Daily Mail, January 8 2003

Whichever political genius let Lord Irvine out of the attic where he had been safely stowed out of sight must surely be feeling his own collar this morning.

The Lord Chancellor, who earned national derision over his taste for wallpapering his official residence at £300 of taxpayers’ money per roll, was subsequently bundled away and not allowed to frighten the voters again.

Until now. In an interview with the Today radio programme this week, Lord Irvine managed to undo all the careful work of his handlers. On the subject of burglary, and then on reform of the House of Lords, he revealed himself (and by extension, the government) to be monumentally out of touch, patronising and arrogant.

First, he made the astonishing claim that most people were happy to see burglars kept out of jail -- even if it was their second offence – provided there were no ‘aggravating elements’.

Just what planet is the Lord Chancellor living on? Burglary is its own aggravating element. It is felt by its victims as an assault on their privacy, a violation of the sanctuary of home so great that some victims cannot bear to carry on living there. It causes particular distress to old people, some of whom even die from the shock of it.

None of this seems to occur to Lord Irvine who – when he is not residing at his protected nine-room official apartment – lives in a heavily guarded Scottish mansion.

What on earth was he talking about when he claimed that most people had no faith in prison as a remedy for crime? Does he really think, therefore, that most people would prefer to see murderers, rapists or drug-dealers escape a jail sentence?

Most ordinary people just want action to be taken to prevent themselves from being burgled. Lord Irvine is simply wrong to say that community sentences work better than a jail term. The reconviction rate after a community sentence has been passed is virtually the same as after a prison sentence. The difference is that while the burglar is locked up, he is not able to burgle.

The Lord Chancellor was springing to the defence of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Woolf, who said in a judgment that burglars who would previously have got 18 months in jail should now get a community sentence.

But Lord Irvine’s real gaffe is to have underlined even more starkly that the judges are merely doing the government’s bidding. In a confusing statement yesterday in which it appeared to be hedging its bets, Downing Street tried to distance itself from both Lord Irvine and Lord Woolf. Yet the fact is that the Government is also desperate to get prison numbers down.

For although more people need to go to prison because more serious crimes are being committed, the Treasury is simply refusing to fund more prison places. The Chancellor of the Exchequer is said to believe that since jail sentences don’t deter crime, there is no point in providing any more prisons. One might as well say the same about community sentences – or, for that matter, the law itself.

Beneath this refusal lies a deep contempt for the opinions of ordinary people. The bien-pensant view is that anyone who wants criminals to be jailed is an atavistic red-neck bent on vengeance. But this utterly ignores the fundamental role that punishment plays in the whole concept of justice. And it also ignores the function that prison -- properly conceived -- can play in rehabilitation.

Yes, prison currently fails. But that is because the government treats it merely as human warehousing. Used properly, it could teach inmates to read and write or learn a useful trade; it could impart the means to self-control, and crucially -- with proper follow-up on release -- support them in living law-abiding lives.

None of this is done because the government is not prepared to pay for it.

Not content with this, the Lord Chancellor then treated us to his views on House of Lords reform. One might think that here he would have shown just a touch of humility, since he is after all the minister personally responsible for this debacle. But no, not a bit of it.

The policy is stuck at stage one because Labour MPs have rejected the government’s proposal for 20 per cent of peers to be elected. They think this isn’t enough. Brushing this aside, Lord Irvine mysteriously divined that people had turned against ‘hybridity’, and wanted either all peers to be elected or all to be appointed. Yet the government, he said, didn’t support this brutal choice. So what did it support? Well, it was going to be left to an official committee to make sense of it all.

In other words, Lord Irvine hasn’t got a clue what to do about Lords reform. The government is stuck up the proverbial creek with no paddle in sight. Advance to an all- elected chamber would cause Parliamentary paralysis; retreat to an all-appointed chamber would be such an extension of executive power that even this government couldn’t get away with it.

So we are likely to be stuck with stage one of Lords reform for ever and a day – and with the unacceptable extension of cronyism that this has brought about. Having embarked on this reform out of spite for hereditary toffs (yet can any belted earl come anywhere near Lord Irvine of Lairg for grandeur?) the government is paralysed.

And there are so many more urgent things to tackle – such as our transport chaos. Yet here too, Lord Irvine could only scoff and sneer. Why, he snorted, to judge from the media you’d think the government was responsible for the bad weather or the terrible traffic.

Well, hello, Lord Chancellor – the terrible traffic is very much the government’s responsibility, because of the truly terrible absence of a proper transport policy. But then why should Lord Irvine or any other minister even know what this really means when they are transported everywhere in chauffeured official cars?

Not a shred of regret or concern did he deign to utter about any of the government’s comprehensive failures to govern this country adequately. Just look at the looming distress from the crisis in the pension industry, to which government policies– in particular Gordon Brown’s raids on pension dividends and the penalties he has imposed upon savings – have made such a significant contribution.

Yet with his own guaranteed pension of a £180,000 lump sum and £90,000 per year, Lord Irvine declared that the next election would show how this government ‘will be loved’.

Lord Irvine may be considered to be a one-man own goal – but in displaying such a deep disconnection from ordinary people’s lives, he sadly typifies the administration of which he is such a magnificent ornament.

Posted by admin at January 8, 2003