The spirit of forgiveness is abroad this September - but will it shine its light on the rioters who are appealing their ‘excessive’ sentences in the Court of Appeal? The spirit has already spun its benign magic on two crooks, letting them out of jail early, even though they had each fiddled the taxpayer out of more than £10,000.

We’re talking here, of course, about the Lords Hanningfield, and Taylor of Warwick, who were jailed for fraudulently claiming thousands of pounds of parliamentary expenses. They were released earlier this month after serving only a quarter of their sentences, which is nice for them.

Peer pressure, perhaps?

The spirit of forgiveness has also been busy with the case of David Laws, the millionaire Lib Dem MP who resigned as chief secretary to the Treasury in May 2010.

He resigned when it became known that he had claimed expenses of more than £40,000 in the form of second home costs between 2004 and 2009, when in fact he had been renting rooms at properties owned by his long-term partner, James Lundie.

He broke the rules to keep details of his sexuality private, he claimed, and had not benefited financially.

But so what: that’s not what we expect from government ministers - or so we keep telling ourselves. And why, when you’re a millionaire with a decent salary, claim the expenses in the first place? Would Laws’ privacy have been better safeguarded if he had claimed no expenses at all?

He has been forgiven, anyway, and there is now talk of welcoming him back into the fold with another important role in government - which is very forgiving of all concerned, particularly as Laws has already shown such poor judgement.

But what example will the generous way in which he has been forgiven set would-be rioters? Will they throw back their shoulders and declare: We are all in this together?

No, of course not, but at least that image brings us nicely back to the rioters in the appeal court.

You’ll recall that two them each received four years in prison for posting notices on Facebook inviting people, as one offender put it, to a ‘smash down’ in the town centre.

No rioting happened as a result of either postings, but pour encourager les autres they got four years each.

Others appealing their sentences include the man who got 16 months after picking up a bag of clothes that he had found hidden in bushes during Manchester’s riots.

The clothes had been looted from nearby shops, which he should have guessed, but he acted on impulse, albeit a dishonest impulse.

It was a moment of madness, with 16 months behind bars to ponder his folly. He did not, unlike the peers and Laws, commit offences over a sustained period.

There was no ‘protracted course of dishonesty’, as the judge described Taylor’s actions. There were no ’six counts of false accounting’, as in Hanningfield’s case, either.

And there was no wrongful claiming of second home expenses over several years, as in Laws’ case. If there is any justice, the spirit of forgiveness should smile down on these rioters who are appealing their excessive sentences.

Otherwise some people might begin suspecting that there is one law for ‘them’ and an altogether different law for ‘us’ - and that we are not ‘all in this together’.