The CLC is not alone in providing legal
support for Christians who feel they have been discriminated against. The Christian Institute established a legal defence fund in 2006 to pay for legal challenges by Christians of “national importance” and, more recently, the predominantly Catholic St Thomas More Centre which provides free legal advice and assistance in cases involving religious freedom. The Christian Institute will go to court in Bristol on Monday to defend Cornish guest- house owners Peter and Hazelmary Bull, who refused to allow a gay couple to share one of their double-bedded rooms two years ago. The Bulls are being sued for sexual orientation discrimination by Martyn Hall and his civil partner, Steven Preddy, under the Equality Act, over their policy of restricting double- bed accommodation to married couples only. The case is the first of its kind in Britain. But neither of these bodies has anything
like as high a profile as the CLC, leading to criticism of the Centre’s work in some quarters. One Christian lawyer, who did not want to be named, said the CLC’s focus was too nar- row, and risked undermining its core message. “I think they are very sincere and honest people but I think they see things in apoca- lyptic terms. They almost seek martyrdom rather than trying to seek workable solutions. They are a little too narrow in their outlook. There are too few lawyers. Just four, from what I know. They don’t seem to have any desire to work with other Christian legal groups.” He also claimed the CLC “seemed to be uniformly unsuccessful”. “They have not won anything, as far as I
know. They do not do enough to resolve these issues outside of court, when they would prob- ably be able to achieve more that way. They also seem to have an obsession with homo- sexual cases.”
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hese views were refuted by Andrea Williams, who said the CLC was there to “make a stand” and was not discouraged by its losses. “All of our cases are to do with freedom of religion to fight for people’s right to be free to profess their faith,” she said.
“When legislation is anti-Christian then there’s a sense that we are going to lose, but we will continue to contend for the truth and to contend for justice. We are a small group of people who are committed to justice.” She says that the centre, far from actively seeking out cases, was actually overwhelmed with enquiries from those needing help. After high-profile work on homosexuality, she is turning her attention to abortion, an issue which she is passionate to confront. “We need as a Church to understand how to protect those women who are on the con- veyor belt of abortion,” she said. “We want to change the legislation to ensure that women must give informed consent, so that it is com- pulsory for women to understand the full impact of abortion before they make their choice. Women are often not made aware of their choices. We have women who come to us who have been massively traumatised by their experience of abortion.”
CLIFFORD LONGLEY
‘The British tradition of wanting to see criminals suffer is an old and deep one’
The question of how you treat wrongdoers is a profoundly moral one. The trouble is that political self- interest and morality may point in different directions. All credit therefore to Kenneth Clarke, the Justice Minister, for risking unpopularity in the media and rebellion among his backbenchers by putting morality first – although saving money also comes into the equation. He has announced the aim of reversing the seemingly inexorable rise in the prison population and bringing it down, in the first instance, by 3,000 from its current 85,000. The prison population increase has been driven since the early 1990s by the message that “prison works” – the slogan of Michael Howard as a Tory Home Secretary – and subsequently, under Tony Blair, of being “tough on crime” (as well as on “the causes of crime”). As year on year the prison population has risen, so the crime rate has fallen. Mr Howard and several Labour Ministers claimed one caused the other, on the grounds that taking criminals out of circulation will remove their chances for offending – except of course, offending against each other in prison, which presumably doesn’t count. It didn’t reduce reoffending once
they were discharged, however, and Mr Howard’s penal experiment failed to disprove one of his Tory predecessors’ description of prisons as “colleges of crime”. Crime rates have been falling in the Western world, in societies with falling prison populations just as much as those with rising ones. Furthermore the crimes allegedly prevented by locking potential perpetrators up are not statistically significant enough to make much difference. And it is a truism that the criminals you catch are the more incompetent ones – the rest often get away. Mr Clarke’s large dose of humane common sense, delivered in a Green Paper on Tuesday, has put to shame Labour’s claim to be a party of progressive penal reform. He wants to reduce the prison population because he doesn’t believe the dogma – committing a major heresy according to the right-wing press – that prison works. And he has
recognised that a large proportion of those sent to prison are personally inadequate, ill-educated, frequently addicted to alcohol or hard drugs, with undiagnosed mental illness often a factor. That does not make them likeable citizens or useful members of society. It is a mistake to sentimentalise criminals. They may well be a nuisance and a danger to other individuals. But the reason they do not respond well to punishment is often because the whole of their lives has been one long punishment. Many criminals have been in the care of the state as children, and the state is a lousy parent. Sitting on the local magistrates’ bench as a Justice of the Peace for 12 years I have read countless pre-sentence reports that tell the same sad story. The lesson is simply that “man’s inhumanity to man” is contagious. Someone treated badly will treat others badly. Mr Clarke is by no means the first
Minister to want the public to take community sentences, usually unpaid work, as seriously as prison. For all his talk of greater severity, however, it is unlikely the public’s appetite for vengeance will be satisfied so easily, for the British tradition of wanting to see criminals suffer is an old and deep one, a residual strand of Puritanism. It will take time to change. His Green Paper invites fresh thinking, and I have a modest suggestion of my own to address the vexed question of short prison sentences. They are unpopular with prison governors because they are too short to allow the prison-based rehabilitation system to work, which is why they are ineffective at stopping reoffending. But magistrates know they are necessary when every other tool in the sentencing locker has been tried.
So why not take short-term prisoners who are not an immediate danger to others out of the present penal system and put them in residential institutions which would specialise in intensive short-term treatment programmes? Why not give them all the same two months in custody, with a month under supervision after release? Why not let them choose the eight weeks themselves, prison by appointment as it were, within a time limit of six months? And why not let these new institutions – part penal, part psychiatric – be run by the private or voluntary sector, set them free to innovate, and let them be paid according to their success in reducing reoffending? Such a system might work: variations of it have been tried elsewhere. It might be popular. And it might even be moral.
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