The Tories, we know, are the party of order. They stand for decent, law-abiding tax-payers, and would like a little less solicitousness toward the criminals if you don't mind. But not these days - or at least not at this precise moment, for our affairs are highly volatile. The Tories are allowing themselves to be out-flanked to their right by Labour on this issue. How could this be?

Tory ideology has always included seemingly contradictory elements. Since Thatcher, the central antagonism within the Conservative Party has been between the 'mods' and the 'rockers' - the liberal right, and the reactionary right. The liberal right is concerned primarily with ensuring a stable investment condition for the efficient accumulation of capital. It is opposed to state authoritarianism on immigration and public order. The reactionary right favours the same basic economic policies, but prefers tough controls on immigration, even where these harm business interests, and a punitive criminal justice system. I would say that, very broadly speaking, these positions reflect class perspectives, inasmuch as the small business sector of the Tory party is probably more threatened by crime and social disorder than the sorts of financial corporations and multinational service industries that the Tory leadership is allied with. I would suggest that the petite bourgeois element in the Conservative bloc has never been less influential than it is in this unstable coalition, and this has allowed a certain pro-business liberalism to dominate.

Of course, the divisions don't break down quite as neatly as this schema suggests. Consider that even that greengrocer's daughter Margaret Thatcher conceded that prison was an expensive way of making bad people worse, placing her to the left of Michael "prison works" Howard on this issue. Her administration, while beefing up the coercive powers of the state in several respects, also acted on Home Office research showing that locking up young offenders just didn't work, using cautions instead of detention. Still, I think that the current administration, while comprising different strands, is thus far more socially liberal than past Tory governments and that this is an unstable situation because it derives from its unique character as a product of civil service initiative that gives it a certain independence from the typical Tory base. It is also, relatedly, one that is conducting deep cuts in the criminal justice system. This is upsetting not only the police, who are now looking to Labour to defend them, but also some of the more 'traditionalist' Tories such as David Davis, who fear that it will undermine the party's reputation on law and order.

This would be a more persuasive fear, perhaps, if this authoritarian disposition hadn't actually contributed to the Tories' reputation as the 'nasty party', and thus reduced their electoral appeal. Even in the hard right leadership of Iain Duncan Smith, an attempt - ultimately unsuccessful - was made to liberalise the party's approach to crime and social issues. Oliver Letwin, as shadow home secretary, sought to establish rehabilitation as a central Tory theme in a new "tough, but caring" approach to crime, which actually looked softer than the New Labour approach. Cameron, taking note of the polls, has attempted to re-pivot the Tories' language on the basis of a defence of 'English liberty' against New Labour nanny state authoritarianism. Appointing Ken Clarke as Home Secretary confirmed this approach, and it's certainly a logical one while in coalition with the Liberals. In addition, the Tories are committed to their austerity remedy and within that solution they have little choice but to cut deeply across the board: they can't protect the criminal justice budget without coming down even more catastrophically on social services, and thus incurring an even greater risk of provoking revolt.

Even so, anti-crime crusades have traditionally worked to buttress Tory support and co-ordinate ideological responses to ongoing crises, particularly since the Sixties - even if these have little to do with crime itself. The issue of crime articulates a number of classic Tory thematics: 'family values', since divorce and single-parenthood is supposed to contribute to an increase in youth crime; 'welfare dependency', since welfare is supposed so subsidise the sort of dysfunctional 'lifestyle' that leads to crime; 'discipline', since indiscipline in schools is held to create unruly human beings; 'responsibility', since it is argued that crime is made easier by a culture that diminishes individual responsibility (for poverty, unemployment, ignorance, etc.) by transferring the blame to society; and so on. It enables a number of punitive responses to the effects of capitalist failure. Crime is also bound in a set of connotative linkages with race, culture and nation: the criminal is the ultimate Other, the anti-social outsider, and criminality is proof of Otherness, of a lack of respectability and entitlement. Think of statements along the lines of, "there is a very real problem with a small number of Muslim men, who...", or "black on black violence is a very real problem, which...", or "illegal immigrants shouldn't be allowed to come here to escape punishment for crimes they committed in their own countries". Even if such discourses are no longer as viable as they once were, even if social authoritarianism is declining as the population becomes more educated, there is still no other issue on which conservatism enjoys such an in-built advantage, and there surely remain residual moral and political attitudes which, in a crisis, can be accessed and mobilised to the advantage of a reactionary agenda.

