The more specials we have. The sensitive criminologist own Professor Ian Lowe delivering the lecture in murder is professor of criminology and Professorial Son of All Souls College at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. In arrived in Oxford in 2005, having previously taught at Heal the University of Edinburgh. It has published extensively on policing, private security, public sensibilities towards crime, penal policy and culture.
The last two years, Ian is focussed on exploring the politics of crime and the public roles of criminology. First Strand, which was brought together in his book called Public Criminology.
The next stage of the project focuses on ideologies in crime control after the current academic year and has been awarded a mid-career fellowship by the Independent Social Research Foundation to pursue this research titled Insert the Politics of Crime, which feels a little more prescient and indeed necessary this week. Today's lecture is Crime Order Two Faces of Conservatism. And without further ado, I'll find you words. Thank you very much, Alpha, and thank you for that.
Well, it's a great honour to be here, even though I spend most of my time here and. And to be delivering this final lecture and to the usual anxieties that attend these occasions, like when you've had to string together a coherent argument and all those things, I've managed to add an additional three of my own. So I just want to preface what I want to say by those.
The first is, is as Alpers just kindly pointed out, this this lecture is part of a wider project, which I'm engaged in over the course of the year. So I've not suddenly developed an interest in conservatism. Per say, conservatism is one of the places on the map of political ideologies.
I'm going to spend the year travelling around, and the assumption that kind of guides this project is that one of the things that gives crime control its kind of emotional charge, one of the one of the reasons that it kind of matters to us, one of the reasons why the question of crime is so difficult to reduce simply to questions of what works and what's effective is because when people come at that question or their series of questions, they do so from a particular place on the ideological map.
And their location on that place changes the ways in which they think about the topic, the kinds of meaning and priority they gave to certain significant concepts order, authority, legitimacy, the state rights and so on and so forth. The kinds of institutions I think one might mobilise to to address crime and so on and so on. So the project is, in a sense, an attempt to kind of trace out and map those connections.
It also has its policy title and our first just alluded to called In Search of a Better Politics of Crime. Let's start with some simple, which is that how are we might think about that project that it requires not merely better information about how criminal justice institutions work or do not work, but also requires new and better ideas. So my justification for this kind of tool of the political landscape is in part an attempt to try and mine resources for thinking about that a wider project.
Now, on good days, this all seems important and worthwhile and a great thing to be spending this part of my life on. On bad days. It seems hopelessly ambitious and ridiculous and I wonder why even bothered. So the additional anxiety that attends this talk is the first outing the project has had is that my attempts to make sense of this will be a test case, whether I can do it anywhere else right now. Having said that, there's that anxiety.
Number two is that conservatism presents particular kinds of challenges for trying to do this, which I'll come on to in a minute. I also feel a kind of double outsider to the task. So I'll fess up at the beginning that I never thought of myself as a conservative. And more importantly, for this purpose, I'm not a political theorist. So much of the time I feel myself scrambling around in unknown territory without the requisite, requisite skills to be able to navigate effectively or securely.
And my hope is that the territory I think I'm trying to situate myself in is that under-explored terrain at the boundary between criminology and political theory. So if this project goes off well, I will at least most of illuminated some of that territory. Okay. The third anxiety was occasioned by the traumatic events of Tuesday. So my worry now is what I'm about to say for the next 45 minutes or so will be heard and interpreted through the lens of.
Trump's triumph as president elect of the United States. And I was joking with Karen yesterday. I could have just spent the day rewriting it. I kind of hope that doesn't happen, not least because this paper was not written with that outcome in mind, nor do I think it will greatly help to understand what's going on.
So for one or two reasons to come back to, in fact, there's another bit of this emerging book on populism and technocracy, which I think rather still tangentially gets at the question of what's going on in that dimension of contemporary politics. So I rather draw the hope that we don't reread everything I'm about to say through that particular prism, tempting that it may be the slight qualification to that goes something like this.
I think that the scary and dangerous world that we now appear to be living in creates all kinds of responsibilities for us as academics and thinkers and researchers and writers. And the Board of Criminology blog that was posted yesterday kind of articulated some of that.
