Description - Private Lives in Public Places by Dianne Willcocks
The title highlights the way in which legislation has impinged upon the private lives of British citizens during the last ten years. The twin results have been a curtailment of their civil liberties, and a greater surveillance upon both public order and private life. 'Freedom has replaced liberty in the Conservative lexicon, just as market democracy has replaced social democracy. Under Margaret Thatcher the Conservative party presented itself as the only political party taking the issue of law and order seriously. The party set its agenda around these issues, emphasising individual effort and endeavour and advocating a return to 'Victorian values'. In this challenging critique of Conservative criminology, Mike Brake and Chris Hale contest the complacency of Conservative rhetoric about law and order, and record the abysmal failure of the Tory's hard line on crime and punishment. They argue that, ironically, Conservative policies have created the very conditions in which crime has flourished. Brake and Hale show that the rise in crime, rather than being stemmed by Conservative policy, actually increased.
They link government economic and social policy to the increased militarisation of policing, the privatisation of law and order issues, the overcrowding of prisons, the rise in crime, fraud in business and industry, and the ignoring of health and safety regulations in industry and transport in favour of profit. They describe, for example, how the Conservative government was able to marshal the police and the courts to break organised working-class resistance to their economic and social programme, and show how a law and order society was created in Britain through the passing of a series of laws which, they argue, have undermined basic civil liberties. Crime, like unemployment, remains a fact of life in Britain today. Both problems are here to stay, the authors believe, until a government is elected which is determined to tackle their root causes, embedded in poverty and exploitation.
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