I’m going to take November off. For some time now I’ve been having tiresome problems with my hands and fingers — nothing that wouldn’t quickly be put right by becoming ten years younger, but failing that remedy, increasingly uncomfortable. Arthritis, inflammations and ganglions all contribute, and some of these may or may not respond to a month of injections, icing, physiotherapy and anti-inflammatory unguents of varying kinds.
In addition to these palliatives I have decided to take a month off from the computer keyboard, to give the fingers and wrists a rest. I’ll read my emails once a day, but not reply to them. No more emails from me, no more blog posts or responses to your and others’ comments, until December at the earliest. If you urgently need a reply from me on some immediate issue, let me know by email, text or telephone and I’ll use Skype either to telephone you back or, ideally, to Skype you (loud bangs and unprotected ears during my national service in the army half a century ago pretty much prevent me from hearing anything useful on my ordinary telephone now). My Skype name is bbarder, but I shan’t be online much for the next month apart from reading emails and occasionally Skyping.
No doubt many of you will welcome a rest from my messages and posts as much as I’m looking forward to a chance to read some of the books long awaiting my attention on the bookshelves and in my Kindle.
I hope to be back in time to wish you a happy Christmas. Meanwhile, as they say over the loudspeakers, thank you for your attention. And please don’t respond to this with messages of sympathy: I’ll take those as read, and anyway it’s not that bad!
All the best
Brian
The Labour leadership is making a sad mistake in opposing the government’s decision to abolish IPPs (Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection), as I argued in a new blog post yesterday. The other sentencing changes announced last night by the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, and adequately summarised on the Guardian’s website here, also deserve general support by all small-l liberals, despite justified misgivings over the expansion of offences that are to attract mandatory life sentences. It would make a welcome change if the Labour front bench were to respond to the reform programme as a whole on the following lines, which I commend to the shadow Justice Secretary, the Rt Hon Sadiq Khan (also my MP):
“The most important of the new measures announced by the Justice Secretary is the welcome decision to replace Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) by tough fixed-term sentences for the most serious offences. This should help significantly to reduce the excessively large prison population, of which more than 6,000 are currently serving IPPs, over 3,500 of them having already served their tariffs (the part of their sentences set for punishment). I welcome Ken Clarke’s assurance that only some 20 of those 6,000 IPPs would have qualified for the new mandatory life sentences for very serious sexual and violent crimes. Labour has serious reservations about introducing mandatory life sentences for crimes other than murder, as the government now proposes: we think judges, not politicians, should decide each sentence in the light of the circumstances of each case; but Ken Clarke has promised that ‘Judges would retain the discretion not to impose a mandatory sentence if it would be unjust to do so’, which should preserve reasonable flexibility. Mandatory life sentences will apply only to cases where an offender has twice been convicted of a serious offence attracting a sentence of at least 10 years on each occasion, so in practice the addition to the prison population resulting from this measure should be small.
“We especially welcome the proposal for a four-month mandatory prison sentence for aggravated knife possession for 16 and 17-year-olds, but not for younger children. Those convicted of ‘using a knife or offensive weapon to threaten and endanger’ are to be given a four-month detention and training order, two months in a young offenders institution and the rest undergoing training in the community. Adults will receive an automatic six-month sentence for the same offence. This should help to meet widespread concern about the menace of knife crime.
“Our concern until now that if IPPs are abolished, prisoners will be released while still a threat to our security, is adequately allayed by the promise of longer sentences for the most serious offences, allowing more time for reform and rehabilitation, and by the decision that serious offenders will not become eligible to apply for release on licence or parole until they have served two-thirds of their sentences, instead of the current half-way mark.
“It is a sorry indictment of the coalition government that these generally positive reforms have been so long delayed by widely reported opposition to them within the Cabinet and no doubt also from the unregenerate ranks of reactionary Tory back benchers. If the Liberal Democrats in the coalition, with their claims to be the champions of liberal reform, have been supporting the Justice Secretary against his right-wing critics in the long drawn-out argument over these reforms, we have yet to hear of it. It is not only over Europe that both the Conservative party and the government are split from top to bottom, with their Lib Dem allies standing helplessly on the touchline.”
