The Blunders of Our Governments

Anthony King, Ivor Crewe

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780746180
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With unrivalled political savvy and a keen sense of irony, distinguished political scientists Anthony King and Ivor Crewe open our eyes to the worst government horror stories and explain why the British political system is quite so prone to appalling mistakes.

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Panic, symbols and spin

Frequently the cry goes up, “Something must be done!” Newspapers, especially the tabloids, typically take the lead and cry the loudest, but they are often followed closely by other media; and opinion polls frequently suggest that the cause that the press is currently advocating, whatever it happens to be, actually does have broad public support. Ministers then need to decide whether they should do something and, if so, what that something should be. They are often under intense pressure to act quickly; and of course, if they do act quickly, they are liable to blunder. They may also wish to give the impression that they are taking prompt and decisive action when in reality they are doing no such thing. In addition, the party or parties in power almost invariably want to put the best face they can on all of their major undertakings and, in order to do that, they often apply thick layers of cosmetics. Policies as well as pensions can be mis-sold.

The original Dangerous Dogs Act was certainly such a policy. It was panic-driven, almost wholly symbolic in character and spun to maximum ministerial advantage. Initially ministers, as we noted in Chapter 3, were reluctant to introduce new legislation, believing that, in a dog-owning culture such as Britain’s, attacks by dogs on humans were inevitable from time to time and that the existing statutes, if enforced, offered members of the public as much protection as the state and the law could reasonably be expected to provide. But in the spring of 1991, once a few especially savage assaults by dogs had been reported, newspapers and broadcasters began to report a whole spate of them. Within a few weeks, the media were projecting a series of isolated incidents as a veritable epidemic. The cases were often sad, the details gruesome. Under the headline “Devil dog chews up wife’s arm”, the Daily Express reported the case of a family pet – a Rottweiler, as it happened – that had bitten its owner, a Bristol housewife, seventeen times and had broken her arm in several places.‌¹ Within days, the Bradford Telegraph and Argus reported what had happened to a little girl in Bradford called Rukhsana Khan:

Rukhsana was tossed about like a rag doll by the ferocious dog for 15 minutes while onlookers struggled to free her from its vice-like grip. The six-year-old from Springfield Street, Manningham, Bradford, suffered 23 dog bites to her back and three deep bites to the left hand side of her chest where the dog gripped on for dear life. She has five other bites to her chest and lost two teeth in the attack.‌²

The dog in this case was a pit bull terrier. The savage attack on Rukhsana was publicised nationwide.

By now, media pressure on the government to act was intense, and the tabloids’ vehement language in editorials was matched by that of the broadsheets. The normally restrained Times, alluding to incidents like the attack on Rukhsana, declared that “such incidents or worse will be repeated endlessly until the government acts”. It added: “Every single case will be because of the government’s delay.”‌³ The Independent insisted that “it cannot be beyond the wit of politicians to design some adequate scheme of dog registration, which would require that the animals should be kept under control and that certain breeds such as pit bull terriers and Rottweilers should not be privately owned at all”.‌⁴ A leading article in the Guardian, under the heading “The dogs of war”, agreed: “No British government easily confronts the dog lobby here: even so, it is still a mystery why the Home Secretary has done so little in the past decade to staunch the flow of the killer breeds.”‌⁵ A poll published in the Sunday Express suggested that 61 per cent of voters would support the banning of dangerous breeds such as Rottweilers. A majority also favoured stiffer penalties for the owners of dangerous dogs, including possible imprisonment.‌⁶

Only a brave or foolhardy government could have resisted such an onslaught, especially if, as was the case in the spring of 1991, the next general election was due in under a year’s time. Ministers in any government would have had to be seen to be doing something even if they doubted whether a great deal could actually be done to prevent dangerous dogs – not to mention dogs that did not appear to be dangerous – from attacking people. In the case of John Major’s government in 1991, it was also under intense pressure from the Labour party, as well as the media, to introduce draconian legislation. Labour wanted the government to require the registration of all dogs, whatever their breed.

The government undoubtedly had to be seen to be doing something. But what it actually did – introducing under intense pressure at great speed the specific piece of legislation that it did – was bound to fail, in policy terms if not in party-political terms (the Conservatives won the 1992 election). The legislation, with its loose drafting and its primary focus on dangerous dogs and dogs bred specifically for fighting, could never have significantly reduced either the population of potentially dangerous dogs in the UK or the incidence of serious attacks by dogs of all breeds on individual humans. Enacting the measure was overwhelmingly a symbolic act, intended to symbolise the government’s determination to deal with an issue, not really to achieve anything in particular. The measure was, in addition, oversold, which is probably one of the reasons it has had such a bad reputation ever since. Winding up the second-reading debate on the proposed legislation in the House of Commons, Kenneth Baker, the home secretary, made claims on its behalf that were, to say the least, ambitious:

The provisions contained in this public protection Bill are tough and specific. Their aim is to deal quickly and effectively with a serious danger. I believe that an overwhelming majority of the public want this preventive measure, which is intended to avoid a repetition of the attacks that we have witnessed recently, to pass quickly into law.‌⁷

The majority of the public probably did want the bill passed into law, but that was almost certainly largely because of the positive spin the government had put on it. The measure had been, among other things, mis-sold or at least grossly oversold. Its effects have been negligible.

Symbolism also appears to have been to the fore in connection with two pieces of legislation not so far mentioned: the soberly named Firearms (Amendment) Act 1997 and its soon-enacted sequel, the Firearms (Amendment) (No. 2) Act 1997. Both Acts were responses to the Dunblane massacre of the previous year, when a lone gunman, equipped with four high-calibre handguns, all of them legally owned, had shot dead sixteen Scottish schoolchildren and their teacher. Both Acts largely failed in their principal stated purpose of reducing the possession and use of handguns. No outsider can know for sure what was in the minds of the two home secretaries, Michael Howard and Jack Straw, who between them introduced a ban on the legal ownership of high-calibre handguns and then a ban on the legal ownership of low-calibre handguns. However, the official report of their speeches in the House of Commons makes it clear that both men were well aware that, unlike in the case of Dunblane, a large proportion of the handguns used by criminals in the course of committing crimes were not held legally but illegally and that they might therefore be affected little, if at all, by the new legislation. Both men nevertheless maintained in parliament that they believed that their proposed bans would reduce the levels of handgun-related crime; Straw, for example, told...