ANOTHER VOICE

These punishment freaks will lose us the next general election

AUBERON WAUGH

hen we have all finished laughing over the Old Bailey acquittal of Patrick Pottle and Michael Randle on charges of having helped the spy George Blake escape from Wormwood Scrubs 25 years ago, per- haps we might spare a thought for the con- clusions to be drawn from this strange episode. The first conclusion which occurs to me is that the 110 MPs who signed a motion demanding that this pair of clowns should be prosecuted have made fools of themselves. The second and more interest- ing conclusion is that large parts of the par- liamentary Conservative Party — all the rows of clones of Kelvin Mackenzie, the editor of the Sun, who have been filling the back benches since 1979 — have miscalcu- lated the mood of the nation. They are out of touch. They no longer have anything to offer the C2 voter.

I was interested to see what the Sun would say on Thursday, 28 June — the day all the other newspapers reported the jury's verdict. Oddly enough, my own copy of the Sun did not seem to mention the matter. Then, on the Friday, it made up for the omission in an editorial which must be seen as eccentric even by the odd standards of that newspaper. It was headed 'Stinkers of the Bailey':

The 1,000-year old jury system, one of the glories of our legal system, is marred by the disgraceful acquittal of Patrick Pottle and Michael Randle.

This odious pair decided in their arrogant wisdom that the jail sentence on the traitor George Blake was too severe. . . .

Yet, despite their self-confessed guilt, an Old Bailey jury let them walk free from the court- room.

We hope Pottle and Randle now crawl back under the stone from which they should never have emerged.

And the 12 jurors?

They have given fresh hope to criminals all over Britain.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you stink.

Some may read no more than petulance into this little cry, but to me it reads more like panic. Things are not going very well for News International. Not only are jour- nalists on the Sun, Sunday Times and News of the World required to service Mr Mur- doch's gigantic debts incurred while setting up Sky TV — hence the moral fervour with which they urge the Chancellor to bring down interest rates — and find Sky's £2 million a week running losses; the Sun has also lost 300,000 readers, or so we are told. Can it be losing its touch? And is it just possible that the lower classes have grown fed up with being treated as if they were all sadistic morons and punishment freaks?

For as long as I can remember, it has been considered self-evident that the law- and-order issue at home and jingoistic pat- riotism abroad were the two things which bound enough C2s to the Tory party to put them in with a chance. Hatred of lenient judges was what recommended the Duke of Worsthorne to the vilest peasant on his estate, what gave the businessman and the London cabbie something to talk about. No punishment was too severe, no police pow- ers could ever be too excessive. I remember seven years ago — in Thatcher's heyday writing about a serious attempt by Conser- vative MPs to give police the power to grab any citizens off the street at will and submit them to an intimate body-search — search- ing their anuses and vaginas for drugs, weapons or illicit radio transmitters. In fact this measure very nearly became law in Leon Brittan's Police and Criminal Evi- dence Act of 1984.

If there has been a sudden change of heart among the British lower classes, it might have been brought about by chang- ing perceptions of the police. Since, under the new dispensation of exhibitionist, power-hungry chief constables, the police started persecuting respectable citizens who happened to be motorists or owners of shotguns, they have become one of the most loathed sections of the community. Add to this the mounting evidence that where serious crimes are concerned their zeal outruns their discretion to the extent that they nearly always catch the wrong person, and nobody can feel very safe in advocating ferocious penalties. It is one thing to urge a return of hanging for juve- niles convicted of stealing an apple, quite another to find oneself on the gallows for the same crime as a result of incompetent coppering and police frame-up.

In fact I always doubted whether the British public was quite as sadistic or quite as moronic as it appeared from conversa- tions with cab drivers, in public bars and opinion polls. It occurred to me that people produced these revolting reactions only because they thought it was expected of them to do so. Put the same people on a jury, or ask them to vote in a referendum which would actually restore hanging, and you might have a very different response. Or so I have often mused. Needless to say, no such thoughts seem to have occurred to the new Tories. It is noticeable how the bond which once united the Duke of Worsthorne with his gamekeeper, the London businessman with his cabby, has now been adopted by these mop-haired be- cardiganed cretins bobbing around in Mrs Thatcher's wake as a talisman. The new, hybrid 'classless', overweight, androgynous young Tory-in-a-basket now sees penologi- cal sadism as his only way of ingratiating himself. As a result, after 11 years of Mrs Thatcher, we now have a higher proportion of our citizens in prison than any other country in the world; we have more life- sentence prisoners than all the other coun- tries of Western Europe put together; the proportion of prisoners serving life sen- tences has increased fourfold in 20 years from one in fifty in 1970 to one in twelve and a half in 1990. One explanation for this is that anyone convicted of murder in Britain, whatever the extenuating circum- stances, must receive a mandatory life sen- tence. Last week, the Commons blocked a Lords attempt to remove this obvious absurdity from the statute book. More alarming than this, one learns that Conser- vative politicians —most particularly junior Home Office ministers like Mr Hogg have been regularly increasing the 'tariff, or minimum period in prison recommend- ed by the trial judge. How, I wonder, do the Conservatives hope to attract more votes that way? What possible purpose is there in the activity apart from the private satisfac- tion of the junior Home Office minister?

To me, it seems obvious that nobody should be made to serve more than five years in prison as punishment; those re- quiring longer periods for preventive de- tention should be held in secure lunatic asylums, heavily doped. However, just as one began to have terrible doubts about Mrs Thatcher at the time of the Gibraltar shootings in 1988, so one begins to fear for the sanity of the governing party when one learns that now, 46 years after the end of the second world war, we have set up a brand new war crimes unit in Scotland Yard to investigate alleged war crimes in such places as Guernsey. The more impor- tant point is that the country is behind nei- ther the Government nor the police in these bizarre, vindictive enterprises. This moron Mackenzie will yet manage to lose us the general election.