Justice?

 Nick Timothy.

Race should play no role 

in justice but shamefully

 in Britain it now does.

From arrest to sentence, minority defendants are handled with greater sympathy than white men

No longer possible to deny that in the land of Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus and the Bill of Rights we have differential policing and justice. The law is no longer blind, and now treats criminals differently depending on their religious beliefs, ethnicity and sexuality.

Nick Timothy

10 March 2025 6:00am GMT

The sentencing guidelines published last week explicitly instruct judges that a pre-sentence report “will normally be considered necessary” if a perpetrator of a crime is “from an ethnic minority, cultural minority and/or faith minority community”, female, transgender, or a drug addict, or a victim of modern slavery, trafficking or exploitation.

Pre-sentence reports are used by courts to find mitigating circumstances that can lead judges to avoid custodial sentences, and impose suspended sentences and community punishments instead.

And these guidelines are clear: minorities should receive lesser punishments than white people, especially white men. The provisions about slavery, trafficking and exploitation are an invitation for lawyers to help illegal immigrants to escape the reach of the law.

This is not the first official direction to tell judges to put identity politics before the once-sacred principle of equality before the law. Last July, the Judicial College published the Equal Treatment Bench Book, which quotes approvingly a US Supreme Court judge saying, “in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently”.

Putting this principle into practice, the Bench Book warns for example that “the family impact of custodial sentences [is] particularly acute for black mothers” because black families are more likely to have lone parents.

For women who wear the burqa, the Bench Book says it is a “balancing exercise” to determine whether a judge can ask that the veil should be removed. It says, “the identity of a defendant can be established in private without requiring removal” and it expresses scepticism about “deciding credibility from the appearance and demeanour” of a witness or defendant.

The Bench Book has a whole section on “Islamophobia”, a concocted concept eliding ideas of blasphemy and criticism of individual Muslims with racism. And it endorses statements by the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), as well as the definition of Islamophobia produced in a report by a cross-party group of MPs.

The MCB remains banned from contact with government because of its links to extremism, and the report the Bench Book quotes complains, “a supposed right to criticise Islam results in another subtle form of anti-Muslim racism”. It gives the rape gangs as a “real life example” of how “criticism humiliates, marginalises, and stigmatises Muslims”.

Similar attitudes exist in policing. The Police Race Action Plan, published by the College of Policing, promised to stop “the over-­policing of black communities” and complained that black communities are not only “over-policed but ­
under-protected”.

The Action Plan noted that black people are more likely than white people to be murdered, and to be victims of knife crime – but failed to add that black people are also more likely to commit these crimes. “Regardless of their causes,” the Action Plan says, “racial disparities in our actions [are] problems in themselves.”

Disparities in policing and criminal justice exist, but the causes cannot simply be wished away like this.

Official figures show the difference in sentencing outcomes is explained by the greater tendency of white defendants to plead guilty, which leads to shorter sentences.

Stop and search powers are certainly far too often abused, with police time wasted and young, often black men stopped unnecessarily. But everyone is let down if we pretend young, black men are more likely only to be the victims of knife crime and not also knife criminals.

The logic of imported American racial theories and culture has poisoned our police just as it has the courts. Following the murder of George Floyd in the United States, the police here promised to become “institutionally anti-racist”.

This does not just mean the police should be against racism, but that they should be proactive in eliminating outcomes with racial disparities in the name of “equity”. This is an objective that deliberately subordinates the idea of equality, and dismisses it as an excuse for inaction.

And so we have police forces asking the public to help to find suspects without describing their racial identity – unless they are white, of course – and refusing to be transparent in the aftermath of terrible crimes such as the Southport murders. Inevitably, activists have worked out how to exploit this new system of identity corporatism, which is how we end up with Islamists advising the police during operations in control rooms, and the differential treatment of marches and protests.

This is the result of the abandonment of our commitment to equality before the law. And there are wider lessons too. The changes in policing and the criminal justice system may have their origins the Equality Act and Human Rights Act – but Parliament never decided to do any of this.

These changes have been brought about by unelected, unaccountable officials – police officers, prosecutors, judges, committees and councils – through technocratic rules and guidance. The meaning of laws has been changed, the purpose of the criminal justice system lost, and dogma put before ancient principle.

From the broader ineffectiveness of the police, and the failure to punish high-volume criminals, to associated problems such as the use of human rights laws to prevent immigration control and the Public Order Act to create a blasphemy law, the same problems exist. For the police we can also add weak and woke leadership, bewildering bureaucracy, an inability to rise to new challenges and exploit new technologies, and a failure – elsewhere in the criminal justice system, to be fair – to lock up repeat offenders for lengthy sentences.

If we want the law to serve us all equally, and if we want the police and criminal justice system to protect us from criminals, change from top to bottom is needed. We need to return to tried and tested principles, and enforce the law without compromise. That can only start with elected leaders using the power we entrust to them. DT