In addition, one of Lord Ashcroft's recent polls (for what it's worth) indicates that among potential Tory voters who backed other parties in the last election, a big issue was the perceived lack of priority given by the Conservatives to crime. A recent Yougov poll [pdf] confirms that the current administration is seen as being less 'tough' on crime than the last government, not a state of affairs the Tories will be happy with. (Labour, predictably, will be fucking delighted, though the poll results also suggest that 'toughness' is neither automatically nor uncomplicatedly popular.) Lastly, most importantly, as austerity bites and gives rise to an increase in property crime, as well as intense social conflicts, the Tories will want to 'police the crisis'. We have already seen how the student protests led to a major escalation in police repression, with the government bestialising protesters to justify their actions. A crackdown on 'violent crime', stimulated by a moral panic over some incident or other (involving Muslamic ray guns no doubt), would provide a pretext for future mobilisations, justifying a shift in resources from welfare to policing and validating the state's coercive powers. Such was the calculation that the Thatcherites made even before the Ridley Plan estimated that the social conflicts likely to be unleashed under a Tory administration would call for a massive expansion of policing.

The Tories are seemingly not well placed to exploit any sudden passion for punishment that arises as the result of a criminal outrage. Yet there are elements of Cameronite ideology that would enable a transition here. If, in the Sixties and Seventies, the ideologeme of reaction was "the Violent Society", for the Tories today it is "the broken society". The Tories have maintained that for the last decade or so that Britain is a society experiencing moral degeneration due to the breakdown of communities and families. They intend that their responses should be seen as 'humane' - promoting social action through the 'third sector' and so on. But it would be logical within those terms to reach for punitive solutions once the 'Big Society' dog fails to bark. And indeed, a deepening of the crisis, a couple of quarters of negative growth, a financial crash, a series of defaults in the eurozone, or any number of highly plausible scenarios in the foreseeable future, could finish the coalition as it presently is. In which case, the material basis for the current Tory leadership's relative social liberalism would vanish.

"We begin by attempting to unpack some of the core images which seem to us to form central elements in the 'traditionalist' ideology of crime. Gouldner once argued that all social theories contain 'dominant assumptions' about society embedded in them. We would argue that all social ideologies contain powerful images of society at their heart. These images may be diffuse, quite untheorised in any elaborate sense; but they serve to condense and order the view of society in which the ideologies are active, and they constitute both the unquestioned substratum of truth - what carries conviction - and the source of its collective emotional force and appeal. Together, these images produce and sustain an uncodified but immensely powerful, conservative sense of Englishness, of an English 'way of life', of an 'English' viewpoint which - it also, by its very density of reference, asserts - everyone shares to some extent. We do not make any claim to offer here an exhaustive inventory of this traditional English ideology, only to have identified some of the major issues around which this traditionalist definition of 'Englishness' is constructed and organised. Our aim here is to open a discussion which we regard as of considerable importance, and to touch on two related but distinct aspects. First, can we begin to identify the social content which is being carried in these images, around which a traditionalist view of crime is organised? Second, can we begin to make sense of its power to generalise across social and class divisions - its claims to 'universality'? The traditionalist ideology is not the only active ideology in society by any means; but it is a dominant ideological field. And this dominance, and its claims to general representativeness, are connected. It is dominant because it appears to be able to catch up quite contradictory life and class experiences within its master framework. Ideologies are easier to understand when they seem, within their own logic, to reflect or adequately correspond to the experiences, positions and interests of those who hold them. But though ideologies do include this practical relation, they cannot wholly be explained in this way; indeed, when we speak of the practical social role of ideologies, we are speaking of the power of ideologies to translate into convincing ideological terms the outlook of classes and groups who are not, even in a collective sense, its 'authors'. So we are also concerned here with what it is in the social and material condition of subordinate classes which allows the dominant traditionalist ideologies to gain some real purchase, and to carry conviction, to win support. How is this traditionalist ideological 'unity' constructed out of disparate and contradictory class formations? How does this version of 'the English way of life' provide the basis of ideological consensus?

"We turn, first, to the notion of respectability - at once, so different for different social classes, and yet so 'universal' a social value. It is an extremely complex social idea. It touches on the fundamental notion of self-respect: men who do not respect themselves cannot expect respect from others. But respectability also touches the more 'protestant' values of our culture; it is connected with thrift, self-discipline, living the decent life, and thus with observance of what is commonly held to be upright, decent conduct. It is strongly connected with ideas of self-help and self-reliance, and of 'conformity' to established social standards - standards set and embodied by 'significant others'.

