Who made Ibram X Kendi prime minister? Everywhere you look, the racialism perfected by America’s insufferable ‘anti-racists’ continues to wash over British institutions. These outrageous new sentencing guidelines are only the latest, most radioactive example.
Yesterday, the Sentencing Council quango issued its new guidelines for England and Wales. Among other, more prosaic changes was the instruction that courts consider ordering what is called a pre-sentence report (or PSR) if the defendant is from an ‘ethnic-minority, cultural-minority, and / or faith-minority community’ – or if the defendant is under-25, pregnant, or a primary carer.
The upshot of this would be that members of ethnic, cultural or religious minorities would be less likely to serve custodial sentences. PSRs inform judges of an offender’s background, personal life, etc, and the government’s own analysis, notes David Shipley, suggests they tend to result in being spared jail.
The Sentencing Council isn’t even trying to hide it. ‘The reasons for including groups [for PSRs] vary’, read a statement rushed out yesterday, ‘but include evidence of disparities in sentencing outcomes’. Translation: the aim is to go easier on certain groups so as to address alleged inequalities within the broader justice system.
This really is Kendi-ism in a nutshell: the notion that all racial disparities equal racist discrimination and that ‘anti-racist’ discrimination is required to correct it. And the perils of it are obvious to anyone who thinks about it for five seconds: racial preferences corroding hard-won principles of blind justice and legal equality. Sadly, far from being some post-BLM, transatlantic import, these divisive nostrums have actually been circulating among the British establishment for many decades.
This quasi-religious conviction that inequality of outcome must mean inequality of treatment gets in the way of looking at disparities in a clear-eyed way – which is, of course, crucial if you actually want to close them. For one thing, ethnic minorities tend to plead not guilty at a higher rate, leading to less leniency at sentencing, because they tend to be more distrustful of the advice given to them by state-provided lawyers.
As former Downing Street policy chief, Munira Mirza, has previously argued on spiked, this distrust has its roots, no doubt, in the legacy of historical racism. But it is sustained today by the fact-free refrain, belted out by ‘anti-racist’ groups and the British state, that our institutions remain ‘institutionally racist’ and that barely anything has changed since the Bad Old Days.
Woke quangocrats cannot address this problem, because they are a considerable part of this problem. And so, rather than assuage some sections of the citizenry’s distrust in the system, they go around breeding yet more distrust in the system, putting a thumb on the scale with explicitly racialist intentions.
This is as much an affront to democracy as it is equality under the law. The Sentencing Council is one of many ‘independent’ – code for ‘unaccountable’ – institutions we have to thank New Labour for, bred of Blair and Brown’s deep conviction that a few unelected wiseacres are all that stand between civilisation and barbarism.
In truth, these agencies have become vehicles for the most reactionary and demented people to push the most reactionary and demented ideas – from the Sentencing Council to the Climate Change Committee; from woke racism to eco-austerity – on a bewildered nation.
Now Labour is having to at least pretend to face down its bastard offspring. After Tory blood vessels began to burst over the new guidelines yesterday, Labour condemned the changes. Justice secretary Shabana Mahmood has written to the Sentencing Council to ‘register [her] displeasure’ – that’ll tell ’em! – but has zero power to stop the guidelines coming into force.
Clearly, Labour is desperate to deflect any accusations of two-tier justice, having effortlessly pivoted from calling it a ‘far right’ myth to insisting that it has always been dead against it, actually. ‘As someone who is from an ethnic-minority background myself, I do not stand for any differential treatment before the law, for anyone of any kind’, said Mahmood in her statement yesterday.
But doing so would involve Labour picking a fight it is obviously unwilling to pick. Against a quangocratic state, largely of its own creation, that wields power without accountability, and has become a receptacle for all of the most poisonous elite orthodoxies of our age.
Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater
