ABSTRACT
Ironically, this ideological shift came hot on the heels of a very different justice agenda that came close to asserting itself at the beginning of the 1990s. In the wake of high profile miscarriages of justice around the cases of the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six and the deficiencies of the criminal justice system they exposed (Rozenberg 1994), a rights oriented justice agenda was almost discernible, not least in the decision by the Home Secretary (then Kenneth Baker) to hold a Royal Commission of Inquiry into the criminal justice process, fired at least in part by the miscarriages of justice in question and the evident wrongful convictions they involved. However, even at that point the nascent rights-based justice agenda was compromised, because the Royal Commission’s terms of reference were to enshrine ‘securing the conviction of those guilty of criminal offences’ as a core concern of the Commission’s work, a clear marker of a potentially different agenda from that hoped for by more rights oriented commentators (Rozenberg 1994: 321-4). As such, Howard’s ‘ending of the 1960s consensus’ was to emerge on ground already shifting in a public protection direction. This development is cited not just out of historical interest; what Howard claimed to have done constituted a quantum leap in the public protection agenda, taking it significantly further along the path of populist punitivism, the consequences of which are still evident in contemporary law and order policy, as many chapters in this book testify. More significantly for the purposes of this chapter, his ‘simple approach’ – more police powers, more sentencing powers, more prison places, and so on – also acts as a classic statement on the apparent need for ‘rebalancing criminal justice’, in zero-sum terms away from the rights of suspects and towards the ‘rights of victims’. Commentators on the political discourses associated with the so-called ‘war on crime’ have drawn attention to the ideological refrain of rebalancing or ‘reshaping’ justice and crime policy – typically towards a more crime-control orientation (Simon 2007: 96-101). Over the past three decades in Britain one of the recurring themes of political rhetoric associated with ‘law and order politics’ has been the claim, as reflected in Howard’s statement above, of the need for readjusting the balance between suspects’ rights and the rights of victims more in favour of the latter. There has been little political space for the notion of readjusting the balance in the opposite direction. This has been the climate within which actors involved in engaging with policy change in the crime field have been operating, including those that are the focus of this chapter: victim-led campaign groups.