"The 'others' are always those who rank and stand above us in the social hierarchy: people we 'look up to', and in turn respect. The idea of respectability means that we have taken care not to fall into the abyss, not to lose out in the competitive struggle for existence. In the middle classes, the idea of 'respectability' carries with it the powerful overtones of competitive success; its token is the ability to 'keep up appearances', to secure a standard of life which enables you to afford those things which befit - and embody - your social station in life. But in the working classes, it is connected with three, different ideas: with work, with poverty, and with crime in the broad sense. It is work, above all, which is the guarantee of respectability; for work is the means - the only means - to the respectable life. The idea of the 'respectable working classes' is irretrievably associated with regular, often skilled, employment. It is labour which has disciplined the working class into respectability. Loss of respectability is therefore associated with loss of occupation and with poverty. Poverty is the trap which marks the slide away from respectability back into the 'lower depths'. The distinction between the 'respectable' and the 'rough' working class, though in no sense an accurate sociological or historical one, remains an extremely important moral distinction. If poverty is one route downwards out of the respectable life, crime or moral misconduct is another, broader and more certain route. Respectability is the collective internalisation, by the lower orders, of an image of the 'ideal life' held out for them by those who stand higher in the scheme of things; it disciplines society from end to end, rank by rank. Respectability is therefore one of the key values which dovetails and inserts one social class into the social image of another class. It is part of what Gramsci called the 'cement' of society.

"Work is not only the guarantee of working-class respectability, it is also a powerful image in its own right. We know how much our social and indeed personal identities are caught up with our work, and how men (especially men, given the sexual division of labour) who are without work, feel not only materially abandoned but spiritually decentred. We know in fact that this is the product of an extremely long an arduous process of historical acculturation: all that is involved in the erection, alongside the birth fo capitalism, of the Protestant Ethic, and all that was involved in the insertion of the labouring industrial masses into the rigorous disciplines of factory labour. Work has gradually come to be regarded more as 'instrumental' than as 'sacred', as manual labour under capitalism is disciplined by the wage contract; leisure, or rather all that is associated with non-work and with the private sphere, has come to rank even higher than once it did in the hierarchy of social goods, as family and home have been progressively distanced from work. Yet, for men above all, the workaday world of work, and the formal and informal values associated with it, seem in many ways coterminous with the definition of 'reality' itself. And this, though endowed with extremely powerful ideological content reflects a material fact: without work, the material basis of our lives would vanish overnight. What matters here, with respect to crime, however, is not so much the centrality of work, and our feelings about it, as what we might call the calculus of work. The calculus of work implies the belief that, though work may have few intrinsic rewards and is unlikely to lead to wealth, prosperity and riches for the vast majority, it provides one of the stable negotiated bases for our economic existence: a 'fair day's wage for a fair day's work'. It also entails the belief that the valued things - leisure, pleasure, security, free activity, play - are a reward for the diligent application to long-term productive goals through work. The former come after, and as the result of, or recompense for, the latter.

"Of course, some professional crime could, technically, be seen as 'work' of a kind, and there are certainly testimonies by professional criminals which would support such an interpretation. But few people would see it that way. The sharpest distinction is made between the professional or organised life of crime, and the petty pilfering and 'borrowing' from one's place of work, which is regarded as a customary way of setting a funamentally exploitative economic relation to right, and is thus not understood as 'crime' in the ordinary sense at all. Crime, in the proper sense, when involving robbery or rackets for gain, is set off against work in the public mind, precisely because it is an attempt to acquire by speed, stealth, fraudulent or shorthand methods what the great majority of law-abiding citizens can only come by through arduous toil, routine, expenditure of time, and the postponement of pleasure. It is through this contrast that some of the most powerful moral feelings come to be transferred against deviants who trhive and prosper, but do not work. One of the most familiar ways in which the moral calculus of work is recruited into attitudes to social problems is in the way people talk about 'scroungers', 'layabouts', those who 'don't do a stroke' or 'live off the Welfare'. The characterisations are often applied indiscriminately, and without much evidence, to various 'out-groups': the poor, the unemployed, the irresponsible and feckless - but also youth, students and black people. These are seen as getting something without 'putting anything into it'. The image implies instant moral condemnation. At the same time it is important to remember that again, a real, objective material reality is distortedly expressed in these negative images of the 'scrounger' and the layabout. For the vast majority of working people, there is absolutely no other route to a minimal degree of security and material comfort apart from the life-long commitment to 'hard graft'. It must be remembered that this feeling that 'everyone should earn what he gets by working for it' also informs working class feelings about the very wealthy, or those who live on unearned incomes, or accumulate large pieces of property, or about the unequal distribution of wealth. There is evidence that what is sometimes called a 'pragmatic acceptance' of the present unequal distribution of wealth is matched by an equally strong feeling that there is something intrinsically wrong and exploitative about it. So sentiments stemming from the prevailing 'work calculus' have their progressive aspect too, though they are often used to underpin root conservative attitudes to all who transgress it.

