If there’s one thing this government is addicted to, it’s crackdowns. Rishi Sunak loves to talk tough on how he is going to ‘crack down’ on small boats, climate protestors, Mickey Mouse degrees, banks blacklisting, anti-social behaviour. Just last week Home Secretary Suella Braverman vowed to crack down on homeless people living in tents as a ‘lifestyle’ choice, as if the destitute choose to sleep outside because they like stargazing, rather than because they are crippled by poverty, addiction and mental health issues.
As the government chases ever more intense crackdown highs, it gets its hits from banning things. American Bully XLs. Smoking. Laughing gas. Drip pricing. Noisy protests. Leaseholds in new houses (but not in flats, where owners are much more likely to be exploited). Some bans are more needed than others, but it’s all very strangely unconservative: where are the principles of consumer choice, adult autonomy, individual liberty, free markets? It’s also, in many cases, wholly unnecessary over-reaching.
Passing laws that have neither the means nor the will to be enforced is utterly pointless showboating
Take criminalising the possession of laughing gas. The last thing our government needs in its incredibly unsuccessful ‘war on drugs’ is to open up another battlefront. Police forces are already so under-resourced and over-stretched that, every day, 6,000 criminals get away with offences: that’s 30,000 sex offences, 330,000 violent crimes, 1.5 million thefts and 320,000 cases of criminal damage a year.
There is no point in outlawing more things when existing crimes are not prosecuted. Passing laws that have neither the means nor the will to be enforced is utterly pointless showboating.
It’s a similar story with the smoking ban, which risks potentially glamourising a habit which is losing popularity anyway, particularly with young people. In all likelihood the ban will simply lead to Prohibition-style racketeering and bootlegging, whilst taxing e-cigarettes will result in adult smokers going back to tobacco if there is no difference in terms of affordability. Teenagers will buy vapes and laughing gas online, where they can order industrial cannisters that are up to eighty times the normal size.
The Conservatives can push compulsory clean living all they want, but they have lost sight of what voters want. In the grand scheme of things, who cares if grown adults want to inhale a mind-altering balloon at a festival when people can’t get a doctor’s appointment, can’t rely on the police to investigate a burglary, can’t get the train to work or afford to put the heating on?
We pay more and more for increasingly inefficient and ineffective public services because the quality of government intervention and regulation has been sacrificed for quantity. The social contract is broken: we can guarantee that police will pursue a speeding fine and local councils will penalise you for not putting your bins out correctly, but half of hyper-prolific criminals (with at least 45 previous convictions) are spared jail time. Our prisons are so over-crowded that judges are told to delay sentencing hearings and free criminals early.
Our sentences for violent and sexual crimes are laughably lenient. A man with six previous convictions, including battery, can kill his girlfriend whilst on a community order and serve less than three years in prison. A serial rapist can leave prison seven years early and go on to rape again. A driver without insurance can kill a 17 year old cyclist, and not stop, and only be banned from driving for a year. Yet Sunak wants laughing gas users to be imprisoned for up to two years?
The Tories continue to promise policies that are impossible to deliver in practice. For example, they can use all the hardline rhetoric they like, but they are never going to be able to check the bank accounts of every benefits claimant every month.
Besides, is this really a priority given our state of permacrisis? Are there not more pressing matters, like record NHS waiting lists? Labour aren’t offering an alternative vision either. Starmer’s proposal for supervised toothbrushing in schools (as if teachers don’t already have enough to deal with without being responsible for their students’ oral hygiene) suggests both sides of the political spectrum want to micro-manage more and more aspects of people’s lives.
Our relationship with the state fundamentally changed during the Covid lockdowns, when personal freedom deferred to public health. At the time, many Tories criticised the previously-libertarian Boris Johnson for suddenly becoming a nanny-state fusspot. Now both parties compete to do more, more, more, when voters really want them to do less, but to do it well.
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