It is not an exaggeration, I don’t think, to say that government policy is very rarely based on evidence. For example, when Professor David Nutt (the head of the advisory council for the Misuse of Drugs Act) wrote a scientific paper on the relatively modest risks of MDMA, he was instantly dismissed for contradicting government policy. As the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, explained very clearly at the time: you cannot be a government adviser and go against government policy.

Ben Goldacre, Guardian columnist and author of Bad Science, notes:

“Drugs instantiate the classic problem for evidence based social policy. It may well be that prohibition, and the inevitable distribution of drugs by criminals, gives worse results for all the outcomes we think are important, like harm to the user, harm to our communities through crime, and so on. But equally, it may well be that we will tolerate these worse outcomes, because we decide it is somehow more important that we publicly declare ourselves, as a culture, to be disapproving of drug use, and enshrine that principle in law. It’s okay to do that. You can have policies that go against your stated outcomes, for moral or political reasons: but that doesn’t mean you can hide the evidence, it simply means you must be clear that you don’t care about it.”

Of course, government policy with regard to drugs is not the only area of social policy that actually goes against its stated outcomes. One example that springs readily to mind this week is Conservative policy with regard to families. Nadine Dorries, representing the Christian fundamentalist right of the party, recently exclaimed: “We believe that given what happened over the past week our number one priority should be reinforcing family, reinforcing relationships.” However, Gillian Pascall, writing in the journal Social Policy & Administration in 2002, looking back at 18 years of Conservative rule, notes:

“The marketization of life, pursued under Thatcherism, contributed to undermining the family form which has traditionally underpinned the market. Deregulated labour markets and spreading owner-occupation in an unstable housing market have been important contributions to family breakdown, insecurity and women’s access to – and need for – jobs. The idea of family responsibility was promulgated, but in practice family members have become less able to support each other.”

As Gramsci once said “history teaches, but it has no pupils”. This week The Financial Times reported that “David Cameron is being urged to accelerate tax breaks for married couples as part of his moral clean-up of Britain following last week’s riots”.

During the course of his speech (described by one unnamed “senior Conservative” as “a very long, drawn-out way of saying ‘we told you so’”), Cameron apparently:

“…attacked the riots as the culmination of a ‘slow-motion moral collapse’. He complained that ‘social problems that have been festering for decades have exploded in our face’. But the prime minister supplied no evidence that the riots marked a long-term decline in behaviour – perhaps because the available data point in the opposite direction.”

Commenting on the findings of the latest British Crime Survey (BCS), the FT goes on to note that “the riots are anything but the climax of a crime wave”. Indeed, findings from the BCS indicate that the rate of lawbreaking “now remains around the lowest level ever reported”.

This is not the first time that Cameron has conveniently ignored the results of the BCS. When he first started talking about the “broken society” in 2007, he made much of rising crime rates. “We need a big cultural change in favour of fatherhood, in favour of parenting, in favour of marriage,” he said. Writing in the International Journal of Social Welfare though, Leeds University’s Simon John Prideaux notes:

“…it seems incredulous that Cameron has chosen not to acknowledge the findings of the British Crime Survey. Could it be that such evidence represents a direct contradiction to Cameron’s analysis? After all, the 2006/07 British Crime Survey report states that violent crime in general has actually fallen 41 per cent, with assault with minor injury falling by 58 per cent since 1995. Indeed, at its current level, this amounts to over half a million fewer victims over the period covered. Arguably, then, these findings make a mockery of the belief that there is a growing and threatening ‘underclass’”

As I have written about before, this ideal of family life and the expectation that it offers a panacea to crime is highly problematic. For example, the family itself is the site of significant crime - the 2007 British Crime Survey for example, shows that 16% of all violent crimes are domestic, and for women, domestic violence is the most prevalent type of violent victimisation. What is more, this ideal of family life presented by David Cameron is patriarchal, racist, and elitist. As the governor of Morton Hall Prison, Jamie Bennett, explains:

“It is patriarchal as it seeks to undermine the economic independence asserted by women and seeks to impose upon them a traditional domestic role. It is racist because it presents a particular white, Christian ideal of family life that does not embrace diverse ideas about the family. It is elitist because it posits a middle-class view of family life - for many working-class parents, the option of obtaining flexible working to suit family life is unrealistic as indeed is the option of non-working parents dedicated to parenting.”

Rather than being based in any kind of social reality, the “return to core Conservative values of marriage, commitment, discipline and duty” are constructed around elitist ideals and do not embrace the diversity of people living in the UK or take account of their needs. It is an approach that is destined to fail its own stated outcomes because it is based not upon any kind of evidence, but merely upon prejudice.

 

Keywords:

• British Crime Survey |
• crime |
• Evidence based policy |
• family |
• riots |

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