January 2011 Archives

Of all the things said this week in the wake of the Alan Johnson resignation, it was a comment by Douglas Alexander which summed things up best.

Now shadow foreign secretary, Alexander was one of the architects of the Labour election campaign. I believe history should judge that the campaign wasn't a total failure. After all, Labour was in theory on its knees, yet David Cameron couldn't pull an overall majority out of the ballot box. Historians can decide whether that was more to do with a Tory failing or Labour being more in tune with supporters than the media would have had us believe at the time.

The predicted demise of the anti-social behaviour order will be mourned by many in the media. Since being introduced in 1999, they have been a source of many a good news story.

Sadly, to many they were a symbol of Labour's desire to push the state further out at every opportunity. ASBOs couldn't just be instigated by the police, councils could push one to court, as could housing associations. Then came the 'evidence' that they weren't working: trouble-making youths seeing them as a badge of honour, and the statistic that 55% of ASBOs were broken.

The coalition set out early on its plan to 'move beyond the ASBO.' That now appears to mean scrapping the ASBO and giving the police more powers to solve yobbish problems. The idea the Daily Telegraph (link above) particularly likes is the idea of a copper seeing a 'yob' vandalising a fence and making him repair it on the spot.

Brilliant. Instant justice. But what happens next time, and the time after that? Is being supervised by a policeman to repair a fence any less of a badge of honour to the cretins who commit anti-social behaviour than an ASBO? Of course not.

And here's where the negative myths around ASBOs do some real damage. The interpretation of 55% of ASBOS being broken be proof that ASBOs don't work is simply wrong.

On Monday, the perma-tanned health secretary Andrew Lansley was doing a live interview with Sky News from a beach in Anglesey. I think we can all agree it is unlikely he collected his Ronseal sheen from spending Christmas in North Wales.

He was already on dodgy territory politically - the subject of the interview was his decision not to run the flu advertising campaign. The facts were quite simple: In Scotland, where the campaign had run, take-up of the flu vaccine was higher than in England, where Lansley had insisted GPs should contact at-risk patients directly.

Lansley insisted that there was no need for a vaccination campaign because GPs could be trusted to get in contact with the right people. But what he failed to appreciate is that one, probably round-robin, letter from the GP wasn't having the same impact as the 'catch it, bin it, kill it' campaign which crops up in day-to-day life time and again.