ABSTRACT
The New Labour government was dominated by the concern to ‘liberate’ the citizen from the state, and at the heart of New Labour’s thinking on citizenship was the idea that with rights come responsibilities (Lister, 1998: 313). New Labour emphasised the need for citizens to share risks and responsibilities with the state, reflecting a discourse which increasingly draws upon the language of obligations rather than the ‘old’ Labour discourses of social rights (Lister, 1998: 313). Announcing the publication of a five-year crime strategy in 2004, Tony Blair said, ‘Today’s strategy . . . marks the end of the 1960s liberal, social consensus on law and order’, claiming that ‘people have had enough’ of the part of the 1960s consensus that focussed on the offender’s rights and encouraged people to take ‘the freedom without the responsibility’ (Blair, 2004: 3). As shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair characterised youth offending as a descent into ‘moral chaos’ (Haydon and Scraton, 2000: 420). Social problems consequently became defined in terms of the individual rather than state responsibility; in 1994, Blair wrote, ‘we should never excuse the commission of criminal acts on the grounds of social conditions’ (Blair, 1994: 6), echoing the views of the Thatcher and Major governments that youth crime was symbolic of individual and family failure and replacing concerns for welfarism, needs, rights and collective responsibility (Prior, 2009: 18).
