Ken Clarke was summoned to Downing Street yesterday, the BBC reports. He spoke to David Cameron for half an hour, after which the controversial sentencing review was dropped: there will not be a per cent
fifty discount in plea bargaining and Clarke will have to find £130m of savings from elsewhere in his department.
Clarke has paid for last month’s rape victim fiasco, which so incensed the party leadership. The government is adamant that this is not a u-turn; rather, it argues, it has consulted on extending plea bargaining from the current level of 30 per cent and decided against such a move. It points to a report issued by the Howard League, which finds that community services and further sentencing discounts will lessen the deterrent element in criminal justice and do nothing to abate re-offending, the central aim of Clarke’s reforms. The report chimes exactly with Professor Ken Pease’s findings last July. On the other hand, the Prison Reform Trust is square behind Clarke’s proposals.
But there is a wider context here too. Downing Street has been openly wary of Clarke’s liberal crime agenda, fearful of surrendering vital ground on law and order to Labour. As Jonathan Jones noted during the recent rape fiasco, a large majority of the public oppose the reforms. That probably concentrated minds in Number 10. However, after the retreats on privatisation forests and the NHS, there is a growing sense that this is a government that runs for cover at the first whiff of unpopularity, a weakness it may yet come to rue.
Where does this leave the justice secretary and his programme? The sentencing discount was a key part of his reform package. Clarke still has radical plans to tackle re-offending, but his resources will now be further constrained because he can’t substantially cut prison numbers. He was already one of the Cabinet of the Walking Dead; now he’s like in the old boy in the club who sinks into an armchair and never rises again.
Ironically, Gabrielle Browne, the attempted rape victim for whom all of this is being done (metaphorically at least), met Clarke recently and, after having the sentencing proposals clearly explained, she said they were “fair enough” and backed the policy. Lucky that Clarke has a sense of humour.
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