Justice

While we were inspecting HMP Elmley on the Isle of Sheppey, a commotion broke out on one of the wings. ‘What’s up?’ one of my team asked the nearest prison officer. ‘Bloke who’s getting out tomorrow has just been told he’s being shipped to Rochester jail.’ The man was manhandled towards a prison van. ‘If I was him, I’d kick off too,’ the officer added quietly. Reducing the prison population will do nothing to stem the flow of drugs pouring into every jail in the country That week things were so desperate in the south of England that the prisoner was being forced to spend one night in a jail

If one were to ask for a quintessential display of the British character it would be hard to better the Shrewsbury Flower Show. Officially the world’s ‘longest-running flower show’, according to the Guinness World Records, it is held over two days in August, attracting 60,000 visitors. This summer should be the show’s 150th birthday. Last week, however, the Shropshire Horticultural Society abruptly cancelled it. Rising costs were cited as a factor. But the main reason was the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act – known as Martyn’s Law. The legislation, which was given royal assent this month, requires organisers of events with more than 200 people to engage in lengthy bureaucratic

The population of the United Kingdom was increased this week by the arrival of two Albanian lesbians who have been given the right to remain here by an deputy Upper Tribunal judge called Rebecca Chapman. The women insisted that they would face persecution in Albania for their sexual preferences. This is despite the fact that Albania decriminalised homosexuality 30 years ago and in 2010 adopted a law that prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.  Rebecca was not impressed, however, pronouncing Albania to be a ‘patriarchal, conservative society in which homophobic attitudes still exist, particularly in rural areas’. (Those of you who have just read Rebecca’s description of

Pointless laws Sir: The leading article ‘Wrong problem, wrong law’ (19 October) makes cogent points about the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill, in particular pointing out that it would probably not have made any difference had it been in force at the time of the Manchester Arena bombing, and that if passed it will impose disproportionate and often unmanageable burdens on venues such as churches and village halls. There is, in truth, a wider point here: most legislation is either counterproductive, useless or both. All legislation has five aspects: (1) A real purpose. This may be to achieve the ostensible purpose of the legislation, but is often really to make

The guilty plea of the former human rights lawyer Phil Shiner this week to charges of fraud is a story that deserves considerable attention. Shiner had tried to claim £200,000 in legal aid without disclosing that – in the breach of the rules – he had employed an agent to cold-call potential ‘victims’ of mistreatment at the hands of British service personnel in Iraq. An inquiry held by the UK government in 2014 found that the allegations of abuse or violence which Shiner brought forward had little basis in fact: one fighter who was said to have been killed in custody by a British soldier was established to have died

Ihave spent most of the morning trying to convince people online that Huw Edwards’s conviction does not mean that all, or even a majority, of Welsh people are sexually attracted to children. ‘We thought it was just sheep. It isn’t,’ one furious interlocuter named only as ‘Ned’ posted with what I assume he thought was bitter irony. Another mentioned that Edwards’s supposed ‘friend’, from whom he procured the disgusting photographs, was also Welsh and that there had been recent, very serious paedophilia cases in both Swansea and Cardiff crown courts. The big lie is that our courts are above the fray and never beholden to the ephemeral influence of politics

It’s a Wednesday evening, and I’m getting psyched up to go catch a paedophile with the boys. Playlist on, rocking down the A12 and chatting to my new mate, Nick, in his van. There’s a man not far from here who thinks he’s going to meet an underage girl tonight. He doesn’t know that we’ll be pulling up instead and that his sick fantasy – and his life as he knows it – will be over. Nick is a guy I met on Facebook who runs a team of paedophile hunters called London Overwatch. He says that he’s caught 300 paedophiles, and that tonight’s is one of the worst. This

In a week when the Chief Inspector of Prisons published an Urgent Notification detailing the horrors of HMP Wandsworth, I found myself revisiting memories of being jailed there for the crime of fraud. Clanging doors, rattling chains, men screaming at night in anguish or despair or because their cellmate was assaulting them. No help coming. Emergencies unattended for far too long, and people dead as a result. No purpose, no hope, not even the possibility of redemption. Wandsworth is a miserable prison, one which does as much as possible to brutalise, punish and hurt those it jails, and nothing to heal or change them for the better. The process does

This week’s truism: all top-down attempts at leftie social engineering end up causing rather more misery and injustice than the misery and injustice they were designed to alleviate. This is chiefly because they come up against that most un-leftie of things, reality – but also because liberals are incapable of looking at actual outcomes and are able only to wring their hands in despair and wish for stuff. The world is not an ideal place and attempts to pretend they can make it so are always misbegotten. When you politicise a crime, all kinds of problems occur The most obvious example of this is in that most explicitly iniquitous of

Procurement profligacy Sir: In response to Susan Hill’s query ‘Who allows the profligacy in NHS hospital procurement to continue?’ (‘Best medicine’, 16 July), it seems the national scale of public sector bureaucracy is just too great. Given the size and spending power of the NHS, no one should come close to achieving equal efficiencies in economies of scale, nor gain better prices from suppliers. But this is not the case. As a non-clinical procurement professional in the NHS, having come from the private sector, I’ve been surprised to consistently find the national purchasing authority of the NHS (formerly ‘NHS Supply Chain’, now ‘SCCL’) to be the worst pricing option available

At the end of October, just before I started as HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, the inspectorate and Ofsted visited Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre near Rugby. Rainsbrook was built by the Blair government to house the increasing numbers of children imprisoned as a result of policing targets and tough-on-crime policies and it was one of four centres contracted out to private providers. The great hope was that these better-funded centres would provide a more humane alternative to Young Offender Institutions. Rainsbrook holds children aged mostly 15 to 18, but on our inspection we discovered that for their first two weeks, new arrivals were being locked in their cells for 23½