A Spectator's Notebook
ONE OF THE DIFFICULTIES Of the House of Lords is that it is liable to be laughed at both when its members turn up and when they stay away. More than three hundred attended the hanging debate a week or two ago; about twenty-five bothered to come along to Tuesday's debate on prison con- ditions. Debate is hardly the word for it, as all the speakers were on the same side, except Lord Mancroft, the Under- Secretary of the Home Office. Our prisons were roundly con- demned as 'beastly, repellent, loathsonie and degrading,' and Prison conditions were described by Lord Haden-Guest as those of 'swinish filthiness.' Even Lord Mancroft admitted that there was 'a lot still wrong,' and his speech showed a welcome change from the attitude of fatuous complacency that he exhibited in last year's debate. The two things most obviously wrong with our prisons are lack of hygiene and the absurdly low pay that prisoners get. While making every allowance for shortage of money, the position seems very much worse than it need be. A diplomat has just been appointed to lead the Treasury. I should like to see the next permanent head of the Home Office come from the Ministry of Health or some such department.
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