Several lessons for Labour need to be learned from Nick Robinson’s BBC programme Five Days that Changed Britain, broadcast on 29 July, about the five days in May between the election and the formation of the Tory-LibDem coalition government.
The first and most important lesson was summed up towards the end of the programme by Peter Mandelson, usually a canny strategist, when he speculated that we were now in an age of coalition politics, in which no single party was likely in the foreseeable future to win an overall majority in the house of commons: that if ever there was to be another Labour government, it would probably have to be in coalition or some other kind of alliance with the LibDems: and that Labour strategy would need to adapt itself to this new and by implication unfamiliar and unwelcome reality.
Yet it has been all too obvious in recent weeks that the Labour parliamentary leadership and perhaps also the PLP as a whole still haven’t learned this lesson. Directing its firepower more at the LibDems than at the Tories, excoriating Nick Clegg for his supposed betrayal of LibDem principles and promises by joining the Tories in government, trying to drive a wedge between the coalition partners — all these self-indulgent activities have been directly contrary to the interests, not only of the Labour party, but also of those hundreds of thousands of people who will lose their jobs and in many cases their homes and the availability to them of the welfare state safety net as a direct result of Cameron’s and Osborne’s slash-and-burn ideology-driven policies. The latest folly has been to commit Labour to voting against the Bill providing for a referendum on AV (the LibDems’ main jusification for being in the coalition) and for a reduction in the number of MPs and re-drawing of electoral boundaries to make their population sizes more nearly equal. There are certainly serious flaws in the detail of the Bill, which need to be addressed at the Committee stage, but to oppose the entire Bill (especially after Labour had been the only party to promise a referendum on AV in its manifesto) is simply crass, partly because it makes Labour look opportunistic and unprincipled, and partly because it’s bound to infuriate and alienate the LibDems whose support Labour is sooner or later going to need as an absolute condition of forming another government. It really is time for Jack Straw (and some other ageing Blairites) to hang up his penchant for opportunistic ducking and weaving and leave the strategic thinking to younger men and women.
We aren’t necessarily thinking only about what might happen in five years’ time, however much Cameron may try to fix the constitution to keep himself and his coalition in power for a full parliament. Germany’s PR system means permanent coalition governments, with the Free Democrats, the German equivalent of our LibDems, almost always being in the position of king-maker after every election: since its foundation in 1948, the FDP “has been in federal government longer than any other party, as the junior coalition partner to either the CDU/CSU (1949–56, 1961–66, 1982–98, and since 2009) or the Social Democratic Party (1969–82)” (quoted from this). But the significant point is that twice in this period, in 1966 and 1982, the FDP has switched sides between elections, causing the fall of a right-of-centre CDU/CSU government and its replacement by the SDP in 1966, and vice versa in 1982. It’s constitutionally perfectly possible for the same thing to happen here if three conditions come to be satisfied:
- first, very widespread disillusionment in the electorate with the dire consequences of Tory economic and social policies;
- secondly, mounting dissatisfaction among LibDems in parliament and the country with Tory policies which LibDem members of the government are being forced to support;
- thirdly — and easily the most important: a Labour opposition offering a coherent and practical set of alternative policies fully consistent with LibDem principles, including active support for the repeal of New Labour’s most illiberal measures eroding fundamental civil liberties (even if the repeal is the work of a Tory-led government), renunciation of any policy of military intervention in other countries unless in self-defence or under UN auspices, and economic-social policies expressly designed to protect the poor and vulnerable and the public services on which they depend, and to ensure that the sacrifices necessary for recovery are made only by those rich enough to make them.
If all three conditions are satisfied, the pull of a transfer of LibDem support to a Labour programme (and a Labour leader) hugely more attractive to the vast majority of LibDems could prove irresistible. Of course the fall of the Tory-led coalition government and its replacement by a new Labour-LibDem administration under a Labour prime minister would certainly need to be ratified very quickly by a fresh election, probably within weeks. But all this could happen surprisingly quickly.
There’s no guarantee that it will. Tory slash-and-burn policies just might succeed, against all informed expectations. The LibDems might continue to be repelled by the idea of putting into power the party which without doubt lost the last election by a substantial margin. Cameron’s and Clegg’s apparent personal chemistry might yet keep the coalition going for the full five years, and current LibDem ministers might be reluctant to put their ministerial perks and power at risk by abandoning the Tories and putting alternative support for Labour to the test in an unpredictable fresh election. But all this is very iffy. And in any case, Pascal’s wager applies: Labour could have a huge amount to gain, and anyway nothing whatever to lose, by developing a coherent set of centre-left progressive small-l liberal policies calculated to appeal to the LibDems just as soon as the new leader has been elected in September — and helping, not hindering, the LibDems on their journey back to their true and natural home on the centre-left of British politics. It’s not just that this could help to bring about a transfer of LibDem support from the Tories to Labour: it’s also the right and necessary thing to do on its own merits. But in the meantime it’s essential to treat the LibDems as potential future allies, not as irreconcilable enemies. Don’t trash them: woo them!
A recent blog post on Labour List by Hadleigh Roberts, Countering the coalition: Don’t attack the Lib Dems, arrived at the same conclusion but by a somewhat different route. Such a strategy may not satisfy the blood-lust of the more pugnacious Labour front-benchers, blinded by their anger at what they choose to see as LibDem treachery to the left. But that anger needs to be tempered by recognition that in those Five Days that Changed Britain, the LibDems ultimately had no alternative. Clegg had enunciated an unexceptionable guideline for action if there was a hung parliament: that whichever party had won the most votes and the most seats should be allowed the first attempt to form a government. The country would have felt betrayed if the LibDems had used their limited but crucial numbers to keep in No. 10 the party which had manifestly lost the election. And while the Tories immediately presented to the LibDems a coherent policy programme with attractive concessions to LibDem policies as the possible basis for a coalition, Labour failed utterly to present a coherent alternative, apparently caught on the hop without having done any homework against the possibility of a hung parliament. But that leads to consideration of another of the three lessons Labour needs to learn from those Five Days, and that will be the subject of a further blog post. Watch this space.
Brian
David Cameron’s visit to Washington this month (July 2010) collided with the resurrection by some American Senators of the controversy over the release in August 2009 on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government’s Justice Secretary of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted (quite possibly wrongly) of responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Many, not all, American relatives of Lockerbie victims, and their Senators, are furious, not only that al-Megrahi was released, but also that he’s still alive, 11 months after being released on the grounds that he had only three months to live. This seems to the Americans, and some others, to strengthen their suspicion that the mass murderer was actually released in exchange for a lucrative Libyan oil drilling contract being awarded to BP (BP! All together now: ‘Booooo!’).
