So much for Reid then...

John Reid, who began his job as home secretary stating the department was unfit for purpose, and began working on its administration rather than looking at the various scary new powers and duties previously pushed for, now wants to close "legal loopholes" in order to prevent safe verdicts being quashed on technicalities. A good idea in principle, but the BBC helpfully listed a few such loopholes thusly:

"Common examples of so-called loopholes include the police failing to properly read suspects their rights, or searching homes with out-of-date warrants."

So the "loopholes" are actually not loopholes at all, but the police (and therefore the home office) not doing their jobs properly. I once met a defense lawyer who revelled in getting people off the hook due to technicalities. I asked him if that wasn't morally dubious, but his reply was that the police have rules and procedures and they have them for a reason. He viewed his actions as a means of punishing the police for not obeying those rules and procedures, and of course if the police are punished for such misdemeanours, then they will get the message that they must try harder. It's the importance of clear feedback, folks!

What is more worrying about Reid's sudden change in tactic is that he is beginning to adopt too familiar NuLabor rhetoric - the same meaingless claim that he wants to "rebalance criminal justice in favour of victims". This was last trotted out when Safety Elephant wanted to remove the rights of wrongfully imprisoned folk from receiving compensation if they have their convictions overturned with their first appeal. Clarke came very close to suggesting that somehow the wrongly convicted were a) not victims and b) were criminal regardless of their acquittal. All this to cut a piss-poor £5 million a year, which one commentator noted wouldn't cover the subsidies for the House of Commons bars.

Again the issue seems to be a binary one - either we have to have our rights read to us or we don't; either police have to obtain a search warrant or they don't. You can't legislate to cover over the police's incompetence without removing from the police the obligation to observe the rights of the citizens it is supposed to be protecting and serving. To suggest that you can is to suggest that the law should operate on a fuzzy case-by-case nature, and that ultimately we cannot know beforehand our rights, or in what way the law actually applies to us. Say bye-bye to that feedback, folks!

This is the latest in a long line of modest proposals (The NIR, the children's index, vehicle tracking, carbon rationing...) that thinly veil NL's determination to create a controlling all powerful Big Government. And where does it get us? Billions of pounds in overspend on schemes that, though easy to fit into a sentence, cost a fortune to even come close to implimentation and usually come unstuck as soon as NL encounter something they hadn't thought of. Which brings us back to Charles Clarke's rebalancing of criminal justice away from victims of injustice. Now people who are acquitted after their first appeal receive no compensation, irrespective of the length of time they have spent in chokey, and have no alternative but to sue the Government, thus costing the Home Office much more than £5 million a year.