Downing Street Says » PM’s Bristol Visit and Criminal Justice Speech

The Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) explained that the main focus of the visit to Bristol would be law and order. Tomorrow he would deliver the first of a series of lectures on domestic policy, in the same way that he had recently done on foreign policy. This series came under the banner or headline of "Our Nations Future".

The speech tomorrow would reflect on three things, the Prime Minister’s own personal experience of law and order, which as they all knew stretched back to his days in opposition. Second, expert opinion, some of which had been commissioned specifically for this speech. The Prime Minister had hosted a seminar with experts on the 7 June. Five different experts contributions were now posted on our website. We did not agree with all the opinions but the Prime Minister thought it was important that people had access to that range of opinion. The third strand would focus on front line experience and to update him on that the Prime Minister had asked to spend the afternoon in an inner city area of Bristol speaking to local people about how the government’s law and order measures had worked so far and what further changes they wanted to see, which he would then reflect on in his speech.

The Prime Minister would argue that we needed a proper, considered, intellectual and political debate about the nature of liberty in the modern world. He would present an historical analysis of how and why crime, immigration and the criminal justice system had changed over the last century and argue that the modern world had changed the nature of the debate between security and liberty. He would say that if we did not rebalance the system across a range of areas the rights of law-abiding citizens would be at risk.

Asked if the speech would talk about the balance between liberty and terrorism, the PMOS said that it would obviously be part of it as it was part of what had changed the overall balance. One clear difference between this century and the twentieth century was the nature of terrorism. Asked what had changed the balance in regard to domestic crime, the PMOS said that he was not going to pre-empt too much of the speech, but organised crime was different in part because methods had changed with technology and because of that organised crime could be much more global in it’s operation. Put that antisocial behaviour was not a new phenomenon, the PMOS agreed but suggested that people’s expectations that it should be dealt with had grown. People quite rightly did not believe that they should put up with antisocial behaviour. The government had also developed over the last few years new methods to deal with that kind of problem, which had not been there in the past.

1 Comment »

Well, if the Government has developed new methods when are they actually going to be put into effect?

From where I stand things haven’t changed at all. Despite all the ‘initiatives’ launched during this lengthy New Labour government things seem – if anything – worse.

Surely they’ve had more than enough time to find at least one method which is effective – apart from the usual crap about ‘new successes’ that the publicity machine constantly churns out?
Comment by Chuck Unsworth — 22 Jun 2006 on 9:06 pm | Link

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» Thursday, June 22, 2006

PM’s Bristol Visit and Criminal Justice Speech

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