Some people would shrug off Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling’s ridiculous comparison of some parts of our inner cities with the Baltimore shown in the TV series The Wire. I believe it is more serious than that and is symptomatic of Tory thinking about social policy.
Radio 4’s Today Programme invited an American journalist to Britain to look at some of our problem areas like Manchester’s Moss Side and at the same time sent a British journalist to Baltimore. Far from proving Grayling’s allegation it underlined how wide of the mark Tory claims of a ‘broken society’ really are. The British journalist found five murders in Baltimore on the day of his arrival. Just two detectives were allocated to solving these cases, while in Britain the American journalist found that more than 20 detectives were assigned to the one case on it was investigating. He said the instance of serious crime involving drugs and homicide was so much smaller here it was impossible to make a comparison between the two countries.
The myth of the ‘broken society’ invented by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith insults the very people it claims to be speaking for. Worse the solutions the Tories are advancing to deal with the difficulties experienced by people living in these areas would make conditions worse for them. Great weight is put on a mysterious group in society call social entrepreneurs. So while cuts are being made in state funded programmes directed at the needs of deprived people such as Sure Start you are hoping that individuals will come forward to fill the void you are creating by creating a dragon in the form of the state and seeking to slay it.
Forgotten in all this is the necessity for our economic system to distribute employment and income in an equitable manner. The way the Tories view this is revealed by proposals to exempt estates below one million from death duties. Shadow Chancellor George Osborne’s attempts to tax bankers in the city on the high level of bonuses they receive have been deemed laughably inept by the City itself.
Grayling is a Surrey MP representing Epsom and Ewell. The mindset of his Tory dominated police authority is indicated by the campaign it has mounted against the level of funding for policing in Surrey. Despite a low level of recorded crime, it found that an increase of 7% over two tears in the precept it received inadequate to deal with the levels of crime it identified. When the government insisted that the levels of funding Surrey demanded were not acceptable, the police authority went ahead and levied a tax anyway.
In response a cap was placed on the police authority resulting in a cost of £1.2m in refunding all the county’s council taxpayers. The county council and the police authority responded by mounting a campaign against the government for being so intrepid as to cap its precept. As the original expenditure was illegal, one can only assume the money spent on this was illegal as well.
In supporting its demand for money above that which was accepted by the government the police authority claimed it was a special case. In fact it is funded in a better way than any of the neighbouring authorities such as Hampshire, Kent, Sussex, and Thames Valley. Hampshire and Thames Valley have more than twice the number of recorded crimes of Surrey but are not in receipt of budgets that reflect this. Surrey residents receive £200 a head for policing, while Hants, Kent and Sussex receive considerably less. The cost per crime in Surrey is £3,332 far more than Hampshire at £1,913 receives. The figures for all other nearby counties are likewise considerably less. For this higher expenditure the people of Surrey enjoy a declining detection rate. This has dropped from 27% (below the national average of 28%) to 22%.
There are few examples of where Tory social policy will take us. However if we use the paradigm of Tory run councils such as Surrey we can see clearly what we can expect. No one in the Tory leadership will comment on Conservative run Surrey having one of the worst OFSTED grading for the care of needy children in the country. Nor does the wealthiest are of the country achieve a much better grading its care of the elderly for instance. What is being revealed about the policies of Tory councils such as Hammersmith and Barnet hardly indicates any priority being given to those in social need.
In all this one is left with the impression that Tory social policy is a leap in the dark. If one is cynical it might be seen as providing a humanitarian veneer for the nasty party. Even if Michael Gove’s advocacy of following the Swedish model of allowing a wide range of community groups to open schools has some justification, the evidential basis on which he justifies these moves is on shaky ground. Tory social policy seems to be more based on specious comparisons with American TV series than verified statistical analysis.