Titan Nicks Sunk

The empty suit at the Ministry of Incarceration and Deportation has dropped plans to build three Titan prisons, and has decided instead to build five supersized ones. From mythology to Macdonalds in less than eighteen months; such is the glory of British justice. The Ministry said that the decision was a result of "consulting widely and listening to all views", as all New New Labour decisions always are. Since Gordon's little Darling has predicted green shoots next year leading to full-blown economic recovery by 2011 and the overtaking of America, India and China by the middle of Labour's fifth term in office, it surely cannot have had anything to do with spending cuts. Certainly, given the miraculous effects of ID cards and the national database, there cannot have been any nasty, unconstructive thoughts at the Ministry that crime might rise as a result of the economic recession.

The original plan, in fact, was to sell off the sites of the old prisons for redevelopment and give the money to private corporations so that they could build cheap human warehouses miles from anywhere, thus aiding the permanent integration of offenders into the criminal community; the Guardian's home affairs editor suggests cynically that the viability of this plan may have been affected by the fall in property values. The shadow minister for keeping the rabble in line, Dominic Grieve, said that "warehousing offenders in hulks twice the size of Wembley was not going to address increased levels of reoffending"; but any comments he may have made on the perils of inadequate investment and private profiteering appear to have been lost amid the Guardian's liberal bias.