The Solicitor General and Wigston MP, Edward Garnier, has succeeded in stopping a planned 360 place new prison build, for young offenders,  at Glen Parva in his own constituency. There will be those who might accuse him of being a NIMBY.

The economic downturn has meant cutbacks and savings are needed all over the place. A cheaper, equivalent number of adult prison places will instead be provided elsewhere. According to the MoJ: “This forms part of the £325m that the Ministry of Justice will contribute to the savings of £6billion for this financial year (2010-2011), as announced by the Chancellor, Gideon Osborne,  earlier this week”.

Edward Garnier, has said: “We need to be more imaginative about how we treat offenders within the criminal justice system”.

This got me thinking. Nobody can accuse me of being a NIMBY. Now I know there are those who claim that our prisons are already holiday camps, so why am I supportive of the plans to turn a place in Richmond, North Yorkshire, in my own constituency, into an adult prison?

The guidebook states that Lindale Holiday Park, near Bedale, is:

“A peaceful site set in the rolling hills of lower Wensleydale, convenient for visiting the dales and many local attractions. There are holiday caravans and lodges available for sale. There are holiday lodges with private spas available for hire. The park is open all year.

The many trees and shrubs on the park give privacy, seclusion and beauty to the site . In this beautiful environment you will find a tranquil holiday haven in complete empathy with its picturesque country surroundings.

To ensure peace and quiet Lindale Holiday Park is free of distractions, there is no club or bar and no touring caravans leaving you free to relax in a rural idyll“.

It is without doubt eco-friendly. Therefore, ideal for the first ecological prison in the country. It maybe a new concept for us in the UK, however, there is a successful working model already in existence in Norway.

Obviously such  a prison would be low security, and Kenneth Clarke and I have reached an understanding that only those prisoners who have successfully completed a course on Anger Management or Sex Offender Treatment Programme will be transferred to what will be called Dale’s View Prison.

Location, location, location…

I don’t know, I just got the vision in my head of lorries dumping waste in a landfill site.

Which leads me neatly onto this interesting topic.

Judicial review in Ireland

There were important missed opportunities in the early development of judicial review of legislation in Ireland.

“The judicial power of the high court shall extend to the question of the validity of any law having regard to the provisions of the Constitution.”

I have never been satisfied with the idea that we have an “unwritten” constitution, and I think Labour missed a good opportunity to allow judges to have more power under the HRA 1998. Under Labour Parliament lost the moral authority to govern. And the Executive, particularly Charles Falconer and Jack Straw, acted as though above the law.

Our problem is that we live too much in the past, thinking of glorious bygone days of British Empire. I wonder where we would come in the league tables of 47 Member States in the Council of Europe or 27 in the EU? I suspect, given the anti-Toryism in Europe, we would come somewhere near the bottom in both of them.

My task is to score points to get us into the near top of the Premiership.

“It is not acceptable that taxpayers should continue to bear the heavy cost of rescuing the banking sector,” Mr Barnier said. “They should not be in the front line. I believe in the polluter pays principle.

“We need to build a system which ensures that the financial sector will pay the cost of banking crises in the future.“

I suspect that James Macintyre is guilty in relation to judgment/judgement in his article referring to David Miliband attacking me.

He probably meant to say judgement and not judgment here: “Finally, Miliband said that while Hague was good at “jokes” his new job would, “for the first time in a long time”, require him to have “judgment”".

What a shame that David Miliband did not show better judgement over CIA torture flights taking off and landing on British soil when he was Foreign Secretary. Had he done so, then perhaps “Sir Igor Judge, the lord chief justice; Lord Neuberger, the master of the rolls; and Sir Anthony May, president of the Queen’s Bench” would not have passed judgment upon him!

Hague must prioritise human rights

The new foreign secretary can make the UK into a force for good in the world – he should start by reading Amnesty’s new report

When the one-time foreign secretary Robin Cook became leader of the Commons in 2001 he famously “read himself into” his new role with a marathon 48-hour briefing session. As William Hague takes the measure of his new foreign secretary job, I urge him to steel himself for the challenges ahead with a little light reading: the new Amnesty International report 2010 (subtitled “The State of the World’s Human Rights”) published later this week.

Hague may not wish to devour our – often grim – 400-page opus in one weekend, but here are some reasons why he should place it on a handy bookshelf in his office.

First, Hague will naturally be seeking to put numerous bilateral and multilateral relations on “reset”. Starting with the United States, the UK is re-establishing where it stands on key issues, always, of course, assessed against the UK national interest. The tools for this reassessment are many and varied – economic and military data are key – but “softer” indices of judgement play a major role. This realm, broadly “political”, must, I believe, include human rights if Britain is to make the right choices in the world.

