pinches and slaps

Depressing, but hardly unexpected:

Government plans to limit compensation payments for wrongful convictions ignore their devastating impact on people's lives, campaigners say.

Miscarriages of justice campaigners also criticised changes under which people cleared on their first appeal will not be eligible for pay-outs.

The Home Office said it aimed to enable bigger pay-outs to crime victims.

But of course, they are crime victims: victims of crimes by the state.

I can’t help thinking that when you make something cheaper, in this case when you make state crime cheaper, then it follows that you intend to make more of it.

Remember Blunkett charging people wrongly convicted for their food and lodgings in jail? And going to the high court in order to enforce his right to do so?

In the future I think we’ll look on legislation like this as the most specifically characteristic examples of the personality of this government. The pettiness; the spite; the cruising hostility looking for an outlet. The amorality, too. Underneath it all there’s the notion that crime has no moral weight, that there’s nothing about being wrongly accused and found guilty that in itself entitles you to compensation of some sort.

If the economy is the business of government and foreign policy is its public face, then home affairs is its domestic personality. This is what government is like round the house, what its breath smells like in the morning, what it shouts at the television news. You wouldn’t want to visit the House of New Labour; there’s a list of confidential report-your-neighbour hotline numbers tacked up by the phone. There’s another long list of household rules tacked up on the fridge, each item underlined heavily and all enforced with pinches and slaps. There’s poison laid down in the garden for wandering cats. There's a general miasma of desperation, self-pity and malice.

Comments

[Charlie Whitaker]

Yep.

Of course, leaving curt messages on post-it notes around the place (the lavatory cistern, the airing cupboard) is classic passive-aggressive behaviour. And from the metaphorical to the real - I wonder if there's a 'humourous' placard on the Safety Elephant's desk at work. "You don't have to be a ... to work here, but ..."

[eddie alfaro]

thank you for the nice site.
i had fun reading.

eddie