Hell In A Handbasket.

[liadnan]

I was going to write yesterday about Charles Clarke's decision to cap compensation for those wrongly convicted at £500,000. Do eleven, fifteen, twenty years in the Scrubs for a crime you didn't commit, waking up every morning to being Big Frankie's Bitch... doesn't matter. Still only worth half a million. Less bed and board. Christ, is there some immutable law that every Home Secretary is more illiberal and obnoxious than the one before or something?

But Tim Worstall does it better in The Times

Comments

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I can only assume that ₤500,000 was chosen because that's the average annual household income of a Labour cabinet minister.

[jen-c-w.livejournal.com]

that last sentence is a work of art.
And sadly all too accurate.

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

I am still shocked by the 'less bed and board' bit and that happened quite a while ago...

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I can't believe that the way to address the imbalance between the miserly compensation for victims of crime with the judicially arrived at damages for wrongful conviction by reducing the later instead of increasing the former....

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

I couldn't agree with you more.

The view I heard on the radio (5Live, I think) was that they reckoned he thought no one would bother to stand up for guys who have been in jail. Which sounded particularly cynical, even for this government.