THE THATCHER ERA

The Thatcher Era

The Thatcher Era

Introduction

The impact of Thatcherism on the criminal justice system may be understood in terms of two apparent paradoxes. The first is that of continuity and change, so that while there have been significant developments in the direction of authoritarian forms of rule under Thatcherism these developments cannot be viewed in isolation from previous periods of British history. Thus, while Thatcherism is authoritarian, it is inaccurate to identify authoritarianism with Thatcherism as a wholly new departure. The second apparent paradox is that of consensus and conflict. We argue that a central feature of Thatcherism is its ability to draw upon and renovate consensus through conflict(Dammer Fairchild 2006 pp. 67-69).

Context

Looking back to the period of the 1970s in Britain, it is possible to view many of the present developments as building upon what happened then, in a different socio-political context. As regards the police, for example, the system of national organization which was so important during the miners' strike was set up in the earlier period in large measure as a response to the successes of the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1974 strike, and the creation of a quasi-military 'third force' of riot-trained police again emanates from the 1970s. Similarly, allegations of police racism, which have been a major cause of riotous resistance to the police throughout the 1980s (and particularly in 1980, 1981, and 1985) were common currency in the 1970s and earlier. As regards the courts, the consistent and structured injustice confronting working-class people in magistrates' courts was a persistent theme of the 1970s.

The recent appeal of the Birmingham Six (Nelken 2000 pp. 89-109), together with the cases of the Maguires and the Guildford Four in turn remind us that all of these people were convicted in the earlier period. As far as prisons are concerned, the resistance to jail conditions and maltreatment in the 1980s are no more than the latest chapter in a story that includes, for example, Hull in 1976. It was also in the 1970s that the militarization of prison control began with the institution of Minimum Use of Force Tactical Intervention (MUFTI) squads (Delmas-Marty Spencer 2002 pp. 109-112).

In 1993, Andrew Rutherford published an analysis that identified three elements to the criminal justice system that represented different 'credos' -punishment, efficiency and care (Rutherford 1993). Two years later, Anthony Bottoms, in a benchmark article, also distinguished three conceptual fields just deserts, managerialism, and community (Bottoms 1995). This article uses their templates as points of departure, much as Alison Liebling used Rutherford's in her review of 'late-modern' imprisonment (Nelken 2000 pp. 89-109). At first sight the templates yoke together distinct or even opposing principles: for example, 'punishment' and 'care' sound like opposites, but there are many contexts in which the two find themselves linked, and one of the vexing fascinations of seeking to understand current policy is the way in which they accompany one another -'tough and tender' in so many pronouncements.

Both models introduce a mediating term - 'managerialism' or 'efficiency' that focuses on the operations of ...