Book Reviews : PENNY GREEN, The Enemy Without: Policing and Class Consaousness in the Miners' Strike. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990,235 pp.. ALISON YOUNG, Femininity in Dissent. London: Routledge, 1990, 190 pp
| Author | Phil Scraton |
| Date | 01 March 1994 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399400300111 |
| Published date | 01 March 1994 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
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the vantage point of the Anglo-Saxon penal culture. Here, Beccarian certainty of law is not
deemed a crucial variable for the description of law as just. In countries with a codified law
and in Common Law countries ’discretion’ enjoys a completely different status. For
example, in Italy, when the word discretion is used in institutional agencies, its meaning
closely matches that of ’arbitrariness’. Here, a precise distinction of roles, a statutory set of
penalties and individual guarantees do not allow for subjective interpretations or
discretionary decision-making. A subtle suspicion informs the relationships between
citizens and the authorities in Italy, where it is felt that rights and prerogatives must be
thoroughly defined and allocated. Conversely, in Common Law countries, discretion
does not imply negative connotations. Here discretion may denote the paternalistic nature
of the relationship between citizens and authorities, but it may also be assumed to offer
scope for reform. For this reason, Ferrajoli’s book should be read with great interest in the
Anglo-Saxon world, where it would give much material for comparison. The second
consideration regards the circumstance that Ferrajoli only seems to describe how the penal
systems diverge from the principles of Enlightenment but fails to explain the structural
reasons why they do so. The divergences he describes may in effect be regarded as part and
parcel of law, and the effort to bring the legislation back into the realm of its founding
principles may sound somewhat ideological. The reason for this dual existence of law
remains to be explained by sociologists and anthropologists. But can we ask Ferrajoli to
also act as a sociologist and an anthropologist after his fruitful excursions into all the other
academic disciplines listed above?
VINCENZO RUGGIERO
School of Social Work
Middlesex University, London
PENNY GREEN, The Enemy Without: Policing and Class Consaousness in the Miners’
Strike. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990,235 pp..
ALISON YOUNG, Femininity in Dissent. London: Routledge, 1990, 190 pp.
The portrayal of the Thatcher years, the 1980s, as a ’golden age that never was but is now
invented’ would be seen as predictable, if not an over-simplification, had it originated
from a commentator on the Left. Coming as it did from her successor, a man deeply
implicated in the consolidation of New Right policies and whose previously undis-
tinguished political career was projected spectacularly under Margaret Thatcher’s
sponsorship, it exposed the lie from within. Booming real estate, new high-tech
companies, tax breaks, popular capitalism, expanding markets, holidays abroad, heritage
at home
and so on, were each expressions of what Neal Ascherson called, early on, ’funny
money’. While the London Left heralded the advent of the ’New Times’ and put its faith
in the image makers yet another rock band sang a different lyric: ’here comes another
winter of long shadows and high hopes ... waiting for Utopia ... waiting for Hell to
freeze over’ (The The, Heartland).
And deep in the heartland the price of the economic boom was paid. John Pilger caught
the reality with chilling clarity as he visited a rubbish tip in Birkenhead where a scavenging
child had lost his life, and again as he reported from the rat-infested, disease-ridden
accommodation for the poor in London. These were Victorian accounts from the return
to Victorian values. As the steel industry closed, so did its communities; as the coal
industry was decimated, so were its towns and villages. But the band played on. Appalling
poverty and structured unemployment in the regions was matched by record profits and
incredible salary hikes in the City. The great sell-off of the family silver, proclaimed as
participatory capitalism, took anything that was profitable in the public domain into
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private ownership. Public services (healthcare, education, welfare, even prisons and
policing) have been gripped by privatization and subjected to the dogma of New
Managerialism.
As David Edgar noted, the great ideological and political success of the New Right was
to wreak such social havoc and economic turmoil while hijacking the concept of
’freedom’. Hayek’s free-market economy, Thatcher’s economic libertarianism, was sold
popularly on the principles of individual free choice and the escape from state
intervention. Behind the mask was an unprecedented level of state interventionism. Of
course
John Major is right, there was no ’Golden Age’. The long-term unemployed knew
that - as did...
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