Transferring responsibility for prisons from the Home Office to the new Ministry of Justice, and putting that department into the all-too-experienced hands of failed former Home Secretary Jack Straw, is already having predictable results. The grotesque discrepancy between the government's treatment of the super-rich on the one hand, and of its own employees in the Prison Service (and other sectors of the public service) on the other, shames us all. The public service is being made to lower its living standards in the name of the government's efforts to contain inflation, while thousands of others, in the private sector, make hay with burgeoning increases in income and wealth, low rates of personal taxation and total unwillingness on the part of ministers to do anything about the widening gap between the richest and the poorest. For example, this in the Guardian of 31 August 2007:
Gordon Brown yesterday made it clear that the government was not prepared to put economic stability "at risk" by changing the way in which the 2.5% pay increase is being implemented in stages. "We have succeeded in tackling inflation and having a stable economy because of discipline in pay over the last 10 years," said Mr Brown. "That discipline will have to continue."
Not much "discipline in pay" has been in evidence recently among the financiers in the City with their fat cat salaries, distended bonuses and lavish share options, all apparently paid by and to each other regardless of the success or failure of the individual concerned, never mind the public interest or the social consequences:
EMI chief executive Eric Nicoli left the business yesterday with a £3.3m payoff as the music company's new private equity owner, Terra Firma, brought in its own executives, who have no experience of the music industry, to try to turn around the ailing company. (Guardian, 30 August 07)
And:
Boardroom pay at the UK's top companies soared 37% last year as full-time directors were rewarded with inflation-busting increases in basic salaries, big cash bonuses and substantial payouts from share schemes.
The surge in pay, which takes the average total pay for a chief executive to £2,875,000, is more than 11 times the increase in average earnings and nearly 20 times the rate of inflation as measured by the consumer price index. The ratio between bosses' rewards and employees' pay has risen to 98:1, up from 93:1 a year ago – meaning that the work of a chief executive is valued almost 100 times more highly than that of their employees. (Guardian, 29 August 07)
We have all had our reservations about the Prison Officers' Association in the past, but when an already derisory pay award calculated by an independent body set up by the government is effectively halved by Gordon Brown and Jack Straw by being spread over two years in the name of 'discipline in pay', in breach of the spirit of an agreement under which the prison officers gave up their right to strike in exchange for independent assessment of their pay and conditions, it's impossible to blame the screws for breaching their part of the agreement, too, by staging a one-day strike. At least their 'industrial action' has caught the attention of Mr Straw:
The Prison Officers' Association believes that the Prison Service leant on the pay review body last year to award a 1.6% rise. Colin Moses, POA national chairman, said the 29,000-strong union was demanding talks with the prisons minister Gerry Sutcliffe."What we now see is clear interference in the pay review body. Our members have taken a pay cut." (Guardian, 18 August 2007)
A rise of 1.6%, below the rate of inflation and thus a cut in real terms! Such 'discipline in pay' would cause red revolution if it were to be imposed on the hedge fund managers and the futures traders and the manipulators of derivatives and the sub-prime mortgage lenders and the SIV-lite restructurers and all the other mysterious money-magicians on whose industriousness our prosperity — or at any rate their prosperity — nowadays seems to depend.
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, our Labour government — our Labour government — grossly overloads our prisons, which are bursting at the barbed wire with people suffering from mental illness and drug addiction who plainly ought not to be there at all; persists in trying to solve this problem by building more and more prisons, instead of removing those prisoners who shouldn't and needn't have been jailed in the first place; places huge strains on prison staff and thus effectively torpedoes programmes designed to rehabilitate prisoners and so to reduce the horrendous rate of re-offending after release, in consequence actually aggravating the risk to the general public — and then has the gall to impose a pay cut on the prison officers who, along with the prisoners themselves, are paying the price of government cowardice in the face of the reactionary tabloids. What a disgusting spectacle.
PS: Can this be the same Jack Straw who was Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary at the time of the US-UK attack on Iraq, and in that capacity received the advice of his own departmental lawyers that the attack would be illegal and indeed would constitute an act of aggression — advice which the then prime minister later claimed he had never seen? And when that legal advice was ignored and the aggression went ahead, did the then Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary resign in protest at the humiliation of his own once-great department? It's funny, I seem to have forgotten him doing that. Anyway, it makes him especially well qualified to scold the prison officers for their "illegal action" — in holding a one-day strike.