Unfortunately, however, I have little confidence that Ed Miliband or Sadiq Khan will take anything like such a positive line in response to Ken Clarke’s reform programme. Labour is apparently still trapped in the retrograde, pathologically risk-averse mind-set of successive New Labour home secretaries on the subject of prisons, crime and punishment. It’s time to return to Labour’s liberal reformist roots. How bizarre that it’s a Tory Secretary of State for Justice who is blazing the trail!
Update (pm 27 Oct 11): The Justice Secretary was quoted on the Daily Politics programme today as having said he would be consulting about the idea of making it easier for Parole Boards to “let out” those serving the Indeterminate Sentences that he’s getting rid of. You can hear the relevant words here, beginning at 18’50″. This is the first reference I have seen or heard in the interviews and media coverage since Mr Clarke’s proposals were published last night to their implications for existing IPP prisoners. It’s encouraging, as far as it goes. But it will be controversial.
Brian
At last the prime minister himself has signalled the firm intention “shortly” to end the cruel injustice of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs).
David Hanson, Labour MP for Delyn, who was a minister of state for Justice in the Labour government, asked a question in today’s Prime Minister’s Questions demanding that the prime minister drop the Justice Secretary’s proposal to abolish “Labour’s” IPPS, on the grounds that they were necessary to keep dangerous criminals off the street. David Cameron replied that there would shortly be an announcement by the Justice Secretary. IPPs were a failed system which didn’t work and was not widely understood. They would be replaced by tough determinate sentences which would keep dangerous criminals off the street; and the government would end the current system whereby dangerous criminals were being released half-way through their sentences. This would be generally welcomed. (You can hear the question and answer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b016lrw2/Prime_Ministers_Questions_26_10_2011/
– beginning at 21’36″.)
This seems to be the firmest commitment so far, given by the prime minister himself, to the ending of IPPs, and it must be irreversible. There are other signs that the announcement by the MoJ is imminent. I have commented on the Emmersons Solicitors IPP campaign Facebook page –
Let’s hope that the determinate sentences which are to replace IPPs won’t be mandatory, unduly savage, or applied to any but the most serious violent offences. But if IPPs are really to go, that will be a huge gain. I doubt if the MoJ announcement will deal with the question of existing IPPs, but it will be very surprising if there’s no action soon to simplify and speed up the procedures for dealing with post-tariff IPPs even if there’s no public announcement about it.
Tragically, the terms of the question to the prime minister by David Hanson (presumably inspired by the Labour leadership) and of the latest statement by the Labour shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan, appear to commit Labour pretty firmly to oppose the ending of IPPs. This refusal, or inability, to acknowledge the injustice of IPPs, the misery they inflict on thousands of people who have either committed no offence or else have been punished for what they have done and paid their debt to society, the indefensible imposition of what amount to life sentences for offences for which a life sentence is manifestly and grotesquely excessive, and the disastrous practical effects of keeping thousands of IPP prisoners indefinitely in already over-crowded prisons, marks the definitive end of any hope of Labour abandoning the crudely illiberal attitude to penal policy reflected in the records of successive New Labour home secretaries.
In his first speech as Labour leader, Ed Miliband promised to change the Labour government’s often casual attitude to civil liberties. That promise is now being spectacularly broken. Labour MPs who obey their leaders’ instructions to vote against the ending of IPPs will bear a heavy responsibility. How comfortable can they be with the company they will be keeping when they join forces with the most primitive of the hangers and floggers on the far right of the Conservative party in parliament and the country, and the most ignorant and unscrupulously populist of the tabloids and the reactionary broadsheets? What a betrayal of the core principles of a once progressive and compassionate Labour party!
Let’s hope that the LibDems in parliament will steadfastly support this long overdue reform; that there’ll be enough enlightened Labour rebels against their own front bench to ensure that the government’s proposals will be approved by parliament; and that IPPs will soon be history.
