the private

sector in the delivery of public services, include

representatives from G4S (David Banks, Managing Director of

the Group's Care and Justice Services), Serco (Clive Barton,

Marketing Director for the Serco Group and Gary Sturgess from

the Serco Institute, the Group's research facility) and the

construction companies who have been chosen by government

under the NOMS Strategic Alliance Framework Agreement to build

penal facilities and to carry out minor refurbishment works on

publicly-run prisons (John McDonough, Chief Executive of

Carillion and Adrian Ringrose, Chief Executive of Interserve).

      The private sector has now become the principal policy-

making partner of government. Independent academic experts are

rarely consulted and, when they are, it is questionable the

extent to which their advice is actually taken into

consideration. Just last month, Professor David Nutt, chairman

of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs was dismissed

by Alan Johnson after he publicly claimed that alcohol was

more harmful than many illegal drugs such as LSD, Ecstasy and

cannabis and accused the government of distorting and

devaluing the research evidence on the matter. Despite

government claims to favour what it describes as 'evidence-

based policy-making' and considerable investment in research

19

in the field of crime policy, in practice the New Labour

administration has been very selective concerning the results

it chooses to publish and use in policy formulation (Hope,

2004). The trend has been exacerbated by the transposition of

efficiency imperatives into the field of research: academic

experts increasingly find that they are discouraged from

undertaking work which seeks to analyse broad fundamental

questions with regard to penal policy since it clashes with a

performance target culture which favours short-term solutions

(Maguire, 2004). In addition, the penal reform lobby has come

to exercise less and less influence over policy-making (Ryan,

2008). Today, the experts' in the field of criminal justice

are more likely to come from the private sector than the

public. The potential for conflict of interests is of course

great.

 

Conclusion      As the influence of the private sector has become

stronger, the state has become weaker, even if it has become

more authoritarian. But this is about more than simple

authoritarianism. Authoritarianism emanates from the state.

Neoliberal ideology has infected the policy-making process to

such an extent that government is now obliged to bend to the

interests of the private sector whether it actively chooses to

do so or not. It is largely out of populism that it attempts

to respond to the interests of the victims of crime. Although

the primacy accorded to the interests of private business may

20

be presented as an inheritance from Thatcherism, it is only

under New Labour, as neoliberalism has become truly

routinised, that it has become so prominent.

      In the present political context, it would seem that the

trend is irreversible. Indeed, should David Cameron become the

next Prime Minister, there is every indication that the

private sector will remain a key partner in the policy-making

process and that its imperatives will continue to drive

policy, especially in light of Conservative Party promises to

render the public sector more efficient. Punitive

interventionism is also likely to remain. Although 'caring

conservatism' dictates that the Party pay more attention to

social problems, attention is still focused on reinforcing

personal responsibility, through coercion if necessary. In

addition, in spite of the Party's professed concerns about the

erosion of civil liberties in modern Britain, it is unlikely

that these will be better protected under a Conservative

government. On the contrary, the Party has already promised to

extend police powers and there is little chance that a

Conservative government would interfere with the interests of

the private security industry which is profiting to such a

huge extent from the increased surveillance of British

citizens. Perhaps it could now be suggested that the

neoliberal hegemony, initially set in train under Thatcher, is

now complete.

Bibliography

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