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October 14, 2005

How the Government Adds Insult to the Injuries it Has Inflicted on the Public

‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’. ‘Education, education, education’. ‘No return to boom and bust’.

One by one, the flag-ship commitments that brought New Labour to office in 1997are running into the sands.

A very small statistical dip in the overall crime rate allowed the Government misleadingly to boast of having successfully reduced crime. But violent crime stands at an all time high. The Government has spectacularly failed to get tough on its immediate cause -- the criminals who perpetrate it.

Despite long-standing evidence of a steadily mounting need for additional prison capacity to house the burgeoning numbers of offenders awarded custodial sentences, the Government has persistently refused to build any. Yesterday’s Times contains a front-page story that , to solve of prison over-crowding, the Home Office intends to extend still further its already hazardous early release scheme. ‘Criminals sentenced to four years in prison could be freed after just 18 months.’

With recidivism rates for those granted early release standing at 8%, we can be certain that violent crime will continue to stay uncomfortably high.

Meanwhile, Tony Blair’s boast to have improved school performance received a cruel blow by a report also in yesterday’s Times that, ‘despite soaring A grades at GCSE and A level, … nearly half of students this year failed to get a grade C or better in GCSE maths and 40% failed to reach a C in English’.

According to CBI estimates, ’15 million adults do not have the arithmetic skills expected of a 14-year-old and …one in ten adults cannot read to a similar level.’

Whatever the Pink Floyd may at one time have blithely sung, our school-children certainly do need an education. If their teachers are failing to provide one, this could be partly due to their having graduated from university without adequate proficiency themselves in these subjects.

As to our Iron Chancellor’s proud boast of having presided over an unparalleled sustained period of economic growth that has enabled him to increase spending on public services massively without increasing government debt or taxes, all that seems about to change and be shown up for another failed promise. In making his budgetary calculations, the Chancellor appears to have relied on growth estimates that now appear wildly optimistic.

Meanwhile, as is also reported in yesterday’s Times, the latest official unemployment figures show ‘the number of people out of work and claiming benefits climbed for the eighth month in a row, marking the longest sustained increases in unemployment since the early Nineties.’

These economic trends would not be nearly as depressing as they are -- forgive the pun! – did not yesterday’s papers also reveal the Chancellor’s much vaunted Working Families Tax Credit scheme to have proved itself monumentally unworkable and plagued by fraud.

Perhaps, it is the fault of all those innumerate employees turned out by our failing schools and universities who administer the system, but the last year, the most recent for which there are figures, it is reported the Revenue overpaid tax credits to the tune of ‘£2.2 billion to 1.9 million families’. The Revenue is expecting mistakes of a comparable order of magnitude this year.

Small wonder is it, as yesterday’s Times reports, that the National Audit Office has become so concerned about the high level of benefit fraud that it has ‘refused to give a clean bill of health to the tax credits section of the Inland Revenue’s accounts for the third year in succession.’

At one time, such a dismal track-record of a Government in office might have been expected to be visited by voter revenge at the ballot-box at the next general election. However, if its lack-lustre record in office were not bad enough, to the list of Government initiatives that have proved failures can be added one that might well prevent this from happening.

It is also reported in yesterday’s Times, the Government seems determined to press on with household rather than individual registration for postal voting, against the strong advice of the independent Electoral Commission that household registration lends itself to electoral abuse.

Doubtless in future, offenders stuck at home on early release from prison will have a field-day fraudulently claiming benefit, before, through using multiple votes they have frauduently amassed by registering their household, keeping in power a Government that has served them and other criminals so well, but the honest law-abiding majority so badly.

Posted by David Conway at October 14, 2005 01:10 PM

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Posted by: janval at November 1, 2005 10:49 PM

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