Herein lies one of several Lockerbie mysteries. In 2007 the then British government agreed that al-Megrahi should not be excluded from the scope of the Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) being negotiated with Libya, as the UK side had originally demanded. Jack Straw, then UK Justice minister, publicly acknowledged that this ‘concession’ (which implied that al-Megrahi could be transferred to serve the rest of his prison sentence in Libya) was motivated by British commercial interests in Libya, including the BP contract. But it was part of the original UN-approved agreement on the management of the Lockerbie suspects that if either of them was convicted, as al-Megrahi was, he would serve his sentence in the UK (in practice meaning in Scotland, as the whole process was to be conducted under Scottish law). The terms of the agreement, formally approved by the UN Security Council in resolution 1192 of 27 August 1998 , are set out in a letter from the UK and US Acting Permanent Representatives to the UN, circulated in the UN as document S/1998/795 of 24 August 1998 (pdf). The requirement that any sentences must be served in the UK could hardly be clearer:
“If found guilty, the two accused will serve their sentence [sic] in the United Kingdom.” (para 4).
In the event, one of the two accused was acquitted. Al-Megrahi was convicted. Clearly any transfer of al-Megrahi to serve part of his sentence in Libya under the Prisoner Transfer Agreement so laboriously negotiated with the Libyans by Messrs Blair and Straw would have contravened the arrangements approved by the Security Council in 1999.
Question: when Blair and Straw made their concession to the Libyans under which al-Megrahi was not after all to be excluded from the PTA, did they know, and remind the Libyans, that whatever the PTA said, under the original agreement approved by the UN, al-Megrahi couldn’t be transferred to serve the rest of his sentence in Libya?
There are plenty of other murky questions still to be answered about the whole affair, but this must surely be one of them. (An additional puzzle is why the embattled Scottish First Minister and Justice Secretary, Alex Salmond and Kenny MacAskill, never ones to miss a trick, have not seized the opportunity to skewer Tony Blair and Jack Straw by pointing out from the beginning that their PTA could never have been used to transfer al-Megrahi to a Libyan prison.)
It was painful to hear Messrs Obama and Cameron at their White House news conference on 20 July vehemently denouncing the Scottish Justice Secretary’s decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds after independent medical opinion had declared that he was dying of terminal prostate cancer and would probably — but not certainly — be dead within three months. Under Scottish law that prognosis provided clear grounds for compassionate release. Obama and Cameron are decent humane people and it’s hard to believe that they really disapprove so strongly of such an obviously humane decision by the Scots. Presumably they both think it expedient to condemn the release in order to placate the grieving Lockerbie relatives and, especially, the indignant Senators. I doubt whether we’ll ever know whether the decision was really based solely on compassion for a dying man, or whether it was influenced, even subliminally, by pressure from London not to let al-Megrahi die in prison for fear of the effects of that on UK commercial interests with Libya, or (perhaps more likely) by fear of what might be revealed if al-Megrahi’s appeal against conviction was allowed to proceed.
There has been legitimate criticism of Cameron for his public dismissal in a foreign country of a perfectly reasonable and legally watertight decision by a senior member of the Scottish government. There was nothing to stop him pointing out that in making his decision, MacAskill was acting in a quasi-judicial capacity, not on behalf of the Scottish government although he is a senior member of it: that the decision was in accordance with Scottish law and precedent: and that due process was rigorously followed. None of that is affected by Cameron’s (and Obama’s) disagreement with the decision, which in the end comes down to a matter of judgement. Why did Cameron fail to explain, if not to defend, the action of a member of one of Britain’s established and democratically elected governments? Having virtually been wiped out in Scotland, the Conservatives might show a little more respect and tact in commenting on the Scottish government’s actions.
Several well informed people believe there are skeletons in this cupboard which powerful people in the UK and the US want to keep securely and permanently locked away right where they are. For example, an impressive body of respectable opinion, by no means all professional conspiracy theorists, is not convinced that al-Megrahi was properly convicted. It’s impossible to know whether this doubt was a factor in Kenny MacAskill’s mind when he made his decision: fortunately for him, there were ample other grounds for compassionate release. It does look however as if some of those concerned were anxious that al-Megrahi’s appeal should not be heard, either because it would risk bringing Scottish justice into disrepute by discrediting the original trial as unfair and defective, or for more sinister reasons. Or were the likely consequences of al-Megrahi’s appeal possibly succeeding simply too awful to contemplate — for example, the reactions to be expected in the US, and the appalling questions then to be answered: if the two Libyan suspects didn’t do it, who did? And what compensation would be due to al-Megrahi or, if he had died in the meantime, his family?
So why did al-Megrahi agree to abandon his appeal before it could be heard? Was it because he feared that he would not live long enough to see it determined, or because abandoning the appeal was a condition, implied or explicit, of his release on compassionate grounds? Perhaps someone should put this question to al-Megrahi while he is still alive.
A recent article in the Independent newspaper alleged that the Libyan government had paid the doctors whose prognosis that al-Megrahi would die within three months had provided the justification for his release on compassionate grounds:
There are several facts that batter these claims with question marks. The most obvious is that, 11 months later, Megrahi isn’t dead. It’s the most amazing medical recovery since Lazarus. Or is it? It turns out the doctors who declared him sick were paid for by the Libyan government, and one of them says he was put under pressure by Libya to offer the most pessimistic estimate of life expectancy. Susan Cohen, whose only daughter died in Lockerbie, asks: “Why didn’t the Scottish Government pay for the doctors?”
[Johann Hari, the Independent, 23 July 2010]
But as a crisp comment on this canard pointed out, –
This is utterly untrue. The medical report was by Scottish doctors, NHS cancer experts. The ones paid for by Libya were not part of the evidence used by the Justice Secretary. Fact checking mate, you call yourself a journalist?
Indeed, the main medical advice on which MacAskill relied was provided by the Director of Health and Care of the Scottish Prison Service, Dr Andrew Fraser, who has been described by MacAskill as a doctor of “unimpeachable integrity”. Yet the slanderous claim that the prognosis had been provided by doctors paid by the Libyan government spreads like toadstools all over the blogosphere and into the MSM. Moreover, it has repeatedly been made clear that the three-month prognosis was accompanied by a warning that he might die earlier, or he might live longer: no forecast in such circumstances could be certain. And who knows whether al-Megrahi would still be alive if he had been left in his Scottish prison cell to die, in a foreign country miles from his family? As to the repugnance commonly expressed at the ‘hero’s welcome’ he received on his arrival back in Libya, it needs to be pointed out that he was being welcomed back as a victim of a monstrous injustice, the Libyans believing almost to a man and woman that he had been wrongly convicted; this was the opposite of a welcome accorded to a mass murderer and terrorist.
