A War on Crime? Law and Order Policies in the 1980s

Abstract

Prior to the 1979 General Election ‘law and order’ policy, the means by which governments seek to control crime and maintain public order through enforcement of the criminal law, exhibited many of the features of the consensus politics of the post-war period. Indeed, so broad was the agreement over policy in this area (with the exception perhaps of support for or opposition to the reintroduction of capital punishment), that in many respects law and order was hardly a ‘political’ issue in the sense of falling along distinct party-political lines. This is not to say that law and order policy itself remained static during the period (Ryan, 1983), rather that the major developments which did take place did so within a broad framework of political consensus.