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SFO and BAE: contrasting fates.
BAE are celebrating record profits. New Labour are thinking about closing down the SFO. Funny that...
Vince Cable has been unusually outspoken about the BAE results:
"The company's profits depend on major, UK government-supported, export contracts - around which there are unresolved allegations of corrupt commission payouts and pending prosecutions - or on favoured contracts for government procurement."
BAE of course breathed an enormous sigh of relief when the government decided to end the investigation of BAE by the SFO. Some other politicians were unusally quiet on this issue. The "official opposition" spend a lot of time agreeing with the government over issues like Iraq and education. On this they kept their mouths shut - probably worried that someone would notice that the Al-Yamamah middleman was a Tory donor.
Perhaps it is wise to be quiet on this issue. The SFO's reward for investigating the Al-Yamamah deal is to find that they are destined for oblivion. This is what the Guardian says:
Ministers have begun working on proposals to disband the Serious Fraud Office, merging operations with other agencies, the Guardian has learned. The plan comes three months after relations between the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, and SFO director Robert Wardle reached an all-time low over the latter's two-year investigation into kickback allegations linked to a BAE Systems contract with Saudi Arabia...
Disbanding the SFO would prompt fresh criticisms that Lord Goldsmith has been pursuing a political battle with the agency as an EU anti-corruption watchdog is considering whether it was wrong for the attorney general to halt the BAE investigation.
More on this story here.
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Off post, I am sorry, but I cannot find any article in relation to "We can cut crime", and make prison work, being spouted by Menzies Campbell and Nick Clegg. In any event, I have fisked it on my blog, after hearing about it on 18DS. The soundbite went from making prison work, to making prisoners work, to stealing money from prisoners for their hard labour. Is this the best that you lot can come up with?
Clegg's point yesterday was that we should increase the very small percentage of prisoners who currently work in prison. This would prepare them for the outside world by getting them into the habit of regular work and providing a small nest egg when they get out to allow them to rent a flat for example. A proportion (20% I believe) of their income would go to fund compensation for victims of crime.
It strikes me as a thoroughly sensible proposal. Not world-transforming but the sort of good sense that would make a difference over time if implemented.
This is just another word for taxation. A friend of mine pointed out that I had missed the point that it was reminiscent of the labour camps during World War 2 which the Nazis opened for the Jews. I don't think I would have gone that far, but I will have to think about it some more. My criticisms can be found here http://prisonervoice.blogspot.com
What utter nonsense. Prisoners aren't being forced to perform dangerous tasks or even tasks which are more onerous than those non-offenders do on the outside. They can accept or reject the terms that are offered to them and if that includes making a small contribution to a fund which helps to make good just a small fraction of the damage they did to earn their place in prison, then good.
Your friend's comparison with the Nazi labour camps is horrible and utterly ridiculous on every level. People in labour camps had committed no offence, were subjected to barbaric conditions which bore no comparison to those endured outside, could not decline work and so on. As somebody whose mother was born in one of those camps (not one of the worst of its type thankfully), I really do find it grossly offensive.
It still remains a policy dreamt up by Anne Widdecombe, and is illegal not only to punish twice but to levy such a tax without it being the subject of an Act of Parliament. If they were given a community sentence instead of prison, and the court made a compensation award it would be a different matter.
Imposing compensation and punishment isn't "double punishment" at all. The former is about making whole the victim (as far as possible) the latter is imposed by society for a breach of its rules. It is common practice for businesses to pay a fine for, say, health and safety violations or cartel activity, and to quite separately compensate people who got ill or lost money as a result of the violation. You are also well within your rights to sue somebody who has been prosecuted and convicted of punching you (few do because in practice it is hard to recover the money and people want to move on).
And it isn't a tax. It's merely the terms and conditions of employment if you choose to work in prison.
You may think you're being liberal about it JHL - actually you are merely being confused about the law, weak and wooly.