I’m generally suspicious of conspiracy theories but in this case I seem to smell a number of rats — not least because of the decision of the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) in June 2007 after lengthy study of the case to refer it to the High Court for a second appeal against conviction. There were also a number of reports by Hans Köchler, who had been an international observer of the original trial, appointed by the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and who described the decisions of the trial and appeal courts as a “spectacular miscarriage of justice”. Some of the relatives of the victims, who have naturally followed all the proceedings closely, are doubtful whether al-Megrahi was properly convicted. There is a strong suspicion that Iran may have been involved, including a specific Iranian said to have been in the pay of the CIA (I am not of course suggesting that the CIA could have been involved in planning or carrying out the bombing). Al-Megrahi’s fellow-Libyan co-defendant was unanimously acquitted by the judges. There’s a good deal of doubt about the actual whereabouts on the relevant day of the principal prosecution witness, on whose testimony al-Megrahi’s conviction effectively stands or falls, and about his alleged identification of al-Megrahi at the trial, which was both shaky and possibly compromised. Even the vehemence of American protests at al-Megrahi’s release tends to arouse suspicion: what beans did they fear he might spill once out of prison? Why all the effort to prevent the second appeal from coming to court? And so on. It really does look as if someone, somewhere, has been and still is hiding something.
It’s important, however, to stress that it’s most unlikely that the British Labour government was involved in any kind of conspiracy with the Scottish Executive, not least because of enmity between Labour and the SNP and the obvious risk that the wily Alex Salmond would use any double dealing against it. UK ministers certainly made it clear that Britain’s commercial and other relations with Libya would be damaged if al-Megrahi were to be allowed to die in prison in Scotland: but this clearly expressed a hope that he would be transferred under the PTA (which, as noted earlier, would have been contrary to the original agreement); and there’s not the slightest evidence that this sentiment was a factor in MacAskill’s mind in deciding on al-Megrahi’s release on compassionate grounds. All the same, I wonder why the previous UK government and the US government have hitherto refused to allow Scotland’s First Minister, Alex Salmond, to release the texts of their correspondence with him about the issue — correspondence which Salmond says he is ready to release immediately if the other two governments will consent to release. Perhaps we shall at last be allowed to read that.
Footnote: The attempt by US Senators to summon Kenny MacAskill (and Jack Straw), to be grilled in Washington DC about al-Megrahi’s release by a Senate Committee, strikes many of us, including me, as impertinent. Our political leaders are answerable to the British people through their elected legislatures, not to the legislators of a foreign country, however powerful. I am glad that both MacAskill and Straw have both declined the ‘invitation’, although I regret that Straw at first shilly-shallied (talking of needing to consult Gordon Brown, of all people, before deciding what to do), instead of immediately and robustly saying, in effect, in the immortal words of the great American tennis-player, “You have got to be JOKING!!!” The action of both the Labour and the Conservative spokesmen in the Scottish parliament in criticising MacAskill’s refusal to appear before the US Senate Foreign relations Committee was nakedly opportunist and unprincipled; on this issue the Scottish executive plainly deserved full cross-party support.
Note to Ephems visitors: This post is based on sections of an earlier piece on this blog and responses to comments on it, but with substantial new material added, including detailed chapter and verse for the assertion that under the original arrangements approved by the UN Security Council, al-Megrahi, once convicted, was required to serve his sentence in the UK and so could never have been transferred to Libya under the PTA.
Update (26 July 2010):
Guardian Letters, Monday 26 July 2010
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/26/megrahi-controversy
Vital point missed in Megrahi controversy
- The Guardian, Monday 26 July 2010
In all the renewed controversy over the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing (Unthinkable? Bush testifies to Chilcot, 24 July), a vital point seems to have been missed. Under the terms of the US-UK “initiative” under which Megrahi was convicted, he was required to serve his sentence in the UK. The initiative was accepted by Libya and approved by UN security council resolution 1192. For that reason Megrahi could never have been transferred to serve the rest of his sentence in Libya under the prisoner transfer agreement (PTA) negotiated by the Blair government with Libya, regardless of whether Megrahi was included in or excluded from its scope.
It’s difficult to understand how the PTA came to be signed when it could never have been used to transfer Megrahi, the only Libyan then in UK custody. If BP was pressing for Megrahi to be transferred under the PTA, why was it not told that this was ruled out by the terms of the original agreement? Why didn’t Alex Salmond and Kenny MacAskill point this out to Tony Blair and Jack Straw when they were arguing about the pros and cons of the PTA? Above all, when Blair and Straw made their “concession” to the Libyans under which Megrahi was not after all to be excluded from the PTA, did they remind the Libyans that Megrahi couldn’t be transferred to Libya? If not, why not?
In an article published on Comment is Free on 1 September 2009, Oliver Miles pointed out that Megrahi’s transfer to Libya under the PTA would have been contrary to the original agreement. It’s strange that even then no one seems to have seen the implications of this.
Brian Barder
London
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Brian
The Kabul conference and David Cameron’s pilgrimage to Washington have generated plenty of articles and interviews agonising about Afghanistan. Ministers are asked what would happen in that country if “we” withdrew “our” forces next week [approved answer: the Taliban take over the country again, invite al-Qaeda back, bombs explode all over London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast]. This, though, suggests a confusion over who “we” are. If it means we the UK, the correct answer is presumably that either American or some other NATO country’s troops would replace ours, and the war would continue without missing a beat. But questioners and those answering them seem to assume that without the British contingent, the whole NATO effort would collapse, surely an improbable scenario: or alternatively that if the British pull out, the Americans would give up and pull out too – an even more improbable assumption. Perhaps it’s just a case of everyone identifying “us” and the Americans as inseparable twins, joined at the hip: whatever “we” decide to do about Afghanistan, the Americans will have to do whatever we do – a self-evidently ludicrous proposition, when you think about it. We’ve done more than our share in Afghanistan, and suffered many more than our share of deaths and maimings there. Someone else’s turn, surely? As for the timing of and necessary conditions for the end of the whole western intervention in Afghanistan, the Americans will decide those, whatever we think and whether or not we’re still there. However, our coalition ministers clearly want out, and soon, which is something to be grateful for.
* * * *
Cameron’s visit to Washington collided with the resurrection by some American Senators of the controversy over the release in August 2009 on compassionate grounds by the Scottish government’s Justice Secretary of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted (quite possibly wrongly) of responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing. Many, not all, American relatives of Lockerbie victims, and their Senators, are furious, not only that al-Megrahi was released, but also that he’s still alive, 11 months after being released on the grounds that he had only three months to live. This seems to strengthen suspicion that the mass murderer was actually released in exchange for a lucrative Libyan oil drilling contract being awarded to BP (BP! All together now: ‘Booooo!’). Herein lies one of several Lockerbie mysteries. In 2007 the then British government agreed that al-Megrahi should not be excluded from the scope of the Prisoner Transfer Agreement (PTA) being negotiated with Libya, as the UK side had originally demanded. Jack Straw, then UK Justice minister, publicly acknowledged that this ‘concession’ (which implied that al-Megrahi could be transferred to serve the rest of his prison sentence in Libya) was motivated by British commercial interests in Libya, including the BP contract. But it was part of the original UN-approved agreement on the management of the Lockerbie suspects that if either of them was convicted, as al-Megrahi was, he would serve his sentence in the UK (in practice meaning in Scotland, as the whole process was to be conducted under Scottish law). Question: when Blair and Straw made their concession to the Libyans under which al-Megrahi was not after all to be excluded from the PTA, did they know, and remind the Libyans, that whatever the PTA said, under the original agreement approved by the UN, al-Megrahi couldn’t be transferred to serve the rest of his sentence in Libya? There are plenty of other murky questions still to be answered about the whole affair, but this must surely be one of them.