Yuk.
Brian
Hat-tip to Lorna Lloyd of Keele University for drawing attention to some remarkable statistics of work done by British consuls overseas in various countries on a scale I wouldn't have thought possible: full facts and figures, issued by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, here.
Several remarkable facts and figures jump out at you. To quote the FCO website,
According to the most accurate figures available, the period April 2005 – March 2006 saw 1,368 Britons arrested in the USA; 955 hospitalised in Greece; 376 British citizens die in France and 6,078 lose their passports in Spain.
The figures are astonishing, and shaming. Quite apart from the huge numbers of arrests, hospitalisations, etc., of British citizens overseas, there are some amazing differences between countries visited — e.g. 1,549 arrests in Spain in the last financial year, out of nearly 14 million British visitors (14 million!), or 0.0111 per cent, compared with just 108 arrests in France out of nearly 11 million British visitors in the same period (0.00098 per cent). The figure for US arrests is even more extraordinary: out of only just over 3 million visitors, 1,368 were arrested, a whopping 0.0456 per cent. Moral: don't make jokes about Dubbya or the "war on terror" while you wait in the queue for immigration at JFK.
Various explanations for the high number of Britons dying in Spain – 1,325 out of nearly 14 million – spring to mind, especially if you have ever watched the television programme about "Club 18-30" behaviour by Brits in Spanish sea-side resorts dedicated to oceanic quantities of strong booze, mountains of fish and chips and chicken tikka massala, and (apparently) lavish amounts of sex, all for youngish visitors from the UK.
I'm bewildered, though, by the astronomical numbers of British people who lose their passports while abroad: in the relevant year (FY 2005-06), lost British passports numbered 6,078 in Spain, 3,064 in the USA, 1,236 in Germany and 2,023 in Australia. Surely these can't all have been sold to would-be illegal immigrants?
How and why nearly a thousand Brits got themselves sent to hospital in Greece in a single year is also a bit of a mystery. (This was long before the current plague of forest fires.) Perhaps something nasty in the moussaka ["layers of ground (minced) lamb or red meat, sliced eggplant and tomato, topped with a white sauce and baked", according to Wikipedia]? Or might it be the retsina? Best, perhaps, stick to fish and chips or chicken tikka massala washed down with Sainsburys Basic Sparkling Bottled Tap Water.
The FCO observes that –
…the Czech Republic features as one of the countries where most consular assistance is required with a disproportionate number of lost passports, arrests and hospitalisations. This is likely to be due to the massive influx of hen and stag parties to Prague.
India, Thailand and Australia also appear in the top ten countries where Britons required consular assistance – perhaps suggesting that although Brits are getting more adventurous with their travels, they are not doing enough preparation before they go. The high figures in India might well be a result of many British Asians visiting family members and foregoing usual travel preparations such as vaccinations or travel insurance.
So it seems that as a nation we fail dismally to make proper preparations for our innumerable visits to Abroad, and we behave abysmally when we get there. Considering that we have such a long history of interaction with foreign parts, this seems rather sad.
Brian
The Financial Times reports that:
The US has earmarked about 80 detainees for release but has faced difficulty sending them back to their home countries. In some cases countries have been unwilling to accept men who have been accused of terrorism. In other instances, the US has not been satisfied that the detainees would be treated humanely or that adequate security measures would be put in place. [My emphasis -- BLB]
We obviously shouldn't hesitate to salute this American solicitude, however belated, for the humane treatment of Guantanamo graduates.
A front page article in today's Observer provides chilling examples of linguistic blunders committed by illiterate undergraduates of Imperial College and collected by an admirable IC tutor, Dr Bernard Lamb. Unfortunately the article itself includes the following (not, of course, written by Dr Lamb):
Some used herd instead of heard, fourth instead of forth, been instead of bean, and many of the writers were 'hopeless at punctuation'.
