The Sentencing Council for England and Wales has introduced “two-tier” guidelines for judges, instructing them to grant favorable treatment to “female” defendants and anyone “from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community”—that is, virtually anyone who is not a white, male Christian. The guidance, effective from April, specifies that courts should typically require a pre-sentence report before sentencing women, individuals from ethnic, cultural, or faith minorities, as well as other groups, such as young adults aged 18 to 25, people claiming to be transgender, and the disabled.
The Sentencing Council, sponsored by the Ministry of Justice, emphasized the “critical role” of pre-sentence reports in determining whether or not a defendant should be imprisoned. Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick, of the notionally right-wing Conservative Party, challenged the policy in Parliament, stating, “The new sentencing guidelines… will make a custodial sentence less likely for those ‘from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community.’ Why is the Justice Secretary enshrining this double standard, this two-tier approach to sentencing? It is an inversion of the rule of law. Conservative Members [of Parliament] believe in equality under the law; why does she not?”
Labour’s Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is already accused of presiding over “two-tier” policing, with anti-immigration protesters facing a draconian crackdown after white girls were killed en masse by a black knifeman in the town of Southport, while Muslim counter-demonstrators were allowed to run amok.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who is of Pakistani descent and was raised partly in Saudi Arabia, claims that there “will never be a two-tier sentencing approach under my watch or under this Labour Government.” She subsequently said she had written to the Sentencing Council requesting the language be removed. However, Jenrick accused her of playing “dumb,” insisting her representative to the council had not objected to the language when it was first proposed.
In any case, two-tier sentencing already exists in England, with the courts having ruled predators who target South Asian girls should be punished more severely than predators who target white girls, as white girls suffer less, in 2015—under the Conservatives. Then, in 2018, the Judicial College issued guidance for trainee judges stating explicitly that “True equal treatment may not… always mean treating everyone in the same way” when it comes to race, noting that “in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently”—i.e., grant favorable treatment to ethnic and religious minorities.
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