Tuesday 21 June 2011

Courage of Convictions

The last time that Ken Clarke was in the Cabinet, and possibly (I'd have to check) the last time that he had specific responsibility for these matters, the sentence for everything was automatically cut in half as soon as the judge or magistrate had handed it down. It would be wholly in keeping both with his own record and with that of his party, not least under Margaret Thatcher, for him to bring in legislation cutting every sentence by ninety-nine per cent for those who pleaded guilty and by ninety per cent even for those who were convicted despite having entered a not guilty plea.

Shame on Labour for failing to reverse this despite having voted against it, as surely as for failing to reverse, despite having voted against, the Conservative Party's surrender of the supreme legislative power of Parliament, its devastation of small and family business by abolishing Resale Price Maintenance, its suppression of numerous historic regiments of the British Army, its metrication of weights and measures, its decimalisation of the currency, its abolition of National Service, its crippling of the Police with needless paperwork, its dismantlement of the national rail network, its wiping of historic county names and boundaries off the map, its replacement of O-levels with GCSEs, its closure of so many grammar schools that there were not enough left at the end for that record ever to be equalled, its discontinuation of the fiscal recognition of marriage as a good uniquely and in itself, and so very much else besides. On none of those occasions was that party in coalition with the Lib Dems or anyone else.

Light sentences and lax prison discipline are both expressions of the perfectly well-founded view that large numbers of those convicted, vastly in excess of the numbers that have always existed at any given time, are in fact innocent. We need to return to a free country's minimum requirements for conviction, above all by reversing the erosion of the right to silence and of trial by jury, and by repealing the monstrous provisions for anonymous evidence and for conviction by majority verdict. And we need to return to proper policing. Then we could and should return to proper sentencing, and to proper regimes in prison. But only then.

6 comments:

  1. Much of this is in at least one of your books, I know, because you can probably guess who I am.

    Sorry to go slightly off topic, but there can't really now be people in universities who think that these things only exist if they are on the Net somewhere. Can there? I'm glad I got out when you could have done. Maybe so should you have done, if quite that level of naïveté is what you now have to dael with.

    But anyway I don't believe you. It can't be true, it just can't be. We are all greatly looking forward to seeing this and many other of your vital insights in print and in review, looking forward in circles that will never admit any bitter, naive ex-tutee of yours.

    Read this post and so many others of yours and know that no such creature will ever come to anything. Your protégés on the other hand can look forward to glittering futures. I've been to Oxbridge and it no longer has figures like you, college-based polymaths changing people's lives. God bless Durham.

    ReplyDelete
  2. "Its abolition of National Service"?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes, indeed.

    Reintroduced by Labour after the War. Abolished by the other lot. I do enjoy pointing that one out.

    The effectiveness of our Armed Forces now depends on their being all-volunteer. So National Service should now be non-miltary. But it should nevertheless be uniformed, ranked, barracked, and, moreover, compulsory for both sexes.

    People who had had a year or two of that would go into work or to university with an entirely different perspective on life. Think of the people most likely to oppose this scheme and the point is made as to how much better for society at large that perspective would be.

    ReplyDelete
  4. @17:01 is obviously more of an insider than I, but he or she shouldn't bet on David's books being reviewed, no matter how good they are. Just ask Peter Hitchens. His hugely important last book was reviewed in no newspaper except his own and he was only advocating the "eccentric" Old Tory Right position not the unmentionable Old Labour Right one.

    ReplyDelete
  5. National Service is the punishment handed out by a society that criminalises yout .Being young shouldn't be a crime.

    ReplyDelete
  6. You might as well say the same about school. On the contrary, you could make a much stronger case that that is sending people off into the world, and not least to university, without such a formative experience.

    You didn't read the bit about its being non-military, did you? There would probably be less chance of dying in the course of this than of doing so in the course of numerous forms of employment.

    ReplyDelete