* * * *
Still on al-Megrahi: I was sorry to hear Messrs Obama and Cameron at their White House news conference today (20 July) vehemently denouncing the Scottish Justice Secretary’s decision to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds after independent medical opinion had declared that he was dying of terminal prostate cancer and would probably be dead within three months. Under Scottish law that prognosis provided clear grounds for compassionate release. Obama and Cameron are decent humane people and it’s hard to believe that they really disapprove so strongly of such an obviously humane decision by the Scots. Presumably they both think it expedient to condemn the release in order to placate the grieving Lockerbie relatives and, especially, the indignant Senators. I doubt whether we’ll ever know whether the decision was really based solely on compassion for a dying man, or whether it was influenced, even subliminally, by pressure from London not to let al-Megrahi die in prison for fear of the effects of that on UK commercial interests with Libya, or (perhaps more likely) by fear of what might be revealed if al-Megrahi’s appeal against conviction was allowed to proceed. Several well informed people believe there are skeletons in this cupboard which powerful people in the UK and the US want to keep securely and permanently locked away right where they are.
* * * *
Another issue in a politically exciting but depressing month has been the proposed Graduate Tax, under which the escalating cost of university tuition (in England? England and Wales?) would be funded by university graduates who would pay a special tax once their earnings rose to levels that enabled them to pay it. Coalition LibDem minister St Vincent Cable floated the idea and four of the five aspirants to the Labour party’s leadership have endorsed it. None of these worthies has explained how it could be fair to pick out graduates to be made to pay income tax twice on the same income, given that if their university degrees were responsible for increasing their incomes, they would automatically pay more tax on the additional earnings anyway. Nor was it obvious that this specific one of the many factors causing above-average earnings should be singled out for a special tax. There seems no more reason to make graduates pay retrospectively for their university education than to make those who learned their three Rs at state schools pay for their school education, or to impose a special extra tax on those who owe their health or even their lives (and consequently their earning power) to their treatment under the National Health Service. If extra revenue has to be raised to pay for our universities, it should surely be paid mainly by the richest in our society, by definition those best able to pay for it. Graduates in their first few years after leaving university won’t usually be among the richest, nor qualify as those best able to pay more tax. These simple principles really shouldn’t have to be spelled out to those with aspirations to lead HM Loyal Opposition and ultimately our government.
* * * *
There has been extensive discussion in recent days of the manifest injustice, even suffering, caused by the system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection, or IPPs, introduced by David Blunkett when home secretary as a form of preventive detention. Several thousands of people on IPPs who have served the ‘punishment’ element of their prison sentences (by no means only for serious offences) are kept in prison until they can demonstrate to a parole board that they won’t re-offend if released – something that it’s inherently impossible to prove. As a result, already grossly overcrowded prisons are even more overcrowded by prisoners who’ve done their bird but whom the parole boards won’t release. The Kafka-esque character of this monstrous regime has been emphasised in a major report on IPPs issued during the month by the Prison Reform Trust and in reports by the head of the Parole Board and prison governors, among several others. Yet in the hour-long oral questions to Justice Ministers on 20 July in the house of commons, the last before the long summer recess, not a single question about IPPs was asked. Let’s hope that notwithstanding this apparent lack of interest in the issue on the part of our MPs, IPPs will be subjected to rigorous reappraisal as part of the coalition’s welcome review of sentencing policy, due to report in the autumn. Those IPP prisoners who have served their tariffs but who are being made to wait for years to attend the behaviour management courses effectively required by parole boards as evidence of reform and rehabilitation, and then for years more while they wait for the parole board to consider their cases, and then for an indefinite period of years after that when the parole board has not dared to risk releasing them, should clearly be released without further ado. Some will reoffend, but that’s just a risk we have to accept as a cost of living in what ought to be a free society. Even more IPPers would not reoffend if released, and those are being indefinitely incarcerated for no reason whatever.
* * * *
As I pounded the treadmill in the gym while listening to Mahler on my iPod and reading some familiar Keats to relieve the boredom (licks finger and chalks an imaginary figure 1 on imaginary blackboard), it occurred to me that there are four discrete propositions in the famous couplet –
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
– and that all four propositions are not only untrue, but actually absurd.
Brian
“Is this the end of the UK?” was the title of a characteristically provocative and elegant article in the London Review of Books [Vol. 32 No. 10 · 27 May 2010] by Dr David Runciman, who saw in the contradictory swings and nagging anomalies of British contemporary politics an unravelling of the constitution that might eventually make the country literally ‘more or less ungovernable’. Runciman, one of the most perceptive of political analysts, seemed to me to be missing something, most unusually for him. This letter from me appears in the current issue of the LRB — Vol. 32 No. 14 · 22 July 2010 :
The End of the UK
David Runciman’s gloomy forecast of ‘the end of the UK’, because of the political consequences of devolution, ignores a central factor: in the words of Vernon Bogdanor in The New British Constitution, devolution ‘has turned Britain from a unitary state into a quasi-federal state’ (LRB, 27 May). Allan Tanner’s reply hints at this in predicting the inevitable ‘further devolution of power to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland’ and expressing bafflement at England’s reluctance to consider alternatives to what he calls the ‘Westminster system’, which I take to mean our current ‘quasi-federal’ and self-evidently transitional constitutional arrangements (Letters, 24 June). I’m baffled by this, too.
When Runciman is surprised by the absence of uniform swings at the general election, and concludes that ‘seen from one perspective, devolution has now made the United Kingdom more or less ungovernable,’ he is picking out a feature of federal constitutions, even quasi-federal ones, which is quite unsurprising to voters in the US, Australia, Canada, Switzerland or Germany, who take it for granted that there’ll be swings in different directions in different federal units – the reason often being that state governments can be unpopular whichever party runs them, which will affect the swing in that state accordingly. No one in a federation would think that this makes her country ungovernable. The same thing happened in the UK, with an unpopular Labour ‘federal’ government at Westminster, a popular Conservative Party in England and anti-Conservative (so pro-Labour) sentiment under a minority SNP government in Scotland. Other inconsistent sentiments dominate Wales and Northern Ireland.
