When Poachers Become Gameskeepers. Part II

In Part II we move across Atlantic to the UK. As a main tenet of their respective party platforms the Conservatives under David Cameron played on their "hard on crime" credentials, and the Liberal Democrats on the importance of education for the nation and therefore were strongly against raising tuition at public universities.

Recently Ken Clarke, the Conservative Minister for Justice, was shown touring a prison as part of his penal reform policy. He essentially said that fewer criminals will go to prison because imprisonment has done nothing to stop re-offending rates and so is more likely to be a school for crime as opposed to a house of behavioural reform.

Ironically there is truth in what he said. "Warehousing" criminals at great expense and essentially doing nothing to rehabilitate them is in the vernacular of the Conservatives "not good value for money".

In opposition, the Conservatives drew up plans to build 5,000 new prison places and promised to meet a Labour pledge of 96,000 prison places by 2014. Now the Ministry of Justice is facing budget cuts of up to 33% over the next four years. Maybe the budget deficit is driving this new found enlightenment.

I actually think Mr Clarke is correct and I would much prefer to see community sentences. Conservative MPs and law-and-order campaigners will dismiss community sentences and other non-custodial sentences as a soft and ineffective response to crime. Maybe they want to reintroduce Chain Gangs? In any event they should focus on the second part of their crime manifesto, "hard on the sources of crime"!

My last crossover is the Liberal Democrats. In their election manifesto they were going to scrap university tuition fees during first degrees. A good portion of Liberal Democrat support comes from students. Nick Clegg caught their attention in the pre-election debates allowing him to position himself as a new voice with modern policies.

Now they are part of a government introducing a bill to significantly increase tuition fees. Vince Cable, the deputy leader of the Liberal Democrats and Minister for Business has gotten his knickers into a real twist. He first said he would vote for the bill, and then half-reversed himself into nomansland and suggested that like many Lib Dem MP's he too would abstain from voting.

The question of tuition for public universities is an important one and I am not suggesting it is a simple decision. There are many nuances to be considered as to how this fits into the overall social policy of a political party, but surely the education (policy) of a nation should not be used merely as a political slogan to gain election.

We shall see how they vote on this lynchpin of their election platform this coming Thursday.