Take Afghanistan, Hague’s avowed priority issue. Equipment for troops, dealing with the narcotics trade, assessing already complex relations with Pakistan and Iran, the US and Nato – each of these will play a part in policy formation. But what of human rights in Afghanistan? We’ve been told numerous times that UK forces are in Afghanistan to stop terrorists killing people on the streets of Britain. Yet politicians have readily cited human rights concerns – especially virulent anti-women policies from the Taliban – as further cause and justification.

As Afghanistan prepares for the “Peace Jirga” on 29 May, the question is increasingly: on what terms does the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai attempt a peace settlement with the “reconcilable” elements of the Taliban and other armed groups? The US and Nato view on this will be important, so the UK must consider this extremely carefully.

Hague will read on page 55 of the Amnesty report that in 2009 the Taliban and other anti-government groups actually “stepped up attacks against civilians, including attacks on schools and health clinics, across the country”. Worryingly enough, the report makes clear, Afghan women and girls were targeted for attack by the Taliban and were also the subject of widespread societal discrimination, forced marriage, domestic violence and other abuse.

The danger now, then, is that a rush to stem Taliban violence through a “peace” deal will mean women’s already fragile rights being traded away. The UK should have no part in this “trade-off”.

Other enormous challenges ahead require the same human rights input for any informed foreign policy thinking. Iran is far more than a “nuclear issue”, as the huge election protest movement last year demonstrated. If, for example, British personnel are again seized by the Iranian authorities, the Foreign Office needs to be thoroughly apprised of detention conditions, the risk of torture, the fairness of trials and a host of other human rights issues. Indeed the same applies to all countries: there is no clearer example of British interests intersecting with those of the citizens of other countries as when a British national is detained in a foreign jail next to political prisoners in, say, Burma, China or Saudi Arabia.

Diplomacy is a two-way street. But no meeting with a foreign leader or their foreign affairs ministers should take place without the foreign secretary being less than fully aware of what occurs in the police stations of that country (in some instances in the basement cells of ministry buildings themselves). It’s as well to know that the smiling prime minister’s own brother is accused of torture if you’re about to sign a multimillion-pound trade deal.

Meanwhile foreign powers are adept at seeing the beam in our own eye if we broach their human rights failings. Getting our human rights house in order makes good sense internationally and domestically. The unpleasant fact is that the UK’s involvement in “war on terror” secret detentions and torture left us exposed to justified criticism. Hague’s announcement last week that there would be an inquiry into this is overdue but extremely welcome. Certainly we can have no claim to the moral high ground unless our record is significantly better than it has been.

The UK can be a force for good in the world in multiple ways – from firm support for the UN millennium development goals and an effective international criminal court, to continued championing of a global arms trade treaty and of lifesaving measures on maternal health and HIV/Aids treatments. In a speech to FCO staff on his first day in the job, Hague mentioned the importance of “international organisations”, a promising enough sign that we’ll be monitoring here in terms of support for human rights at the United Nations, the EU and elsewhere.

Hague and his Conservative-Lib Dem coalition colleagues have an opportunity to pursue an agenda of law, order and human rights at home and abroad. A well-informed, human rights-aware Foreign Office is a boon to good government and much will rest on the decisions taken in the first years of the new foreign secretary’s tenure. As well as absorbing his FCO briefs, William Hague should read our report in full. I’ve already mailed him a copy.

In 2006, Kenneth Clarke said: “In these home affairs things I think occasionally it’s the duty of politicians on both sides to turn round to the tabloids and right-wing newspapers and say ‘you have your facts wrong and you’re whipping up facts which are inaccurate’.“

Ken has yet to discover Jack Straw’s legacy, when he gets up to speed on the recent developments in Europe (a place outside Westminister Village and the M25).

The timebomb is scheduled to go off on 1 June 2010. The wind turbines will probably scatter brown stuff in all directions in the UK.

Europe is a dead political project

This is the beginning of the end for the EU unless it can find the capacity to start again on radically new bases

• This is an edited version of an article which will be published in full in the June issue of the online journal Theory and Event (Johns Hopkins University Press)

In the comments…

ChampagneMolotov

“Europe can still make it, but the UK needs to play ball or get out”.

The sole achievement of Gordon Brown as Second and then First Lord of the Treasury was to keep Britain out of the euro. I suspect this was inadvertent. Mr Brown was not a knee-jerk Europhile of the Mandelsonian variety. He engaged in that casual compliance with Europhilia that allowed much to be done by omission: not least, of course, the Treaty of Lisbon, and his shameful refusal to hold a referendum on it.
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