Brian
My letter in today’s Guardian argues that rising demand for fuller self-government in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland points to full UK federation as a better culmination of devolution than the disintegration of our country. When will any UK political party grasp this and thereby reap a great medium-term reward? Let’s hope someone will show my letter to Ed Miliband, the only current party leader with imagination, a long view and the required dash of courage.
For anyone who doesn’t read the Guardian, here’s my letter (printed exactly as submitted!):
Professor Curtice calls devolution “a one-way process that seemingly can have only one conclusion – breakup and separation” (Devolution’s slippery slope, 10 October). The first of your reports on Scotland (Scotland gets a choice of ‘independence lite’ in referendum, 10 October) similarly documents popular pressure for fuller autonomy for Wales and Northern Ireland and for full fiscal autonomy for Scotland, with the Scottish Lib Dems advocating “fiscal federalism for all parts of the UK”, not just Scotland; and you report UK MPs inexplicably alarmed by Alex Salmond‘s indications of willingness to consider full fiscal autonomy for Scotland within the UK as a possible referendum alternative to independence.
But it’s apparently taboo to mention either of the elephants in the room: how long England will passively watch the other three UK nations moving inexorably towards full internal self-government while England alone is denied its obvious benefits; and why those seeking a credible policy for saving the UK from disintegration still can’t see the obvious alternative to breakup, namely a full federation of the four UK nations – each eventually enjoying full internal self-government – with the Westminster parliament and government becoming the federal organs responsible for only those subjects that need to be managed on an all-UK basis. That, rather than disintegration, is the logical (and potentially most popular) culmination of the devolution process and, given some imaginative political leadership, one that could revolutionise the way we govern ourselves. There could be a rich reward for the first UK party leader to pick up this ball and run with it.
Brian Barder
London
In a typically shrewd commentary, the Guardian’s Michael White is one of very few commentators even to mention federation as a possible solution:
A federal British solution as part of a wider constitutional settlement including Lords, Commons and the voting system? That gets some Lib Dem support. But England’s dominance (52 million out of 62 million) makes it tricky.
But it’s precisely England’s dominance that makes a federal system necessary: full internal self-government plus equal representation in the federal second chamber (as in, for example, the US and Australia) would protect the three smaller UK nations from constant English interference in their affairs, a protection which partial and reluctant devolution fails to provide at present.
According to media reports, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, is intensely relaxed about the prospect of Scottish secession and the break-up of the UK, because it might mean a permanent Tory majority in what’s left of Britain. There was a time when failure to defend one’s country’s integrity and survival constituted high treason, a capital crime. In our more enlightened times, imprisonment for life without the possibility of parole would no doubt be a preferable alternative to beheading. The prime minister, David Cameron, is said to be troubled by the threat of Scottish secession, not so much out of old-fashioned patriotism or concern for the welfare and interests of the people of the four UK nations, but because he doesn’t fancy going down in history as the prime minister who presided over the death of the United Kingdom. Well, never mind his motives. How is he going to head off Scottish secession? None of our leaders seems to have a clue. If Ed Miliband’s office doesn’t spot the opportunity, perhaps David Cameron’s press secretary will recommend that he has a look at today’s Guardian letters. (Nick Clegg, too?)
Brian
Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs), which keep thousands of people indefinitely in prison long after they have been punished for their offence, inflict needless misery and injustice on IPP prisoners and their families. They urgently need to be replaced by a fairer system of sentencing. The Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, has promised to do just that by an amendment to be tabled soon to a Bill that is now before Parliament. There’s a danger that Ken Clarke’s unpopularity with the right wing of the Conservative party and the more rabid of the tabloids, and right-wing distrust of his enlightened proposals for penal reform generally, may frighten No. 10 Downing Street, the Home Secretary, the Labour opposition and even the LibDem members of the coalition government into opposing the replacement of IPPs, forcing Ken Clarke either to abandon it or to water it down in a way that could make it virtually meaningless.