"Another social image with special importance for public ideologies of crime has to do with the need for social discipline - and with England as a disciplined society. Once again, there are different versions of this very general social idea across the different class cultures; the idea is interpreted and applied differently within different cultural systems of meaning, while retaining sufficient common elements to appear to carry a more universal validity. The idea of a 'disciplined society' is enshrined in popular mythology - the whole nation 'at prayer' having been long ago supplanted by the whole nation in an orderly queue. It is especially strong at those high points of popular history, like 'the War', where a country of free individuals 'pulled itself together' to defeat the enemy. The 'discipline' of English society is not the rigorously organised tyranny of the bureaucratic or regimented state, but that 'self-discipline', flexible yet tenacious, while holds the nation together from the inside when it is under stress. In the English ideology, 'discipline' is always linked and qualified by an opposing tendency which tempers its authoritarian harshness: in the upper classes, the idea of discipline and anarchism (as caricatured, for example, in the roles played by John Cleese in the television comedy series, Monty Python's Flying Circus). Lower down the social scale, discipline is often qualified by the image of a sort of petty-bourgeois 'anarchy' (as, for example, in post-war Ealing comedies or Dad's Army). However, the capacity of popular mythology to counter or qualify the respect for 'social discipline' in these ways does not mean that it is not a strong sentiment - only that it is held, like so many other traditional social values, in a peculiarly British way, and with a very special English sense of irony.

...

"The traditional idea of social discipline is closely linked, on the one hand, with notions about hierarchy and authority. Society is hierarchical, in the dominant view, by nature. Competitive success may promote individuals up through this hierarchy, but does not destroy the notion of a hierarchical order itself. But the hierarchy, in turn, depends upon the giving and taking of authority. And the exercise of authority, both on the part of those who exercise it, and of those who give obedience to it, requires discipline. This trinity - the hierarchical nature of society, the importance of authority and the acclimatisation of the people to both through self-discipline - forms a central complex of attitudes. In this version of the dominant social image, indiscipline is seen as a threat both to the hierarchical conception of the social order and to the exercise of 'due authority' and deference; it is thus the beginnings, the seed bed, of social anarchy.

...

"[T]he three social image clusters we have so far discussed - respectability, work and discipline - are inextricably connected with the fourth image: that of the family.

"In the traditionalist lexicon, the sphere of the family is of course where moral-social compulsions and inner controls are generated, as well as the sphere where the primary socialisation of the young is first tellingly and intimately carried through. The first aspect has to do with the repression and regulation of sexuality - the seat of pleasure - in the family nexus; and thus with authority. The second has to do with the power which the family has, through its intimate exchanges of love and anger, punishment and reward, and the structure of patriarchty, to prepare children for a competitive existence, work and the sexual division of labour. The family, too, is a complex social image; different forms, functions and habits may be found in the different social classes. Thus the structures of sexual identity and repression within the working-class family, though in some respects reproducing the dominant stuctures of sex roles in the organisation of the family, are also profoundly shaped by the material experiences of the class - the construction of practices and a definition of 'masculinity' and masculine work and values in the world of production which are transposed into the sexual organisation of the family. Similarly, the apparently cross-class conception of the family as 'refuge' carries a particular weight and intensity when the world from which the family froms a 'refuge' is the daily experience of class exploitation in production and work. But the 'sense of family' is a strong value because it is an absolutely pivotal social institution. Few would deny its central role in the construction of social identities, and in transmitting, at an extremely deep level, the basic ideological grid of society. Family ideology is undoubtedly also changing; and we have learned to think of the family, also, in more positive, less punitive terms. But, when we come 'right down to it', the dominant image of the family - perhaps across classes - still has more to do with the duty of instilling a basic understanding of fundamental 'do's and don'ts' than it does of providing a mutually sustaining and releasing framework. Love is what we hope and pray will emerge from the family, but disciplining, punishing, rewarding and controlling is what we seem actually to do in it a great deal of the time. Reich, with some justification, calls it a 'factory for creating submissive people'. And, as we have come to see, the fundamental images of authority, power and discipline, aloong with the primary origins of what Giles Playfair calls 'the punitive obsession', are experienced and internalise first within its tiny kingdom. The alignment of the sexual and the social - a fundamental task of the family - is just the homology of structures which creates inside us those repertoires of self-discipline and self-control for which, later, the wider world is to be so thankful. It is little wonder, then, that fears and pancis about the breakdown of social discipline - of which crime is one of the most powerful indices - centre on the indiscipline of 'youth', 'the young', and on those institutions whose task it is to help them internalise social discipline - the school, but above all, the family."

