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.
He wrote: “The Sentencing Council is a woke, unaccountable organisation. This week it issued guidance to make prison sentences less likely if you are an ethnic minority… Two-tier justice is not a myth.”
Robert Jenrick, also sometimes the de facto UK opposition leader, criticised the Labour government for trying to appear bold on equality under the law when this change may have been their work in the first place. He told broadcaster Sky News of the emergence of these new instructions to justice that it is a stark example of “two-tier justice” that would corrode public trust in the law.
He said: “To me, this seems like blatant bias, particularly against Christians, and against straight white men… Either this was the policy of the justice secretary – she’s changed her mind, but this was her policy – or she was asleep at the wheel.”
Buttressing these points, British broadsheet The Daily Telegraph reports Friday that members of that Council have previously gone on record as holding very politicised views on justice, including Council advisor Beverley Thompson OBE who believes ‘BAME’ people are over-represented in the justice system. In other words, too many non-white people are charged and sentenced.
Others instances cited include members professing support for BLM, lamenting “minoritisation” through “social processes of power and domination”, and agitation against prison sentences for ethnic minorities in definance of the “punitivist attitude of the general public”.
Breitbart News
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