One of those tasks, it seems to me, one of our tasks in this world is to try and understand what makes or what something about the social world, the cluster of sensibilities, the accumulation of fears and fantasies that could lead millions of people to put a cross next to the name Donald Trump. And some of those people are just angry white men. Some of them are women, some of them are Hispanics, some of them were Muslims.
And it seems to be beholden to try and understand that worldview and that sensibility. And in a sense, I think what I'm trying to do rather closer to home in relation to conservatism is something akin to that. Right. I can start now. I think it's safe to say that during the this is a 50th anniversary lecture, during the 50 years that this centre has been in existence, in one form or another, conservatism has been this country's dominant political tradition.
And I think one can also safely say that conservatism has been one of the political traditions that has most fully animated and contributed to the rise of a certain kind of a motif and heated up.
Law and Order politics is a cliché of British politics to say that law and order or crime and punishment are somehow naturally conservative issues, by which is usually meant some version of the claim that somehow voters implicitly trust the Conservatives to know what to do about crime, to be tough on it, to back the police, to be tough on offenders, to sympathise with victims and so on and so forth.
And some of the most influential accounts of the politics of crime over the last three or four decades. You think of Stuart Hall, the town's policing the crisis or the culture of control or some of O'Malley's work have attended to the ways in which, in a sense, crime got wrapped up with the kind of remaking and resurgence of a certain kind of conservative politics.
Now, despite that, I mean, I think it's also the case that one is hard pressed to think of many influential conservative writers on crime. And the fact that James Q Wilson will pop up once or twice in the next 45 minutes, gets so frequently mentioned in this context is because to some extent he stands as the exception.
I think it's also true to say, especially in this country, less so in the States, but also to some extent in the states that there is no vibrant tradition or paradigm of conservative criminology to which one can point to or analyse or identify. And indeed. Most provocatively, you could say that conservatism kind of functions as criminologist. Other, in other words, is a kind of external, emotive, common sense about crime.
Which criminology kind of sets itself the task of demystifying and seeking to contest? Now, I think it's an interesting question why that antagonistic relationship might well have developed. I think one plausible answer to it is that liberalism sorry, criminology is a kind of creature of enlightenment liberalism. It sees as one of its constituting tasks, putting reason to use in the service of social betterment.
Whereas, as we shall see, conservatism in many ways is best understood as a counter enlightenment tradition, one that refuses to be seduced by the idea that we're always capable of making social and moral progress. But nonetheless, the result, I think, is that conservatism has become one of criminology buzzwords. It gets bandied around as if we all somehow know what it means. We all know what's wrong with it, and we all know we need to spend no serious time thinking about it.
That therefore one struggles in criminology, I think to find many or indeed any serious or systematic or sympathetic accounts of what conservatism actually is and the ways in which it operates in our field. Still less why some of its ideas and concepts and claims can resonate so powerfully among so many of our CO citizens.
So my aim for the next how long? Keep an eye on the time, because I haven't got any kind any any kind of timekeeper anywhere near me is to offer some kind of rational reconstruction of. What it is to be a conservative and what kinds of arguments and beliefs and values and claims have been marshalled around the court in question by people who travel under that label.
And I want to do this with an orientation which is, in the first instance, anthropological, by which I mean, I try and want to try and recover and clarify from the inside what it means to be a conservative. A more conservative take on crime looks like with a view to offering something that might look like a kind of best case account of that position.
One fully committed conservative would at least recognise, if not fully agree with, as well as to try to understand its emotional and cultural appeal and engage in some kind of dialogue with its central claims. Now, this task is is not without its challenges. Three of which I just want to mention by way of extent, finalising this extended introduction. And the first of this is the claim pressed by many who think of themselves as conservatives. The conservatism isn't really an ideology at all.
The idea here is not simply that conservatism lacks the kind of founding texts and authors that you would find in liberalism, for example. But to try and reduce conservatism to a set of abstract principles and concepts is in some sense to distort it and therefore to fail to understand it. On this view, conservatism is a kind of sensibility, a kind of way of being in the world. It's just the disposition of those who are not minded to surrender a known good for some kind of unknown better.
