UK: New guidance could result in harsher sentences for White, Christian men
New guidance from the UK’s Sentencing Council could see minorities receive lighter criminal sentences than White, Christian men.
The council issued guidance last week instructing judges to order a pre-sentence report if an offender is a religious, racial, or gender minority. A pre-sentence report lobbies the court for a more lenient sentence by describing the hardships a particular offender may face if they receive jail time. The Sentencing Council says a pre-sentencing report should be produced if a convict is “an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community.” The guidance specifically says that women, people who identify as transgender, and young adults 18-25 are among the groups who should benefit from pre-sentence reports.
Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick slammed the new guidance, saying it carries a “double standard” that enshrines a “two-tier approach to sentencing.”
“I will be challenging this sentencing guidance in the courts on the grounds it enshrines anti-white and anti-Christian bias into our criminal justice system,” Jenrick said. “And if Labour won’t amend the law to prevent this, the Conservatives will. There are few more important principles than equality under the law – we will fight tooth and nail to defend it.”
According to The Telegraph, Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is pushing back on the guidance and threatening to strip the Sentencing Council of its powers through legislation. The council is a quasi-NGO, or “quango,” that is independent of the government and therefore outside the direct control of cabinet officials and lawmakers.
“I will be reviewing the role and powers of the Sentencing Council alongside the work of the independent sentencing review [headed by former justice secretary David Gauke]. If necessary, I will legislate the Sentencing Bill that will follow that review,” Mahmood said.
‘Two-tier Kier’
The Labour government has been accused of two-tier policing, even earning Prime Minister Keir Starmer the nickname “Two-Tier Kier.” Last year, for example, 37-year-old Shaun Tuck was jailed for 15 weeks for a social media post that police considered racist. Thirty-four-year-old Sam Melia was sentenced to two years in prison for selling anti-immigration stickers. But twenty-one-year-old Hamoud Al Soaimi, a Syrian Muslim who participated in the repeated gangrape of a 13-year-old girl while in his teens, was sentenced to just 180 hours of community service. Similarly, in 2023, a 20-year-old woman named Husina Hussain who drunkenly assaulted a bowling alley employee and shouted racial slurs in public avoided having to wear a sobriety ankle monitor because she was Muslim.
Last year, the Labour government drew criticism for cracking down on anti-immigration riots while allowing Muslim rioters to rampage freely. The anti-immigration riots were triggered after a Rwandan migrant stabbed three young British girls to death, and the rioters, who were primarily White British taxpayers, were imprisoned. Prime Minister Starmer promised to increase surveillance and censorship to clamp down on the “far-Right.”
Meanwhile, police were noticeably absent when hundreds of migrants, mostly Muslim men, attacked a bar, destroyed cars, and chased down journalists. In a similar incident last year, West Yorkshire Police fled from a 2,000-strong mob of Muslim and Romanian rioters who destroyed a police vehicle and set a bus aflame. Police officers on the scene took flight, saying afterward they had been met with “a barrage of bricks and missiles.” The police remained largely absent for several hours as the rioters set fire to the neighborhood. Firefighters refused to enter the area, fearing for their own safety.
A “number of people” were arrested in connection with the riot. According to independent journalists, one of those was a British woman who was arrested on the spot after making “racially insensitive” remarks about the rioters.