So now is the moment for all liberal-minded people who recognise the indefensible injustice of IPPs to take urgent action to stiffen the government’s support for its own policy, and to encourage MPs to resist the inevitable clamour from the primitives on the Tory back benches and in the tabloids. Please spare five or ten minutes to email or write a letter to your MP, especially if he or she is a LIbDem. Here is a suggested form of words that you could either copy-and-paste into an email or letter, or else re-write in your own words:
IPPs: Suggested text of email or letter to your MP and other MPs
I am writing to you as my Member of Parliament to appeal for your support in Parliament for the earliest possible replacement of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs), as envisaged by the Justice Secretary, the Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke QC MP. There are well over six thousand people with IPPs locked up indefinitely in our badly overcrowded prisons who have no idea when, if ever, they can hope to be released. Of these, well over 3,500 have already served their ‘tariffs’ (the punishment part of their sentences), and their numbers are growing. They remain incarcerated not as punishment for any offence they have committed but because the Parole Boards can’t be satisfied that if released they won’t reoffend, which is obviously impossible for a prisoner to prove. Only a minuscule proportion of the thousands of offenders given IPP sentences have ever been released, even when the original offence may have been relatively minor.
This is a form of preventive detention such as we have never before seen in Britain in peace-time and rarely even in wartime. It contributes significantly to over-crowding in our prisons and causes resentment of its obvious injustice which makes rehabilitation far more difficult. The uncertainty over any hope of ever being released causes misery amounting almost to torture for the wives, husbands, partners, parents and children of those who have been subjected to this nightmarish punishment. Replacing it with fairer determinate sentences would help to relieve prison over-crowding, greatly reduce the agonising uncertainties that inflict such misery and injustice on IPP prisoners and their families, save public money, reduce reoffending, and remove an ugly blot on our system of justice.
I would be grateful if you would pass this message to the Rt Hon Kenneth Clarke QC MP, Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, for his comments, in the hope that he will take urgent action in accordance with his undertaking to include provision for the replacement of IPPs by determinate sentences in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill which is now going through Parliament.
_____________________
You can get the name and email and postal addresses of your MP by visiting http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mps/ or http://www.writetothem.com/, or very often by Googling the MP’s name. Please remember to include your name and address so that your MP can see that you are one of his or her constituents. Even if you have written to your MP in the past about this, please write again now, perhaps referring to your earlier message and any reply that you received then.
To make your appeal even more effective, please send a copy of it for information to The Rt Hon Nick Clegg MP – Leader of the Liberal Democrats, Deputy Prime Minister, Lord President of the Council and MP for Sheffield Hallam, email address: leader@libdems.org.uk, or by post to The Rt Hon Nick Clegg MP, Leader of the Liberal Democrats, 4 Cowley Street, London SW1P 3NB. In copying your message to Nick Clegg, please urge him to treat support for Kenneth Clarke’s proposal to replace IPPs as a non-negotiable condition for the LibDems remaining in the coalition government: if the LibDems were to go along with a veto of this essential reform, they would lose all credibility as upholders of liberal principles.
You could also usefully copy your email or letter to the Labour Opposition’s shadow Justice Secretary, The Rt Hon Sadiq Khan MP, email address: sadiqkhanmp@parliament.uk, or by post to The Rt Hon Sadiq Khan MP, House of Commons, Westminster, London SW1A 0AA. Alternatively email The Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, milibande@parliament.uk, or write to The Rt Hon Ed Miliband MP, Leader of the Opposition, House of Commons, Westminster, London SW1A 0AA. The Labour leadership has inexplicably been very lukewarm about Kenneth Clarke’s penal reform proposals, but you could point out to Ed Miliband or Sadiq Khan that there can be no possible justification for Labour not to support the replacement of IPPs against the likely opposition of illiberal right-wing elements with which Labour has nothing whatever in common.
