Votes For Criminals

Some bits and pieces mostly for my records.

1 John Hirst exemplifies the horrifying reality

2 A background

3 New Statesman　

4 An interesting comment -"It is perfectly possible for the UK legislature to derogate from the ECHR should it

really want to" -Are you sure about this? In the Convention Article 15 it says derogation is permissible "In time of war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation any High Contracting Party may take measures derogating from the obligations under this Convention to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation..." I'm not sure that a signatory would be able to justify a derogation in this case. ( Link)

　 The staggering arrogance of Zoe Williams

……they're in favour of very heavy sentences (for other people, mind), there's plenty of support for the death penalty among them – they're essentially Melanie Phillips.And there are good reasons for this: the median age of a prisoner is 23, the peak age of offending is 17. Some 30-40% of any given prison population will have a reading age lower than 10, though this is improving with peer mentoring schemes. It's basically an immature, semi-literate population, and is commensurately rightwing (this doesn't explain Phillips herself, of course).