Republican reactionaries and their business and media allies have spent years winding people up, filling the public with hysterical, poisonous shit about black communist welfare queen drug mules taking over the country. The corporate-funded Tea Party crowd are largely white, more than averagely well-off yanks who believe - have been fervently told - that the country belongs to them and them alone. Hence, take it back. Hence, the batshit 'birther' insanity, and Palin's 'real America', and the vigorous promotion of John Birch Society bile in the shape of Glenn Beck. They're trying to make a large section of the public as irrational as possible, fill their heads with racial conspiracies, turn every last white man and woman who still has a house and two cars into a potential minuteman, ku klux or vigilante.

I think it's a logical corollary of a particularly vicious phase of capital accumulation. As more and more wealth has been transferred to the rich and welfare programmes curtailed, the state has dealt with the breakdown of working class communities by criminalising their condition in various ways. In addition to manning the iron gates of private property, the state has sought other ways to sweep up and jail the social refuse: penalising drug-users and the homeless, for example. The necessary supplement has been the pornographic spectacle of punishment, of sadistic denigration, of fearful othering, such that no punishment is enough.

This deliberate, calculated brutalisation of political language has been taking place for years, and the accompanying trend has been for a lunatic petit bourgeoisie to become more and more deranged. The 'Tea Party', yes, represents a minority which US law enforcement could contain if it wanted to. But it is acting as an accomplice of the ruling class as that same class wages a bitter war to prevent even moderately social democratic forces from emerging from this recession, to stop even the mildest gain for the working class. It is doing so partly because the petit bourgoisie would rather lose all its wealth in another all-consuming crisis than share it with the dirt who, after all, caused this crisis with their feckless borrowing.

So, in light of that, who cares if Jared Lee Loughner looked on Sarah Palin's website, or heard a speech Sharron Angle made? It was enough for him to exist in a particular context of American life, in this era. It was enough to live in Arizona, where the murders took place, and which has been nominated by a local County Sheriff as "the Mecca for prejudice and bigotry". That would have been more than sufficient to drive a vulnerable man out of his mind. And it isn't as if the idea of political assassination had to be suggested to him by osmosis or innuendo. Palin is often quite explicit when she wants an enemy of the 'real America', the pristine white America of lore, to be assassinated. So is Pat Robertson, you may recall. Assassination is as American as the hackneyed patriotic schtick that often seems to motivate it. This isn't about the gallows humour of the Republican right which consists precisely of knowing, wink-wink in-jokes (gun-sight imagery, 'Reload', and so on) about the barbarism that already exists, and which they have done so much to cultivate. It's about what the jokes advert to. The problem is not whether and how to domesticate political language, as some have wrongly assumed, but how to fight back against the political forces that are fomenting this bilious filth. The first step here, I think, would be to prevent the Republicans from shutting down discussion of the political dimensions of this crime.

This is just an addendum to recent debates. Racism does not cut both ways, and it cannot. By definition. This is a point that we are forced to recall every time there is a bogus witch hunt, such as that would caused Shirley Sherrod to lose her job as the Georgia state director for rural development in the US Department for Agriculture. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor pointed out, the controversy was only possible because the right had successfully re-defined racism:

It's also a point that bears remembering when the slogan of the British National Party and the English Defence League is that "racism cuts both ways". They are not saying this in isolation. They are saying this against the backdrop of media reports which are specifically designed to confuse this issue. The effects of this are not felt only on the right. I have myself been engaged in debates with perfectly decent liberals who, for one reason or another, had forgotten that racism is a structural matter, and not to do with mere prejudice. But, once again, the backlash was assisted by a considered change in the way in which knowledge about society was gathered by the government. In the US, of course, the "color-blind" approach of the liberal sector of the ruling class and the state bureaucracy was consecrated after WWII following the sociological work of Gunnar Myrdal, whose net effect was to reduce racism to a set of social attitudes rather than the structure of oppression which produced them. This later provided the neoconservative and segregationist reactionaries with one of their mobilising tools: attempts to mitigate the effects of structural racism, through affirmative action for example, were "reverse racism". If racism was not seen as a system of structural oppression, then attempts to remedy structural discrimination could be depicted as themselves racist. But I think the turn, in the UK, was somewhat more recent, perhaps because the fruits of anti-racist struggle were more recently enjoyed.

