Anyone who is concerned about the human condition must be getting worried about Jack Straw. As he goes about the business of being the man who hopes to be Labour’s next Home Secretary, Straw is finding life more and more stressful and threatening. In this situation, what do politicians do? They make a speech—or perhaps, depending on how strongly they feel, several speeches. And so it has come about that Straw, who obviously feels strongly about his chances of getting to sit on the govemment Front Bench in the near future, has spoken out.
Among the first to feel the lash of Straw's tongue were beggars and alcoholics. Or rather aggressive beggars and alcoholics; so it could be that addicts and vagrants, who accept their position cheerfully, will avoid the worst consequences of any laws designed to sweep them away which a future Labour government may introduce. Until then, the streets will continue to be littered with the open, human evidence of the fate which awaits anyone who does not fit into capitalism’s presumptive pattern of wage-slavery. The rich will still have to avert their eyes to this spectacle, as they make their way from the opera to an expensive supper, or to their club, or to the discreet shops of Knightsbridge.
Intimidation
Then there are the squeegee merchants—the people who wait, with bucket and sponge, at busy traffic lights and insist on cleaning car windscreens, with an implied promise that provided the driver pays them for this service, they won’t hold on the aerial as the car is driven way. Now this can be intimidating, especially to drivers who take a pride in keeping their own windscreen sparkling clean and their aerial stiff and straight. Not nearly so intimidating, though, as the pressure a lot of the motorists are likely to be under from their employers, who now wield all the power associated with widespread unemployment. Of the adult population, 60 percent are now either unemployed or in jobs which can be defined as insecure. Three-quarters of full time jobs are on short-term contracts. Sitting in the petrol fumes at the lights, the motorists are harassed all right—but not only by the squeegee merchants.
Perhaps encouraged by the response to his campaign to clear the streets and the busy junctions of all offenders against good order and wage-slaves' discipline, Straw then turned his attention to children. Not just any children; at the moment he is concerned only with those who are out on the streets at a time when Straw thinks they should be at home, watching party political broadcasts on television or tucked up in bed with a copy of the Labour Party’s latest policy document. Driving home from the Commons, says Straw, he sees children who he judges to be under ten years old and he wonders where their parents are. He didn’t actually say that these children are a threat to anyone, or had committed any crime but he clearly feels they are another threat to Labour's ideal society and something must be done about them.
Straw’s proposal of a curfew for all ten-year-old children was, he said, a “sensible" way of dealing with a problem. In fact the police already have the power to pick up any child who seems to be at any kind of risk and take them home, or to hospital, or to a social worker. Where Straw’s curfew would break fresh ground is in the fact that it would not be necessary for the children to be at risk; merely being out of doors after a certain hour would be enough for the police to act.
There was a predictably mixed response, on the one hand from people who are concerned at the apparent increase in violence and offences by young children and on the other from people who are worried about civil liberties and the presumption of innocence and why kids should be out by themselves at night and how the curfew would fall heaviest on families who are already the most disadvantaged among the working class.
Straw was unperturbed, probably convinced that his ideas would strike a sympathetic chord with enough people to be a vote winner. He did not seem to be concerned to ask why the adults who are supposed to be caring for children are apparently so careless. He did not refer to the fact that, however it is measured, poverty in this country gets worse and more distressing year-by-year. According [to] the Child Poverty Action Group, about a quarter of the population live at or below the poverty line; in 1979 about ten percent were at that level. Straw did not dwell on the fact that as poverty deepens all sorts of human factors go with it, like self-esteem, like confidence in the future, like care for the family . . .
Backlash
There was a time when it was hardly necessary to argue this case, as one White Paper after another promoted the policies which eventually sprouted the great social work boom of the Sixties and Seventies. Many members of the Labour Party could delude themselves that they were in the forefront of this movement in ideas, that in future problems like crime, homelessness, addiction would be treated in their social context instead of being explained away as the poisonous fruit of evil personalities.
Well that was along time ago and now we live, as socialists said we would, in a period of reaction—of backlash. The present Home Secretary, Michael Howard, has single-mindedly exploited this, presumably on the assumption that in this way he advances his political career. He has not bothered to respond to Straw’s odious attempts to outbid him in the contest for the get-tough-on-crime vote. Perhaps he agrees with the Labour voter who said Straw is “. . . the only man on earth who can make Michael Howard look left-wing’’.
From the politicians' point-of-view the advantage with the policies of Straw and Howard is that they blank out the need to properly investigate social problems and come up with a considered response to them. They suffocate debate under panic and hysteria. They perpetuate the social system which impoverishes, brutalises and represses us—mortgages and homeless, addicts and athletes, adults and children.
Ivan
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