Some random jottings about current happenings:
I was slightly disconcerted this morning, lying in bed half-asleep with the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on in the background, suddenly to hear my own voice for a few seconds, apparently explaining that it’s OK to carry on eating in the middle of a famine. It was a trailer or plug for a programme being broadcast tomorrow morning (Sunday 30 Aug) at 11:15am on BBC Radio 4, and repeated at 9am the following Friday, 4 September. It will also be available for download or listening on the Radio 4 BBC website. The Radio Times billing says:
The Reunion
Sunday 30 August 11:15am – 12:00pm BBC Radio 4
Sue MacGregor presents the series which reunites a group of people intimately involved in a moment of modern history. In Ethiopia, close to eight million people became famine victims during the drought of 1984, and over one million died. The international relief effort that followed was the largest ever mounted, culminating in the Live Aid concert in 1985. Reporter Michael Buerk, nurse Claire Bertschinger, former head of Oxfam Hugh Goyder, Major Dawit Wolde Giorgis of the Ethiopian relief effort and Sir Brian Barder, Ambassador to Ethiopia at the time, join Sue to recall the events.
Whistledown, who make the programme for the BBC, recorded the five of us exchanging recollections for more than two hours, so only a fraction of the discussion will be included in the 45-minute programme. I shall hear it for the first time tomorrow and await the experience with some trepidation.
Update, 31 Aug. 09 : Listen to the programme as transmitted on 30 Aug 2009 by clicking “Listen now” on the Ethiopia item at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b007x9vc. Listeners outside the United Kingdom may not be able to play this. In that case try http://bit.ly/nS2GI. Or hear the programme repeated on BBC Radio 4 at 9am UK time next Friday, 4 September (accessible in streaming video worldwide on the BBC Radio 4 website’s “Listen Live”).
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John Plender, writing in today’s weekend FT (29/30 Aug 09), makes some interesting points about the current signs of incipient recovery from the recession:
Fears of global financial collapse and, at least in the short term, deflation have been put to rest by the huge policy response. The effectiveness of the various initiatives – Tarps, Talfs, quantitative easing and the rest – may have been mixed. But the outcome is clear. These and similar moves around the world have prompted an incipient economic recovery. … [B]ig banks are in clover because their capital position continues to be subsidised by the state. Loose monetary policy delivers easy profits by cutting their borrowing costs and increasing their interest spreads. Increased concentration resulting from bail-outs means that pricing power is strengthened. …
In the private sector corporate profit margins have held up well against the recession, thanks to cost-cutting. Yet one company’s cost-cuts subtract from another company’s revenues. As wages are cut and people laid off, consumption is dented. … while quantitative easing, the modern equivalent of printing money, has so far failed to crank up bank lending significantly, it has undoubtedly put money into the hands of the investment institutions from whom central banks have been buying bonds.
There’s an obvious irony in the spectacle of the main beneficiaries of the crisis being the financial institutions whose greed and folly brought the world economy to the brink of collapse, while its main victims are the guiltless unfortunates who have lost their jobs, been evicted from their homes, and seen their incomes and savings slashed. There’ll be more guiltless victims yet when spending on public services is ruthlessly cut to begin paying off some of the huge accumulation of national debt made necessary by the crisis, once we have begun to emerge from the recession — or even sooner if and when Messrs Cameron and Osborne move into Downing Street. It seems they aren’t going to wait for the end of the recession to get to work with their little hatchets, such is their instinctive enthusiasm for ‘small government’.
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Another irony: as Plender’s FT article confirms, the drastic measures taken by virtually all western governments to counter the credit crunch and consequent global economic crisis are manifestly beginning, in Plender’s words, to “[prompt] an incipient economic recovery”, and the principal unchallenged architect of those growingly effective counter-measures is Gordon Brown. Brown was no more responsible for the crisis than any other national or international leader, none of whom saw it coming but few if any of whom reacted to it as speedily and decisively as our prime minister. It seems a little unfair, therefore, that throughout the media and especially the blogosphere, his name is mud. He’s even being blamed by some of the vengeful harpies who wanted the convicted Lockerbie bomber to be left to die in his Scottish prison cell in a few weeks’ time on the novel (and AFAIK non-scriptural) principle that compassion should be reserved for the virtuous: apparently few people have yet grasped that devolution actually means some powers having been transferred to the government in Edinburgh with the UK government at Westminster no longer having any say in how they are exercised.
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Gordon Brown might however take some limited comfort from one statistic that seems to have been largely overlooked. According to an opinion poll reported in the Guardian on 24 August 09, –
In an immediate general election, 25% say they would vote Labour – the joint lowest score in Guardian/ICM polling history and the worst for Labour in the series since June last year. The figure has only been lower once, in an ICM poll carried out for another paper during Labour’s spring leadership crisis.
Yet according to the same poll report, –
While 58% of all voters – including 37% of people who voted Labour in 2005 – now think Cameron would be best, only 31% back Brown.
So if both figures are to be relied on, and despite that qualifier “only”, Gordon Brown is currently running some six percentage points ahead of his own party in the opinion polls. That doesn’t seem to add up to a powerful case for a change of Labour leader (or prime minister, not necessarily the same thing) before next year’s general election.
