ABSTRACT
The Police Federation, delighted with the success of their pre-election law and order campaign and content to continue flexing their new-found muscle, lost no time in writing to the new Home Secretary to outline the case for the reintroduction of the death penalty. The failure to modernise the prison estate meant ‘prison overcrowding had increased to worrying levels’. The ‘short, sharp, shock’ experiment that had been signalled in advance of the election, was the most obviously ‘tough’ of the measures associated with Whitelaw's tenure as Home Secretary. The life of the Home Secretary, arguably more than any other Secretary of State, is affected by sudden crises, events that could not have been foreseen or easily planned for. Whitelaw's approach to penal matters was fairly well captured in the provisions of the Criminal Justice Act 1982. The miners’ strike also witnessed some of the worst violence during an industrial dispute for several decades.
