The Unexpected Outcome of James Bulger’s Murder: New Labour

Brendan O’Neill argues that the authoritarian New Labour project had it’s origins in the aftermath of two year old James Bulger’s murder in 1993:

For the changing Labour Party and its supporters in the media and the intelligentsia, the murder of Bulger became powerfully symbolic – of out-of-control communities, of the rise of individualism at the cost of community solidarity, and primarily of the dangers of ‘too much freedom’. It is striking that it was Tony Blair, who was then shadow home secretary but would later, of course, become the colossus of New Labour, who most keenly exploited the Bulger tragedy. For him, the killing was not a mercifully rare or inexplicable occurrence, but a ‘hammer blow struck against the sleeping conscience of the country, urging us to wake up and look unflinchingly at what we see’.

What Blair and his supporters saw was a society that needed more ‘order’ and ‘respect’ – his two favourite buzzwords of the time. The killing of Bulger revealed a ‘moral vacuum’, said Blair in 1993, and ‘if we do not learn and then teach the value of what is right and what is wrong, the result is simply moral chaos, which engulfs us all’. Blair had already been presenting New-ish Labour as the true party of tackling crime (he made his famous promise to be ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’ just a month before Bulger was murdered) and as one sympathetic biographer points out, the Bulger killing finally showed that Labour ‘had taken the issue of law and order away from the Conservatives and made it part of the Labour agenda’.

It’s a strong and unsettling piece of analysis, particularly the line about ‘too much freedom’. In the last 13 years New Labour has used that implied excess to justify its entire authoritarian experiment, from underpinning its identity strategy to attempting to lock people up for 42 days without charge, to justifying the Digital Economy Bill. Because there haven’t been mass protests in the streets, because the tabloids aren’t currently campaigning against the Independent Safeguarding Authority, you have to assume Blair got it right, at least in electoral terms. There does appear to be an attitude that ‘too much freedom’ is a bad thing, which just manages to justify the surveillance state, despite continuing potshots taken against it. O’Neill is right when he later describes the whole ‘rights and responsibilities’ narrative: obedience to the state before you are allowed to access constitutional basics which had previously been sacrosanct. It’s not how the modern state has ever operated before, but at least New Labour is winning against evil teens and pre-teens, and then the bogeymen it’s developed since: paedophiles, terrorists and ‘pirates’; order is everything, and who’s to know it’s all a fraud?

Through the permanent demonisation of Jon Venables and Robert Thompson New Labour has managed to convince us that there are people in our midst who are fundamentally evil, whom we need absolute protection from. The ISA, ID cards, the Digital Economy Bill, you name it, the name of the game is to protect through subjugation. It’s an equation which has proven successful in different ways in Russia, China, Singapore, even the United States (Patriot Act anyone?), and given the right-wing dominance over the press in this country I don’t see it coming apart any time soon.

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