Quality | 2009.01.10
Zoe Williams: Straw's vest is full of holes
A report published today by the National Association of Probation Officers shows storm clouds gathering around Jack Straw\'s fluorescent vests. Perhaps they are waterproof. But that won\'t help.
In short, Straw and Jacqui Smith conceived this plan to make convicted criminals wear tabards saying "Community Payback" while they were out on community service. Most of the charities and other schemes that use this punitive labour refuse to distribute the vests. Their reasons are various: sometimes it\'s a charity shop, and volunteers feel that to loudly protest the criminality of the people serving might scare away customers. That\'s hard to measure, I suppose - some will be scared off but others might be actively attracted to the shopping experience, thrill-seeking or maybe possessed by civic duty. Consumers are funny.
A more common objection to the vests is that they are humiliating and they attract, indeed actively solicit, censure from passers-by. Experience shows what common sense would suggest - this censure doesn\'t come in the form of a stern look: rather, people swear and spit at the tabardiers (this is a word I\'ve just made up; sadly, it cannot pass into the language until some enthusiasm is shown for the tabards themselves).
But I think even if these vests were engendering a more measured response, there\'s still something profoundly disturbing about seeing people abased in this way. In a park down the road from me I\'ve seen nursery staff wearing fluorescent bibs that say How\'s My Caring?, with an 0800 number underneath; I guess so you can shop them if they smack anyone in the petting zoo or push children into the goats.
This unnerves me in a way that seeing the van equivalent doesn\'t. You can be branded by your vehicle any which way - hell, you can drive a car saying Foxtons and you still own your own destiny. But when you\'re branded on your person, you are demeaned. It has connotations of a livery, which lacks even the dignity of a uniform, as the wearer\'s identity is appropriated to accessorise the ambitions of the owner.
And there are still worse resonances of the Nazi yellow badge, a public degradation both emblematic and practical as it dehumanised the wearers while laying down the administrative foundations for the horrors to come.
None of this is good, is it? None of this screams "useful adjunct to a penal policy in a developed country of the 21st century". It\'s just about possible that the Community Payback bibs are so stigmatising, so hamfisted, that they might have an ironic cachet among bad young people. The charities that currently refuse to enforce them could then flog them on eBay. You can do anything when you\'re a charity, so long as there\'s money in it. However, I think this is undermined by the sheer quantity of the things, 10,000 apparently, and that\'s just what the justice department will admit to. That\'s never going to turn into hot streetwear, is it? The shapeless fluorescence isn\'t the problem, it\'s the lunatic abundance.
Never mind all that now. What bothers me is the unpleasantness of the thought process that took this from beermat doodle to good idea in the first place. The wording Community Payback has a nasty, Schwarzenegger, blockbuster exhilaration about it. You get this image of Straw really getting off on his own authority, on his trusty sword of blah, as he called payback time for society\'s bad seeds.
Furthermore, this idea of shame as a meaningful and, more to the point, harnessable tool of justice is incredibly old-fashioned, and I don\'t mean "a bit 70s" - I mean centuries old. There has been some evolution in the way we see one another since the days when convention and the world order were taken as so self-evidently righteous that all it took was a raised aristocratic eyebrow to mobilise society against its crims and mendicants. Public shaming has no such currency now, and that reflects more the march of equality than the disintegration of propriety. Jack Straw should know all this, surely. He\'s meant to be leftwing; he\'s not Norman Tebbit.
But beyond all of that, it\'s just so petty-minded. Like the proposals announced this week that patients should be free to blog, in a non-defamatory way, about their GPs, it leaves you, well, wanting more. Not in a good way - just wondering how they could have time for this kind of measly rule-making, minute in its scope, not so minute that it\'s actually been properly thought through; trifling in its impact, not so trifling that it isn\'t offensive. I\'d like to see Jack Straw in a tabard, saying 10,000 Wasted Tabards! That\'s How I Spent Last Year. How\'s My Governing? Never mind an 0800, I\'d cough up 0845 kind of money on a hotline for that.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]1/jack-straw-offenders-tabards
