Blair is right about prison sentences. But the culprit is the man he sees in the mirror
Perhaps the most bizarre spectacle in the dying days of Tony Blair’s time in No. 10 Downing Street has been the way in which he has joined protests and campaigns as if, somehow, he were not running the country. Last month, he signed a petition effectively demanding that the Prime Minister — that Mr Blair — give scientists better protection against animal rights activists. But nowhere is his sense of exasperation and helplessness more acute than in his one-man campaign against judges who hand down lenient sentences.
Last summer, he sternly warned judges that ‘the rules of the game are changing’ after the 7 July attacks and that they had to get tougher on suspected terrorists. When nine Afghan hijackers were allowed to stay in Britain after taking their plane to Stansted airport, Mr Blair declared the verdict an ‘abuse of common sense’. Once again, the foolish judiciary had struck. The Sun newspaper’s current campaign against soft judges is being followed with enthusiastic interest in No. 10.
As Home Secretary John Reid is at one with his boss in this matter, as in all others, and lost little time in his new job before saying that ‘the system is not working to protect the vast majority of ordinary, decent, hard-working citizens’. Listening to them both, it is easy to believe the heavy implication: namely, that the government is all for tough sentences, a wish that is being vexatiously frustrated by a liberal judiciary. The public are being invited to join Mr Blair in lobbying against these judges, to sign his metaphorical petition.
But the patience of the judiciary has snapped in the most remarkable place. Lord Goldsmith, the Attorney General and a man so biddable that he drafted, redrafted and reredrafted legal advice justifying the Iraq war, warned Mr Reid — using the intermediary of the press — that he would not respond to ‘political or public pressure’. The Home Secretary had asked him to review the now notorious case of Craig Sweeney — the convicted paedophile who sexually assaulted a three-year-old girl but is believed to have been given a minimum sentence of only five years and 108 days. Mr Reid was told that this was an instruction too far. The reaction genuinely startled the Home Secretary, who had unwittingly stumbled across one of the deepest and least-understood fault lines in New Labour.
The increasingly liberal bent of the judiciary long predates the Blair government. As early as 1991, Kenneth Baker was held in contempt of court, ludicrously, because his officials had failed to pull a Congolese asylumseeker off his 6.30 p.m. plane for Kinshasa. His appeal had been granted at 5.50 p.m. This set the tone for Michael Howard’s battles with the judiciary in the mid-1990s, After a pause, the struggle was resumed by David Blunkett and now by Mr Reid.
But this time it is different. While some judges openly taunt Mr Blair by claiming that his terror laws are a greater threat than terrorism, ministers have had more success than they would admit, or seem to understand, in forcing the hand of the judiciary in prison sentences. Whether Mr Blair realises it or not, the system he is now railing against is one which his ministers have steadily built over the last nine years.
Sympathy for the Prime Minister should evaporate on close inspection of the Sweeney case. Justice Griffiths Williams, a senior circuit judge with no record of leniency, in fact gave Sweeney an 18-year life sentence, five years more than the recommended minimum. Crucially, this is where the judge’s discretion ended: it was Labour policies which shredded his minimum sentence to little over five years. As Sweeney was arrested in the car with the abducted girl, he could do nothing other than plead guilty. But this entitled him to an automatic onethird reduction in his sentence, thanks to the dictates of the Sentencing Guidelines Council set up two years ago by the Home Office. The system is designed to encourage guilty pleas, thus speeding up court procedures and lowering costs. But idiotically, Section 5.2 of the act means that this offer even applies ‘where an offender is caught red-handed’. No matter how strongly judges may dissent, they are mandated to comply.
Next we must take account of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, under which Sweeney will automatically be considered for parole after half of his already reduced sentence. This is applied to all prisoners, no matter how depraved the crime. Since 2000, such rules have allowed 53 criminals serving ‘life’ sentences to be released after six years or less. While Mr Reid has demanded an appeal against what he sees as the unduly lenient sentence given to Sweeney, it will be granted only if an ‘error of principle’ is upheld. Here, the error was legislative, a foolish law drafted by the government. It is not one the Prime Minister is well-placed to protest against. It is understandable that Mr Reid should express outrage when faced with the consequences of this botched legislation. But the bias against prison sentences is now ingrained at every level of England’s criminal justice apparatus. This is being led from the top in the form of Lord Phillips, the Lord Chief Justice, who declared last month that ‘a community sentence is more likely to prevent re-offending than a prison sentence’. England must adjust, he said, to the realities of an era in which a third of men have a criminal conviction by the age of 30.
In its five-year plan the Home Office declares, as a matter of official doctrine, that there are too many prisoners and that shortterm sentences are inefficient ‘either at punishing the offender, or at stopping them committing crime again’. The latter claim is true, as the disaster of the early release scheme has shown. But is the answer shorter and fewer sentences?
The real problem is not rebel judges — as ‘liberal’ as many of them undoubtedly are but judges sticking too faithfully to flawed ministerial instruction. It is too late for Mr Blair to change his mind now, of course, as Lord Goldsmith was effectively reminding him last week. The baton — or truncheon — now passes to the Conservatives, who can capitalise on the wealth of data from failed Home Office experiments to prove that prison is the best means of protecting the public from persistent offenders. With 80,000 places for 77,000 inmates, there is an obvious need for new prisons — capital projects which Gordon Brown is unlikely to want to pay for. While David Davis made the building of new jails a core theme in his failed leadership bid, such rhetoric jars with David Cameron’s style. Yet the logic for adopting this policy is becoming more compelling by the month. Some Cameroons agonise in private that the Tory leader has not been sufficiently robust and clear on this very simple point: more criminals should be in prison, and should serve longer sentences.
Mr Blair is reaching the end of a painful intellectual journey. After realising that the Conservatives were right on the internal market for the National Health Service and on grant-maintained schools, he is only now — by implication — endorsing the slogan Mr Howard made his own more than a decade ago: prison works. Yet under his government, England’s criminal justice system has come to enshrine the opposite principle. The Prime Minister is banging his head against a brick wall that he built himself.
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