If you have any doubts about the shocking injustice of indeterminate sentencess, please read the section on IPPs in an article by the barrister Philip Rule in the September issue of Inside Time, or any of the posts on the subject on this blog, such as here and here (including the comments appended to them, and my responses to the comments). There is also much useful information on the Facebook page of the Emmersons Solicitors’ campaign against IPPs, here. (In response to recent comments on this blog I suggested that it was a bad time to revive the campaign against IPPs at a time when Ken Clarke was embroiled in a controversy over the Human Rights Act and Theresa May’s cat, with the prime minister apparently backing Mrs May. But the situation has changed completely in the last three or four days and it is absolutely essential to pile on the pressure now for IPPs to be replaced.)
Any day now the Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, is expected to table an amendment to the Bill to include the replacement of IPPs along with his other sentencing reform proposals. Here is an opportunity, not likely to be repeated, to do something concrete to influence events and to help to remove a monstrous blot on our criminal justice system. Please take the time to act now, while there’s still time.
Update (14 Oct 2011): An MP who received a constituent’s letter based on the text suggested in my post (http://www.barder.com/3331) has replied rejecting two of its criticisms of IPPs as “false” (while accepting that there are other, legitimate, grounds for criticising IPPs such as failing to make available courses in prison whose completion is required before parole boards will consider release).
The MP’s first point of disagreement is that “The principle of detention until and unless the Parole Board is satisfied as to risk is not new and underpins the life tariff scheme that was introduced at the time of the abolition of the death penalty.” But it is no part of the case against IPPs that its tariff system is ‘new’, and its use with prisoners serving life sentences in no way justifies applying it to those who have by definition been sentenced for much less serious offences than those attracting a life sentence. A life sentence is basically what it says: society’s judgement that the offence — such as murder, which carries a mandatory life sentence — is so grave that he who commits it must be imprisoned for the rest of his life. In practice there may be varying numbers and kinds of extenuating circumstances surrounding each individual murder, and varying grounds for thinking the murderer likely or unlikely to commit another murder, and this is reflected in the tariff system which allows the offender, subject to certain conditions, to be released after a set number of years, although always subject to being recalled to prison if he breaches the terms of his release. So for a lifer conditional release from prison before death is a privilege and an act of conditional clemency, not a right: imprisonment for life remains the essence of the sentence. (Whether it is right for parliament to force judges to impose a life sentence for every single murder, regardless of individual circumstances, is a completely different issue, unrelated to IPPs.)
IPP sentences are completely different. The tariff set for an IPP represents the punishment element of the sentence. Once the tariff (whose length reflects the degree of gravity of the original offence) has been served, the offender has been duly punished and has paid his debt to society. The unique feature of the IPP is that even after having undergone his punishment, the IPP prisoner is still kept in prison, no longer as a punishment but because society is afraid that if released he might reoffend, and accordingly sets a series of quite unrealistic tests that have to be passed before the prisoner may be released. He is no longer in prison as a punishment but purely in preventive detention. What’s worse, the onus is on the prisoner to satisfy the parole board that if released, he won’t reoffend: the parole board will automatically reject an application for release, even if there are no specific grounds for supposing that the prisoner will reoffend, unless the prisoner can satisfy the board that he won’t reoffend, which is an inherently impossible demand. From the parole board’s point of view, agreeing to release an IPP prisoner is risky: if they get it wrong, and the prisoner does reoffend after release, they will be blamed for their poor judgement; whereas if they refuse to agree to his release, they can never be blamed, because no-one can ever know whether or not the prisoner would have reoffended if he had been released. Hence the abnormally small number of IPP prisoners who have ever been released. The presumption of innocence, even innocence of hypothetical future offences not yet committed, is denied to the IPP prisoner. This is rank injustice, straight out of Alice in Wonderland, or Kafka, and it’s not in any way comparable with the tariff system for those serving life sentences.
