March 31, 2025 - 10:40am
Even those who have no sympathy for Labour should be horrified at the abject sight of a British government, of whatever persuasion, being treated with such obvious contempt as Keir Starmer has been by the Sentencing Council.
The Sentencing Council is a quango which issues “guidance” (so-named but largely mandatory) to judges. Created by Gordon Brown a month before the 2010 election, it and its predecessors’ purpose was to restrict judges’ discretion over sentencing so that punishment for the same crime didn’t vary enormously depending on which court they were tried in, or which judge presided.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood expressed in the strongest terms her objections to the Council’s plans to establish a two-tier sentencing regime (it proposes to guarantee certain identity groups a pre-sentencing report, which almost invariably leads to a more lenient sentence).
The quango’s response? First, a deeply misleading public letter to Mahmood; now, open defiance. After the PM signalled his willingness to change the law to stop the introduction of “two-tier” sentencing guidelines, the Sentencing Council for England and Wales has refused to back down on its guidance. This puts Starmer in a deeply invidious position.
If he legislates to overrule the Council’s new “guidance”, as Mahmood has suggested, he risks further upsetting his own party, which is already feeling mutinous after successive welfare cuts. What’s more, he’d be handing a significant win to Robert Jenrick, who recently tabled his own bill to that effect which the Government rejected. But if Starmer doesn’t intervene, he will humiliate his Justice Secretary and deeply undermine any future attempt to exert ministerial pressure on the quasi-autonomous state.
The Prime Minister can be forgiven if he feels aggrieved by this; for while the Sentencing Council is a Labour creation, the Tories must take the lion’s share of the blame for the imminent arrival of “two-tier justice”. After all, it was the Conservatives who not only presided over the appointment of the Council’s current membership, several of whom are entirely open about their veneration of identity politics, but who in 2016 appointed David Lammy to conduct a review into racial bias in the justice system.
His report was the spur for the new guidelines, and in choosing him David Cameron and Theresa May all but wrote the conclusions themselves. Clearly, evidence from the Ministry of Justice about systemic discrimination by juries against white defendants seems to have escaped their notice.
Did either Conservative leader really intend for it to get this far? Probably not. It’s not inconceivable that they didn’t think all that deeply about it. The Lammy Review, like May’s talk of “burning injustices” (which rather pre-empted her own review), was a nice thing to announce; its subsequent mutation into the new guidelines proceeded unchecked because nobody wanted to be the nasty person opposing it in the meetings.
But if the current row has put a spotlight on anything, beyond the sheer extent to which MPs have outsourced their jobs to quangos, it is the way these sugar-rush announcements can bake bad ideas into the structure of government.
Even if the public mood has turned against identity politics — and Mahmood would not have intervened so forcefully if she did not think it had — there is now a sprawling apparatus of semi-public bodies driving it forward anyway. Nowhere is this problem more pronounced than within the judiciary: for good historic reasons, a judge is formidably difficult to remove from their post, and can sit the bench for decades.
The Sentencing Council’s brazen disregard for Parliament is all the more remarkable because some judges clearly smell danger in growing public scrutiny. Only last month Baroness Carr, the Lady Chief Justice (and chair of the Sentencing Council), launched a wildly over-the-top attack on both Starmer and Kemi Badenoch for daring to criticise an asylum decision.
A more prudent strategist might have at least tried to take the heat out of the issue. Instead, she and her colleagues have thrown down the gauntlet and made the row over PSRs a trial of strength between themselves and Parliament. The question now is whether Starmer will seize this opportunity to root out the rot — and whether, deep down, his party wants to.
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Subscribethe guidelines if implemented would be in Breach of the ECHR( they have even said this) and probaly numerous UN codes
Any White , male, straight person sentenced after the implementation of these guildines would be able to sue the goverment, get a payout and a sentence reduction. As White, Straight, Male’s are a significant % of the prisoner population (lower than their % in the general population). This would be very expensive, very embarassing for the Goverment
So will Labour implement an illegal guideline. Here’s the thing, we already have lower sentencing for Women for the same offence, they just don’t write that down in law
The main takeaway from this article, for anyone who hasn’t noticed yet, is that the Conservatives are fake opposition.
I can’t think of a single bad Labour policy that the Conservatives reversed. Remember the promised Bonfire of the Quangos? They could have done it several times over, but chose not to.
We’ve had a New Labour government for the entire 21st century. It’s no wonder we’re in the state we’re in.
The one “Conservative” accomplishment was Brexit, and that was just a gamble that went the wrong way. The aim was to crush resistance to transnational government within the Conservative Party and in society at large.