It's always dangerous to point the pedantic finger at others' language mistakes (which is why this pot is always — well, usually — chary of pointing its pedantic finger at black kettles), but you'd have thought, wouldn't you?, that the Observer's sub-editors and even its august Editor might have scrutinised this article with special care.
Having myself suffered more than once at the hands of newspaper Letters Editors — especially at the Guardian – who think they can express my thoughts better than I can, re-writing my prose so adventurously as sometimes to remove its meaning altogether, I'm in two minds about minor mistakes in readers' letters: should a compassionate letters editor correct them before launching the letter into the public prints, or should he or she let the writer's mistake speak for itself, leaving the rest of us to draw our own conclusions? The thought is prompted by the following in a letter in today's Observer:
I traced my birth mother. She was a lovely lady whom I am sure would have made an excellent mother.
That intrusive 'm' yet again! Long ago I gave up trying to persuade the then Readers' Editor of the Observer's sister paper, the Guardian, to persuade its writers to recognise the difference between the nominative and other cases of "who". Today's example, though, is made even more enjoyable by the sub-heading provided for the erring letter: Who are you calling 'mum'? Perhaps they are meant to cancel each other out.
Nine cheers (three each), though, for at least three other, good, things in today's Observer.
(1) It must have taken some courage to print Mary Warnock's article last week questioning the justice of sending to prison people who have downloaded images of child abuse (mis-named 'child pornography') onto their computers but against whom there is not a shred of evidence of having themselves ever abused a child. Paying to download these horrible pictures and videos certainly encourages and colludes indirectly in the abuse of the children shown in them, and is rightly regarded as an offence. But to equate it with physically abusing a child is grotesque, and there seems no case in equity or common sense for sending anyone to prison for it.
(2) Andrew Anthony rightly lambasts the West Midlands Police and the Crown Prosecution Service for their extraordinary joint statement denouncing a serious television programme, Undercover Mosque, for allegedly quoting Muslim preachers "out of context": they have even gone so far as to refer the matter to the regulator, Ofcom. The programme, made by reputable producers and editors, broadcast extracts from inflammatory sermons which the programme makers vehemently deny were in any way "out of context". No-one suggests that any breach of any law has been committed by the programme — or even necessarily by the preachers — and this apparent foray into television criticism by the West Midlands Police and the CPS seems both unwarranted and potentially sinister. Anthony's article's dissection of this incident is exemplary.
(3) The Observer's editorial about the EU "Reform Treaty" and whether there should be a referendum on it (as demanded by the Tories and the noisier tabloids) performs a useful service by pointing out that the government's real, as distinct from its "public", reason for refusing to hold a referendum on the treaty is that it would lose it, suspicion of the EU and all its works being so widespread in Britain. The institutional and procedural changes proposed by the treaty are made patently necessary by recent EU enlargement, and their defeat in a referendum would be extremely harmful. It's anyway questionable whether any large number of British voters would have read the document upon which they were required to pronounce, or whether, even if they had read them, many would understand their implications or the nature of the changes from existing practice that would be entailed — and I am certainly among those who would neither read nor understand the document, having much better things to do with my time. We can't seriously expect ministers to admit that the reason for not having a referendum is that its result would be to reject the treaty, which both the EU and Britain clearly need, but it's useful for the serious media to point this out as the Observer has done.
The blame for this inconvenient argument rests on (a) the Blair government for having recklessly promised a referendum on the now defunct proposal for a new EU 'Constitution', some of whose provisions are reproduced in the new draft treaty; and on (b) the Tories and their attendant tabloids for their mischievous and cynical opposition to the draft treaty and their demand for a referendum on it — a reversion to the bad old days of the pre-Cameron Conservatives' unprincipled, opportunistic Europhobia.
* * * * *
Some things I would prefer never again to hear or read in trendy political commentaries and interviews:
What is the Daily Beast's take on this?
The Daily Beast goes with the terrorism story as its lead.
The Brown bounce.
That's all we have time for [followed by commercials aimed at four-year-olds, or sport, or a segment on doing up houses]
I'm sorry to interrupt [introduction to an interruption that prevents the speaker from making his or her main point]
Son of the manse [referring to the prime minister, or indeed anyone else]
At the end of the day [used first thing in the morning or mid-afternoon]
The next general election need not be held before 2009 [the last one was in May 2005 and we still have statutory provision for five-year parliaments in this country, not four]
I'm now joined by … [introducing someone speaking from a television studio several hundred miles away]
There are many more such irrritants, but you get the general idea.
