The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Is it a Ban? Is it a Crime? No, it's an Operational Applicability Event

Leftist pressure groups and other obnoxiously literate types are now threatening the unfortunate Chris Graybeing with legal action over the ban on sending books, or indeed anything much, to people in prison. The campaign has now been joined by the notorious human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC, who has written a book or two himself and therefore hardly qualifies as a disinterested party. Robertson was tactless enough to point out Graybeing's lack of legal knowledge, which is as needlessly discriminatory as pointing out Michael Gove's lack of teaching knowledge or Jeremy C Hunt's lack of medical knowledge or Iain Duncan Smith's lack of knowledge.

Fortunately for Graybeing, he has Nick Clegg on his side: "the measures being proposed are not about banning books," Clegg proclaimed, "they are about making sure the security arrangements around packages delivered to prisoners are applied consistently across the prison estate," which just happens to involve placing arbitrary limits on prisoners' access to reading material. The "measures being proposed" have, in the reality-based community, been in operation since November; but that's Wee Nicky for you. Anyway, rather than merely agreeing with those who worry about the impact on rehabilitation, Clegg declared himself "a total fellow traveller": an interesting choice of words, since fellow traveller is a term mostly used by political witch-hunters to refer to those who sympathise with designated witches without actually buying the cat or riding the broomstick. Nick Clegg is not actually a member of the Conservative Party.

2 Comments:

  • At 11:03 pm , Anonymous Madame X said...

    Making political hay out of inmates is a longstanding tradition this side of the Pond. There's nothing Americans love to hate more than a captive audience. Then they can continue to complain about high recidivism rates.

     
  • At 6:47 pm , Blogger Philip said...

    Are those the same recidivism rates which prove that prison is a deterrent to crime?

     

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