Something new is coming down the “far-right conspiracy theory” to government policy pipeline
From “far-right conspiracy theory” to government policy in just two months.
Back in January, an internal review conducted by the Home Office concluded that fears about a “two-tier” justice system were “extremist”. And yet earlier this week, the Sentencing Council released new guidelines, under which ethnic and religious minorities are to be given softer sentences — presumably as a counterweight to perceived “structural racism” in our judicial system.
“Two-tier justice” is not a right-wing talking point — it is the policy of the British state. Voices on the right, chief among them Robert Jenrick, have called out these new guidelines as a poisonous attack on the principle of equality before the law. This “inversion of the rule of law”, as Jenrick rightly puts it, is fundamentally at odds with centuries of British jurisprudence.
Unfortunately, this is actually nothing new; the British state has pursued a policy of two-tier justice for some time now. As Charlie Peters has noted, brazen examples of two-tier justice stretch back to the mid-2010s. In 2015, a judge ruled that Asian victims of child abuse suffer more than White victims, thus mandating stricter punishments for those who abuse Asian children. According to that judge, the “shame” culture in many Asian communities, and damage to arranged marriage prospects, makes the abuse of Asian children a more severe offence than the abuse of White children.
Likewise, members of Pakistani grooming gangs have received strikingly light sentences, perhaps for fear of sparking a backlash from the Pakistani community. Four men involved in the Telford grooming gang case — Muhammed Choudhrey, Muhammed Yunis, Mahroof Khan, and Tanveer Ahmed — each received a sentence of just 2.5 years when they were convicted back in 2013. Each of these men was found guilty of having sex, or facilitating sex, with children.
Somehow, those convicted for speech offences during last summer’s riots received comparable sentences. Daniel Kingsley, 33, from Flintshire, received almost 2 years in prison for inflammatory Facebook posts. Julie Sweeney, 53, from Cheshire, also received a sentence of more than a year for a similar offence. Whatever you think of the content of those social media posts, how can any sane country hand down such similar sentences for such different crimes?
Yet by formalising this unofficial policy as a principle of our legal system, the new Sentencing Guidelines lay bare a simple reality — for the British state, preserving the project of multiculturalism is more important than the safety of ordinary Britons.
We should not jettison the principle of equality before the law in order to prop up the failing project of multiculturalism
Lighter sentencing is just one of the tools that the Government is using to manage communal tensions in our increasingly divided society. The braying of left-wing activists about minority overrepresentation in our prisons fuels conflict and division, after all. Much simpler to hand them a concession, by artificially skewing the demographics of our prisons, than ask why certain groups are more likely to commit crime in the first place.
But this is not a tradeoff worth making. Put simply, we should not jettison the principle of equality before the law in order to prop up the failing project of multiculturalism. To sacrifice such an important idea so cheaply is deeply shameful. Equality before the law was hard-won and hard-kept by generations of Britons before us; it is one of the principles which made us amongst the freest, safest, and most prosperous nations in the world. Mealy-mouthed attempts to abdicate responsibility for this decision simply do not hold water when such an important idea is at stake — the Lord Chancellor must do more.
If the Lord Chancellor were really serious about preventing these new guidelines from coming into force, she actually has the power to do so. Under the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, she has the power to dismiss members of the Sentencing Council, on the grounds of “incapacity or misbehaviour”. What better example of “misbehaviour” could there be than undermining ancient legal principles, such as equality before the law? The current members of the Sentencing Council should be sacked and replaced, with their successors instructed to overturn these poisonous new guidelines.
In order to dismiss the judicial members of that Committee, she must have the support of the Lady Chief Justice, Baroness Carr, who recently condemned both Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch for criticising judicial decisions. The Lord Chancellor is unlikely to find a friend in her, but she does have the power to unilaterally remove the six non-judicial members of the Council, and to put pressure on disagreeable judicial members to resign. If she were really serious about equality before the law, this is exactly what she would do.
Don’t hold your breath. When push comes to shove, this Government has shown itself willing to sacrifice all manner of things to spare the blushes of the multiculturalists. Whether it be arbitrary bans on certain items of kitchenware, or restrictions on online speech, anything can be jettisoned in order to ease or preempt intercommunal tensions.
I am afraid that it won’t work. Activist charities will continue to claim that the British judicial system is structurally racist against ethnic minorities, even as official guidelines mandate the opposite. No concession will ever be enough; the sooner the political establishment learns this, the better.
