British Bust

In the UK, justice is what you make of it:

New sentencing guidelines coming into force in the United Kingdom soon that would advise judges to go softer on ethnic and religious minorities when deciding whether to jail them are a dangerous manifestation of “two-tier justice”, UK government ministers say, vowing to block the change. This is quite a step change for this left-wing government from just months before when two-tier anything was a trope, conspiracy theory, or myth, the work of the “far right” trying to sow division. Now the story develops further, as The Times of London states these new rules for judges actually have their genesis in work by senior members of this very left-wing government. They report: The council said that the changes had been influenced by several sources of research, including a review carried out in 2017 by Lammy, now the foreign secretary. The review found widespread racial discrimination in the criminal justice system and recommended changes to improve outcomes for black, Asian and minority ethnic offenders. In the review, Lammy said that sentencing decisions needed greater scrutiny and judges must be equipped with more information about the offender’s background. Quite the conundrum for the government of the day to be working against its own past activism. Indeed, Brexit leader and now sometimes de facto UK opposition leader Nigel Farage observed on Friday that far from the present government’s involvement in the “woke, unaccountable” Sentencing Council being limited to David Lammy’s report, the Prime Minister himself is a former member of the body.

When you run the system, you can decide who gets what...