The MP’s other criticism is to deny the assertion in the post’s draft letter that in some cases of IPPs “the original offence may have been relatively minor“. There’s one sure way to measure the seriousness of the offences that have attracted IPP sentences: namely, the length of the tariff. The shorter the tariff, the less serious the offence in the eyes of the judge. According to Ministry of Justice figures, in March this year there were 1,550 IPP prisoners with tariffs of less than 2 years, and 3,200 equal to 4 years or less. Only 50 — five zero — had tariffs of 10 years or more. The average tariff length for IPPs imposed before the minimum tariff for an IPP was made longer (to stop IPPs being awarded for really trivial offences) was three years, and even after the change it was only four years. Before the change in the law, people were being given IPPs with tariffs of just a few months, and nearly all of these are still in prison, in some cases three or more years after the end of their tariffs. As mentioned in my post, last March there were no fewer than 3,500 IPP prisoners who had served out their tariffs, having undergone their punishment, but were still in prison. In the face of these figures, it’s impossible to deny that many IPPs are being awarded for “relatively minor” offences or to assert that IPPs are given only for really serious crimes.
As the MP’s reply acknowledges, the failure of the prison system to provide all IPP prisoners with rehabilitation courses whose completion parole boards demand as a condition for even considering an application for release is indeed one of the indictments of the whole IPP régime. But it is by no means the most serious. The whole thing is a denial of the most basic principles of justice. It is intellectually and morally untenable. It should go.
PS (24 Oct 2011): I have put some further relevant extracts from recent House of Commons notes and papers on my website: see http://bit.ly/nI572h.
Brian
Labour’s shadow Justice Secretary, Sadiq Khan, has again attacked Ken Clarke’s humane, courageous and progressive programme of penal reforms designed to reduce our bloated prison population, improve prison conditions by enabling prisoners to work and undergo rehabilitation training, provide treatment instead of punishment to victims of drug and alcohol addiction and mental illness, and expand non-custodial community sentences which are demonstrably more effective in deterring re-offending than imprisonment, as well as saving public money. Clarke plans to abandon Labour’s deplorable plans for building yet more prison cells and to replace the indefensible system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs) which leaves thousands of people indefinitely behind bars in preventive detention long after they have paid their debt to society. Sadiq grudgingly accepts some of these objectives but repeatedly accuses Clarke of being motivated purely by a desire to save money and of seeking to undermine the Labour government’s achievements.
His latest attack on Clarke and his reform programme appeared in Huffington Post Politics on 6 October. Despairing of achieving anything by discreet private lobbying and argument, I finally went public with an exasperated comment on the Huffington website:
This is a seriously disappointing article. Kenneth Clarke, the only established liberal Tory in the Cabinet, proposes reforms in penal policy that are urgently necessary, mostly to repair damage done by successive New Labour home secretaries, and which include sharply reducing prisoners’ numbers at a time when (as every penal reform expert agrees) up to half of the prison population shouldn’t be there; giving work to those who genuinely need to be imprisoned; and replacing the monstrous system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs). Sadiq Khan, an excellent constituency MP, opposes or carps at all these proposals. He misrepresents Clarke’s figure (3,000) for reducing the prison population as a target when it’s clearly an estimate, and attacks Clarke’s proposed abandonment of the mindless New Labour plan to build yet more prisons. Sadiq denounces cuts in police numbers when he must know there’s no correlation between front line police numbers and crime levels. He denounces Clarke’s acceptance of cuts in his departmental budget when he knows that such cuts would be unavoidable under any government, and many of them could be achieved by progressive reforms.
At a time when Ken Clarke’s ministerial future is in jeopardy because of his public exposure of Theresa May’s dishonest demand for repeal of the Human Rights Act, Labour should be defending him and his liberal reform proposals against the assaults of reactionary Tory MPs and tabloids. If Clarke goes, all hope of progressive penal reform goes with him. Please think again, Sadiq!
Progressive and humane penal reform policies were once a central element in Labour’s core values. A series of reactionary and illiberal New Labour home secretaries abandoned those principles, over-reacting to terrorism and tabloid demands for ever harsher punishments for offenders with a string of authoritarian measures that filled our prisons to bursting point, allowed re-offending to soar, and laid the foundations for authoritarian behaviour by the police and the security authorities, criminalising protest and introducing an indefensible (but little recognised) system of preventive detention that’s unprecedented in peacetime in the modern era. Much of the present Justice Secretary’s reform programme is designed to repair some of this damage. Sadiq Khan said, without a trace of irony, in his speech to the Labour party conference on 28 September this year:
I believe we should all worry that this Coalition Government threatens to undermine our hard work.
