Swift Justice

Even an acolyte of the Blessed Tony may occasionally make a mistake, and one such has graciously owned up barely twenty years after the fact. It appears, mirabile dictu, that the imposition of indefinite sentencing for petty crimes has occasionally led to people serving indefinite sentences for petty crimes, while promised courses for rehabilitation were found unsustainably non-productive of favourable headlines in the right-wing Press. The statute was eventually declared unlawful by the hated Euro-wog Convention on Human Rights and revoked under the coalition, but those who had already received indefinite sentences did not have their cases re-examined. Doubtless the Conservatives took a dim view of British justice being diluted by a foreign court, while their Liberal Democrat accomplices took a dim view of diverging from the Conservatives in the face of moderate and acceptable quantities of suicide and self-harm. Although the original policy was as flawless as any other conceived in the divine light of the Reverend Blair, it was let down by the human fallibility of lesser specimens, whose toughness on crime prevented their anticipating that making an option available to the judiciary might cause members of the judiciary to take up the option. Fortunately, lessons have been learned and any compensation made to the surviving victims will be at the expense of the taxpayer rather than the culprit.