Government Greed and Hypocrisy

I see that the press are soundly condemning the BMA for sanctioning a strike by doctors, the first for almost 40 years, over proposed government reforms to their pensions.
As with other Public Sector workers these ‘reforms’ amount to the doctors paying higher pension contributions, and working longer, up to age 68, before they can retire.

As an ex-Local Authority officer I don’t claim to be impartial, just the opposite, I’m firmly on the side of all those resisting these government-imposed ‘reforms’.

Lets be clear as why this ‘pension crisis’ occurred in the first place.

The UK, prior to 1997, had what is widely acknowledged to be one of the finest pension schemes in the world, until the government got greedy and abolished tax relief on income from share dividends, a key source of cash for pension funds and which effectively robbed those funds of nearly £12,000,000,000 leaving huge shortfalls and forcing hundreds of firms to wind up their final salary schemes.

Since then the government’s cack-handed handling of the economy has resulted in the present depression and accompanying financial crisis, with falling investment income, derisory interest returns on savings and industrial stagnation.

The government’s response is to force those still in final-salary pension schemes to pay more, get less and work longer for it and to throw the rest of the working population onto the tender mercies of the financial markets and providers, you know, those bankers and financiers that the government thinks are little better than loan-sharks.

If there really is a ‘pension crisis’ and pension schemes have become ‘unsustainable’ – whose fault is it?
It’s not the pension funds themselves, still less is it their working members – IT’S THE GOVERNMENT’S FAULT!

If the government got it’s sticky little fingers out of working peoples pension funds, and got to grips with it’s reckless over-spending, there would be no ‘crisis’ and people who’ve worked all their lives, paid their taxes and been good little boys and girls could look forward to retiring at a sensible age with a decent pension instead of having to work until they drop into some God-awful care home when the government can seize anything they have left to pay for their so-called ‘care’.

What a set of hypocrites they all are.

A Deluded Man

So Ken Clarke thinks that the newspapers are to blame for the size of the prison population, saying it’s their fault that thousands of criminals are in jail needlessly.

see here

These are the same ‘needlessly jailed’ criminals who’ve had chance after chance of avoiding jail by being given so-called ‘community punishments’ and include the 52812 criminals who’ve been given more than one ‘community punishment’ in a single year, a figure highlighted by MP Mr Pritl Patel who also revealed that one such criminal had received no less than 20 ‘community punishments’, all of which had manifestly failed to either reform him or turn him away from offending.

These are facts which Mr Clarke, in his zeal to do anything rather than jail criminals, would prefer to ignore as it doesn’t conform to his misguided, skewered view of ‘justice’. 

The sad fact is that justice will not prevail, nor will the inexorable rise in criminal behaviour be reduced while we have a ‘Justice Secretary’ who does not believe in punishment.

An Interesting Day

Busy day in court today – remands; early first hearings; committals to Crown Court; a bit of sentencing, this is what the Magistrates’ Court should be rather than the rigid ‘matrix’ it’s become of late with road traffic cases on Wednesday, domestic violence on Thursday and trials on Friday, to the exclusion of everything else.

Time was, and my age is showing now, all days were like today, solicitors in-and-out, prisoners up-and-down and never knowing what would crop up next.

Days like today keep you on your toes and test your competence and knowledge in a variety of ways, very satisfying all round.

We managed to upset a couple of solicitors along the way, not least by being more conversant than they with the law on one particular issue, that of R vs Povey, the benchmark case governing possession of an offensive weapon, but I won’t lose any sleep on that account.

Far too often solicitors, or at least some of them, treat us, the Magistrates, as being ignorant of the law and malleable to whatever they say. Time was of course when Magistrates were actively discouraged from even thinking about what the law actually said, or meant, that was for the Legal Advisor to determine, but times change!

Nowadays, more and more we are directed by the higher courts, and by the Sentencing Council, to be aware of the Law and to apply it, taking advice when unsure, and some solicitors seem to be finding it hard to come to terms with this new reality.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Case Management Hearings when trials are timetabled, witness lists agreed and the issues to be tried are agreed.
Whereas, this was once the private preserve of the Clerk and the advocates, now, on the direction of the Lord Chief Justice no less, it is for the bench to examine the issues and to question the advocates on the strength of their respective cases and the need for witnesses to attend and solicitors, in my experience, do not on the whole take kindly to being cross-examined by ‘mere’ Magistrates, especially those with a working knowledge of the Criminal Procedure Rules (shock horror – a Beak who knows what he’s doing).

The caveat to this is, of course, that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing and one must be very sure of one’s ground before arguing the toss with someone who has spent his or her working life immersed in the vagaries of English Law, and this is where the Legal Advisor comes into his or her own. When in doubt is the time to take advice, best done before one puts one’s foot in it.

One issue did come to the fore today, which gives me some concern. In two of the cases, and there was a similar one before me last week, it was clear that a previous bench had failed, somewhat spectacularly, to assess the seriousness of a case by reference to the Sentencing Guidelines. Such carelessness, and it can be nothing else, places the sentencing bench in an invidious position.
If the previous assessment is too low the defendant and his solicitor feels hard-done-by when sent to the Crown Court after a previous bench had determined that it fell within their powers to sentence.
Perhaps worse, and such a case occurred today, was when the assessment of seriousness had clearly been set far too high and had been sent to the Crown Court who promptly sent it back, instructing us to deal with it ourselves.

In each case a careful study of the guidelines, and a word with the Legal Advisor, would have prevented a situation which reflects badly upon the overall competence of the Lay Bench and does nothing to inspire confidence in its decisions.