Once we have the nous to move to a fully federal system for the four nations of the UK, these apparent anomalies will be seen as commonplaces. They seem now to make the UK ungovernable only because our existing constitution is a hopeless mixture of unitary and federal elements. As long as it stays that way, there can be no answer to the West Lothian question, and the Westminster government and Parliament will continue to struggle to play two inherently incompatible roles simultaneously. On the one hand, they are federal governing bodies for the whole of the UK in matters not devolved to the three smaller nations; on the other, they govern England in all matters. The composition of the House of Commons, with its numerous non-English members, is obviously quite unsuitable for an English Parliament and the composition of the government it produces is almost equally inappropriate for an English government, as we saw when Brown and Darling of Scotland, supported by an assortment of Scottish friends, were running the show, having been democratically elected by the whole of the UK to do so.
By the same token, it’s the lack of a proper distribution of powers between the federal centre and the four constituent nations that makes it ‘very hard’ for Runciman ‘to imagine how a Conservative administration in Westminster … will be able to impose painful spending cuts on Scotland and expect to survive there as a political force’. Revenue distribution among the constituent units of any federation is invariably a difficult and controversial issue, but in a fully fledged federal system, once Scotland (say) knows what its share of the national revenue will be, and given both full internal self-government and extensive tax-raising – or tax-lowering – powers, it will be up to the autonomous Scottish government to decide where, if at all, to impose cuts, not the federal government at Westminster. Runciman’s reluctance to apply the federal principle to the many anomalies he identifies leads him to the conclusion that
underneath the uncertainty is the steady, barely perceptible unravelling of a patched-up, threadbare UK constitution.
It’s the residual unitary features of the constitution, though, that are unravelling, including most prominently the absence of devolution to an English Parliament and English government, whose eventual creation is now inevitable, and the institution of which will complete the process of federalisation that began with devolution. The political leader who spots this, picks it up and runs with it, will surely score a famous try.
Brian Barder
London SW18
London Review of Books, Vol. 32 No. 14 · 22 July 2010, letters.
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Update, 18 July 2010: ‘Leo’ has posted a comment here with a link to a highly relevant document that includes a number of possible objections to the propositions in my LRB letter above. I have tried to reply to the principal ones in my response. I reproduce Leo’s comment and my response here:
From Leo
July 17th, 2010 at 10:40 pm
Your solution is susceptible to a number of problems which Professor Bogdanor outlines in a very solid paper on the West Lothian question recently published in Parliamentary Affairs. You can download a copy here: http://www.mediafire.com/?ka1m21o5777uz1q
Brian writes: Thank you very much for this. I have read Professor Bogdanor’s paper with much interest, as I read his other constitutional writings. However, without, I hope, sounding presumptuous, I would argue that there are good answers to all his objections to the ultimate goal of a federal UK, including the objections to a parliament and government for England as a necessary part of it.
Professor Bogdanor raises three main objections: (1) that the English don’t want, and are not interested in having, their own parliament, whether or not as part of a federal system; (2) that England would be bound to dominate a federal system by reason of its size, for example because the other three nations would not be able to combine to outvote it; and (3) that it would be contrary to a basic principle of the constitution as people in Britain understand it that different areas of the UK should be free to adopt different standards of social services and other benefits, thus depriving the central government and parliament of the power to enforce basic uniformity of standards throughout the UK.
This is not the place to debate these objections in detail, but, very briefly:
(1) If no reform were to be adopted until there was widespread desire for it, we would still be living in caves. There was initially very little desire for devolution in Scotland and Wales, but experience of it has greatly increased enthusiasm for it and indeed produced pressure for more. I sense that there is increasing uneasiness in England about the ability of the Scots to follow a different path from that decreed at Westminster (most noticeably over university tuition fees: but it may well explode over National Health Service “reforms” imposed by the Tory-LibDem coalition in England [and Wales][1]), when England has no such option. In any case, this is a question of political leadership. A political party led by a good communicator could create an understanding of the benefits of federalism which would lead to a growing demand for it, including federal organs for England.
(2) English dominance of the UK by reason of size, and the inability of the rest of the UK to balance England by combining together, are a fact of life now, in a unitary (or union) state. A main purpose of devolution is somewhat to limit England’s ability to dominate the other nations, but England still necessarily dominates the ‘federal’ parliament and government at Westminster. A full federal system would minimise England’s dominance (a) by ensuring that all four nations would enjoy separate but complete internal self-government, so that (e.g.) English MPs at both national and federal levels would be debarred from interfering in education policy in Scotland or in local government in Wales; and (b) by instituting a federal upper house, or Senate, on the US and Australian model, with an equal number of elected members from each nation, regardless of population, thus preventing England from outvoting the other three put together (and conversely enabling any two of the smaller nations’ senators to outvote England’s). England’s dominance, already reduced by devolution, would thus be much further reined in by a federal system, rather than representing an obstacle to it.
(3) The principle of uniform standards throughout the UK has already been breached as a result of devolution. Differences will grow and expand as more powers are devolved to Scotland and Wales before long, and probably to Northern Ireland too, as part of the price of having a predominantly Conservative government in Westminster when the Conservatives are almost unrepresented in Scotland. (Professor Bogdanor suggests that this could be resolved by adopting PR for elections to the house of commons, but since this is strongly opposed by both the Conservatives and most Labour MPs, it seems unlikely to provide a solution any time soon.) The British under federalism, as already under quasi-federal devolution, will have to get used to the idea of differing standards and systems in the different nations, which will be perfectly defensible so long as the differences reflect differing local wishes and interests as expressed in the three, or eventually four, national legislatures and assemblies. Serious imbalance would be prevented, as now, by equitable redistribution of all-UK financial resources: negotiated in a federal system through a mechanism involving all five governments and parliaments. So long as all four nations had access to roughly equal amounts of money per head of population, but, significantly, weighted to take account of need, each of the four could then decide separately how they wished to spend it, augmented according to local wishes by more or less revenue from local taxes. Screams of ‘post-code lottery’ would have to be answered by patient explanation of the basic principles of federalism. In any case, as indeed Professor Bogdanor acknowledges, that dam has already been breached with devolution, as even a baffled Tony Blair was forced by Paddy Ashdown to begin to realise (in a telling quotation near the end of Bogdanor’s paper).
Professor Bogdanor also argues that an English parliament would be regarded by many English people as no less remote from them than the Westminster parliament is now. Actually it would be bound to feel somewhat less remote, since it would be a purely English body which the Westminster parliament obviously is not. Anyway, so what? People in northern Queensland regard the state government down in Brisbane as remote and uncaring — and the federal (Commonwealth) government in Canberra as even more so. But life goes on and the Australian federation works pretty well, even though New South Wales and Victoria overwhelmingly dominate the other states.
