The Spectator’s Notes | 11 December 2010

Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop.

Kenneth Clarke’s reform of prisons is an example of the target culture which the coalition says it wants to stop. His target is to reduce the prison population by 3,000 by 2015. Since the projected increase in the population (absent the new policy) is somewhere between 2,000 and 7,000, this will be a very hard target to hit. It is therefore almost inevitable that people will be kept out of or released from prison for bad reasons. As soon as the public sense this, they will lose confidence in the policy.

In March 1998, the Deutsch-Britische Gesellschaft, an enlightened body devoted to Anglo-German understanding, paid for me to travel round Germany giving the same lecture each night. Its title was ‘Independent nation states are the best means of preventing war in Europe’, but its main topical thrust was to argue, rather impertinently, that my hosts should not join the euro, which was about to come into being. ‘I am truly astonished that the German nation should be proposing to surrender the sovereign symbol of its successful return to civilisation, prosperity and good government,’ I said. ‘Each time anyone uses a deutschmark he is reminded that its country of origin is rich, and secure and trustworthy… Now this great achievement is to be spun upon the roulette wheel of greater European integration.’ The result of the euro would be that: ‘Resentment at the actions of unelected foreign bankers… will force politicians to transfer huge sums of public money to the aggrieved. This, in turn, requires higher taxes, and a central authority to allocate the money. A European economic policy and a European economic government will be born.’