QUENTIN LETTS: Chamber of gasbags reward one another as thugs stroll free
They flung wide the prison gates and a thousand thugs walked free. Yet the Commons was punishment in itself: a chamber of drippy gasbags praising each other for their clemency and virtue.
Watching it, one felt a certain kinship with Solzhenitsyn’s labour-camp inmate Ivan Denisovich. Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood was explaining her second tranche of early releases.
News websites already had photographs of lags being collected from prison in £100,000 limousines, cackling and promising to vote Labour.
In our elected legislature almost no one found those scenes enraging. Okay, a couple of Tories had a minor go and Labour’s Charlotte Nicholls (Lab, Warrington North) worried that victims of crime might not like seeing wrongdoers back on the streets earlier than expected.
Shabana Mahmood KC MP, The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood and Transport Secretary Louise Haigh leave 10 Downing Street after cabinet meeting
Otherwise there was cross-party nodding. Cordial thanks fluttered to and fro as MPs praised their opponents’ temperate tone. What about the so-called people’s champions of Reform? Were its MPs not there to shout their disgust that criminals were strolling free?
Nope. Their leader, Nigel Farage, had looked in for a short while earlier at Foreign Office questions but for this session not a single Reform bloke was to be seen. The hour-long session started around 1.30pm. Were Reform at the pub, putting ploughman’s lunch before party?
Ms Mahmood talked and talked, hunched earnestly over her notes. ‘We must be smarter about who we send to prison,’ she warbled, her sing-song diphthongs those of a customer complaints instructor versed in anger-management workshops.
‘We need both sticks and carrots. We will take an evidence-based approach.’ I have covered the Commons on and off since 1990 and there has never been a time when prisons ministers have not said these things.
She said ‘this Government believes in prison’ but she also felt it was not worth locking up some offenders. Well of course. She spoke of ‘building a prison outside of prison’. Outside of prison? Ugh. Is there a maximum sentence for grievous misuse of prepositions?
She spoke of ‘the work we will take forward’ and disclosed that ‘rates of violence against prison officers have been too high for too long’. You don’t say.
Nigel Farage , had looked in for a short while earlier at Foreign Office questions but for this session not a single Reform bloke was to be seen. The hour-long session started around 1.30pm
She said ‘this Government believes in prison’ but she also felt it was not worth locking up some offenders. Well of course. She spoke of ‘building a prison outside of prison’
Much of it, as ever, was blamed on Conservatives. And yet Ms Mahmood announced that a review of prisons was to be led by David Gauke, one of those very Tory justice secretaries allegedly responsible for so much wickedness.
Ah, but Mr Gauke – or Lord Gauke, as we may soon know him – was okay because ‘he has the respect of the judiciary’. A friend of the judges. No further questions.
Not a single ruddy person asked why we have been so useless at deporting foreign prisoners (of whom there are 10,000). If we sent a few back to their homelands we might not have to release violent druggies. Not a single person asked if it was a wise use of cells to hand long sentences to previously innocent people who posted hate-filled remarks on social media.
Instead Tory spokesman Edward Agar gulped about what a good stick his old boss Gauke was. Tessa Munt (Lib Dem, Wells) dribbled on about how it was unfair that so many people from marginalised communities were criminals.
An urbane young smugster called Jake Richards (Lab) oozed satisfaction that the Starmer Government was ‘grasping the nettle’ of lighter sentences – one suspects the nettle may sting his Rother Valley constituents rather more than it does him. And Andrew Slaughter (Lab, Hammersmith) wanted some prisons to be closed.
Thank heavens, then, that Sir Desmond Swayne (Con, New Forest West) tried to cut through the intellectual whale fat to note that some souls considered Mr Gauke ‘a notorious wet’. That, Dessie, is why he was chosen.
Solzhenitsyn at least only gave us one day in the life of Ivan Denisovich. In this Commons we’re looking at five years with no prospect of time off for good behaviour.