Brian
As my wife (our family historian) and I approach our golden wedding anniversary in just eight months' time, she has produced an interesting new slant on the much debated issue of apologising for slavery, in a short article which reveals that while many of my forebears suffered severe persecution at various times and in various places, at least one of them owned slaves (he was one of the early settlers in the newly founded American colony of Georgia). Descendant, therefore, of the victims of persecution but also of a one-time slave-owner, I am intrigued by Jane's highly topical question: who, if anyone, owes apologies to whom? You can read her short paper on the subject by clicking here.
The number of people, especially perhaps Americans, alive today whose ancestors include at least one slave-owner and possibly more, must be very large indeed. The descendants of my single slave-owning ancestor who are now alive and traceable must run into many hundreds. Multiply this by all the numerous slave-owners in the days when slavery was regarded as part of the natural order, and you arrive at a truly enormous population of potential apologisers. Those alive today, of all nationalities, some of whose ancestors suffered persecution, must constitute an even larger population of those entitled to receive apologies. People who, unlike me, live in happy ignorance of the seamier side of their family histories should perhaps count themselves lucky. Anyway, please read "Slavery and persecution: who should apologise to whom?" and make up your own mind about the answer. Don't allow yourself to be unduly distracted by the numerous links in J's article to further fascinating information on the many topics mentioned.
I should of course add that I'm very sorry.
Brian
The Court of Appeal has ruled that it’s unlawful for someone given an “indeterminate sentence for public protection” (IPP) to be kept in prison beyond his ‘tariff’ (the period set by the sentencing judge as the minimum required for punishment, release thereafter being permitted on condition that the offender satisfies the parole board that he won’t reoffend) if he hasn’t been able to take one of the prison courses whose completion is a condition of release. It seems that a thousand or more prisoners serving IPPs are in this Kafkaesque, nightmare logical trap. In the words of Juliet Lyon, director of the Prison reform Trust, -
the High Court has rightly held that it is illegal to detain people until they can prove that they are safe but yet deny them the means to do so. The only wonder is that it took a court judgment to demonstrate to ministers the fault in their Alice in Wonderland logic. It is a life sentence in all but name. The only real difference is that it can be given for far less serious offences. The Prison Reform Trust has come across people given tariffs for their sentence of just 18 weeks. The tariff, as in the life sentence, is the minimum time that must be served. It represents the retribution or punishment for the offence. But even after the tariff, the person remains in prison until they have done the courses necessary to demonstrate they are ready for release.
But because of grotesque prison over-crowding and the low priority given to ‘education’ (including the courses required to qualify for release from an IPP) by the prison authorities, it is often simply impossible for an IPP prisoner to undergo the course required. Unless he has done the course, the parole board won’t consider him for release, even though he has served his tariff. So he has undergone the punishment imposed by the judge
, but can’t be released because he can’t do the course that alone will satisfy the parole board that he is unlikely to commit a further offence. The result, as Juliet Lyon [left] points out, is that a person whose offence was so trivial that his tariff was set by the judge at a mere 18 weeks finds himself in effect serving a life sentence, the mandatory sentence for murder.
This trap — tariff served, no course available, no release possible, indefinite incarceration even though offence committed may have been minor — has rightly been denounced by all the prison reform bodies as well as by the Appeal Court; there are useful detailed analyses and briefs here (PDF) and here. But what these show is that the failure to make available the necessary courses for prisoners who have served their tariffs is only one part of the scandal. Indeterminate sentences are themselves a scandalous abuse of the system: ministers should never have introduced them and parliament should never have approved them, regardless of the availability or otherwise of the courses demanded by parole boards as a condition of release.