Of course other problems will arise on the long and rocky road to federation, a journey that will take several decades and involve many stops and starts and setbacks. But I don’t believe any of the problems will be found to be insurmountable. The journey has already begun, and to try to halt it now at the present uncomfortable half-way house entails too many contradictions and anomalies to be sustainable. Having rejected all the possible answers to the West Lothian question, Professor Bogdanor is forced to conclude that it can’t be answered, and to argue that it doesn’t really matter. I contend that on the contrary it does matter and that there is one, but only one, answer to it. Once there’s a critical mass of understanding of the logic and the benefits of federalism, the thing will develop a surprising momentum. But to get the old cart moving again will require inspired leadership, a commodity that’s currently in rather short supply.
[1] I was wrong to say that the Con-LibDem NHS ‘reforms’ would apply to Wales as well as England: please see Hendre’s comment below.
18 July 2010
Ed Miliband, second favourite after his big brother for the Labour leadership, has written a piece on his campaign blog in which he argues for a graduate tax as a fairer alternative to tuition fees. Four of the five candidates now favour a graduate tax and the press reports that the coalition government is actively encouraging the idea. Vince Cable was on the radio this morning talking it up, not as an alternative to tuition fees but as an addition to them. I see nothing fair about this idea. I have posted a comment on E Miliband’s blog post explaining why, but it’s still “awaiting moderation”. In case my comment doesn’t survive the moderator’s Delete key, I’m reproducing it here:
There’s absolutely nothing fair about a graduate tax. It assumes that a university degree increases the earning power of graduates, which is no doubt true as a generalisation but certainly not true of all graduates — especially at a time when growing numbers of people are going to finish their university courses with degrees but no hope of a job at a time of very high unemployment. It has never been true of the many graduates who work for the not-for-profit sector or even in many areas of the public sector. Many graduates are forced to take jobs for which they are over-qualified and therefore underpaid, with no extra earning power attributable to their degrees.
But the even more serious objection to a graduate tax is that a university degree is only one of numerous factors that may result in above-average incomes: high IQ, industriousness, unscrupulousness, good contacts through well-off parents or through having been to a ‘public’ school, an affluent upbringing and social confidence, good luck — the list is endless. There’s no possible justification or need for government to single out the beneficiaries of one particular advantage (such as a university degree) for an additional tax obligation: if the tax system is progressive, as one day a future Labour government might just possibly make it, then the higher people’s incomes, the more tax they pay, regardless of the reasons for their relative affluence. Why should a graduate pay more tax on her income than someone with no degree but an identical income?
Other arguments against a graduate tax are:
- that the provision of university education to all those who can benefit from it benefits the whole of society in numerous obvious ways, including indirectly those who haven’t been to university, so society should pay for university education collectively through the tax system;
- that the prospect of having to pay a graduate tax on top of income tax and other taxes would inevitably discourage many able young people from aspiring to a university education; and
- that a graduate tax, calculated to pay for the costs of university education, is in effect a hypothecated tax, whose proceeds would be earmarked for a specific category of expenditure; and this is contrary to the basic principle that taxes go into the Consolidated Fund which the Chancellor of the Exchequer can use with total flexibility for whatever needs may arise.
The fair solution to the problem of funding university teaching is a general increase in the higher rates of income tax, on the principle that all those who can afford to contribute more to social goods, not just graduates, should pay more tax . A future Labour government will need to be much less timid about taxing very high incomes — and wealth — on a steeply rising scale. The new 50% marginal rate (which incidentally doesn’t mean anyone paying 50% of their entire income in tax, as many people seem to think) is a start, but there’s ample scope for much more. Threats from the mega-rich to emigrate if their taxes go up are a bluff that should be called — and if it’s not a bluff, good riddance to them. To each according to his need….
Please think again, Mr Miliband and Dr Cable. Tuition fees should certainly be abolished, but not to be replaced, still less supplemented, by a graduate tax. The arguments for financing state school education out of general taxation apply every bit as strongly to higher education. Grasp the nettle!
Up-date, 15 July 2010: My comment (i.e. this post) has now appeared on Ed Miliband’s blog (here). So have a good number of other comments, mostly making very good points both for and — especially — against the idea of a graduate tax. I was especially struck by this one:
Rob Hepworth [Moderator]
It’s preferable to fees but still the lesser of evils. I’m nervous about hypothecated taxes. There’s a danger that our opponents will jump at this and do it for other services eg health – a “health Tax” – to be paid only by people who use the NHS ? Or a schools tax only paid by parents whose children use state schools ? No!! … If we need a tax on top, why not a tax on larger companies whose future manpower depends on a supply of educated graduates?
Other comments on Mr E Miliband’s blog post advance additional cogent arguments against this deeply flawed idea. And there are yet more very good points in comments on the version of this post at Labour List. I can’t believe that Dr Cable’s heart is really in it, or that Ed Miliband’s should be.
Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
The reception for David Miliband’s Keir Hardie lecture on 10 July 2010 has been rapturous in some quarters — e.g. John Rentoul in an Independent newspaper blog, and, more surprisingly, by Jon Cruddas, standard-bearer of the left in the Labour party (“the most important speech by a Labour politician for many years”). This is an opportunity to have a look at how successful the front-runner in the Labour leadership election has been so far in promising to re-format the party’s attitudes and values, and thence its policies, in the aftermath of a serious election defeat — not quite as catastrophic a defeat as many of us expected, but quite bad enough to demand some fundamental rethinking. The 2010 Keir Hardie lecture is clearly meant as a major pronouncement of post-defeat rethinking by the current front runner in the leadership stakes. So it deserves careful attention.
I genuinely hate to say it, but I found the lecture terribly disappointing. In a reappraisal of where Labour should be going, I look for two main ingredients: first, an assessment of the successes and failures, but especially the failures, of Labour’s 13 years in government, frankly acknowledging the defects and mistakes, discussing the reasons for them and ways to make sure that they are not repeated; and secondly, an outline of a new overall Labour policy for dealing with the principal issues of our time, indicating how a Labour (or Lab-LibDem coalition) government would handle at least the most pressing of the following, even if only by a sentence on each:
recovery from recession, debt and the budget deficit, including the balance between taxes and expenditure cuts: restructuring of the economy generally and the banks and financial institutions in particular: financing pensions as people live longer: immigration: retention, strengthening or liberalisation of the mass of anti-terrorism and crime legislation inherited from the last Labour government: the Human Rights Act: the prison overcrowding crisis and sentencing policy, including the now discredited system of indefinite sentences “for public protection”, i.e. preventive detention: Britain’s place in the EU and relations with the US: global poverty: climate change: Britain’s status as a nuclear power, and the future of Trident: how long we continue to take part in the Afghanistan war and in what circumstances we would withdraw our forces: Iran and Israel-Palestine: the doctrine of “liberal intervention”: and ‘whither devolution?’ with still no answer to the West Lothian question, continuing discontent in Scotland and to some extent in Wales, and signs of restiveness (or worse) in England at the continuing denial of devolution to the biggest of the UK’s four constituent nations.
