Robert Jenrick is a real conservative

Robert Jenrick’s victory over the Sentencing Council — James Heale is correct to call it that — is, more importantly, a victory for the new style of Toryism the shadow justice secretary is beginning to articulate. There’s no dressing it up: what the Sentencing Council proposed was the introduction of race-based differential treatment to England’s criminal justice system. Its new guidelines, suspended pending government legislation to render this aspect of them unlawful, state that a pre-sentence report (PSR) ‘will normally be considered necessary’ where a convict comes ‘from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community’. PSRs can lead to a less severe or non-custodial sentence, though this is not guaranteed. Supporters of the guidelines see them as a response to aggregate differences in sentences handed down to white and black or ethnic minority offenders.

The guidelines also encourage judges and magistrates to commission PSRs where an offender is female, transgender or aged between 18 and 25, but the prompt on race/ethnicity is especially offensive given the destructiveness of legal systems that practice racial discrimination, something many of us had thought well-established by now.