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The investigative journalist, war correspondent and author Stephen Grey goes from strength to strength. More than any other single person he was responsible for uncovering by dint of dogged research the scandal of extraordinary rendition, and he wrote a powerful book about it. His reporting in print and on radio and television of long, often hair-raising stints on the front lines in both Iraq and Afghanistan has been vivid, moving and innovative, making sometimes startling use of his immense range of contacts with military and political leaders. The scope and range of his articles in the New Statesman alone add up to an impressive corpus of work. His book on the war in Afghanistan, “Operation Snakebite: the Explosive True Story of an Afghan Desert Siege” (Viking), won deservedly high praise: it’s a riveting read. Now the current edition of Prospect magazine publishes an analysis of the Afghanistan war by Stephen Grey which should be required reading by all the military and civilian policy-makers with any involvement in that increasingly unpopular war. Grey’s article is not another knee-jerk “bring our boys home tomorrow” piece such as I and others might have written: indeed he argues that a precipitate and total withdrawal now would be disastrous and unjustified. But he makes a subtle case for claiming that the generals must share some of the blame with the Ministry of Defence and British ministers for sending our troops into action with inadequate equipment and transport, and for embarking on operations with inadequate numbers of soldiers. It’s a must-read piece. (Declaration of interest: Stephen Grey is a friend of mine. But I don’t think that has affected my view of his remarkable work, which I hope will continue for many years to come.)
Brian
On the admirable New York University Aidwatch blog, Professor Bill Easterly has set us an interesting teaser. He asks us to guess the source of a document about British aid. In quoting his blog post below, I’m including a spoiler, so if you want to try to work out the answer for yourself, don’t read any further here: go over to Aidwatch and read the question before you click on the link there to get the answer.
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So for those who don’t mind me giving the game away, here is Prof. Easterley’s post, including the answer to his riddle, followed by a copy of the comment I have submitted to it and some further thoughts about Britain’s decolonisation effort:
____________
Guess the source of this British aid document on Country Ownership
by William Easterly
“However able their government…many countries cannot finance out of their own resources the research and survey work, the schemes of major capital enterprise… which are necessary for their development.
“Assistance from United Kingdom funds should be related to what countries can do for themselves…There is a need for machinery to provide complete coordination between the efforts of these separate departmental staffs so as to ensure that development proceeds on a balanced and comprehensive plan…With the requisite financial assistance once assured…Governments {would} prepare development programmes for a period of years ahead.
“The whole effort will be one of collaboration…There must be ready recognition that conditions vary greatly from country to country, and that country governments, who best know the needs of their own countries, should enjoy a wide latitude in the initiation and execution of policies.”
The answer is after the jump.
Here’s a hint: I have omitted words as shown by ellipses but not changed any except one – I used the word “country” where the original document used the word “Colony”.
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This document is The Statement of Policy on Colonial Development and Welfare, presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, February 1940.
http://blogs.nyu.edu/fas/dri/aidwatch/2009/08/guess_the_source_of_this_briti.html
____________________________
I have submitted the following comment:
“I was a junior official in the Colonial Office in London (not to be confused with the Colonial Service whose officers worked in the field for the colonial governments) for several years not long after the war when the Colonial Development & Welfare Acts were still a startling innovation. Introduced at a low point of WW2 when Britain’s economy was in desperate straits, and defeat at the hands of Hitler seemed a real possibility, CD&W was a striking testimony to the UK’s commitment to the paramountcy of the interests of the colonial peoples for whom we had assumed responsibility. Some terrible things were done in the name of colonialism but some far-sighted and altruistic things were done too, put into effect in distant lands by a body of remarkably dedicated and committed men and women working in often arduous conditions on behalf of the colonial peoples whom they served, and whose paths to independence they actively helped them along. The current fashionable stereotype of colonialism as unrelieved racism and exploitation gives a very lopsided and partial picture. But with the passing of my generation, I’m afraid it will acquire the status of historical fact, if it hasn’t already. CD&W should be a heartening eye-opener to those who have never heard of it.”
From the late 1950s, when I joined the Colonial Office, until well into the 1960s when I transferred for unexpected reasons to the newly formed Diplomatic Service, British colonialism was transformed into a rigorous policy of voluntary decolonisation as one British colony after another was brought to independence, at a rate which many people at home (and some in the territories themselves) thought recklessly fast, and which our many critics in the United Nations and some of our territories thought much too slow. In most of the territories the movement towards independence developed its own momentum. Delays were sometimes forced on us by conflict in a territory between different political groups competing to gain control of the newly independent country when the British left; sometimes that conflict was violent, and in those cases our efforts to bring about reconciliation and unity were often dismissed in New York and elsewhere as a facade for the traditional British tactic of ‘divide and rule’, which betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of what we were about. Our decolonisation process was both idealistically driven and also the product of national self-interest: diplomatically, politically, financially and economically our remaining colonies were a burden that inhibited us in many ways from doing other things that needed doing. The label of “colonial power” forced us into the same uncomfortable category of less enlightened colonial powers such as South Africa, Portugal, Belgium, Spain and others; even France resisted the decolonisation imperative for much longer than we did.
Many mistakes were made along the way. Some crimes were committed and in pretty rare cases blood was spilled, although very rarely indeed in a violent conflict involving a “struggle for independence” against British resistance to it. The record was certainly marred by the slaughter that accompanied the partition of India, but even now it’s far from clear that any alternative solution to that problem would have been less costly in blood and treasure. In some cases more time to prepare for independence would theoretically have been desirable, but mostly the timetable had a life of its own and trying to stretch it out would have created more problems than it solved. We tried to leave each territory with an independence constitution tailored to its own circumstances and negotiated painstakingly with the local political and traditional leaders in such a way as to offer the new independent country the best possible chance of a peaceful and increasingly prosperous future. In many cases they included provisions for the protection of human rights, early forerunners of our own Human Rights Act. Sometimes the system on independence was a federal one, carefully designed to help widely disparate groups to live peacefully together without any one dominating another: there are lessons to be learned from some of these for us now that our United Kingdom has acquired a quasi-federal status as a result of devolution. As it turned out, few of these laboriously negotiated independence constitutions survived for more than a few years, but they often served a limited purpose as a template for local civil society to aim at in the future.