Now, I think one fully has to grasp this kind of what you might think of as this kind of aesthetic dimension of conservatism is part of what that tradition means, while also remembering that it has an attendant political character. In other words, what conservatism does offer, among other things, is a very distinctive account of the activity and tasks of governing and by extension, of trying to govern crime.
It necessarily has a kind of ideological map which enables people who think of themselves as conservatives to know what they what they approve of and disapprove of, who their friends are, who their enemies are, and what direction they want society to go or not to go, and so on and so forth. And conservatism has to be analysed in those terms as an ideology.
The second challenge, pressed often by conservative critics, is that conservatism is little more than the ideology or political program of privileged groups trying to cling to their power and privileges. On this view, conservative ideas now in inverted commas, are typically pressed in bad faith. They are the motivated justifications of people who are trying to cling to their privilege.
Therefore, what is required in analysing conservative ideas is some attention to the context out of which they emerge, and not so much the analysis of ideology in the terms I am trying to present here, but a kind of ideology critique in the kind of critical theory sense of that term. In other words, a kind of unmasking of those claims to a masking of those ideas and their relationship to existing structures of power and inequality.
Now, I kind of have some sympathy with that view. I think it's I think the view the idea, for example, that equality is natural, is more likely to appeal to people who benefit from existing distributions of society's benefits and burdens than those who are at the bottom end of that distribution. But I think that connection between interest and ideas is not unique to conservatism.
And I also think that reducing conservatism to self-interest in those ways should not free us of the burden of actually trying to examine. Conservative claims about the world, the kinds of questions they posed, the answers they gave, and as importantly, why they appeal not only to the the the entitled and the privileged, but to significant proportions of the downtrodden, the fearful, the fatalistic and so on.
Challenge to challenge three what conservatism, which conservatism you're talking about. The question here is a kind of question about particularity, a question about whether it when trying to understand something called conservatism. There is some kind of entity that you can grasp that has travelled through time and across jurisdictions, whether you're really confronted with analysing a particular kind of plural and multiple conservatism.
And that challenge is particularly acute in relation to conservatism precisely because it's become clear it's a kind of philosophy of attachment to place. It's always has a kind of rootedness in particular locations, and no one has more recently put it as ever chanted, Conservatives of all nations unite so and so.
In analysing conservatism, one needs, I think, to attend to its particular kind of historical rootedness while also being alive to the kinds of family resemblances that might exist between different kinds of conservatism. Now, my way of solving this problem and putting some boundaries around what I'm attempting to do is to make the principal focus of my analysis that tradition of sceptical and British and voice to some extent European conservatism.
And to make that my focus and to think about its connections to and points of departure from the allied traditions with which it has travelled in recent years, notably American neoconservatism and neo liberalism. So what follows is my attempt to give a kind of plausible rendition of. A concern that that that that sceptical British conservative worldview and what it is has to say about questions of crime and punishment is not the only way that you can think about conservative takes on crime.
But it seems to me to be a plausible one and one that deserves more serious scrutiny and attention than it typically is received within criminology. And the argument in some, for those of you like to drop off and reappear at the end is this that one finds in that tradition?
This is too crude. I don't know how committed I am to this, both a source of penal aggravation and a source of penal restraint, by which I mean a kind of moralistic conception of crime and an attendant conception of order which is concerned with ultimately the reassert the reassertion of sovereign authority and control, but also at the same time a kind of scepticism towards the state that always leaves conservatives being.
Reticent, ambivalent about certain practices of punishment and in the end, seeking to find non-peaceful forms of socialisation and social regulation. And for the next 40 minutes or so, I'm going to try and elaborate on all that. Right. It's become a kind of orthodoxy of the literature on the politics of crime. To say something along the following lines that the. Thank you. I have to say something along the following lines.
The the rise and resurgence of conservative politics in the 1970s had something to do with the break that it made, not only with a general post-war consensus about economic and social governance, but a more particular liberal consensus about the management and governance of crime, which kind of held that crime was an issue to be managed off the political stage by experts, by by senior practitioners, by government officials, without much public fuss, as it were.
The break with that tradition enabled effectively conservative politicians to tap into and articulate certain public fears and anxieties about rising levels of crime, and to plug them into a wide, wider narrative about the crisis of social authority, about a crisis of government, about questions of race and so on and so forth. That much is familiar to anyone who's ever read. Policing the crisis, for example.
