CONSENSUS POLITICS
It should be blindingly obvious to one and all that with the advent of the Coalition Government, there would have to be compromise between the Tories and the Liberal Democrats if a consensus was to be reached.
This meant that each Party had to abandon some of its “holy cows” which they had assiduously fed and watered during the election campaign. With cuts in public expenditure and the priority of balancing the national books being an essential part of the agreed agenda, the change in Party policy should come as no surprise.
With this willingness to bend with the political wind comes the decision by Kenneth Clarke, the newly appointed Justice Secretary, to review our whole attitude to crime and punishment, and I for one welcome this decision. I have argued in earlier articles that the “lock them up and throw away the key” mentality of Little England is misguided and doomed to failure, as the recent past has demonstrated.
The statistics are frightening. In the space of fifteen years, the prison population has doubled to a record 85,000. This is not because crime has doubled. It is simply because sentencing courts in the recent past have been compelled to pass custodial sentences where other sentences were more appropriate.
Crime and punishment has historically been the preserve of the backwoods Tory, but not any more. It was the outgoing Labour Government which enacted the Criminal Justice Act 2003, a disgraceful and wholly unnecessary piece of legislation, with the stated aim of making convictions easier to obtain and increasing custodial sentences by a factor of ten.
More statistics. Approximately half of the prison population are serving sentences of 12 months or less. It costs on average £40,000 per prisoner per annum to keep them locked up. You do the maths as they say, and all this before you throw into the pot the enormous legal aid budget, in the region of £2 billion.
The argument advanced by Little England is that if you keep offenders locked up, it is safe to walk the street at night. But with a few rare exceptions, every offender is entitled to release at some time in his life, before he dies of boredom in his cell, and to avoid reoffending, he needs support in the community at all levels. Surely it is better to use our precious national resources to this end.
Allied to this root and branch review of prison law comes the clarion call to the police from Theresa May, the Home Secretary, to forget about ‘targets’ and concentrate on cutting crime. Sadly, this message has fallen on deaf ears, the deafest being a handful of Chief Constables who clearly feel uncomfortable about any new initiative which might disrupt their cosy way of life. Remember Ian Blair? The enormous salary, subsidised housing benefits, an inflated pension pot, chauffeured cars, entertainment allowances and the best seats in the house, and all in the interests of serving
Amazingly, Julie Spence, the Chief Constable of Cambridgeshire, and one of the most vocal critics of this clarion call, stated, and apparently with a straight face, that just one third of her work is about cutting crime. She went on to say that her task was to provide a 24/7 social service law enfarcement (sic) agency. Worse was to come. She had spoken to half a dozen chief constables and none had differed from her view! Perhaps she should speak to the people who really matter – the victims of crime! And speaking of cuts, Julie Spence would be high on my list when heads start to roll.
And what exactly had Theresa May said to ruffle Plod’s feathers? “I know that some officers like the policing pledge, and some like the comfort of knowing they’ve ticked the boxes. But targets don’t fight crime. Targets hinder the fight against crime. In scrapping the confidence target and the policing pledge, I couldn’t be any clearer about your mission. It isn’t a 30 point plan. It is to cut crime. No more and no less!”
Amen to that!
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