In praise of Boris Johnson’s justice shake-up

It ought to be a good day at the office (at last!) for Robert Buckland, the Secretary of State who has outraged the legal profession. He spent most of last weekend on the media rack defending the government’s position that it might break international law to defy an agreement with the EU that it had negotiated. 

Today is much more straightforward. His ‘get tough’ sentencing white paper contains a myriad of proposals that will resonate with ordinary people baffled by a justice system ever more remote from the idea of public protection and punishment, lost in abstractions, passing sentences that bear little relationship to the gravity of the crime.

So while it’s bad news for the criminal justice blob — that stale and increasingly disconnected coalition of woke academics, lawyers, quangos and public sector princelings who control the levers of policy and power — it’s also bad news for violent criminals, terrorists, rapists and those who attack uniformed public servants.