Now, much of the analysis of that tends to focus as either on the kind of consequences of that in terms of what then happened in terms of criminal justice, politics, or on its kind of electoral dividends, the ways in which conservative conservative party use crime, as it were, to leave a working class support. But I think that claim is it's also worth trying to situate conceptually.
And then what by which I mean that there is something about the kind of morphology or architecture of conservative ideology that means it is able to capitalise on and have things to say about crime that flow from its conceptual ordering and in particular from the centrality of the concepts of order and stability to its general world view. This makes conservatism kind of at ease when questions of crime are under discussion in a way that liberals and social Democrats,
I think, are just never quite at ease. And it means that they have a kind of a for conceptual as well as political reasons, have a capacity to kind of get on the front foot, to be attuned to the uses of fear, to be able to kind of very easily tell a story about crime that can kind of connect with a broader set of questions about social discipline, breakdown, governmental authority and the like. And I want to elaborate on that claim.
Now, perhaps the best way in to that is to think about the crisis of rehabilitation, is that mid to late 1970s, as is as is well known, some version of the rehabilitative ideal or what David Garland calls penal welfarism had become by the mid 1970s, a kind of governing orthodoxy of U.S. and U.K. criminal justice policy, the organising rationale of the system.
And it came under both a critique of the kind of technocratic coins that none of these programs appeared to work in the 1970s, as well as a liberal critique focuses on questions of due process, suspects, rights, the control of discretion, and so on and so forth.
But there also emerged at that time a distinctive conservative version of the critique of rehabilitation, which largely was launched from outside the system and its governing premises, and which challenged in the wholesale way all the assumptions that held that view of what crime management without together. And there are three central claims that just briefly want to articulate.
The first is the kind of critique of the idea that crime should be considered a kind of presenting system of other problems, whether they be sociological or whether they be social or psychological. And therefore, we need principally some kind of remedial treatment or intervention on the grounds that what this does is deny the responsibility and moral agency of offenders and their need to account for what they have done.
And, of course, this went alongside and kind of married very closely with a kind of broader but connected account, a critique of the welfare state in its capacity to generate perverse outcomes, welfare dependency, to simply not take account of individual responsibility and the like.
Secondly, the I think the rehabilitation, at least in that kind of grand organising rationale for the system terms, struck conservatives as a kind of as resting on the unwarranted assumption that you can use government to kind of engineer better outcomes. It was a kind of example of governmental overreach or what Michael Oakeshott calls rationalism in politics.
And it also rested on a series of erroneous assumptions about the basically benign nature of human impulses and the kind of know what conservatives to talk to be the naive hope. That you could use state intervention of various kinds to straighten out what camp once called the crooked timber of humanity.
And this required, thirdly, a kind of reckoning with certain kinds of realities about human behaviour, and it's resistant to manipulation, which is where James Q Wilson enters our story, because in the very influential book originally published in 1975, starts with the then arresting claim that public policies need to be designed, according to what he called a clear and sober understanding of human nature.
And in case anyone was in any doubt what he meant by that, he closed the book 200 odd pages later. With this, wicked people exist. I mean, this is now become fairly well known. Nothing if I was you can you can read it behind you. This was nothing short of a kind of tearing up of of 50 or so years of both criminological orthodoxy and a large amount of kind of orthodox and official assumptions about crime and its causes.
And what we need to do about it. And what it ushered in was both a very different conception of how we ought to think about crime and a rather different conception of the kinds of instruments are required if we are to adequately respond to it. Right now, conservatives are often derided by their critics for moralising about crime. And I think if you're a conservative, this charge makes no sense, because for conservatives, crime simply is a moral issue.
And to forget about or neglect that fact is just to ignore something constructive about the nature of crime that involves some kind of crossing of a line between right and wrong. I also think that helps to explain further explain conservatives in a rather difficult and antagonistic relationship, both with criminology in particular and social science in general.
Because conservatives have a distaste for forms of causal explanation of of crime, which appear to face individual responsibility, condone bad behaviour, complicate the question of punishment, surround the offender as Margaret Thatcher once, nicely put it, with a fog of excuses.
