Populism, Law and Order and the Crimes of the 1%

Abstract

The article examines the evidence of endemic financial crime in the global financial crisis (GFC), the legal impunity surrounding these crimes and the popular revolt against these abuses in the financial, political and legal systems. This is set against a consideration of the development since the 1970s of a conservative politics championing de-regulation, unfettered markets, welfare cuts and harsh law and order policies. On the one hand, this led to massively increased inequality and concentrations of wealth and political power in the hands of the super-rich, effectively placing them above the law, as the GFC revealed. On the other, a greatly enlarged, more punitive criminal justice system was directed at poor and minority communities. Explanations in terms of the rise of penal populism are helpful in explaining these developments, but it is argued they adopt a limited and reductionist view of populism, failing to see the prospects for a progressive populist politics to re-direct political attention to issues of inequality and corporate and white collar criminality.

Criminalising Institutional Failures to Prevent, Identify or React to Child Sexual Abuse

“…12, along with other Royal Commission reports, highlights systemic problems that go beyond the organisations. This reflects Hogg's (2013) argument that the state may refrain from introducing organisational law reforms because they have the potential to impact not only upon powerful institutions but also on the state itself. For example, in Report No.…”

“…Attributing blameworthiness to organisations due to failure-whether through the concept of negligence or corporate culture-is potentially broad and, accordingly, they have been resisted by the corporate world and even by governments that might be held accountable for their negligent acts under such laws (Hogg 2013). As I argue below, the Royal Commission has provided clear examples of cultures in organisations that have failed to prevent institutional child sexual abuse and has also demonstrated common sense approaches as to how a prosecutor might prove a criminal corporate culture (Woolf 1997 As a consequence of this program, the mother raised her concerns about the offending teacher with the preparatory school head.…”

Theorising Criminalisation: The Value of a Modalities Approach

“…On this analysis, such laws represent an illegitimate expansion of criminalisation. By contrast, it might be argued that regulatory/compliance regimes frequently serve to mask or diminish the moral blameworthiness of conduct (for example, moral indifference to exposing others to grave risks of harm) that is incidental to a commercial activity, conduct which ought to be stigmatised as seriously criminal (Hogg 2013). What seems clear, however, is that, like the hybrid modality, statutory compliance regimes are designed to bring conduct that would otherwise generally elude criminalisation, within the scope of the (regulatory) criminal law, however deserving it might be of punishment.…”

Left Realism and Social Democratic Renewal

“…Pervasive criminality in the financial sector was an undeniable fact contributing to the crisis. Yet not only were there no significant criminal prosecutions, neo-liberal dominance has remained largely unshaken in the aftermath (Ferguson 2012;Hogg 2013b). The many lessons of the GFC are yet to be fully digested.…”