The recent decision by the Sentencing Council to make pre-sentence reports – which have been shown to reduce the likelihood of a custodial sentence – mandatory for ethnic minority offenders, while not for others, has understandably sparked outrage. Aimed at ‘addressing’ alleged disparities between the sentencing of ethnic minorities and whites, the new rules are two-tier by design. Sentencing Council chairman Lord Justice William Davis has admitted that “[w]hy this disparity exists remains unclear”, meaning there’s no reason to believe it’s down to unfairness. But for our equality-obsessed overlords, if a neutral system produces an unequal outcome, it is necessary to put a heavy thumb on the scales to try to ‘correct’ it. War is peace; inequality is equality.
Yet while the political heat the Sentencing Council is now facing is well earned, the fact remains that two-tier justice in Britain is really nothing new. Indeed, the UK has arguably had a two-tier sentencing regime in practice for more than a quarter of a decade, ever since the introduction into British law of the concept of ‘hate crime’.
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