Flick 🇬🇧 on Nostr: The new rules instruct the probation service to assess bail conditions not merely on ...

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/04/03/labour-is-still-ushering-in-two-tier-justice/

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.