This re-definition of racism is particularly potent when it affects the perception of behaviours that are defined by the state, and of course the main form of behaviour that the state gets to define is criminality. The issue of "racially motivated crime" has always been at the centre of anti-racist struggle, because its definition, and the subsequent treatment of such crimes, is at the centre of the state's handling of discriminatory and oppressive behaviour, and particularly its promise in 'race relations' legislation to protect minorites from racism.

While I was researching my article for the ISJ about racism, navigating the enemy territory of official statistics, I happened upon the fact that from 1994, the British Crime Survey changed its practise of reporting racially motivated crimes. As far as I could gather, the BCS had only begun to count racially motivated crimes in 1988. At first, the victim was only asked about racism as a possible motive if the victim was judged by the interviewer to be non-white. Which is not to say that white people were not asked about racist crime - but the question was 'ecological' rather than personal. They were asked to comment, for example, on whether they thought racist crime was a particularly large problem where they lived. As you would expect, white Britons were less inclined to think of racist crime as a problem in their area than non-white Britons. The reason being that white Britons, insofar as the majority were not perpetrating racist crimes, were not on the receiving end of them either.

The decision to count such crimes in the first place was an important concession to the anti-racist movements of the 1980s. I should say that the BCS's counting procedure was initially at odds with police practise, since the latter were compelled to collect data on racially motivated crime in the mid-1980s. The official police definition of a racially motivated incident was: a) any incident in which it appears to the reporting or investigating officer that the complaint involves an element of racial motivation; or, b) any incident which involves an allegation of racial motivation made by any person. This was different in two ways. First of all, it included the possibility of white victims of racism, and secondly it prioritised the perception of the investigating officer above the prima facie account of victims.

Perhaps for that reason police measurements of racially motivated crime varied considerably with that of the BCS. In 1991, 20% of the victims of recorded incidents of racially motivated crimes, by police statistics, were white. And, despite casting the net wider (and including a more comprehensive list of crimes in their reporting), the total number of racially motivated crimes detected by the police was way below the number detected by the BCS. In a single year, the police failed to detect 80,000 such crimes. This could reflect a number of factors, but it is reasonable to suppose that among them was a lack of willingness in an institutionally racist state bureaucracy to take the possibility of racist motivation seriously. This is a point supported by the fact that between 1988 and 1992, the rate of police detection of racist crimes increased by 77%, while the BCS detected only a marginal increase in that period, suggesting that political changes entailed greater bureaucratic pressures on agents of the police to take racism seriously.

Subsequently, however, changes to the BCS counting meant that any victim of a crime was asked if he or she felt there was a 'racial' motivation, wherever the victim was situated in the racial system. In this new procedure, it was just as plausible - by official lights - for John Tyndall to be the victim of racial oppression as it was for a young black man in Eltham to be. This change was taken at the height of the scandal over the murder of Stephen Lawrence. It followed more than a decade of central government hostility to efforts made by local councils to counter the effects of racist discrimination. And, importantly, it was clearly the result of a considered decision. It had to have come from a conscious, calculated change in the underlying conception of racism deployed by officials, which the statistics were there to report on. Somebody, or some bodies, in a government bureau had to take the initiative in driving this agenda through. I have searched in vain for an official explanation or elaboration of the rationale behind this. One Home Office report [pdf], discussing the change, simply takes it for granted that there were "racially motivated incidents where the victim was white" that the old BCS counting system had not acknowledged. I have no doubt that to many of Whitehall's finest minds, this would be uncontroversial, but it plainly isn't so. Part of the confusion might arise from the nebulous terminology, "racially motivated", which itself potentially implies the model of racism that is in dispute. Yet, nonetheless, there was initially an implicit recognition of a different model, in which racism is structural, even given the use of such a problematic terminology. The rationale behind the change, if it has ever been made explicit, would be an interesting topic of study in itself.

And it would be important. The gathering of data on such matters - statistics, etym. 'the science of the state' - is no neutral exercise, but a hugely important tool of governmentality, as well as a weapon of political struggle. Given the state's immense resources in data collection and knowledge production, its ability to shape popular culture and the output of the capitalist media is considerable. The change I refer to would is discussed in official reports as if it were a minor bureaucratic 'correction', made in a rarefied atmosphere by number-crunching policy wonks, but it shaped the agenda, and it filtered into popular awareness. It certainly fed into the racist reaction, and the spurious victimology that drives support for fascist groups like the BNP. (I offer two examples of the effect that this change had on the media's reporting of racist crimes: here and here. Both of these are chosen for being mainstream reports, widely cited to reinforce the bogus victimology I refer to.) The decision to redefine racism in this vitally relevant field, one that is itself overlaid with racist connotations about black criminality, obviously taken at a high level, has played an important role in enabling the subsequent state-driven neo-Powellite reaction, whose effects we are living through.

