It has been a surreal experience carrying out this process against the backdrop of a witch-hunt against offenders
It has been a surreal experience carrying out this process against the backdrop of a witch-hunt against offenders.
I see little evidence that sentences are “soft”. It is now the time of year when applications for these awards are sifted and existing scholarships renewed. Millions of others had campaigned through 504 organisations under the banner Make Poverty History. Across the world, 150 million more had joined the Global Call to Action Against Poverty. The 10 simultaneous Live8 concerts had been seen by 3.4 billion people It constituted the biggest political lobby in human history
But was it all a waste of time?.
Alongside Tony Blair, John Reid and the editor of The Sun, I spent a lot of last week worrying about prisoners, prisons and our sentencing policies. But when I hear talk of soft judges and a “justice gap”, I wonder if I exist in a parallel universe. Years ago I wrote the biography of that indefatigable prison visitor, Lord Longford, and following his death I joined with his friends and family to set up a charitable trust in his memory. One of our projects is to award scholarships to enable young ex-prisoners to go on, after being released, to university.
So what did it all achieve? A year ago 250,000 people marched in Edinburgh as the leaders of the rich world met in Gleneagles. In neither case, civil or military, is this the way to make a decision of such national moment. The Prime Minister’s energy review increasingly looks like a transparent device to marshal the arguments behind a decision already made We are familiar with this style of politics. Tony Blair once said (about plans to reorganise Scottish regiments): “We will have an opportunity to have a proper debate once the decision is made.”.