Whatever historians might make of Britain’s overall colonial record, it’s virtually incontrovertible that our post-war record of decolonisation was accomplished more peacefully, with more friendly collaboration between the decoloniser and the decolonised, more quickly, and with far less violence, than anyone had any right to expect, and certainly than many other former colonial powers were able to achieve. Overall, and despite the lapses and the shortcomings, the decolonisation effort was an extraordinary success, and I’m proud to have played a minor role in it. My only regret is that this verdict is likely to strike many younger readers of this as perverse, counter-intuitive, smug, and harshly indifferent to the sufferings and sacrifices of the many vicitms of the oppressed colonial peoples’ heroic struggle for their freedom. If that’s what people want or need to believe, so be it. The record, though, says otherwise.
Brian
Today’s [London] Times rather sportingly publishes my letter, sent last week, disputing all three of a Times editorial’s reasons for condemning the decision of the Scottish Justice Secretary, Kenny MacAskill, to release on compassionate grounds the Libyan convicted of involvement in the Lockerbie bombing, Mr al-Megrahi. My letter as published is the second one down at
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/letters/article6807040.ece.
As the text has been slightly cut, I am reproducing here the full text as originally submitted to the Times:
Your three arguments against releasing Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi (Return Flight, leading article, August 21) fail to convince. You criticise the Scottish Justice Secretary because “it is hard not to suppose that he intended at least to leave a whisper of suspicion about the safety of al-Megrahi’s conviction”, as if he should have been unaware of the judgement of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission that there are several grounds for a second appeal against that conviction, even though he correctly set this aside in arriving at his decision to release al-Megrahi. You take the view that “Mr MacAskill needlessly scored a nationalist point in his condemnation of the United Kingdom Government”, but that can only be a matter of opinion, and is anyway irrelevant to the rightness or otherwise of his decision to release al-Megrahi. You concede that “All prisoners are … eligible to be considered for compassionate release” and point out that “not all prisoners are thereby entitled to have that request granted”, which no-one could dispute; but your conclusion that “al-Megrahi’s crime is such that he ought to have served out the full term of his life in prison” is evidently at odds with the recommendations of the prison and parole board authorities and the Justice Secretary’s medical advisers, all of whom Mr MacAskill was obliged to consult, and with Mr MacAskill’s judgement of the respective claims of punishment and retribution on the one hand, and of compassion for a dying man on the other. You acknowledge the “nobility” of the minister’s decision in the end to give more weight to compassion than to retribution: should we then infer that your denunciation of it is ignoble? That’s how it looks to me, anyway.
My views on the subject are set out more fully in a recent blog post here: any Scottish parliamentarian who contemplates speaking in today’s debate on Mr MacAskill’s brave and merciful decision could get no better briefing beforehand than the original post and in particular the 11 comments (so far) appended to it, including my responses to most of them. The comments range from strong agreement with my approval of Mr MacAskill’s decision to equally strong, even vehement denunciation of it. Most are meaty, and some suggest an original slant. I hope there’ll be many more, either on this post or else appended to the discussion at http://www.barder.com/2000.
The other letters in today’s Times about the decision to release Mr al-Megrahi are also of much interest — especially the letter immediately following mine from Mr Ralph Lloyd-Jones about the
vengeful unforgiving attitude of the US. Even President Obama has expressed his displeasure at Scotland’s compassionate release of a lowly Libyan secret serviceman. Whereas the anger of many relatives of those who were murdered is understandable, the British bereaved have also compared favourably with their American equivalents by expressing compassion in this case.
This widespread American reaction has I believe come as something of a shock to many on this side of the Atlantic, including some of those who (mistakenly, in my opinion) think Mr MacAskill’s decision was wrong. (See, for example, the letter published in The Independent on 22 August from an old friend, Bob Knowles, here [scroll to a third of the way down the web page].) My impression is that the balance of UK media comments has so far tended to come down against Mr MacAskill; the overwhelming majority of the responses to my own contrary view, both on this blog and in private e-mails, have come down in his favour.. When passions have cooled a little, I believe that the Scottish Justice Secretary will be seen to have brought much credit to himself and to the Scottish National Party government of which he is a member. I just hope this won’t have the indirect consequence of increasing the vote for Scottish independence in the referendum planned by the SNP for 2010. We in all parts of the UK, not just Scotland, need the eloquent and compassionate voices of Mr MacAskill and other Scottish political leaders of all parties.
Brian
I have no doubt that the Scottish National Party’s Mr MacAskill, Justice Secretary in the devolved government of Scotland, was right to release Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of complicity in the Lockerbie bombing, from prison in Scotland to enable him to spend his last few weeks on earth in his own country with his family.
A friend who has been giving television interviews about the case has also supported Kenny MacAskill’s decision. I sent him a message of congratulations, copying it to a number of others of varying political views. In this message I commented that I couldn’t help relishing the spectacle of this Scottish National Party Cabinet minister, of whom none of us had ever heard until last week, defiantly rejecting the pressures from the seven misguided Senators, an interfering Hillary Clinton and a sorrowful White House to make a decent, humane decision (lucky for Megrahi it wasn’t Jack Straw!).
In my view far too much exposure has been given by the media in recent weeks to the views of the victims’ families, especially those clamouring for Megrahi to be left to die in his Scottish prison cell. It seems to me that their perfectly natural emotional involvement disqualifies their wishes from being given special weight, rather than entitling their views to be treated as paramount. Our judicial system is designed to take justice out of the hands of victims with, in many cases, their natural desire for vengeance, and to ensure an objectivity of judgement that no-one should ask or expect of them. We can and should feel the utmost sympathy for them in their loss, but they should all be invited to read the Oresteia[1] and ponder its lessons, available to us ever since 458 BC. It’s also a pity that attention has been concentrated on the outrage expressed by the American victims’ families (who are of course the majority) at Megrahi’s release, with relatively little attention paid to some of the British families whose spokespersons have in some cases welcomed the decision, often also expressing grave doubts about whether Megrahi’s conviction was safe. As a BBC report says, ‘Doctor Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora was killed in the Lockerbie bombing, has praised the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill for his ”brave” decision in releasing Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi from jail on compassionate grounds.’ You can listen to Dr Swire’s admirably humane interview here.