I think conservatives are also or if there is a conservative sensibility which is also rather offended or at least bemused by the kind of criminological posture in relation to crime, which has the capacity to step back and just think in rather distance and analytical ways about crime as a social problem. And and I know this because I've encountered it in TV studios and various other places where the offence that is being given by doing that is not what you have to say.
But the mere fact that you can think about crime in such abstracted rationalistic, seemingly morally, in different ways. Now, the reason for mentioning it, I think, is that it's there is the capacity to think about crime as a moral problem, which also enables conservatives to, as it were, get on the front foot, to be assertive, to have things to say that connect with public sentiment in relationship to broader public discourse.
A point I'll come back to shortly. So what elements of the conservative story about crime enable it to do that? Yet we briefly run through three of them. First, a critique of structural explanations of crime and why it happens, why it might go up and down. I've written here disconnecting crime and social justice. That's a mistake. But because no conservative would think of what they doing in quite those terms.
And that was a critique of the idea that crime is somehow a product of poverty, of inequality, of unemployment. One finds this the hope, the whole point that James Cooper was made in thinking about crime, about the paradox of crime in the sixties, being the coexistence of rising crime and rising living standards, and was a was a kind of case in point. And there is both a kind of there's a kind of empirical objection that gets made to this, but also a basic a more basic objection.
The thinking about crime in those terms is to some extent, to make some kind of a category mistake. Secondly, in the conservative style, if crime is about poverty at all. It's about moral poverty. The starting axiom of of of a kind of conservative account of human nature is that left to our own devices, without our impulses being controlled and regulated, human beings will, on the whole, behave badly.
They therefore need to be taught to be instructed to have their impulses controlled and so on and so forth. And the story about the rising levels of crime in the second half of the 20th century for conservatives is therefore principally a cultural and moral one, not an economic and social one. It's about what James cubism called the triumph of self-expression. It's about the dismembered families. It's about the erosion of discipline.
It's about the triumph of rights over entitlements and so on and so forth. And this relates thirdly, you know, come back to this much more at the end to an important aspect of the cause of this, which isn't ultimately about police and punishment, but is about the collapse or failure of certain kinds of agencies of social and moral instruction in civil society.
It's about the failure of churches, parents, teachers and others to provide the the appropriate forms of moral instruction, inculcating responsibility and restraint. Now, we'll come back to that at the end, but just two points about about the kind of broader cultural resonance of that.
Well. One. Okay. Firstly, I think what concern what this kind of conservative story does about crime in broader public discourse, it was kind of was kind of a license and inject into into discussions of crime a certain kind of emotionality. In other words, it in a way that the all forms of liberalism and social democracy cannot do. In other words, it said that is. Perfectly okay.
Or we should stop thinking about crime just in the kind of arid language of cost benefit or using abstract theories of social causation. But instead, it's perfectly proper and legitimate to treat crime as an occasion for certain kinds of emotional utterances for thinking about indignation, blame, censure, stigma and the like, and for thinking about the are all solutions to crime using a language of responsibility, virtue, duty, and so on and so forth.
And it's that moralising move that gives conservative ideology the capacity to tap into a certain strand of popular sentiment about these issues. Secondly, it also means it becomes very easy for conservatives to speak about crime in a kind of idiom of common sense, which which can kind of say we are saying things that are just obviously things that you obviously know to be true. We are on your side.
We are here to speak for the concerns of the silent majority, against the indifference of experts and elites and so on and so forth. Hence this this quote I found from Norman Tebbit in 1986, which is on the tape behind me. I mean, those of you who've been paying any attention notice that Theresa may said something extremely similar, both about this and about migration. In her first conference speech as conservative leader several weeks ago.
And we're doing fine. Okay. So I'm conservatism, if you like, as it were, locates crime as a kind of moral question that is a product of certain kinds of failures, of a web of institutions in civil society. And I'll come back to that point and things. I think it matters. But this does not detract conservatives from the idea that when crime is rising, that it calls for the firm hand of sovereign authority and the reassertion of control and discipline.