The whole concept of an indeterminate sentence which takes no account of the gravity or triviality of the specific offence for which it’s imposed is fatally flawed. Once the tariff set by the judge has been served, the offender has “paid his debt to society”, suffered his prescribed punishment, and ought to be entitled to be released. Continued imprisonment after the expiry of his tariff is no longer ‘punishment’, nor society’s retribution: it is indefinite preventive detention, based entirely on the farcical notion that some group of ‘experts’ can predict the future by making a judgement about the future behaviour of a person who may have committed a single offence in the past — and has been punished for it. The fact that the experts have apparently convinced themselves that they can’t make such a judgement unless the prisoner has done a course in prison, and that once he has done the course, they can, merely adds another dimension of fantasy to the whole crazy system.
This is yet another example of the government’s compulsive itch to lock up — necessarily indefinitely — people who have committed no prosecutable offence (or who have completed their punishment for an offence committed) but who anonymous officials or the police or security services believe may commit an offence in the future. Control orders are a particularly vicious example of this proclivity; prolonged detention without either conviction or even charge pending police investigations is another (and one which the new government actually seeks to make even worse); yet another is the government’s prolonged attempt to take powers in a new Mental Health Act to detain indefinitely persons suffering from an indefinable and untreatable mental disorder; and there’s more than a trace of it in the ASBO system, which imposes on young people whose offences have been inherently trivial conditions which are often so arduous that sooner or later the young offender is more than likely to breach them, and will then be sent to prison for the breach, even though the original offence was not by any stretch of the imagination one for which imprisonment was an available or appropriate penalty.
The urge to lock up people for offences they have not yet committed is a symptom of the disease of politicians who are irrationally risk-averse. There’s no possible logic in it. They could lock up half the population as being likely to commit an offence sooner or later, and still a proportion of the other half would continue to steal, murder, shop-lift, exceed the speed limit and plot violent terrorist acts. The justification advanced for this folly and injustice is that pre-emptive imprisonment is necessary for the protection of the public, which is the first duty of government: salus populi suprema lex. But the real motive is much less high-minded. Ministers responsible for this kind of gross abuse are principally concerned to mind their own backs. They are terrified of laying themselves open to the accusation by the Tories or the Daily Mail, or both, of being “soft on crime” or “soft on terrorism”. They seek to protect themselves against the charge, when crime figures soar (which they haven’t done for years) or terrorist atrocities are committed (which sooner or later they will be), that they had done nothing to prevent them, or hadn’t done enough. So they create a record of supposedly protective legislation to which they can point as evidence that they have not been ‘complacent’ (the gravest of political sins) or inactive in the face of danger — any danger. In trying to protect themselves in this way, on the pretence of protecting us, they have been steadily eroding our most basic human right, the right not to be imprisoned except after conviction and sentencing by a properly established court for an offence defined by law. Indeterminate sentences, with the surreal apparatus attached to them for permitting eventual release, are yet another example of rotten legislation, conceived by a panicky and unprincipled government and passed into law by a supine and negligent parliament.
If Gordon Brown really wants to make a radical change in the way the justice system has been perverted under Tony Blair, the early abolition of indeterminate sentences would make a welcome start. Don’t, however, hold your breath.
PS: According to the Prison Reform Trust, more than 3,000 indeterminate sentences have been passed over the past two years and that figure is expected to increase to more than 12,000 by 2012. The Trust points out that indeterminate sentences are in effect life jail terms that can be imposed for a list of 150 different offences. The sentences are being used for “relatively minor” offences rather than the hardened repeat offenders for whom they were designed. This is not a small-scale problem. We should be up in arms about it.
Brian
Everyone e-mails holiday diaries home from internet cafés or wi-fi hotspots in exotic 
places these days, many of them decorated by holiday snaps taken promiscuously with tiny digital cameras. This Vietnam diary, though, collated from e-mails sent from Vietnam by Jill Greenwell a few weeks ago (in June 2007), is out of the ordinary. Jill, an old friend from two postings in Australia, is a much travelled lady, like many Australians, with an experienced and exceptionally observant eye. Moreover she writes with the clarity and precision of a classical scholar, which is exactly what she is, having been for many years involved in the classics programme at Canberra Girls’ Grammar School, one of Australia’s prestigious schools for girls (not surprisingly our own Patricia Hewitt was educated there, although not, I hasten to say, in Jill’s time…).
You can read Jill Greenwell’s Vietnam diary, and see a couple more of her Vietnam photographs, by clicking here. Enjoy!
Brian
