Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party administration in the United Kingdom has promised that they will do something to tackle the monstrous amounts of anti-social behaviour that Britons suffer from. According to press reports the Government has said that they will implement policies that create a situation where instant justice is dished out to vandals, those who engage in anti-social behaviour and other similar criminals.

This sounds great doesn’t it? At last the police will get people who create unnecessary mess and damage will get almost immediate justice.

Unfortunately we’ve seen these sort of promises before from politicians and they’ve invariably turned out to be false promises. These claims by politicians, who’ve often previously taken zero interest in such criminal activity, have been made before.

Older readers may remember one of the Thatcher administrations saying that they’d tackle youth crime by giving these criminals ‘short sharp shock’ Borstal / Youth Custody sentences. This policy did not work. It didn’t tackle the problems of crime, some of the centres used for the short sharp shock policy allegedly became magnets for abusive staff and putting minor criminals in with much worse ones meant that some of those who went through this system came out worse criminals than they were before they went in. This policy was abandoned.

You may also recall the 1997 General Election when then Labour Leader Tony Blair promised to tackle youth crime and anti-social behaviour. Labour’s policies in this area not only ended in failure, as with the Ant-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBO) which became badges of honour for criminals, but crime didn’t fall.

Fast forward to 2012 and Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s plans to ‘make prison work’ and to beef up rehabilitation were greeted with great fanfare by the party. But these policies do not seem to have done much to tackle crime in subsequent years and his ‘rehabilitation revolution’ eventually sank without trace.

Rishi Sunak’s government’s announcement about new crime prevention and law and order policies seem to have far too much in common with previous headline crime initiatives for my liking. It looks to me more of the same old pre-election bullshit about crime that comes from the mouths of politicians but will ultimately end up as either a nothingburger or a rather sleazy bit of British political history.

There’s such a long record of politicians, of all parties, promising to tackle the crimes that most bother people, but failing to do so, that it’s probably correct to suspect that this latest announcement is little more than the usual bullshit electioneering. It’s just Blair’s ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ blather but rehashed by a different political leader from a different party. I’m not going to take Sunak’s promises not just with a pinch of salt, but a whole Dead Sea worth of it.