So who's in charge tonight at the Prison With No Warders?
Last updated at 8:53 PM on 8th January 2011
But it is nothing like as foolish as having a Prison With No Warders. Two staff were in charge of almost 500 convicted criminals, and not just ordinary criminals, but the sort of lawbreakers that even Kenneth Clarke and his liberal Injustice Ministry are willing to lock up.
As we found when they set the place on fire rather than be breathalysed, these are not nice people.
The local population were entirely exposed to what anyone in this anarchic encampment of criminals chose to do
Do you really think Ford is the only British jail where illegal drink and drugs are regularly being consumed against all regulations?
I wonder what the staffing levels were at all this country’s other prisons on New Year’s Eve. I wonder what they are tonight.
It would be funny if it did not matter. But it does matter. And the truly shocking thing about the Ford events is that they have led to no national scandal.
A prison has been set on fire (and we shall have to pay for the repairs). It has been revealed to be, to all intents and purposes, unstaffed. The local population were entirely exposed to what anyone in this anarchic encampment of criminals chose to do.
Nobody has resigned. The story has faded from newspapers and broadcast bulletins.
The ‘Opposition’ has not taken it up with any vigour. And yet we, the people, have been treated with complete sneering contempt. Our political elite do not believe in punishment or justice.
Sniggering behind their hands, they put on a sort of cardboard street theatre to fool us: police who never patrol; courts that hardly ever send anyone to prison; sentences that are never served; prisons with no guards.
You would have thought, when this was exposed in flames for the fraud it is, someone would have been embarrassed, and someone in mainstream politics would have been angry on behalf of the undefended population of these islands.
Pitiful Prescott, a picture of vulgarity
How sad to see the pitiful figure of John Prescott reduced to advertising cheap car insurance. Does he really need the money? What for? I had thought more highly of him.
Just before I heard this sordid news, I had listened to a 1959 recording of Labour’s titanic Nye Bevan, who in the Forties and Fifties must have been young John Prescott’s hero.
A sad figure: John Prescott in the TV commercial
Bevan was filled with prophetic scorn for the nasty new Britain he saw growing up under Harold Macmillan’s ‘never had it so good’ society.
He spoke of the ‘delusion of television’, and the way in which debt was taking hold so that ‘the moneylender has been elevated to the highest position in the land’, warning of ‘a vulgar society of which no decent person could be proud’.
Well isn’t Mr Prescott’s miserable commercial a sign of just such a society?
The tired Tories, like an old labrador on its last legs
The chocolate treats have stopped. There’s a snappish, exasperated tone in His Master’s Voice, and that new poodle puppy is getting all the attention.
Could it be that, before all that long, there’ll be a melancholy trip to the vet from which there will be no return?
More from Peter Hitchens...
- PETER HITCHENS: Didn't you read the small print? Now it's Dave's turn to rub our noses in diversity01/01/11
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- VIEW FULL ARCHIVE
Well, of course it could. Young Master Cameron is not a sentimental man, and he’s had all the use he ever hoped to get out of the Tory Party.
One of his faults (in his own terms, not mine) is that he’s just not very good at hiding such feelings.
And so it will go on until the day when the car turns into the vet’s gateway, and through their rheumy old eyes they will at last see and understand the fate that’s long been planned for them.
It shows that boot-faced, state-sponsored campaigns for equality do not work, and that the lowest pay gap between men and women in the world is not in Scandinavia but Swaziland.
This continued from 1956 (as a reward for the party’s support of the invasion of Hungary) until 1979 and at times was as much as £100,000 a year – more like a million in today’s money.
Landrigan gruesomely murdered Chester Dyer while already on the run from a 40-year sentence for murdering his supposed best friend, Greg Brown. While in prison he had nearly murdered another inmate, stabbing him 14 times.
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