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.

St George's Day

Today is the day to celebrate England's patron saint, and everything English; Shakespeare said it best:


This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,—
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

King Richard II. Act ii. Sc. 1.

A Betrayal

I admit to being astounded at the recent decision at Basildon Crown Court to sentence a 16-year-old to just 60 hours of community service, a three-month curfew and a three-year supervision order after he admitted wounding with intent and affray.
The youth, one of a gang of three, stabbed a 46 year old man three times in his back in an attempt to rob two schoolboys.

Now the Sentencing Guidelines for Wounding with Intent to do Grievous Bodily Harm, contrary to the Offences against the Person Act 1861 (section 18) says that, for a category 2 offence, which this undoubtedly was, the starting point should be 6 years imprisonment.
Even at the lowest category the starting point is one of 4 years custody.
Just carrying a knife, and where it’s not used should, according to the Court of Appeal in the 2008 case of R vs Povey, result in 12 weeks custody.

It takes a leap of the imagination which eludes me to find so much mitigation in sentencing to go from 6 years custody to 60 hours of un-paid work!

I can only assume the judge was influenced more by Ken Clarke than he was by the Sentencing Guidelines for last October our notoriously soft Justice Secretary said, to a Commons committee, that he opposed the concept of automatically locking up young knife criminals, saying it was wrong to suggest that every 13-year-old caught using a knife should be sent to jail.

It is frankly farcical to have the Government appointed Sentencing Council saying one thing, and the Justice Secretary saying exactly the opposite.

It’s little wonder the general public has lost faith in this government’s commitment to law and order, and to the protection of the people who elected it. I suspect they will pay dearly for this betrayal at the ballot box.

Big Brother is going to watch you.

The government says is considering including a Bill in next month's Queen's Speech to extend its ability to monitor all phone calls, emails and Internet use in the UK, a Bill which would force ISPs to install hardware on their servers which would enable GCHQ, the government's spy headquarters, to access "on demand" communications data stored on them without the necessity of first obtaining a court order.

This would allow the government to monitor everyone in the UK's emails, phone calls and which web sites they have visited.

Every email to your child, every status update for your friends, every message to your mistress, all would be monitored by GCHQ, at all times.

The Home Office Minister, James Brokenshire, has denied that it is the government's intention to form a giant database,"absolutely not" he says, and insists that the content of the calls, emails etc will not be monitored - just where and when they were made or sent, and to whom, and of course we believe him, and who will be able, once this facility is in place, to prove otherwise.

He has also said that the reading of people's Facebook conversations by GCHQ would be "disproportionate", although he doesn't say they won't do it, and does admit they could be "looked at", and if that isn't 'reading' what is?

When the last Labour government tried to introduce a similar Bill the present coalition partners opposed it, it hasn't taken them long to change their minds.

Nick Pickles, director of campaign group Big Brother Watch, has said the move is "an unprecedented step that will see Britain adopt the same kind of surveillance seen in China and Iran".

Conservative MP Dominic Raab says it would "fundamentally change the nature of the relationship between the state and the citizen" and turn every individual "into a suspect".

At present, our freedom and privacy is protected by the courts by saying: 'If you want to intercept someones private conversations and it is a terrorist or a criminal, go and ask a Magistrate to approve your request.'

Conservative MP David Davis said the planned changes would remove that protection

and in an interview with the BBC went on to say that "you shouldn't go beyond that in a decent, civilised society, but that is what is being proposed."

The cost of installing the tens of thousands of specialised pieces of hardware to monitor the country's Internet traffic by ISPs is expected to run into billions of pounds, a cost which Internet Service Providers would have little choice but to pass it on to their customers so that British Internet users would be paying extra to allow their government to spy on them more effectively.

Big Brother would not only be watching you, but would be charging you for the privilege.

Some, particularly government ministers, in an attempt to justify these plans, will no doubt say what, throughout history, every tyrant that ever existed has said to excuse their mechanics of repression and surveillance:

"It's for your own good''

"It's for the greater good of all"

"It's to combat dissidents"

"Law-abiding people have nothing to fear"

These very same sentiments were expressed by Hitler, Stalin and Chairman Mao and are used now by tyrannical regimes worldwide, be it China, Iran or North Korea.

David Morrish, a long serving Liberal Party councillor expounded the Liberal Party's principles before the last election when he said that the party was born out of the struggle for individual freedom and that "We will fight excessive government interference".

The Liberal Party's main pre-election manifesto stated quite clearly that they, the Liberal Party existed to create a liberal society and that they opposed the “Database” State.

The Colchestaer Conservative Association articulated the principles of the Conservative Party by saying that the core Conservative principles which provide the basis for all policy are that Conservatives stand for less interference from the state – freedom for individuals, families, voluntary groups and businesses and that they believe that the more you trust people, the more power and responsibility they are given, the stronger they and society become.

I never thought I would live to see the day that a Conservative-led government, in partnership with the Liberals, would be prepared to ignore these sentiments.

It shows that their so-called principles are no such thing and that they will set them aside, and all the traditions of freedom that countless millions have given their lives for, in their pursuit of power, power pure and simple over what was once a free people.

Been there, seen that and got the tee shirt.

So David Cameron wants to toughen up non-custodial community sentences with new sanctions.

Seemingly admitting that community sentences are seen as a soft alternative to prison, which they are, the Prime Minister is proposing to include new ‘tougher’ measures in the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill, though whether he’ll get his proposals past the arch-softy Ken Clarke is another matter.

A Ministry of Justice spokeswoman said:

"We want to reform community sentences to ensure that offenders are properly punished for their crimes and effectively rehabilitated and we are still considering a variety of options. We will publish a consultation setting out our proposals in due course."

Umm, been there, seen all that before.

Over the last 20 years I’ve seen various ‘initiatives’ to ‘toughen up’ non-custodial sentences. We’ve had ‘Community Service’; ‘Un-Paid Work’; ‘Community Payback’; Accredited Programs’; ‘Specified Activities’; ASBOs; restraining orders; football banning orders; exclusion orders and a host of other ‘sanctions’, none of which has made the slightest impression on either re-offending rates or the public’s perception that successive governments care more about money and social engineering than protecting the public.

And statistically it’s not looking good either.

In December, the National Offender Management Service said that during 2010/11 one in four offenders who had been given community sentences, or released from prison early on licence, failed to comply with the terms set by the authorities.They went on to say that of the 198,725 orders and licences that came to an end during that period, only 150,632 were completed successfully, a failure rate of one in four.