15 - Conservative criminal justice: a strange rediscovery of ‘law and order’ politics

Summary

Introduction

Despite winning three consecutive elections, in 2015, in 2017 (albeit short of a majority in the House of Commons) and in 2019, the Conservative governments of these years experienced increasingly troubled times. Each pillar of the Party's ‘traditional appeal’ – stable government, sound finance and law and order – came under sustained challenge. In this chapter, the latter theme, Conservative law and order and criminal justice policies, are subjected to particular scrutiny, although powerful conflicting influences played across all three themes.

A number of momentous events undoubtedly played their destabilising parts here, including Brexit and its long-drawn-out aftermath, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing rapid escalation in energy prices, triggering, in turn, the highest inflation rates for 40 years and the cost of living crisis. But the Conservative Party also underwent a crisis, largely of its own making, resulting in a rapid turnover of leaders – prime ministers – five of whom eventually came to hold the reins of power during the eight years after 2015. Such a rapid turnover of leaders, in part reflecting factional tendencies within the Conservative Party (Guiney, 2022), including, for England and Wales, five home secretaries and seven secretaries of state for justice, inevitably had their impact upon the consistency of policy making across a wide range of areas of government, especially the criminal justice system.

As has been noted previously (Squires, 2016), while the Conservativeled Coalition government had pursued a number of consistent penal policy goals, centred on delivering austerity, managerialism and the outsourcing of criminal justice services (Skinns, 2016), the much-vaunted ‘rehabilitation revolution’ (later styled ‘transforming rehabilitation’) barely got off the ground. Less than four years into the newly outsourced community supervision arrangements, and following critical reports from both within Westminster (National Audit Office, 2019) and partner nongovernmental organisations and policy experts (Plummer, 2018; Annison, 2019), David Gauke, the fourth justice secretary in four years, announced a major policy U-turn, bringing rehabilitation services back within the national Probation Service (Schofield and Johnstone, 2019).