This adds up to a meaty and complex agenda. We’re entitled to know where each of the five candidates stands on at least the most pressing items in it.
On most of these issues I would expect a major policy pronouncement like the Miliband lecture to pinpoint and explain the differences between the new post-election policies that he would pursue if elected party leader, and those of the present coalition government. Attacks on the latter would, in my ideal lecture, be carefully placed in the context of a superior Labour alternative. Where Labour and coalition government policies now largely coincide, I would hope to see praise and support for some at least of what the Cameron-Clegg government is beginning to do or at least to promise, especially in the area of civil liberties and Afghanistan. Importantly, I would hope that the Labour leadership, including the candidates for election as leader, would resist the temptation to continue to defend the plainly indefensible elements in the policies and legislation of the Blair and Brown governments, especially in the fields of foreign policy and civil liberties, and to applaud the promises of the coalition government to reverse some of them.
Applying these hopes and expectations to Mr Miliband’s Keir Hardie lecture, I’m sad not to find in it any honest acknowledgement of the three great failures of the Labour years: (1) the Iraq war crime, still not openly acknowledged as such from the Labour front bench despite still mounting evidence of its criminality (not to mention the slide into an unwinnable and increasingly costly war in Afghanistan); (2) the relentless assault on individual liberties under cover of a hyped-up fear of terrorism; and (3) the constant indulgent kowtowing to the City and the financial institutions, leading to obscene inequality in our society, a poisonous celebrity culture fed by inconceivable personal wealth for the few, and now an almost total economic collapse which has given a profoundly reactionary Conservative party a golden opportunity, seized with greedy hands, to dismantle the welfare state. Miliband’s lecture barely touches on any of these major failures (apart from a half-hearted admission of failure to address the excessive role and inadequate regulation of the financial sector), still less offering any specific new policies designed to guarantee that no future Labour government will ever repeat them. Instead, there is sentence after sentence of what can only, in all charity, be described as pious waffle, to much of which careful analysis can attach virtually no meaning at all.
Perhaps worst of all, the lecture suggests absolutely no concrete policies for dealing with an unsustainable budget deficit and national debt, combined with nursing the first timid signs of recovery from recession, as a coherent alternative to the enthusiastic regressive butchery now already beginning to be practised by the Cameron-Clegg-Osborne triumvirate. It’s a waste of time denouncing each new cut as the axe falls, bewailing each new loss of valuable programmes and projects, and stridently supporting every noisy interest group as each is targeted in turn by the Osborne axe, without being able to offer a positive, detailed and more socially responsible alternative programme.
We’re not fools: we know that a Labour government would have had to make painful decisions about increased taxes and public expenditure cuts, and we are entitled to know what they would be. We need to know if Labour will stick to the illiberal and timid policies of the Blair-Brown era which so strained the loyalty of millions of its members and supporters. Mr Miliband doesn’t tell us. Would Labour under Miliband really be able to avoid raising VAT (as Alistair Darling favoured when Chancellor, until foiled by Gordon Brown) and abolishing some of the more obviously wasteful quangos? Would it really have persisted in the mindless follies of ID cards and the associated monster national database; of wasting more billions on nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers and state-of-the-art fighter-bombers that we don’t need and can’t afford; of 28-day detention without charge and thousands of section 44 stop-and-search intrusions; of continuing to expand our shamefully inflated prison population, and building yet more prisons; of continuing the cull of brave (or even cowardly) young British men and women (not to mention Afghan civilians) in a literally purposeless war in Afghanistan; of extraditing Brits to the US on the basis of vague and menacing accusations which would cut no ice at all if we sought to use them as a basis for extraditing Americans from the US? Would Labour still be refusing to hold a proper independent inquiry into serious charges of British collusion in torture? If the five candidates for the leadership can’t give us specific answers, indeed commitments, on questions such as these, it’s hard to see how they can lay claim to the votes of party members or the blessings of Labour’s remaining supporters.
It’s easy to pick holes in the Miliband lecture and perhaps it’s unfair to judge it in isolation from DM’s other policy speeches and interviews. But I haven’t so far seen much to applaud in them, either. The title of Miliband’s article in the New Statesman of 5 July — “How to solve the English question” — raised my spirits: here at last a potential future Labour leader would surely tackle head-on the problem of unfinished devolution, England still denied the partial self-government enjoyed by the other UK nations, the West Lothian question, all that: but no. All Mr Miliband had to say on that complex of issues was:
An “English Parliament” is not the answer. We must strengthen the civic pride and economic resilience of English towns and cities. This is how the sense of identity, belonging and place of the many Englands can be better embedded and expressed. Labour needs to work with the grain of local and institutional affiliations – from army regiments to hospitals, from fire services to local authorities.
So much for the gaping devolution deficit. So much for the unanswered West Lothian question. We must just be satisfied with strengthening the civic pride and economic resilience of English towns and cities. Perhaps we need a new Ministry of English Civic Pride and Economic Resilience for the purpose. No reasoned argument: just the bald assertion — ’an “English Parliament” is not the answer.’ I wonder why it isn’t the answer. Actually, I’m pretty sure that it’s at least part of the answer, as a stage on the way to a full UK federation. That seems to me worth discussion, not bland dismissal.
If I have to admit to not having read every word of D Miliband’s lectures, articles and interviews since he became a candidate for the leadership, I plead in mitigation that much of it is so stodgy and abstract that it’s very difficult to get through it all without nodding off or turning on the telly half-way through.
It’s such a shame. The older Miliband is in many ways an attractive figure — highly intelligent, sometimes eloquent, unfailingly articulate and well informed, obviously decent; he was a good foreign secretary, the best for several years, with the potential, perhaps, of becoming a great one. He ought to be an irresistible candidate for the leadership. But he’ll need to do better than this if he’s going to come anywhere near earning my vote.
Brian
In a recent blog post (here) I recommended some daunting facts and figures on Indeterminate Sentences (IPPs) published earlier this month in a Prison Reform Trust ‘Bromley Briefing’. The text of the relevant section of the Factfile is here.
The Prison Reform trust has now (8 July 2010) published a 74-page report, Unjust Deserts: imprisonment for public protection [PDF], containing a full academic and practical analysis of the whole system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection, the fruit of two years’ research. The report is a damning indictment of the system — its underlying philosophy, its inherent unfairness, and the fatal way in which it is mismanaged in practice. There are a number of conclusions and recommendations, the first of these being that the system should be abolished and determinate sentences substituted for indeterminate sentences still being served. You can read selected extracts from the report here, and a general summary of it here (“8 July 2010: ill-drafted IPP sentence leaves thousands locked up in bureaucratic limbo“).