The bonfire of the quangoes would have then required them to do and act, and of course then when their incompentence shone through, take the responsibility. And none of them would have wanted to do that once they realised that would be their fate. You only need listen to Johnson now and you can tell he feels hard done by. Not in any way accepting of the failure of his leadership. The man has no idea, and no ideas.
Brexit was not, of course, a Conservative Party accomplishment since the party did not support it and Cameron resigned rather than be responsible for implementing it. The Brexit vote simply highlighted how out of touch the entire political class was with the wishes of a majority of the country – a majority forged in the face of the propaganda of the three major parties and the MSM generally and the BBC in particular. Brexit has not been the success it might conceivably have been had it not been implemented by a Conservative Party that largely opposed it. That failure to ensure any substantial benefit flowed from Brexit has had the result we see today of a massive majority for Labour against the rightward drift seen on the continent.
A proper Conservative government would have had the promised bonfire of the Quangos and would certainly not have appointed an ideologue like Lammy to head up any racial commission. The report referred to in the article refuted the idea that BAME defendants are more likely to be convicted than white defendants despite the belief in this by many in the BAME community. Institutionalising a finger on the scales of justice in favour of BAME accused should have been anathema for a justice system wishing to be perceived as colour blind. If you want to persuade the populace that there exists institutional discrimination against the native population these guidelines are just the way to go about it, and even members of Labour can see it and know that endorsing this would be electorally damaging, but Quangos don’t care as they don’t rely on popular approval.
there are 2 reasons why BAME are more likely to be in Prison, they are more likely to commit a crime, anyone with their eyes open knows that
The other excuse i’ve heard, they are less likely to please guilty, hence getting a longer sentence
The public are increasingly losing faith in the judiciary and the judicial process, whether it is the ridiculous implementation of speech laws which sees mothers and grandmothers behind bars for years for fairly innocuous in the grand scheme of things social media posts, or ludicrous blocking of deportations supposedly on human rights grounds. The whole system needs a radical overhaul – winning a minor spat with one quango won’t be enough.
You’re 100%right in my opinion. Personally, I think the starting point is to repeal or amend every law that even mentions human rights. Instead renew laws to enforce human and corporate responsibilities. At the same time introduce a rule that for every new law (after the human rights changes) two existing laws must be either ended or combined with others. This would lead to far fewer opportunities for lawyers to play fast and loose with justice.
Repeal every piece of legislation passed by a Labour government in the last 25 years – human rights, “equality” “gender recognition”, employment.
Maybe by the Tories too.
Set legislation back to 1997 and we will all be freer, safer and our economy might start functioning again.
And replace all the current judiciary.
This looks to be ‘BLM sentencing’ based on adherence to the structural principle of systemic racism in modern Marxist discourse. My greater concern is with the judiciary today reaching out for an updated form of the insanity plea (Nottingham triple murder) as well as the interventions of human rights lawyers in the cases of aggressive/violent/criminal so-called asylum seekers. That is why the UK needs to be out of the ECHR before it starts considering Rwanda-style deterrents or naval interventions to protect her sea borders.
Policies that favour foreigners, non-whites, women or homosexuals over British, heterosexual, white men will lead to the utter disintegration of “liberal” society. Women only have equal employment and voting rights because men have allowed them to have them. Immigrants – Commonwealth, EU or other – are only here at the pleasure of the native majority. Alternative lifestyles only exist because they are tolerated by the straight majority. So long as white men don’t feel they are being taken advantage of, things can tick along nicely. As soon as they do feel that, things will change very rapidly indeed. And in scary ways.
These idiots at the Sentencing Council should realise they are playing with fire! Starmer should immediately disband the whole quango and return its powers to the cabinet.
Yes. But he won’t.
You are right and it is very scary. I think two-tier-ism (aka policies that discriminate against white men) will be the end of two-tier Keir. And I think the next government – which I believe will probably be a Reform/Tory coalition – will be the last chance to fix this at the ballot box. After that comes non-democratic means of sorting our the issue and that is a terrible prospect.
“After that comes non-democratic means of sorting our the issue and that is a terrible prospect.”