And they seem to me to be two core components of conservative ideology which enable it to grasp the importance of that task. Firstly, an account of the primary responsibilities of the state, and secondly, the dominant place, the order and a particular conception of order has within the conservative world view. So let me take each of those things in turn.
And the aforementioned Michael Oakeshott thinks about governing, as he puts it, as a specific and limited form of activity, which he thinks should be concerned with attending to society's arrangements in order to trying to regulate conflict and ensure peaceable behaviour.
And that theme echoes throughout conservative philosophy the idea that government is a kind of limited task and that its principal job is not endless social improvement and social betterment, but the staving off, as John Grey puts it, of ever present evils, foremost among which is the avoidance of civil strife.
And you find the same kinds of things throughout the kind of conservative pamphlets, ladies speeches and all the kind of things I've spent the last few weeks in the Western Library analysing this kind of echo of the idea of a limited but strong state whose first duty is the protection of its citizens. Now, this seems to me, is entangled in interesting ways with the priority that conservatives gave to the concept of order.
And to understand that, I think you need to recognise that while conservatives believe in freedom and they believe in the they believe in the individual. Conservatism is not first and foremost, unlike liberalism, a philosophy of individual freedom. So in relation to. So in relation to questions of freedom, the conservative view of these things is yes, no. The balance between order and freedom requires constant vigilance and attention. And that's what politics is ultimately about.
But we should be clear the order comes first that takes priority where there's a dispute between the two of them. And similarly, we need to remember that conservatism isn't first and foremost a philosophy of individualism. It's a philosophy of attachment to place, of belonging to families, neighbourhoods, communities, nations, to some conception of a home.
And John, as a quote from John Grey, where he says very nicely before anything else, he says, before even even freedom, human beings need a home, a sense of home. Now, the reason why I think this matters, because it both accounts for the both the priority that conservatives give to a concept of order and the particular way in which they get that concept gets fleshed out.
Because I don't think in the conservative worldview, order reduces to anaemic and operational sounding terms like safety or protection. There's always something much more going on, and that much more has to do with the attachment to and preservation of certain kinds of valued places and valued sources of belonging, whether they be whether they be home or family or neighbourhood or nation or some conception of the people and so on.
And I think that makes order for conservatives in some really deep and important sense, a kind of boundary drawing exercise. When you think about order, you're thinking about questions of who we are and what we believe in, what are the boundaries of us, who threatens us, and so on and so forth. So it becomes a very rich and resonant and always symbolically loaded question, which has which circulates around the idea that has something to do with our shared home.
Now, there are all kinds of things I'll say about that. I just want to say one, and that is I think this helps to explain something that if you if you read conservative publications on these over years strikes you very immediately, which is the kind of primacy the conservatives give to the police and the special affection that that institution possesses within the conservative conception of order.
So when crime is at issue, it seems that there's something the Conservatives instinctively reach for this institution and that that idea that we must that we we must back the police is a kind of resonant and recurring theme of all kinds of conservative literature manifesto statements, pamphlets from the 19 well, from 1964 onwards, when I first noticed that it appears and it generally means two things firstly that we can be trusted to give material backing to this institution and in the end,
only we as conservatives can be trusted to this to provide more, more officers, more power, more equipment, more training and so on and so forth. But as importantly, that they can be relied upon for our support. We will attend to questions of their morale. We will protect them from their critics. We will reassure them that they are doing a value job on our behalf and so on and so forth. And those are that is also a kind of resonant theme.
Now, as anyone who's thought about these for 2 minutes will realise, that hasn't stopped Conservative administrations from being virulent critics of the police at various points in the last two decades and in various places, various times, also making attempts to take them on, to change them, to modernise them, and so on and so forth. All that is true, and I've written about that somewhere else.
But it remains the case that that sits alongside a kind of effective commitment to what you might call the idea of policing or to what an animal kingdom may call the police force of the imagination which operates which continues to possess a kind of special place within conservative conceptions of order, but precisely because what it is imagined, as is both a line between civilisation and chaos, or slightly less dramatically as a kind of comforting,
reassuring source of authority in everyday life and an institution that seems to have a kind of essentially conservative mission, i.e. to protect and preserve things that we value, whether they be our safety, our streets, our homes, our communities, our nation and so on. So for. Right. Okay. Up until this point, the underlying paper looked like that. From this point onwards, it looks like that.