The report spells out in detail:
- the way the system of IPPs was originally misconceived and carelessly drafted, resulting in consequences that were neither intended nor foreseen:
- how it is inherently unjust, relying on a mistaken belief that it’s possible to foresee an offender’s future behaviour in hypothetical future circumstances and on unsupported faith in the efficacy of prison courses to change behaviour while addressing only a small part of the roots of offending behaviour: and
- how the system is incompetently administered, grossly under-staffed and under-resourced, resulting in totally unnecessary costs to the taxpayer of something like £100 million so far, with costs steadily increasing.
One of many depressing features of the report is its revelation that with very few exceptions all the judges and psychologists who contributed their comments to the authors of the report were in favour of the IPP concept, some strongly so: apparently unable to see anything wrong with a system that abandons the concept of punishment being proportionate to the offence committed, substituting the proposition that a person who has served the punitive part of his sentence, but can’t prove that he will not reoffend if released, can properly be incarcerated for years, and indeed in principle for life, being harshly punished for future offences that he or she has not committed and might well never commit if released. This is risk aversion gone mad. It’s worrying that so many of our judges can’t see it: and almost equally worrying that the psychologists, on whose advice on behaviour management and assessment parole boards tend to rely, can’t see it, either.
My sole reservation about this otherwise admirable and comprehensive document is that it offers a number of possible options for reform, including amendments to the IPP legislation further to reduce the number of offences for which IPPs can be awarded. Even though the recommended first option is outright abolition, the offer of a less drastic remedy by further amending the legislation (which has already been amended in the same direction without producing any very significant improvements) and a third, even weaker, option of simply allocating more resources to the management of IPP prisoners and the provision of more behaviour management courses for them, seems to me to weaken the force of the case for abolition. The system is inherently unjust. No amount of tinkering with it can make it fair. Better management of it wouldn’t make it perceptibly less unfair — and it would cost far more money than is likely to be available in the present climate. Conversely, the report calculates — almost in an aside — that the cost to the taxpayer of keeping thousands of IPP prisoners in jail for years after they have served the punitive part of their sentences and are still incarcerated in preventive detention is probably of the order of “around £100 million” so far — and this grotesque cost is likely to go on rising if nothing drastic is done to stop the monster in its tracks. Now is the time to slay it. Please urge your MP now to tell the Justice Secretary that the IPP has had its day.
Update (25 July 2010): It has been reported that No. 10 vetoed a passage in Crispin Blunt’s ‘Churchill’ speech of 22 July in which he had planned to say something to the effect that he expected to abolish IPPs. In fact the videotape of the speech at http://www.justice.gov.uk/news/sp220710a.htm proves that he delivered the section of his speech on IPPs almost exactly as in the text on that web page. I think this is as promising as we can expect, given that he could not have been expected to make a firm decision on the matter in advance of the sentencing review. And at least we have the certainty now that IPPs will be critically scrutinised as part of the sentencing review, which is to report in the autumn. So far, so reasonably good.
Brian
The other day in a blog post about Indederminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) I described the cruelty and injustice of the IPP régime, under which repeat offenders who have served the punishment part of their sentences are nevertheless kept in prison, sometimes for years, until they can satisfy a parole board that if released, they won’t reoffend — something that is literally impossible in very many cases. Thousands – no exaggeration – of people in British prisons are being harshly punished for offences that they haven’t committed because they can’t prove a negative about the future to a room full of men in suits. Few of us could do that, either.
Now the admirable Prison Reform Trust has produced one of its periodic Bromley Briefing Prison Factfiles (July 2010) covering a range of prison-related subjects and containing a section on IPPs with some pretty horrific facts and figures. It’s clearly not widely known, even among the chatterati and the blogospheriacs, that the number has exploded from 3,000 indeterminate sentences in 1992 to 12,822 in March 2010; that by 5 February 2010 there were 476 people serving IPP sentences who had been kept on in prison for two years or more after they had served the ‘punishment’ element of their sentences — they had been, in other words, incarcerated in preventive detention for over two years, and many of them faced genuine uncertainty about whether they would ever be released; or that since 2005 only 133 people serving IPP sentences have been released from prison, 33 of whom have been recalled.
With the Trust’s agreement, I have put the section of the Bromley Briefing Prison Factfile dealing with IPPs, together with the relevant section from the Introduction, on this website: you can read it here. It demonstrates with cold statistics and quotations the Kafkaesque or Catch 22 situation in which these thousands of (almost all) men are trapped. In order to provide ‘evidence’ to the parole board in support of their applications for release, they are virtually bound to have attended various behaviour management courses that allegedly enable them to reform their characters and make reoffending on release less likely. But some IPP prisoners are in prisons where such courses are not available, or where there are waiting lists of a year or even longer for a place on the relevant course, or where the prison staff say the IPP prisoner’s mental condition makes it unsuitable for him to attend the course. Then in some prisons there are equally long waiting lists before an IPP prisoner can attend a parole board hearing to present his case for release (the onus is on him to show that he won’t offend, a wicked reversal of the position throughout the rest of the justice system); and even if he has managed to attend the requisite courses, the board may turn down his application, without being required to give a coherent reason.
One of the great virtues of the IPPs section of the Prison Factfile is that it provides hard evidence of the sheer scale of the injustice and inherently cruel uncertainty involved for the prisoners and their families. The scale is huge, and actually growing. Almost by definition, IPP prisoners are more than averagely vulnerable. To quote the Factfile:
Nearly one in five IPP prisoners have previously received psychiatric treatment, while one in 10 is receiving mental health treatment in prison and one in five is receiving medication. One IPP prisoner in 20 is, or has been, a patient in a special hospital or regional secure unit. Data from the Prison Service’s Safer Custody Group also confirm that IPP prisoners have a raised incidence of selfharm. Three people serving IPP sentences took their own lives in 2009.
We are keeping hundreds of people with mental health problems incarcerated because we are scared to let them out into the community where they could in principle receive much more effective — and incidentally much cheaper — treatment. We’re back to the pre-Victorian lunatic asylum, out of a shameful combination of fear and tight-fistedness — but a lunatic asylum in which the sufferers continue indefinitely to be punished and not simply confined.
New Justice Department ministers have publicly stated their disquiet at this unsustainable, indeed scandalous, situation. They have announced that a review of sentencing policy is to be set up and to report in the autumn. This doesn’t leave much time for you to ask your MP to press the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke, to ensure that the sentencing review takes a hard look at IPPs and recommends that the whole system should be abolished: no amount of tinkering with it can make it anything like acceptable. Mr Clarke may well actually welcome pressure like this: he can use it in evidence against the neanderthals in his own party (and to some extent in the Labour party, whose government introduced IPPs) and against the more viciously vindictive of the tabloids who think the thing to do with offenders is to “lock ‘em up and throw away the key” — which is more or less what an IPP sentence does, come to think of it.
Update, 8 July 2010: Now see new Ephems post about a further and much fuller report by the Prison Reform Trust published today, Unjust Deserts: imprisonment for public protection [PDF]. Key extracts from this report are now here.
Brian
