Thug Who Walked Free Offends Again

Given Labour's enthusiasm for surveillance, snoopery and Serco, it is difficult to repress a certain grim smugness at this latest misadventure of the former apparatchik and sometime bar brawler Eric Joyce. Having been electronically tagged as a result of his assault on some Conservatives and a Labour whip (fortunately, it appears no actual human beings were involved), Joyce last month took it upon himself to remove the tag with scissors in order to attend a charity boat race. "I didn't want to overshadow the charity's work," he said. "If I turned up wearing my tag, that's what all the papers' focus would be on." Equally plausibly, Joyce claimed that he was unaware that cutting off a legally imposed tagging device was a breach of his court order. It appears that the first he knew of it was when an electronic buzzer was triggered and he was contacted by Serco, the security firm, in which presumably Eric Joyce owns no significant stock.

During the last Labour government, Joyce was a serial PPS who drifted from ministry to ministry, working mainly in the second rank of governmental mediocrities and thugs. He worked for the second-rater's second-rater, John Hutton, in three separate ministries, but it is not clear whether this experience was taken into account by the justice system, either as aggravation or mitigation of his offence.