Perhaps an adjustment is needed to the moral compasses of those, including David Cameron, who have been arguing that because Megrahi showed no compassion to his Lockerbie victims (assuming that he was responsible for their deaths), no compassion should have been shown to him by the Scottish judicial system. I suppose by the same token these revenge freaks would like to see torturers judically tortured. It’s a strange ethical philosophy that wants society to adopt the morals of a mass murderer (which is what those concerned believe Megrahi to be), principally, apparently, in the hope that it might make some of the victims’ families feel better.
Several reports have hinted heavily that the whole thing has been a dark conspiracy by the British government, presumably in league with the Scottish National Party, to protect BP’s and Shell’s Libyan oil interests. No evidence has so far been produced in support of this, and indeed it would have been wrong to allow such mercenary considerations to influence a quasi-judicial decision, although personally I would feel more indignant about any such impropriety had political or commercial considerations led to Megrahi’s release being refused instead of allowed. Anyway, I can’t see anything wrong in principle with governments doing what they properly can to protect their countries’ oil interests. It would be scandalous if they didn’t. (By the same token, I was always uneasy about the proposition, a propos the Iraq war, that the US was behaving wickedly in seeking to protect the security of its Iraqi and other middle east oil supplies, although obviously that legitimate concern couldn’t justify the unprovoked aggression against and occupation of a sovereign independent country.)
Where I do sympathise with some of the victims’ families is in their desire to get to the bottom of what really happened in 1988 and to establish who (plural) were responsible for it. When the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission rules, after exhaustive review of the evidence, that there are grounds for an appeal against Megrahi’s conviction, one has to take note and start to ask questions. Even if he was personally involved, it’s clear that others were too. It’s regrettable that Megrahi’s appeal had to be dropped as a condition of his release on compassionate grounds (as I understand it). But the likelihood is that even if the appeal had been heard, we wouldn’t have got satisfactory answers to all the questions still hanging in the air. The same probably applies to any judicial inquiry, even in the unlikely event of any government agreeing to set one up. I wonder whether anyone apart from Gadaffi — or even Gadaffi, indeed! — really knows what happened. I suppose it’s just going to be another Mary [sic] Celeste.
As a matter of interest, of the 15 or 20 responses to my pro-release e-mail message, only two have so far disagreed, arguing that Megrahi should have been left to die in prison in Scotland. A selection of those responses is on my website, here.
[1] “Initially, in their role as avengers of bloodshed, the Erinyes are classical equivalents to the Code of Hammurabi and the Torah, which demand “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”. Thus, they initially embody the concept of lex talionis, or “law of retribution”. The change from an archaic self-help justice by personal revenge or vendetta to administration of justice by trial symbolises the passage from a primitive society governed by instincts, to a modern society governed by reason: justice is decided by a jury of peers, representing the citizen body and its values, and the gods themselves sanction this transition by taking part in the judicial procedure, arguing and voting on an equal footing with the mortals. This theme of the polis self-governed by consent through lawful institutions, as opposed to tribalism and superstition, recurs in Greek art and thought.” [Emphasis added]
Brian
Fresh and yet more noxious light has been cast on the working of the indefensible régime of IPPs (indeterminate sentences for public protection) by the sentences passed in May on the three people convicted of indirect responsibility for the death of ‘Baby P’, as the victim of their brutal ill-treatment or neglect was originally called at their trial. The full names of the three offenders, and of Baby P, have now been released, and I have accordingly added them to the Times report of their sentences:
[Tracey Connelly, 28] the mother of Baby P [Peter Connelly], was given a minimum tariff of five years, her boyfriend [Steven Barker, 33] ten years and [Jason Owen, 37, Barker's brother] three years. … Peter’s mother was described by the judge as manipulative, self-centred and calculating as he imposed the unlimited sentence. He told her that she would be released only when the parole board deemed she was no longer a risk to the public and in particular to children. She will be able to apply for parole in just over three years because of time already spent in custody. [Steven Barker], her former boyfriend, was given life imprisonment after he was found guilty of raping a two-year-old girl and a concurrent sentence of 12 years for causing or allowing the death of Baby P.
[The Times, May 22, 2009]
None of the three was convicted of murder, since it was impossible to establish which of them had actually killed the baby. So they admitted and were convicted of the lesser offence of “causing or allowing” the baby’s death. The crime has aroused intense public anger, fuelled by extensive media coverage. This anger has been intensified by the apparent leniency of the sentences (the life sentence on Barker was for a different offence), with the press speculating that all three might be released within a relatively short time. Yet the judge’s warning to Tracey Connelly, the baby’s mother, that “she would be released only when the parole board deemed she was no longer a risk to the public and in particular to children” has caused some predictable misunderstanding. The Times home affairs correspondent provided a useful if complex explanation:
Analysis: Baby P sentences mean Parole Board is in control
Richard Ford, Home Correspondent
The indefinite sentence given to Baby P’s mother means that she will remain in prison until the Parole Board decides she is no longer a risk to the public. She was given an indeterminate sentence for public protection, which in effect means a person can remain in prison indefinitely.The sentence, introduced by David Blunkett, lays down a minimum term which must be served before the Parole Board assesses whether an offender can be released. Baby P’s mother will serve a minimum of five years before the Parole Board looks at her case. If the board refuses to release her, she will remain in prison with reviews on whether she can be freed taking place every two years. Anyone who is released from an indeterminate sentence for public protection is put under supervision by the probation service for a further ten years. At the end of that period they can apply to the board for the supervision to be lifted. The maximum sentence Baby P’s mother could have received on the charge of causing or allowing her son’s death was 14 years. But if the judge had given her a conventional sentence of this nature she would have been automatically released after seven years and kept under supervision for the remaining seven years.