In his speech to the previous year’s Conference on 28 September 2010, immediately after his election to the Labour leadership, Ed Miliband famously promised to change the party’s direction, not only on Iraq but also on civil liberties and human rights:
[W]e must always remember that British liberties were hard fought and hard won over hundreds of years. We should always take the greatest care in protecting them. And too often we seemed casual about them. Like the idea of locking someone away for 90 days – nearly three months in prison – without charging them with a crime. Or the broad use of anti-terrorism measures for purposes for which they were not intended. They just undermined the important things we did like CCTV and DNA testing [sic]. Protecting the public involves protecting all their freedoms. I won’t let the Tories or the Liberals take ownership of the British tradition of liberty. I want our party to reclaim that tradition. …when Ken Clarke says we need to look at short sentences in prison because of high re-offending rates, I’m not going to say he’s soft on crime…
When is Ed Miliband going to remind his shadow Justice team of that seminal promise, which indeed Sadiq might well have drafted? You will search Sadiq Khan’s Conference speech last month, and his Huffington Post article, in vain for any evidence that he remembers it. Instead, in his own 2011 Conference speech, Sadiq saw fit to reopen the controversy over Clarke’s remarks about rape:
Remember his insensitive and offensive comments on rape? On Radio 5Live, and in response to the statement “rape is rape, with respect?” He said, and I quote: “No, it’s not”. Mr Clarke, let me tell you rape is rape.
Ken Clarke’s ‘offence’ had been, you’ll remember, to point out the obvious truth that while all rapes are serious crimes, some are self-evidently more serious than others, a fact recognised in the wide variations in rape sentences as well as by common sense. Either Sadiq doesn’t understand that, which seems unlikely in an experienced lawyer and former Chair of Liberty: or he does, in which case….
By their unremitting and undiscriminating attacks on an enlightened and humane Tory Justice Secretary, the Labour front bench have made it easier for the prime minister to surrender to the cave-dwellers on the Tory back benches, to an unprincipled and populist home secretary, to the hangers-and-floggers in the country and their favourite tabloids, by sacking Clake from his job. If the LibDems, both in and out of the coalition government, had been brave enough to make support for Clarke and his reform proposals a condition for continuing LibDem membership of the coalition, and if the Labour opposition had similarly been brave enough to honour Ed Miliband’s promise when he was elected leader, they would have hugely improved the chances of Ken Clarke surviving the current reactionary campaign against him and thus enhanced the chances of success for his reforms. How sad and how ironical that in this major conflict, the shadow Justice Secretary has consistently positioned Labour well to the right of a Conservative minister and thus helped to jeopardise all hope of penal reform for a generation!
Full disclosure: Sadiq Khan is my MP, and one whom I both like and respect. He’s an excellent, conscientious and hard-working constituency MP. He has been patient with my stream of appeals and complaints and generous with his time in listening to them. He knows, as I do, that my despair at the party leadership’s failure to abandon New Labour’s illiberal policies on law and order and civil liberties is widely shared in the Labour party’s grass roots. As Ed Miliband’s leadership campaign manager and adviser, he will certainly not have forgotten that inspiring promise in Ed’s first speech as leader. It’s hard to dismiss the suspicion that some of those who lumbered the party with such a dismal record on civil rights and liberty, the Straws and Blunketts and others, continue to exercise a baneful influence on the Labour front bench, mainly in a misguided attempt to defend their own records in office. If so, it’s surely well beyond time for them to exercise restraint instead of influence. Mr Miliband might usefully indicate to them that their time is past and that, in an echo of Attlee’s famous words to the then party Chairman, Harold Laski, a period of silence on their part would be welcome.
Brian
