The UK’s Ministry of Justice, under the stewardship of Labour justice secretary Shabana Mahmood, has quietly published new probation-service rules and guidelines that enshrine a two-tier system for bail conditions. Published in January, these guidelines are not a mere administrative oversight. They represent a deliberate and calculated erosion of the bedrock of our legal system: equality before the law.
The new rules have been drawn up despite Mahmood’s recent grandstanding over the similarly two-tiered guidelines on pre-sentencing reports, produced by the Sentencing Council – an unelected and unaccountable quango. In the case of the bail guidelines, it is not some arms-length body, but her own department that wants to bring in discriminatory two-tier justice. Mahmood’s Janus-faced approach to justice cannot go unchallenged.
The new rules instruct the probation service to assess bail conditions not merely on the facts of an individual’s case, but also on the basis of his or her ethnicity, gender and sexuality. This alone mirrors the discredited guidelines from the Sentencing Council, which Mahmood plans to override, having publicly condemned them as a ‘two-tiered approach to sentencing’. These would have forced judges to order pre-sentence reports in almost all circumstances when faced with a defendant from a minority background, which would make a lighter sentence more likely. Mahmood conveniently pinned the blame for this on the previous Conservative government. Yet her righteous indignation is nowhere to be seen when it comes to the bail guidelines, which were produced in-house by the Ministry of Justice, her own domain. The hypocrisy is as stark as it is indefensible.
The bail guidelines are actually more unequal than the pre-sentencing guidelines. They even order the probation service to consider ‘important historical events’ that may have had a greater impact on suspects from specific groups and cultures. This a clear directive to weigh the supposed historical trauma of colonisation and slavery when determining bail conditions. Needless to say, ‘important historical events’ do not mean the Norman Conquest, which reshaped Britain’s social fabric. Nor will the English Civil War, a period of profound upheaval, count for those with Puritan ancestry. At a stretch, the Irish Potato Famine might be invoked to excuse crimes by those of Irish descent, but don’t hold your breath for consistency. It is not even clear whether trauma experienced by British Jews – either from the Holocaust or the recent Hamas attacks – should count, as this tends to be conspicuously absent from the woke’s selective ledger of victimhood.
Let us be unequivocal: equality before the law is not a negotiable nicety. It is the cornerstone of a free and just society. It demands that every individual, regardless of his or her background, stands equal in the eyes of justice. Equity – the darling buzzword of progressive ideologues – suggests, in contrast, that we should adjust treatment based on perceived historical or present social disadvantages. In the realm of justice, this represents a betrayal of fairness. When bail conditions are softened for some, based on their demographic profile or ancestral grievances, while others face the full weight of the law, we cease to have a justice system worthy of the name.
The Labour government’s track record on this issue is a study in cynicism. Caught out and embarrassed by the Sentencing Council’s two-tier pre-sentencing guidance, Mahmood and her colleagues scrambled to distance themselves, decrying the unfairness while pointing fingers at the Conservatives. Yet, when given the chance to quietly entrench a similar system in bail assessments, Labour has seized it with both hands. The result? A justice system that, under the spurious banner of equity, ends up discriminating systematically.
The Conservatives, for their part, are not without sin. Their failure to detect or challenge this creeping injustice during their time in power is a damning indictment of their lack of vigilance. The political establishment, it seems, is united in its shared indifference to the erosion of our legal foundations.
This is not a time for polite debate – it is a moment for outrage and action. The Ministry of Justice’s new bail guidelines are a travesty. Indeed, they are an assault on the very concept of impartial justice. Labour cannot have it both ways: it cannot decry two-tier sentencing in public while embedding two-tier bail conditions in practice. We, the public, demand an explanation. Why does Shabana Mahmood rail against one form of discriminatory justice only to champion another? Why is the Labour government strengthening injustice under the guise of rectifying historical wrongs?
Equality before the law is not a relic to be discarded – it is the lifeblood of a free society. The Ministry of Justice must reverse this disgraceful policy without delay. And if it will not, it must face the full force of public condemnation until it does.
Gawain Towler is a commentator, former director of communications for the Brexit Party and a consultant for Reform UK.