By giving her an indefinite sentence, the judge appears to have decided that, rather than risk the option of Baby P’s mother being automatically released after seven years, the better option is to hand down a sentence that could mean her serving much longer in prison plus, on her release, a long period under supervision. It also means that rather than automatic release, she will be freed only if the Parole Board considers that she is no longer a risk.
[The Times, May 23, 2009]
In earlier posts (here and especially here — see the numerous comments appended to the latter) I have argued that an IPP, if it involves keeping a prisoner locked up after he has served his ‘tariff’ (the minimum time set by the judge to satisfy the requirements of retribution, rehabilitation and deterrence), can be justified, if at all, only as preventive detention: it can’t be regarded as punishment, for the tariff was supposed to define the length of time for that, so its sole purpose is to protect society from any possibility of the prisoner re-offending, whenever a parole board can’t be convinced that re-offending is unlikely. Given the impossibility of predicting anyone’s future behaviour, even by the great and the good who presumably sit on parole boards, the virtual certainty of abuse, misjudgement and injustice in the system is obvious. It’s compounded by the fact that the onus for persuading the parole board that the prisoner won’t re-offend effectively rests on the prisoner, contrary to the most elementary principles of justice.
Now, if the analysis of the sentences in The Times quoted earlier is correct, we find the IPP giving rise to yet another anomaly. The judge appears to have refrained from passing ‘ordinary’ (non-IPP) sentences of up to a maximum of 14 years because under quaint current practice the two persons affected would have been released after only a half of the time prescribed, i.e. after a maximum of 7 years. The judge evidently thought this unduly short, either because of the gravity of the crime or because of the likelihood of a public and media outcry at the prospect of such ‘monsters’ being set free so early. So he resorted to IPPs, representing indefinite sentences with the possibility that the offenders would never be released — and at the same time set relatively short tariffs, presumably to justify not having passed longer non-IPP sentences. As a consequence of this it looks as if the tariffs set no longer represent the judge’s view of the minimum time in prison required for retribution (i.e. ‘punishment’), rehabilitation and deterrence. The post-tariff IPP appears to have been used for continued punishment (to avoid automatic release after half the sentence passed) and not purely to protect society from the risk of re-offending. This seems questionable, if as seems likely the IPPs have been misused for extra punishment after the tariffs, the tariffs have not been set to reflect the gravity of the crimes, and the IPPs have been used to evade both the practice of releasing prisoners after they have served half of their (non-IPP) sentences, and also to impose a potentially much longer sentence than the maximum allowed by law.
Finally, another nail has been hammered into the coffin of the case for IPPs by a lethal comment posted here by a distinguished Australian lawyer, a former Deputy President of the Australian Law Reform Commission. I am reproducing it below:
From John Greenwell
August 11th, 2009 at 6:36 amAn Australian lawyer comments: I hope the Petition seeking justice for the 971 ‘less-than-two years tariff’ prisoners, is successful. In addition, I hope there will be a fundamental re-think of the IPP scheme – a bad law, unjustly administered – sooner, rather than later.
You may be interested in the Australian approach. We have of course the same common law tradition but, in the field of criminal punishments, we have diverged on basic principle. This difference is reflected in the 2003 UK Legislation introducing the IPP scheme.
I can best explain this by quoting from the Australian High Court judgements in the case which authoritatively stated the Australian position – Veen (1988.). The Court specifically drew a distinction from English law, as judicially expressed at that time:
“The principle of proportionality is now firmly established in this country … a sentence should not be increased beyond what is proportionate to the crime in order merely to extend the period of protection of society from risk of recidivism on the part of the offender … There is no occasion now to contemplate the adoption by judicial decision of the English development.”
The English development (my italics) was one which “permitted a sentence greater than the principle of proportionality would allow” on the ground that a “longer sentence is required for the protection of the community.”
The High Court judgement continued:
“It is one thing to say that the principle of proportionality precludes the imposition of a sentence extended beyond what is appropriate to the crime merely to protect society; it is another thing to say that the protection of society is not a material factor in fixing the appropriate sentence. The distinction in principle is clear between an extension merely by way of preventative detention, which is impermissible, and an exercise of the sentencing discretion having regard to the protection of society among other matters, which is permissible.”
The distinction between what is impermissible and what is permissible is at the heart of an illuminating controversy between C.S Lewis and (others) which appeared over a number of issues in a law journal and concluded with a plea by Lewis that ‘deserts’ must be the first consideration of punishment. To this the High Court said:
“The plea has been heard by the courts of this country, by adopting the principle of proportionality …It must be acknowledged however that the practical observance of a distinction between extending a sentence merely to protect society and properly looking to the protection of society in determining the sentence, calls for judgement of experience and discernment.”
The principle of proportionality is reflected in the parole system in Australia. Thus, the Head sentence will be fixed in accordance with that principle, but a minimum term is fixed to enable rehabilitation and reform of the offender. These though cannot extend the fixed term or allow for it to become indeterminate. There is nothing like the UK Indeterminate Protection Programme which, as I understand it, provides (in the case of sexual and violent offenders) that if, at the expiration of the tariff, the Court or Parole Board is not satisfied that the offender’s release can be made without danger to society, he or she will be indefinitely detained until they are so satisfied. IPP does not purport to be some irregularly imposed punishment for incorrigible offenders. It is a regular part of the criminal punishment system involving, as I understand it, thousands of inmates whose offences must vary in gravity. It is thus a kind of sub-system of preventative detention for crimes of violence.
