http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com

Like Churchill, who rebranded the WW2 “Communal Feeding Centres” as “British Restaurants” with the words “everyone associates the word restaurant with a good meal, and they may as well have the name if they cannot have anything else”, Straw is continuing the grand Nu Lab tradition of talking tough and doing damn-all. Hence the 1,583 “crackdowns” and “blitzes” we’ve seen over the last eleven years. I think the nautical term is “he’s making smoke”.

But when you say “Prisoners and their advocates are a natural resource that people don’t mind seeing exploited” you need to discriminate between people who count and people who don’t. The people who count care deeply about prisoners.

I’ll always remember David Blunkett, master of the strong soundbite, on the suicide of Harold Shipman :

“You wake up and you receive a phone call telling you that Shipman has topped himself. And you think, is it too early to open a bottle?

“Then you discover that everybody’s really upset that he’s done it. So you have to be very cautious in this job, very careful.”

The “everybody” – the people who administer and make a living from the criminal justice system – are the people who count. The people who don’t, as I’m sure you’d agree, are the punitive morons led by the nose by the Sun and the Mail.

Anyone who’s spent any time observing the system at work knows that it is largely a game played out by lawyers, police, magistrates and judges in the often cynical and jaded atmosphere of our courts, with little reference to ‘justice’, the consequences for the convicted (or for the society he ultimately rejoins) or the feelings of the victims.

**It goes without saying, of course, that Straw has no intention of doing that.