Small-Time Doesn't Pay

Chris Graybeing, the Minister for Private Prisons and Heterosexual Hostelry, has decided to bring the rehabilitation of offenders in line with education, public health and the right to dodge taxes: he's going to make it dependent on ability to pay. Chris Graybeing works in the House of Claimants, which notoriously includes a much larger proportion of criminals than the population at large; perhaps that explains why he is so worried about the one thousand million a year which is spent on criminal legal aid. Hundreds of times more money is lost to the Treasury through large-scale tax-dodging by chums of the Bullingdon Club; which doubtless means that Graybeing's idea will be nodded through by the Deputy Conservatives and criticised by Labour for not being harsh enough. Making offenders poorer is likely to be about as effective a means of keeping us safe from crime as running prisons for profit or selling off the state's forensics labs; but since the measure is being sold as a purely financial exercise, perhaps it is unfair to dwell on such trivialities as its probable effects beyond Planet Westminster.