Australia does have specific provision for indefinite detention of a limited class of sexual offender. Thus, to take the example of one Act, ‘indefinite detention’ is allowed following a court order for (a) a ‘serious sexual offence’; (b) A ‘serious sexual offence’ is an offence of a sexual nature involving violence or against a child; (c) the court must find, on application by the Attorney General, that such an offender represents a ‘serious danger’ to the community; (d) that it involves satisfaction that “there is an unacceptable risk that if released, the offender would commit ‘a serious sexual offence’.
It is unnecessary to labour the differences between this and the English legislation. It is confined to a serious sexual offender who is known, from repeated sexual behaviour, following prior convictions, that he will or is likely to re-offend. In Victoria, for example, its application is confined to 3 or 4 male offenders, housed (under security) outside the prison at Ararat. The rationale for indefinite detention in these circumstances is that it is non-punitive and, although not identical, is rather to be aligned to the involuntary detention of inmates in mental hospitals.
I cannot imagine the English scheme, or anything like it, being adopted in this country.
IPPs are an aberration and a denial of justice, and we should rid ourselves of them without delay. The Australian jurists’ case against them seems unanswerable.
Brian
Today’s (2 August 09) Observer has a longish article by Richard Reeves, the Director of the think-tank Demos, in which we are invited to accept that “The “Prog[ressive] Cons” have seized control of the party. Whether they can make it do their bidding is the biggest political question of the next five years.” This is a large and potentially important claim which deserves our attention.
So if, as seems likely, Mr Reeves’s detailed account of the allegedly progressive elements in current Tory thinking and policy-making is based on extensive contacts with senior Conservatives and therefore accurately describes what David Cameron and his Cameroons are currently cooking up for us, we’re entitled to examine it with special interest. We must try to assess the genuineness or otherwise of the Tories’ vaunted progressive credentials as recounted by Mr Reeves. Alas, many aspects of Mr Reeves’s account prompt doubts about his central thesis. For example, –
The state of the public finances has been a blessing, giving Cameron some political cover to back off the regressive, if initially popular, pledge to raise the ceiling on inheritance tax to £1m.
My understanding, quite possibly mistaken, is that so far from “backing off” from this pledge, the Tories remain committed to it, although now somewhat ambiguous about the timing of its implementation. The Tory backwoodsmen (and women) would hardly stand for the abandonment of such a tribally iconic promise. The Tories are already irrationally obsessed with the level of national debt and insistent that the top priority of government should be to start reducing it, not just over time but immediately, by sharp cuts in public spending, even before we have emerged from the recession (which could well last another two or three years or even longer, according to most sober observers). Even if it made sense to cut government spending while still in recession (which it fairly obviously doesn’t), the failure to contemplate raising taxes on those with the lowest marginal propensity to spend (i.e. the rich) as well as the failure to promise to cut public expenditure in ways that won’t undermine increased spending by the least well-off, has a decidedly old-fashioned Tory ring to it. A commitment actually to reduce the wrong tax (because it affects only the rich) instead of raising the right ones (to reduce the deficit without any negative consequences for overall demand) necessarily reinforces scepticism.
A [Conservative] green paper is planned; this needs to spell out in detail how they plan to encourage employee ownership and boost savings for those on low income.
We may all marvel at the putative spectacle of a Tory government encouraging “employee ownership” if this means what it seems to say. The Labour Party long ago abandoned the concept of what used to be called Workers’ Control as being far too radical. As for boosting the savings of the poor (which is presumably what’s meant by the queasy phrase “those on low income”), actually encouraging saving by those with the highest marginal propensity to spend — the poor — while we’re still in recession would be economic madness. The aim should be to encourage spending, not saving, by those likeliest to spend any extra money they receive. The reduction in VAT was a good and necessary example of how this can be done (it’s apparently beginning to show results, despite not particularly ‘progressive’ Tory cries of pain); a straight hand-out of money to everyone on incomes below a given level would be even better.
This [Conservative green] paper is also likely to unveil plans to turn assets such as parks, libraries and leisure centres – owned by the state – over to the community. The rhetoric of the “post-bureaucratic age” never really took off, not least because it’s a phrase almost as ugly as Brown and Balls’ famous “post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory”. But if it means anything, it must mean the creation of a post-bureaucratic state. If old Labour was about giving power to workers over the means of production, new Conservatism is partly about giving citizens control over the means of government.
It’s not easy to disentangle the multiple muddles in this. The vast majority of parks, libraries and leisure centres are owned and controlled not by “the state” as such but by elected local authorities. How would “the community”, which is apparently to take them over from local authorities, make and carry out policy on them, fund their up-keep and pay their staffs, without delegating decisions to officials of some kind, who would need to be served by advisers, accountants, secretaries, and the rest — in other words a “bureaucracy” in the “post-bureaucratic state”? How would the decision-makers be made more accountable to “the community” than elected local councils are now? What view of this plan will the massed ranks of recently elected Tory (and LibDem) Councillors take? What safeguards will there be against decisions by the New non-Bureaucrats to sell off the local parks for ‘development’, close the libraries and sell the buildings to other ‘developers’, and charge such fees for use of the leisure centres as will ensure that only the well-heeled middle classes can afford to use them, undisturbed by the rowdy behaviour of those less well-off than themselves?
The notion that there’s anything remotely ‘progressive’ about such a half-baked and reactionary project is for the birds (and perhaps the Daily Mail). Thatcherism and New Labour have already emasculated our once-thriving local government democracy — remember the Chamberlains? — to the point that parks and libraries are just about all they have left: everything else has been ruthlessly taken over by a series of obsessively centralising governments. To remove local government control over even the pathetic remnants of their responsibilities and hand it to some new undefined “post-bureaucratic” system would simply compound past error. The description of public servants at either state or local level as ‘bureaucrats’, a pejorative term for those who supply an absolutely indispensable service to society, is just pandering to the kind of prejudice enthusiastically encouraged by the right-wing tabloids. Just what’s ‘progressive’ about it beats me.
