ABSTRACT
The sociologist Frank Parkin argued half a century ago, but in an analysis that is still highly relevant, that the major strength of the Conservative Party was its ability to claim oneness with the bastions of traditional British sovereignty: the monarchy, the aristocracy, property ownership, the armed forces, the ancient universities, the land, and the law. Rising unemployment and growing inequality are both linked with rates of offending by a host of studies, some of which have been carried out by government researchers. Counter-intuitively, it was at this point that penal policies assumed their most liberal form in the Criminal Justice Bill of 1990, the product of both ministerial and Home Office groundwork throughout the 1980s. The term ‘underclass’ to describe the largely working-class casualties of deindustrialisation, globalisation, neo-liberal economic policies and rapid technological change may have fallen into disuse, but in the 1980s and 1990s it became almost standard in analyses of crime and allied social problems.