Serious question. Will Hutton likes Cameron's ideas. The current editor of the New Statesman says he takes Cameron's claim to progressivism seriously. The centre-left Prospect magazine has been carrying puff-pieces for Philip Blond's 'Red Toryism', the bland mood music for Cameron's leadership. Some liberals really want to believe the best about Cameron's conservatives.

Yet we have a man who is an ardent royalist, an opponent of multiculturalism and immigration, a supporter of war and an Atlanticist, a supporter of cutting taxes on the rich (he is particularly moved by government impingement on the unearned inheritance of rich kids), a friend of Murdoch, an ally of the most ferociously reactionary forces in Europe, a supporter of increased restrictions on abortions, a fairly traditionalist proponent of marriage (married couples will get tax breaks), and the current high priest of the small state. His shadow chancellor is an unreformed Thatcherite and union-basher. His closest allies in the Conservative Party are neoconservatives. He has, when opportunity arose, engaged in some fairly obnoxious baiting of ethnic minorities, specifically Muslims. Himself a descendant of royalty and child of a City stockbroker who got his first job with the Tories on the recommendation of someone at Buckingham Palace, his front bench is stuffed with venal millionaires. And he's basing his campaign on a line about a "broken Britain" which channels the most socially authoritarian Victorian moralising.

This has involved, among other things, disingenuously talking up the violent crime rate and massively exaggerating the rate of pregnancies among disadvantaged minors by a factor of 10. This article at the Economist systematically demolishes, with some detailed statistical analysis, Cameron's arguments about "broken Britain". But the Tories won't fret too much if their claims are shown to be fraudulent. After all, crime is an issue very akin to immigration in the sense that you can talk it up, bluster, lie, bully, and create a general sensation of crisis and deluge, with the assistance of the scum British press. Then you can deflect criticism by contending that you are merely articulating popular concerns that have so far eluded politicians living in the Westminster bubble. So, they won't mind if the liberal papers point out their little fibs. What is important to note is the ideological basis of the Tories' arguments. This is how Blair Gibbs, a senior Tory analyst and Chief of Staff for Nick Herbert's shadow environment office, explains the problem [pdf]:

The problem is cultural. The root cause is a combination of changing philosophical ideas . . and the long-term fundamental decay of conservative ideas and institutions in Britain. This includes an historically unprecedented collapse of belief in marriage and a consequent epidemic of illegitimacy and unsocialised offspring who, contra the expectations of our post-war intelligentsia, have not justified the age-old hope of Rousseau (that the absence of restrictions on humans produces happy peace) but have instead illustrated the truth of Hobbes (that the absence of restrictions on humans produces violence and despair.) The consequence of this collapse is welfare dependency, a rise in violent crime . . . .
There exists a large and increasingly violent underclass, because Britain suffers from a vicious circle: the collapse of belief in values (of family, marriage, self-responsibility) has now spread from the elites (where it has done philosophical and political damage) to the working classes (where it has done real physical harm). This is what has bred the underclass and the welfare system sustains it. Through the benefits system the welfare state pays the underclass to grow; poor state schooling cannot compensate for the harm caused by broken homes and absent fathers; inadequate policing cannot suppress the symptoms of crime and disorder.

This does exactly what it appears to do. It blames the poor for their situation because they have abandoned conservative values. By becoming liberal, by having abortions and the pill and free love, by not marrying or marrying less frequently, by having "illegitimate" children - illegitimate, mark you - they have caused their own downfall, and are now suckling at the welfare teat when they're not robbing, stabbing and raping their way through Broken Brittania. And it is precisely this kind of ideology, couched in more carefully selected terms no doubt, that were being invited to believe is progressive.

When David Cameron speaks of progress, he is consistent in equating it with attacks on the welfare state, support for 'stronger families', support for 'enterprise', etc. Asked by his would-be hagiographer-cum-amanuensis Dylan Jones about his position on Thatcherism, he ejaculates the following keyword-laden discourse: "[T]here were still big questions. Are we going to have a progressive amount of freedom and responsibility and independence and choice, or are we going to have a state knows best, know your place, rigid, class system? I thought that in all the big arguments, Thatcher and Major were on the right side, and Labour was on the wrong side." It's an idea that comes up a lot. Thatcherism is "progressive". To attack unions, cut welfare and bait immigrants is to mount an assault on the "rigid, class system". A high-handed social authoritarianism under the rubric of integration and cohesion is also progressive. And so on, and on.