I think this is near inevitable , and what’s the outcome from it, well no offence, it’s no contest , the winner is already known and it’s not the side Labour thinks
I know the capability of my fellow people, they nice, slow to act, but mess with them and there no saving you
So the outcome will be the fault of the left, who will quickly find not all people, cultures are equal
Never back a bear into a corner
“Women only have equal employment and voting rights because men have allowed them to have them” 100% , i’ve been stating the same. Women’s rights are dependant on having the Men of that society, agree and support them. It won’t just affect women’s rights in the west, but globally as there will be no dominant west pushing for it
It’s why i say Trump is the best deal for the Left, why because he preserves a functional society with laws, rights, protections. The left if given power for long enough erode all of that, therefore it’s the law of the jungle, and they will lose
Defund the police was always quiet amusing, as sure get rid of the police, then what’s happens to all Civil rights laws, oh wait, you don’t have them, because there is fundamentally no law, and the strongest prevail, and that’s not the left who get triggered over bad words
Men no matter the descrimination they face will always fundamentally decide what society will be , whether it’s in the liberal west or the less liberal developing world
Women need to understand this, their freedoms are at the discretion of the men in their society. For Western women, they got lucky, most Western Men are ok with Women having equal rights, but change that demographic, not as certain
“Starmer should immediately disband the whole quango and return its powers to the cabinet” he won’t because they provide a useful scapegoat, he can pretend he does’nt agree with it, but he does. These are the same people as he is. They think they can implement apartheid against the majority and get away with it.
See here’s the problem, that might work for the majority in India, Africa when the Europeans did it, that not gonna fly with us.
If White men are treated like this, why would’nt they just say, lets remove no matter your passport, all non whites from the UK.
If they don’t see this as a likely possibility , then they really are stupid
Today we learn that this infects bail decisions as well.
Robert Jenrick cannot possibly claim any credit here. This is one of those problems which at least 95% of the blame can be put on the disastrous 14 years of Tory rule.
Total farce.
I have no doubt that the Justice Secretary (for all her limitations) can foresee the ‘….oh but my religion and e.g. West African culture allows me to clip my wife with a stick…’ defences cheered on by Queers for Palestines and Lesbians Embrace the p***s type folk.
It is fantastic to be a tax payer in the UK today. Paying for layers and layers of Gov quangoes and departments that undermine the Gov and the implementation of duly elected political manifestoes, like them or not. So you get nothing done about immigration, nothing done about the implementation of unfair sentencing, and on and on. Meanwhile local authorities are going bust because money is being sucked out of the tax coffers to pay for this sort of rubbish, instead of funding school, police, refuse collection, roads, hospitals and so on. No, it is far more important to pay people inordinate amounts of money to do things like this article presents to prevent Govs doing what they were elected for. UK DOGE anyone?
Actually, local authorities are going bust because, every year, a larger proportion of their income has to be devoted to paying the unfunded pensions of former employees. Same for the NHS.
That too is a contributory factor, and the types of Gov depts as mentioned above are also producing people that will continue to suckle at the state teet for 40 or 50 years post retirement….. It is necessary to reduce the burden on the tax payer signficantly in the UK. That can start with getting rid of departments that do not serve the people, but instead hinder them and burden them with huge ever growing costs.
The problem is always the same: the complete lack of any organisational defence mechanisms protecting the white native population. Every other ethnic, racial, religious, or sexual group has a vast network of advocacy organisations — but white natives have nothing. With no pushback, the woke fascist left are free to do whatever they want.
White natives must organise ( if they want this type of thing to stop ) and stop thinking of themselves as a ‘majority’ in the balkanised dystopia that modern Britain has become.
How is it that BOTH are main political parties have allowed this utter nonsense to get this far!?
Because millions still keep voting them in. Vote Reform, whenever they’ll let you.
Call their bluff and just disband it.
God, the Tories were useless.
“the Sentencing Council is a Labour creation, [and] the Tories… presided over the appointment of the Council’s current membership ”
Yep, this part of the ‘deep state’ is the work of the ConLabLib Uniparty. Vote Reform, whenever they’ll let you.
This whole story is utter rubbish as anybody in the profession well understands. What is appalling is the inability of those in government to withstand an ill-informed mob, and the willingness of the official opposition to fan the flames. And there was nothing “wild” about the LCJ’s warning that it is a dangerous precedent for politicians to announce that a judge has given a wrong decision in a specific case, rather than abiding by the judgment or appealing it. What will you do when all the laws are cut down, and the devil turns back upon you?
Well that was a convincing argument.
Perhaps, but ‘everyone in the profession’ is also convinced that the state ought to be run by lawyers – and that £600 per hour for having a Home Office document on your desk is fair remuneration.
As with so many things, Shakespeare had the answer.
It’s a pretty safe bet, given his record and despite everything he says, that Starmer thoroughly approves of the Sentencing Council’s policy and will do nothing about it beyond rhetorical posturing – just as he has no intention at all of doing anything about illegal immigration. It’s quite astonishing that anyone takes him at his word. It’s Taqqiya, all of it.
No one knows why Starsi Starmer appears with a Union Jack. It doesn’t feel like England around here anymore……..