Which doesn't mean I haven't thought about it. It just means I'm really all down each sentence sentences yet. But still. We're also face to face. I think it would be a mistake to think that conservatives lack enthusiasm for the other institutions, which they instinctively reach for at times of social crisis and rising crime and violence and so on. Namely, the institution of punishment, and in particular the prison. And its. There is a further cliché about British politics.
The Conservative Party members, backbenchers, Daily Mail readers can salivate excitedly at the thought of some of their citizens getting punished and are extremely enthusiastic for there to be more of it, for it to be harsher, more austere and nasty and so on and so forth. And I don't want to say that that kind of visceral, emotional enthusiasm for punishment hasn't been part of contemporary conservative politics.
It's true to say that the return of the Conservatives to power in 1979 coincided with, among other things, the return of a language of retribution and deterrence to discussions of punishment. To return to debates about capital punishment in Parliament for a few years. To the reintroduction of short, sharp, short regimes in young offenders institutions.
In the 1990s, Michael Howard, when he was in times actually enthusiastically declared that prison works, as he liked to say, and set about making penalties stiffer, making prison regimes more austere, and so on and so forth.
So I don't want to. Everything that follows needs to be prefaced by the claim that no, at times of rising crime and violence and crisis, conservatives will be resolute and stern in the idea that one of the things that such crises require is the imposition of sovereign penal control. That having been said, I think, to to to leave the conservative account of punishment there is to is to produce an account with these which is kind of partial and risks forever lapsing into a caricature.
Because alongside those enthusiasms, I think you're also finding conservative writings about about prisons and punishment, a kind of ongoing ambivalence about the institution of the prison in particular, which has often made conservatives in practical politics critiques of the prison system and advocates of penal reform.
Is also the case that the kind of moralising story about crime, which conservatives tell has as one of its implications the idea that there is something futile about thinking you could do anything about crime using the institutions of police and punishment because its sources lie in the socialising institutions of civil society, and therefore that's also where its remedies need to be located.
In other words, there are things in conservative philosophy that kind of temper, that enthusiasm for punishment, and which are both specifically criminal ones and have also something to do with a kind of scepticism about the state and about government as a solution to social problems which animates conservative thought. And I want to say a few words about both of those things. So I'm.
It's kind of close to being an axiom of conservative philosophy that government should not be considered to be a kind of source of social betterment. An institution trying constantly to engineer progress should not be the source of endless innovation and so on and so on, but should be an institution about which we should train ourselves to think sceptically and expect expect less of.
In other words, this an institution is somehow mired in cluelessness, is consistently fails to deliver, is beset by unintended consequences of various kinds. In other words, the what is required in relation to our thinking about governments is a certain kind of lowering of all expectation, which is why this kind of quote from Michael Oakeshott, which is on the board behind me, kind of rather captures that kind of. Stop thinking. Stop thinking that things are going to get better.
We need to quiet you all down. Philosophy of government, which I think is central to conservative philosophy and why this matters in this context, I think because it does help generate what you might describe as a certain a certain kind of penal prudence in conservative thinking about punishment in general and prisons in particular, which which kind of manifest itself in the constant iteration of both the futility of prison, the sense that there really should be an institution of last resort,
the idea that it really is no place for people with mental illness and so on and so forth. And that that is a kind of recurring subtheme of lots of conservative political writing about prisons in the last 30 or 40 years, which is occasionally found its expressions in an actual government policy.
There was a to at least two periods in the 1980s, for example, when reducing the prison population became the explicit aim of conservative administrations attended in the late 1980s in a government white paper by the famous phrase, Prisons are an expensive way of making bad people worse.
This also generates, I think, a kind of routine and recurring attention to what's going on inside prisons, on the understanding that from a conservative perspective, what's wrong with prisons is that they are places of irresponsibility and enforced, demoralising idleness. Hence, again, a constant recurring concern to try and both limit the damage that prisons can do and try and make them places in which offenders can engage in work can be treated decently.
