Labour's final betrayal

When you're in a hole that is so big, and there's no obvious way out, what do you do?

Well, if you happen to be in the Labour government, there is only one answer worth considering: keep digging and see where you end up. Why try a bold climb to the surface, when there is always the possibility of hacking your way through to Australia?

According to the Telegraph today, Labour and their left wing pals at the 'Sentencing Council' have decided that judges have been overly harsh lately. They have been guilty of allowing something called 'upward sentencing drift', which is very naughty and simply must be stopped now for the good of the country.

So what Labour have kindly decided to do, is to stop all this by imposing shorter sentences via the Sentencing Council thingy, whilst at the same time, killing two dirty birds with one stone by releasing a third of the prison population early.

Yes, that's right, you didn't read that funny. The government, in their final days in power, have decided to endear the populous ever more to its warm, caring bosom by letting a third of all prisoners out - whilst ensuring that in future, jail is used as a 'last resort'.

If you wanted to check up on just how many people this will entail, check out the official prison population statistics here.

As you can see, we're not that far off capacity. This won't have anything to do with the decision, of course. Neither will the fact that the critical prison population level has been the cause of countless headaches for Home Office ministers since the beginning of Labour's first term.

I remember back in the day when I used to work with ministers in Whitehall. The first business of the day would often be a furtive brief on the most up to date numbers of prisoners. One eye would keenly assess the number, and the other eye would nervously consider the maximum capacity figure. They never were far off.

But now Labour are staring down the barrel of oblivion, there must be something else; a further motivating factor in this astonishing and breathtaking decision.

This is no longer about simple incompetence. This is not a basic example of poor policy decision making, or injudicious short termism. I believe this is an act of ideology and malice. A reckless, traitorous piece of bad governance which can only, logically, have a negative impact on the decent, hard-working people of Britain.

Death by chocolate, cigarettes, pool, swimming and television: do you know how many prisoners die each year from bougainvillea exposure? Do you? Shame on you.

We must all surely accept that a good degree of the people who will be released are recidivist criminals. The statistics prove this as a very high probability.

Any given third of the prison population will undoubtedly include some nasty, vicious characters. So to say that the decision makes a mockery of justice and the courts process would be an understatement. It is a total middle finger up at the victims and their families, whoever and wherever they may be.

The left never did accept that there are bad people and that wrong must be punished. For them, the automatic assumption is that every wrong doer is matched by wrong doers everywhere. I.e. 'he who is without sin, cast the first stone'. On that logic alone, they think criminals are no worse than middle class Mondeo man.

They also think that every 'offender' (criminal is too harsh a word to use, these days) is a victim of circumstance, and that in any event, if we just tried to understand them more, and if we realised that property is not a man's sacred right, but more akin to theft, then we can begin to get somewhere in reaching out to the perfect society.

Did I forget to say? Lefties are innate idealists. They believe in the perfectibility of mankind. Capitalism and Toryism is what makes people fallible. So what we need to do is smash the demand and the desire for punishment, and to be ever more softer and understanding to 'offenders'. (I do like the word offender - it sort of means to say 'someone who did a little wrong, but someone who can say sorry and everything will be just fine')

I believe this deeply political decision is at the very least partly based on a desire to land one final blow against the middle classes and the law abiding. They have shown their true colours, once more. The New Labour myth was just that - a myth.

Yet in years to come, the people will forget how traitorous and destructive the social democratic experiment was. The left will return, and any half decent work done to reverse some of their evils will be undone, and we'll be back to square one.

Will this country ever emerge from its terminal decline, so long as we keep on allowing sick, fatally flawed left wing governments into Number 10?