Tony Blair said last week that the criminal justice system is ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’.
Tony Blair said last week that the criminal justice system is ‘still the public service most distant from what reasonable people want’. After nine years in office, this was a terrible admission — not least for a Prime Minister who was swept to power on a promise to be ‘tough on crime’.
It is not hard to see why ‘reasonable people’ feel so anxious. The murder of Special Constable Nisha Patel-Nasri was all the more shocking because it seemed of a piece with a growing trend towards brutal street violence. Meanwhile, the High Court has decided to allow the Afghan hijackers to stay in Britain until it is ‘safe’ to return to their own country: the judicial equivalent of handing out British passports. The murder of Naomi Bryant by Anthony Rice, while he was on licence from a life sentence, has revealed not only shocking deficiencies in the probation service, but the extent to which its officials are distracted by the demands of the Human Rights Act.
A civil servant from Newcastle upon Tyne, who begged Mr Blair two months ago to do something about the yobs plaguing her family, said last week that she had suffered a miscarriage because of the torment. On the same day, the director of enforcement and removals at the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, Dave Roberts, told the Commons home affairs committee that he did not have the ‘faintest idea’ how great the ‘illegal population of the United Kingdom’ is. Those who claim that public anxiety about the criminal justice system in this country is the consequence of lurid and irresponsible media coverage of exceptional cases should explain how many such cases it would take before they admitted that there was a problem.
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