Roy Hattersley shines light in John Reid's eyes

In possession of a vision


A successful home secretary must embrace policies that go beyond responding to headlines

Roy Hattersley
Monday April 16, 2007
The Guardian

François Baroin, the French interior minister, comes to London tomorrow for talks with John Reid about coordinating the campaign against terrorism. Despite the obvious importance of the meeting's purpose, newspaper reports will concentrate on a subject which is raised at the margin. The home secretary is required to complain about the mayor of Calais setting up a "day centre" in which refugees can shower, eat a humble meal and seek advice about their future. Asylum seekers are always top of the political agenda and, without a change in political attitude, will remain a blot on the reputation of successive home secretaries long after the department is split in two.

So will the government's response to crime and the fear of crime. Measures taken to protect children from predatory paedophiles will be dismissed as inadequate. Every prison escape will be represented as a scandalous disregard for the safety of virtuous women and innocent children. And administrative errors, made by junior civil servants, will be reported as catastrophes that justify ministerial resignations. In short, home secretaries will continue to be excoriated for their failure to solve problems that are insoluble.

Or, to be more precise, the denunciations and derision will continue for as long as whoever is home secretary sees his (or her) job as fire-fighting - battling against crime and criminals, holding back the tide of intruders, and making nervous parents confident that their children are safe from assault. When the annual statistics show that one type of crime is in decline, nobody will offer congratulations. Ministers will be told that the figure is still too high. Likewise when there is a reduction of asylum applicants. A home secretary whose ambition does not extend beyond reacting to the crises that are identified in the most strident headlines is doomed.

There is, however, an alternative approach that has been used, in living memory, with great success. Forty years ago Roy Jenkins accepted with enthusiasm what, even then, was called the poisoned chalice. There was no terrorist threat to frustrate. But terrorism has never been a major cause of Home Office embarrassment. And all the other problems the home secretary now faces were present in 1967. Indeed, immigration was a far more explosive issue than asylum. Tories in Smethwick had just fought a general election on the slogan "If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour". Dockers were about to demonstrate in support of Enoch Powell.

Crime was said to be threatening the tranquillity of the suburbs. Prisons were full to bursting. There was a spectacular breakout. The police were in open revolt about pay. And the competence of the department was questioned in a series of confidence votes. Roy Jenkins sailed through all those vicissitudes into the Treasury, and - had he not thrown the chance away - would have gone on to become leader of the Labour party and prime minister. He made a success of the Home Office because he thought of it not as a grim struggle to meet the public demand for more severe penalties and more repressive legislation, but as a chance to create the sort of society in which he believed. It was the great libertarian hour.

Style helped. I cannot imagine any recent home secretary rebuffing objections to immigrants taking over whole areas of a city with the thought that "Conservative MPs are inclined to congregate in Belgravia but nobody seems to mind". But his real strength came from the possession of a vision which transcended dealing with the next complaint. At the launch of the Race Relations Board, he made what remains the authentic explanation of the benefits of living in a multiracial society. It is still the classic text on the subject and would make rewarding reading for politicians who advocate assimilation rather than integration.

Roy Jenkins and I had far from identical views about the good society. The first of our serious arguments (none of which did permanent damage to our friendship) began about the proportion of national income that should be devoted to public expenditure, and ended with a passionate disagreement about the desirability of "more equality" as distinct from "less inequality". But I never had any doubt that his view of politics extended beyond responding to headlines. As the Bible almost says, without vision, home secretaries perish.

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