More broadly, the depth of the fiscal hole is genuinely worrying the Tories. There is a danger, as Philip Hammond discovered, of appearing to be too keen on wielding the axe. But only the most rabidly right wing are actually glad of what one senior Conservative describes as an “existential crisis” in the public finances. There are some innovative ideas being floated for the way to handle the internal politics of cutting spending.
There will be a long cuts cabinet to agree the broad shape of government expenditure and the Tories are likely to run this before any ministerial appointments are made. This means that the cabinet will be able to agree cuts to certain departments – behind a “veil of ignorance”, if you like – without this being portrayed by the media as a defeat for the cabinet minister in question.
More confirmation, then, that the Tories plan to start on their programme of cuts in government spending immediately on coming into office, even though it’s virtually certain that we’ll still be in deep recession at the time. The Tories are determined to cut government spending just at the time when any government should be further increasing selective spending — spending designed to preserve and create jobs (both to put spending money in working people’s pockets and to reduce government liabilities for unemployment benefit and other low-level payments to the victims of recession). Simultaneously, a recession-conscious government should be reducing taxation, especially indirect taxes, on middle-income and lower-income families, again to increase overall spending and stimulate demand in the economy, thereby encouraging lending, investment and production to meet it. Tory policies of instant and apparently indscriminate cuts, if implemented, can only deepen and prolong the recession, inflicting needless misery on yet more people who will lose their jobs and be unable to find new ones, will be evicted from their homes, and will see their incomes and access to public services sharply reduced. All this, apparently, to demonstrate the Conservatives’ “progressive” credentials.
All cabinet ministers may have offices in the Cabinet Office.
So instead of the decentralisation of central government, giving greater autonomy to senior ministers and their departments, and breaking the stranglehold of No. 10 and the Cabinet Office (a polite name for the Prime Minister’s Department) over the work and decisions of the whole of Whitehall — a stranglehold established by Thatcher and reinforced by Blair and Campbell — that over-centralised power is actually to be reinforced again by an incoming Tory administration bent on having cabinet ministers sitting in offices all together in the Cabinet Office to receive their daily orders from on high. Over-centralisation has been responsible for much of the blundering of the Blair years, including especially Iraq: now it’s to be made even worse. Progressive? Progressive my, um, foot.
A civil service reform bill will be near the top of the agenda. The civil service neutered Blair for years and the Tories are determined to hit the mandarins hard and early.
This must be the most foolish misconception of all. So far from neutering Tony Blair, the civil service was largely sidelined by him in favour of small groups of cronies on the infamous sofa in No. 10. Already by the time Labour came back into office in 1997 Mrs Thatcher had deprived the civil service of much of its capacity for delivering informed, impartial, loyal but if necessary unwelcome advice, by filling almost every top civil service post with an official (or, sometimes, an outsider brought in for the purpose) who could be relied on to be “one of us”. Blair and Brown enthusiastically continued this self-defeating process, with the malign consequences bitingly described in the Butler report on the use of intelligence over Iraq. Many of New Labour’s worst blunders, including Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan, might well have been avoided if Blair and other New Labour ministers had allowed themselves to invite and then heed impartial official advice: not to be ‘neutered’ or paralysed by it, but to make good and productive use of it. It will be a tragedy if this self-perpetuating failure to make positive use of the resources of the civil service is carried over into a Cameron administration. A genuinely progressive government will use and heed experienced officials, not “hit [them] hard and early”. (Note Mr Reeves’s use of the tendentious and pejorative word ‘mandarins’ to describe honourable, well informed, dedicated, and loyal public servants. But I suppose that if they aren’t ‘bureaucrats’, in the scabrous lingo of The Sun newspaper, they’re lucky only to be called ‘mandarins’.)
Given the need to cut spending, but also the commitment to progressive ends, the Conservatives will have to create a smaller, but more redistributive state…
Once again the obsession with cutting government expenditure, even in mid-recession, is apparently to be allowed to dictate the agenda. Leaving aside the worrying implications of cutting instead of increasing government spending in a recession, it’s not the mark of a progressive party to be determined to create “a smaller state”, which is anyway incompatible with the aim of making the state more “redistributive”. A smaller state will inevitably lack the levers and clout that are absolutely essential to the restructuring and tighter control of our bloated financial sector, if a recurrence of economic and fiscal disaster is to be avoided. The follies of Thatcherite and New Labour’s “light touch” regulatory régime, “flexible” (meaning unregulated) labour market policies, reckless sales of public assets and responsibilities to private sector pirates, money-grubbers and assorted crooks, and instinctual kow-towing to private interests at the expense of the public good, are what have helped to bring our economy to its knees and led to the miseries now being inflicted on tens of thousands of wholly innocent people. These are the hall-marks of the smaller state. Now the Tories want to make it smaller still.
Such an aim confuses harmful over-centralisation of power and responsibility with the necessary and beneficial possession of both by publicly accountable authorities, central and local. It’s the mark of the reactionary, not the progressive, to see “the state” as the enemy, to be reduced and cut down to size, and not as the indispensable instrument for creating a more just, free and equal society. Yet they simultaneously seem to want this smaller and less effective state to be more “redistributive”! Do the rich backers of the Conservative party in the City and out in the country houses of the shires really want to see their share of national wealth and income appreciably reduced, by a Tory government, in order to give a fairer share of both to those less well off than themselves? It might not be a zero sum game in the longest of long terms, but in the short term and in mid-recession it certainly is. Seeing will be believing. Meanwhile a healthy helping of scepticism appears to be in order.
There are signals already that middle-class welfare will be attacked. Middle-income tax credits, child benefit and higher education (still a middle-class gravy train) will all be examined.
