IPPs – Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection – were belatedly abolished in 2012 by the first liberal Justice Secretary or Home Secretary for years, Ken Clarke, a Tory. But the thousands of prisoners then...
Western governments, including our own, have made plenty of mistakes in the middle east and the Balkans since the blundering NATO attack on Yugoslavia in 1999 and the aggression against Iraq four years later,...
In case you have a vote for the Labour party leadership election and haven’t yet voted, here, in no particular order, is an objective check-list of twelve ideal characteristics and qualities for an effective,...
Please urge your MP to sign the following excellent Early Day Motion (EDM 1254) tabled in the House of Commons. It sets out very clearly the appalling situation that the thousands of remaining prisoners...
Last month I wrote yet again about the national scandal of Indeterminate Sentences “for Public Protection”, or IPPs. Long after IPPs have been abolished and can no longer be imposed, literally thousands of people...
In 2012, nearly two years ago, parliament passed legislation abolishing the infamous system of Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection (IPPs), introduced in 2005 by a Labour home secretary, David Blunkett, an indefensible move but...
It’s depressing that parliamentary committees responsible for holding to account such powerful institutions and individuals as the intelligence and security services, the bankers and the police are often either far too soft or far...
Of all the many opportunities now being missed by the Labour party for a vigorous, radical campaign to win over solid popular support, one of the saddest is Labour’s silence on the real possibility...
There were more than half a million official requests for “data tracking of individuals” – details of the timings, originators, recipients, etc., of emails and telephone calls, but in principle not their contents –...
I submitted the following letter to the Guardian on 1 June, in reply to a Guardian editorial inexplicably supporting the proposal now being espoused by the government for a given number of an MP’s...