The question is how did such claims even become vaguely intelligible? How did 'progress' as a discourse become a byword for reaction? The obvious answer is that New Labour made this possible. On every theme I've mentioned above, every objectionable facet of Tory policy, there is a New Labour counterpart - not exact, and not necessarily as extreme, but very real nonetheless. You want a party that baits immigrants, cuts taxes for the rich, allies itself with European reactionaries, trucks with neoconservatives, and calls all this progressive? It's been the ruling government for thirteen years. You want a party that prefers free markets and 'meritocracy' to 'the old structures', 'the old class systems', etc? You want a party whose matey populism abets an elitist agenda that adulates the rich and the unelected, pampered, scum royals? You want a party whose approach to crime is to sensationalise, and blame the poor, and ethnic minorities? You want a party of moralising and social authoritarianism, hedged with a modest concession to gay rights? And calls all that progressive too? Yeah, well, I think you've got the point by now. Tony Blair and New Labour systematically marketed every crackpot Tory idea they could lay their hands on as "progressive". And now David Cameron is a "progressive".

Rod Liddle has been churning out sub-BNP racist provocations for a while now. The latest, taking a horribly violent criminal plot as its cue, issues the following judgment on 'multiculturalism':

It could be an anomaly, of course. But it isn’t. The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.

Defending his comments, he offered the argument that he wasn't talking about race but about 'multiculturalism'. He went on to explain:

My argument is much as it has always been; that the creed of multiculturalism is largely to blame, the notion that cultures, no matter how antithetical to the norm, or anti-social, should be allowed to develop unhindered, without criticism.

There is no good reason to take this argument at face value. For a start, Liddle may be fantastically ignorant and complacent on many levels, but I suspect he is aware that his claims are straightforwardly statistically false. The point of ranting in such an off-hand racist fashion isn't to be precise, it is to 1) get Liddle some more notoriety, 2) hurt the targets of such abuse, and 3) get people talking about race in a particular way that benefits the racists. I also doubt that Liddle is unaware that 'race' and 'culture' are not neatly separable in his tirades. Indeed, that is the whole point. Here I disagree with Sunny - Liddle is unlikely to be confused. Rather, he knows exactly what he is doing. The attack on 'multiculturalism' is the right's main way of rehabilitating certain racist ideas. He would also be aware that white people, who are not subject to the same collective insults, are disproportionately represented in certain types of criminality and anti-social behaviour. (Cf. Bonnie Greer's retort that "the overwhelming majority of paedophiles, murderers, war-mongers and football hooligans are white males and all we got in return was beans on toast and Top Gear".)

The occasion for the rant is crime, but that is not the issue at stake. If it were, then all sorts of unwelcome complexities would arise. If you really wanted to discuss the origins of criminal behaviour, you wouldn't start by talking about either 'race' or 'culture'. For one, few people who use such terms can specify what they mean by them beyond some vague indices or anecdotes. What are the precise dimensions of a 'culture' that supposedly yields violent crime, for example? No one knows. Something about rappers and absent fathers, possibly. We all know how to use phrases such as 'culture of dependency', 'culture of blame', 'culture of violence', etc., but these are miasmic conceits designed to retail a particular kind of reactionary politics. Their vagueness is their virtue. Indeed, without wishing to dignify the discussion by endowing it with serious theoretical merit, we can at least acknowledge in passing that in understanding crime, both how it is constructed and how and why it is carried out, there are all sorts of issues involved that do not correspond to the bigoted obsessions of the commentariat. So, the point is not violent crime. The aim of such bombast is to resurrect some antique racial stereotypes that hold black people to be, whether by endowment or 'culture', rapists, robbers and murderers.

I note that the Spectator's editor, Fraser Nelson, has defended Rod Liddle's 'right to offend'. What he is talking about is the right incite racial hatred, which you certainly don't have and which is a monstrous right to claim. Anti-racist legislation has been conceived and passed precisely to thwart any such 'right'. It is because of this that the far right have had to be extremely careful about how they couch their propaganda in public, as noted by 5CC. But if Liddle can purvey such racially defamatory claims without consequence, then why would the fascists hold back? Especially if all they have to say in their defence is "I'm talking about culture, stupid"?