Once again the language of ignorant prejudice (universities “a middle-class gravy train”) is to be allowed to warp Tory policy. If the middle class disproportionately occupies university places, as it certainly does, it’s a waste of time blaming either the universities or the middle class for that imbalance. The remedy lies not in “attacking middle-class welfare”, presumably by making it even more expensive to go to university and thus making the universities even more socially exclusive than they are already: it can only be done by continuing the process of improvement of state education, fostering much higher aspirations on the part of both schoolchildren and their teachers, and forcing the public (i.e. private) school sector to do far more than most of them seem willing to do at present to share their facilities and resources, including teaching resources, with the state sector. That would be the mark of a progressive government; “attacking” the middle class for its disproportionate ability to get its offspring into university only creates a damaging illusion of progressiveness.
The commitment to spend 0.7% of GDP on international aid is a sign that there is a global dimension at work, although it is still pitifully low.
Here at last is a genuinely progressive Tory policy commitment, reproducing exactly that of both Labour and the LibDems. 0.7% of GDP spent on development aid is a worthy but demanding target, established long ago by the United Nations and universally accepted, anyway verbally, and if only in principle. Britain under Labour, with commendable Tory support, is one of few donor countries actively living up to this commitment and well on course to hit the target. To call it “a sign that there is a global dimension at work” seems to have no discernible meaning, and grudgingly to call the commitment “still pitifully low” makes no obvious sense at all. Fortunately in this area at least even the Tories know better.
Above all, the Conservatives have a progressive trump card in the shape of their education policy, which could smash the middle-class opportunity hoarding made possible by high house prices in the catchment areas of the best schools. The Conservative plans to let money follow the pupil to the school of their parents’ choice and, crucially, to add a pupil premium to the poorest children. A Labour cabinet minister said to me five years ago: “If the Conservatives ever go for a vouchers system weighted in favour of the poor, we’re in real trouble”. They have – and they are.
Another worrying fallacy. “Vouchers” are supposed to ensure that parents can ‘choose’ their children’s schools. But choice depends on spare capacity — more places at “the best schools” than there are parents wanting them or children to occupy them. Without that spare capacity, universal right and ability to choose are impossible, and a cruel deception too. Choice is meaningless unless based on accurate information, and if all parents know which schools are “the best” — to borrow Mr Reeves’s language — it’s hard to see why any of them are going to “choose” the less good or the worst. By definition not all state schools can be “the best”. They can’t all in practice even be equally good (although they might of course be equally bad). Some kind of selection is logically inevitable, whether by ability (as in the days of the 11 plus and still now with the surviving grammar schools, condemning the less able to second-class citizen status for life), or by location (with rigorously enforced catchment areas, which risks the kind of middle-class exploitation by moving house referred to by Mr Reeves), or by purported religious faith (as with the so-called faith schools, a pernicious and indefensible misuse of public money used to support them), by lottery (as now practised by a few local education authorities), or, as the Tories now propose, by vouchers. Just how this is supposed to work remains a mystery. Are state schools going to start charging school fees which can be paid partly or in full by state-issued vouchers, with the poor receiving vouchers denominated in higher money values than the better off — and the rich perhaps receiving no vouchers at all? Are places at ‘the best schools’ going to be auctioned to the highest bidders, i.e. those with the most money or the most vouchers? That certainly seems to be implied by Mr Reeves’s talk of ‘let[ting] money follow the pupil to the school of their parents’ choice’, and ‘the taxes of “hard-working families” [being] used to give an advantage in the education market to the children of the “feckless, idle poor”‘ (my emphasis). If so, this casual abandonment of free primary and secondary education for all, regardless of parental means, one of the most basic bedrock principles of the welfare state, accepted unquestioningly by all Labour and Conservative governments since the war, will blow a massive hole in the entire national consensus on social and welfare policies that has dominated the political scene since Beveridge (a Liberal) and Butler (a Conservative). Parents will find themselves forced to buy their children’s schooling, with the burden that this will impose on the poor partially mitigated by giving the poor more money — but money in a form (school vouchers) which actually limits their freedom of choice of how to spend it. Above all, a voucher system, even if it somehow avoids expressing the vouchers’ relative values in money terms, does nothing to avoid the reality that if all parents are free (or paid) to choose the best schools for their children, most are going to be disappointed, whether or not they have the vouchers. Perhaps the articulate and engaging Mr Gove can explain how he plans to square that obstinate circle. Until he does, we’re entitled to regard a voucher scheme as the most potentially reactionary and regressive, i.e. the least progressive, of the many educational gimmicks with which successive generations of parents have yet been dazzled (or not).
And finally — before this post turns into a pamphlet:
…while the prospect of a Conservative government was once a chilling one to any progressive, there is now the possibility that Cameron, supported by his small band of cutlery-rattling [sic] progressives, really has changed his party, as Peel, Disraeli and Thatcher did before him. We’ll know soon enough.
Well, indeed we will, unless a disillusioned electorate wakes up to the Tory reality in time. But if Mr Reeves’s account of the new progressive Conservatives and their policies is really based on his close contacts and conversations with leading Tory policy-makers, and accurately describes their intentions, then it looks as if traditional Tory reactionaries, obssessively concerned with low taxes, reduced spending on social services, frantic impatient reductions in the national debt, untrammelled freedom for financiers and big business to pursue their own self-enriching and anti-social agendas, and an ever smaller state, are going to have nothing much to worry about. Smooth-talking Dave will see them right, talking reassuringly all the while about how progressive he and his government are. Mr Reeves, rather surprisingly, seems to have been taken in by all this. But then someone who mentions in the same breath Peel, Disraeli and Thatcher as Tory ‘progressive’ reformers of their party does seem unlikely to define what’s ‘progressive’ in the same way as the rest of us.
Brian