And in his latest iteration under Michael Gove can be opened up to certain forms of change and redemption. The second element of. Conservative philosophy, which I think kind of tempers this enthusiasm for punishment. And so and kind of demands of conservatives that they kind of look beyond the penal field for sources of order and control. And also, I think, flows from it from a kind of axiom or central concept of conservative thought.
And this is basically the twin idea that we ought not to think of government as the solution to problems. Often we should think of it as the problem itself. And that what government has done over the course of the 20 latter half of the 20th century is take responsibility for things that ought properly to be left to the institutions of a civil society, whether they be families, neighbourhoods, voluntary effort of various kinds. So one finds in conservative philosophy a theory of politics.
This, which is Scruton as recently articulated it, which thinks of the toss to kind of limit the size and scope of the state and expand the size and scope of civil society. Now, this has to payoffs to recurring payoffs in relation to conservative discourse about crime. First is the idea that the causes of crime and the sources of order lie beyond the control of government and criminal law and the penal realm.
The second is the idea, which I flagged up earlier, that when we think about how to prevent or socialise or inculcate individuals with with restraint, with impulse control, with character, or if you want to describe it, the appropriate institutions for doing that, all the intermediate institutions of civil society, not the agents of the agents of control in the state, families, churches, neighbourhood groups, teachers and so on and so forth.
And at various points, again, in the last several decades, some variants of those themes have occurred, both in relation to what Pat O'Malley, brother pejoratively called responsible ization in the 1980s, when we were all being encouraged to believe that the responsibility for prevention of crime was somehow a requirement of all of us as citizens, as people of work in universities or hospitals and schools and so on and so forth.
And in the recent and iteration of the Big Society, which some of you may remember, was the enthusiasm of David Cameron's for several years. Well, it now remains, though, in his new job and arguably also in relation to police and crime commissioner.
And what you find in relation to all those things is, in a sense, a kind of a set of practices about which many people have been sceptical because they look like cover for things like austerity, but actually have deep roots in a kind of anti statist localism, which is a central part of a conservative ideology. Right. I want to end with a question. I Alfa commonly points out in the beginning why the project to which this is a part is called In Search of a Better Politics of Crime.
And I should it should now become apparent that there's something about the searching for better politics of crime, which is a fundamentally non-conservative thing to do. And therefore, the question that I've been posing in the middle of in the context of writing all this is what what is a project whose ambition is to search for resources, for a better politics of crime, to do with or capable of finding in conservative political ideology.
Now, I was sorely tempted, hence the question box, and I was sorely tempted about 2 hours ago just to sit down at this point and say, help you. You answer that question for me. But I will say one or two things. The first. The first takes me back to the point I was making in relation to Donald Trump's election as president.
In the beginning, the one that the one reason why you might want to wrestle with conservatism and the kind of emotional and cultural appeal of certain kinds of conservative stories or nostrums or concepts around crime from a non-conservative perspective is just to engage in the task of trying to understand what is the nature, what is the nature of the appeal of those ideas and claims for so many millions of people? And I don't think I necessarily got a good answer to that, though.
One of them might just have something to do with the capacity of conservative ideology to tap into some deep rooted. Needs that human beings have to belong to feel attached to something greater themselves, to feel that they have a home. And the capacity of conservatism to to mobilise and to mobilise and think about crime and more likely migration in relation to those series of concerns have not put that very well. But I think that so trying to just understand.
The appeal of a certain set of sensibilities seemed to be one one answer to that question. And the second is that we could just go I can just now go into fully fledged critic mode and point out all the old order to go into a kind of critical dialogue with with that set that world view, which points out some of its consequences and blindspots, its constant tendency to over identity, over identify with authority, to not speak very much about questions of race and gender and so on and so forth.
One could do that. The third possibility, and I guess the most challenging one, is to wonder actually whether anything positive that you would extract from conservative philosophy for that wider project.
And I'm not sure I know have a good answer to that question, but it might have something to do with wanting to hold on to some of that kind of scepticism about state projects, about the capacity of punishment to achieve its goals and so on and so forth, without lapsing into the materialist idea that you can never put reason to the service of making the world a better place, because I'm not ready to give up on that. Thank you. Thank you, Leon. We have time.