Ordinary decent criminals

The Bitchy Boys' Panorama is usually dire, but I made the effort to watch this evening's exposé of the illegal tobacco trade because I remember another, maybe ten years ago, on which some Customs and Excise plod solemnly pronounced that cigarette smuggling "was costing the taxpayer £X million a year".

"No, you stupid shit", I sighed at the unresponsive screen. "It's saving taxpayers that amount, isn't it?"

This time around they were a tad less stupid, but only just. Some plump bottle-blonde was doing the hidden camera bit on a bunch of low-lives flogging untaxed (gasp!) "tobacco products", which are not even the real thing but toxic crap produced by underground factories in the People's Republic of China.

And why is there a £4 billion a year market for this poison? Because, said Blondie proudly, Britain has the second highest level of taxation on tobacco in the world. Well, no; she didn't actually make the connection.  Does the word "Prohibition" ring no historical bells for these arseholes?

Of course it would be too much for a tax-extorting outfit like the Bitchy Boys Club to factor in the Laffer curve, the demonstrable reduction in revenue once tax exceeds the point where tax-payers regard it as legitimate. The rich will exploit loopholes or move elsewhere, the poor smuggle and deal on the black.

Then she said that the worst thing about the Chinese tobacco is that it will cost the NHS a lot of money. That is certainly false. Anyone who takes themselves out relatively young saves the NHS the really big costs associated with the degenerative ailments of old age; not to mention the old age pensions they won't be collecting.

In any conflict between tax evaders and the state, I'm on the side of the evaders.

Why must we only copy "progressive" policies from the States?

Heather MacDonald's "Restoring the social order" in City Journal says it all. If it works, do it for Chrissake!

Why, oh why oh why do the Brits only ever imitate US policies that do not work?

It's "Care in the Community" again

In future the drug addicts and mentally dysfunctional people that crowd our prisons will not be put away but will be offered "voluntary treatment" in hospitals. So says Fatty Clarke on the heels of announcing the closure of six prisons to meet the cost-cutting target he irresponsibly agreed after taking over at Justice.

The most shameful episode during the Thatcher regime was its cynical adoption of community care for the mentally ill as a pure cost-cutting exercise. They emptied the asylums that - as their name implied - were supposed to be refuges for those mentally unable to cope with independent living, but did not transfer the funding without which "care in the community" was a loathsome euphemism for abandonment.

So Clarke's latest wheeze is Tory "cleverness" at work, once more. They seize on "progressive" criticism of an existing programme to justify closing it down, and put nothing in its place. With a self-righteous smirk.

In terms of party politics, the smirk appears to be justified. In 1998 Blair's Health Secretary, Frank Dobson, denounced Tory "care in the community" as a totally failed initiative; but his party did nothing to change it.

Let's hear it for a society where the abandonment of the most wretched and helpless is good politics.

Prison Reform Trust lies

The cynical toad Ken Clarke has pretty much become the mouthpiece for the PRT: "Prison should be reserved for those whose
 offending is so serious that they cannot serve
 their sentence in the community" is straight from the PRT website, which also states "The United Kingdom has the highest imprisonment rate in Western Europe at 151 per 100,000 of the population". There follows a quick blow-job for fatty:

The last time Ken Clarke was in charge of prison and penal policy, as Home Secretary, the average prison population (1992-93) was 44,628. Figures just released by the Prison Service show that prison numbers for England and Wales have now exceeded 85,000. In France, with the same population as Britain, prison numbers are 59,655.

Well now, let's see. The Civitas website asks "Do we have too many people in prison?" and seeks to answer it in terms of prisoners per 1,000 recorded crimes, the only sane comparative statistic. The following chart shows that England and Wales in fact have a lower imprisonment rate than France, and considerably lower than the Western European average.

The third column shows what would be the prison population of England and Wales (given as 80,000) if we imprisoned criminals at the same rate as other countries. At the French rate, the prison population would be 91,113, at the EU average rate it would be 113,150. 

Country		Prisoners per 1,000 recorded crimes		% difference from England and Wales		'What if'?
Spain		57.13		462		369,369
Portugal		34.33		277		221,987
Ireland		28.60		231		184,928
Italy		24.00		194		155,165
Greece		19.48		157		125,920
Luxembourg		19.39		157		125,394
EU Average		17.51		141		113,150
France		14.09		114		91,133
Scotland		13.63		110		88,142
Netherlands		13.21		107		85,393
England and Wales		12.37		100		80,000
Austria		12.29		99		79,486
Germany		12.09		98		78,148
Northern Ireland		9.29		75		60,094
Belgium		8.57		69		55,442
Denmark		7.37		60		47,665
Finland		6.38		52		41,269
Sweden		5.40		44		34,905

So, the Prison Reform Trust lies, Ken Clarke lies, and the Coalition government's new penal policy is a lie. We have a much higher rate of crimes per 1,000 population - that is the problem. 

Countries with low rates of criminality have the following in common: if you commit a crime, there is a high probability that you will be arrested; if arrested there is as high probability that you will be convicted; if convicted you will receive meaningful punishment; and if you re-offend, the punishment will be more severe.

None of these applies in England and Wales. QED. All the rest is bollocks.

Is crime a communicable disease?

Rod Liddle rightly highlights today's Guardian headline, "Black Britons at more risk of jail than black Americans", which draws on the finding of the egregious Equality and Human Rights Commission quango that seven times more black Brits than their proportion of the population are in the slammer, compared to a mere four times their proportion of the population in the USA.

While this has been well known for some time, over the past decade even to comment on it was likely to have adverse legal consequences. I wonder if the report has been an effort by the able head of the EHRC, Trevor Phillips, to force public debate on the subject through the crust of state-enforced denial.

The Labour pukes were appalled when, as head of the Commission for Racial Equality,  Phillips denounced multiculturalism as "sleepwalking to segregation" in 2005. They tried to bury him by melding the CRE into the new EHRC, just as the southern US senators diluted the Civil Rights Act by including women in its provisions.

I don't think the EHCR quango can be abolished without revoking the Equality Acts, but since Phillips is on record denouncing the essential racism of the Labour party, maybe the coalition government can work with him to disentangle the web of deception spun around the issue of equality over the past decade.

What is the point of Ken Clarke?

Cameron must owe the fat tobacco company shill, big time, to have prolonged his career by giving him the Justice Ministry. Nothing he has announced since becoming minister has made any sense in the real world.

In Whitehall World, by getting early Treasury approval for his department's budget, he has won the right to sit in judgment on his fellow ministers' efforts. Hoorah for him. Years of top-level experience distilled down to winning a tactical advantage for inter-departmental squabbling. 

Clarke's two major announcements have been to cut short jail sentences, comprehensively slammed even by the Bitchy Boys, so that's own-goal number one. Now, realizing that he has seriously pissed off the Tory rank-and-file, he is to announce a "40-hour week" for prisoners to work to pay damages to their victims.

Hmm. Let's see. Unless it's decidedly un-"progressive" walking the treadmill, picking oakum, or breaking stones, any prison work is likely to constitute disloyal competition for non-criminals working to pay for the roof over their heads and to feed themselves.

Plus it would be condemned by the European Commission, which Clarke loves as only a man who has lobbied it on behalf of a multinational can.

All in all, a remarkably stupid idea, illustrating only the contempt Clarke has for what he conceives to be the "right wing" of the Tory party, which he appears to believe is still the old hanging and flogging brigade of the 1950s - which, come to think of it, were his formative years.