MPs continue to row over Sentencing Council guidance

‘We do not need Donald Trump-type politics in Britain today,’ Labour MP Diane Abbott said in the House of Commons yesterday during a heated debate over the future of the Sentencing Council following controversy over its guidelines.

Lord chancellor Shabana Mahmood may have hoped the Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill would draw a line under the controversy over now-paused guidance stating that pre-sentence reports will normally be considered necessary if the offender is from a minority community.

However the political backlash continued during the bill’s second reading yesterday. Labour MP Jonathan Brash suggested that ‘if this place continues to butt heads with the Sentencing Council over guidelines like these, maybe the best thing to do is abolish the Sentencing Council?’

Shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick accused the council of creating guidance ‘that would have divided our criminal justice system by race, religion and identity; a two-tier system as offensive to common sense as it was to the most basic and important principle of equality before the law’.

Abbott said ‘two-tier justice’ suggested black defendants are treated more favourably than white defendants. ‘Yet the facts tell us to the contrary,’ Abbott said - highlighting findings from the Lammy Review that found disproportionate representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic people in the criminal justice system.

‘We need to appreciate that not only do we have a two-tier system, but it is a two-tier system in completely the opposite way to what the lord chancellor suggests, and it has been like that for decades,’ Abbott said. ‘It is interesting to hear the banter about this issue between those on the two front benches, but this is not an issue for banter. This is people’s lives; this is people’s liberty. I do not think that the debate is enhanced by some of the Trump-like narrative that we are getting from the opposition. We do not need Donald Trump-type politics in Britain today. We need seriousness about the unfair discrimination in the criminal justice system, and a willingness not just to talk about it, but to do something about it.’