Neil Clark

Let’s hear it for David Blunkett

Neil Clark says that the Home Secretary is wrong about many things, but not about life-imprisonment for murderers

Like most New Labour ministers, David Blunkett gets considerably more things wrong than he does right. Up to now, his tenure at the Home Office has been characterised by a series of ill-thought-out reforms, half-baked policy proposals and regular verbal gaffes. In three years we have had the draconian Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act – which suspends the 800-year-old habeas corpus in the case of foreign nationals suspected of terrorism – attacks on trial by jury, as well as criticism of Asian arranged marriages, and lectures on what language immigrants should speak in their own homes.

When he strays from his Home Office brief, Blunkett’s public pronouncements have been even more toe-curdling. His recent prediction that the Labour vote in northern local elections would be helped by a ‘Baghdad bounce’ – thereby implying that northerners would be more likely to support the bombardment of Iraq than namby-pamby southerners – received the contemptuous electoral response it deserved.

Nevertheless, every dog has his day, and David Blunkett is no exception. With his new proposals for a much tougher three-tier framework of sentencing, in which Parliament, despite the odious European Convention on Human Rights, retains the right to set recommended sentences for murder, the Home Secretary has finally got something right.

When the death penalty was abolished in 1965 (against the wishes of the vast majority of Britons), it was done so on the clear understanding that murder would be punished by life imprisonment and that life should mean life. Forty years on, when ‘life’ means on average a mere 121/2 years in jail, and more than 70 people have been killed by convicted murderers released early, it must be clear to all but the most die-hard members of the Howard League for Penal Reform that something has gone seriously wrong with the criminal-justice system.

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