22 The Sunday Times May 22, 2022COMMENT
B
osses of the National Union of
Rail, Maritime and Transport
Workers clearly didn’t heed the
pleas by the Bank of England
governor, Andrew Bailey, for
pay restraint. The RMT is ballot-
ing its 40,000 members on
what is being billed as the big-
gest strike in modern history, which could
bring the train network to a halt this
summer.
The RMT wants double-digit pay rises,
plus guarantees against redundancies
and “detrimental changes to working
practices”. It is in good company. The
Trades Union Congress has logged more
than 300 industrial disputes in the past 12
months — the most for five years. Workers
at BT, Heathrow and councils across the
UK are threatening to walk out as the
steepest rate of inflation since 1982 puts
huge pressure on household finances.
Bailey perhaps made his point in-
elegantly, but he is right. Employers must
stand firm against demands when they
are unaffordable and unrealistic. Britain
teeters on the precipice of recession, with
GDP having shrunk by 0.1 per cent in
March and the Bank predicting a contrac-
tion next year. Significant job losses are
likely as consumers, feeling the pinch of
higher prices and higher taxes, rein in
spending, taking demand out of the eco-
nomy. Businesses’ borrowing costs are
also going up because the Bank base rate
now stands at 1 per cent. They cannot cave
in to double-digit pay settlements as this
toxic cocktail approaches.
The gap between the 4.2 per cent
annual increase in salaries for the three
months to March and the 9 per cent infla-
tion rate recorded last month illustrates
the pain being endured even by workers
fortunate enough to get pay rises. Indus-
trial strife on the railways and elsewhere
highlights the uncomfortable truth about
this stage of the post-pandemic period:
the forces bearing down on western eco-
nomies, particularly Britain’s, are greater
than any employer, government or cen-
tral bank can afford to mitigate. On top of
Covid’s cost is that of the war in Ukraine,
which looks likely to become a prolonged
conflict, keeping energy and food prices
higher for longer. A hard road lies ahead.
Ministers and people in positions of
authority must be honest about this with
the public, while crafting a narrative thatsustains hope for the eventual sunlit
uplands and laying the foundations of a
return to growth.
During the pandemic £170 billion of
taxpayers’ money was injected into the
economy to support wages through the
furlough scheme and companies via vari-
ous bailout loan programmes. The suc-
cess of furlough in particular saved jobs
and helps explain why unemployment is
at a 48-year-low of 3.7 per cent despite the
gloomy picture. The downside of the
chancellor’s largesse, which came on the
heels of a decade of low interest rates and
quantitative easing, is that it lulled many
voters into thinking the state would
always be on hand to soften further blows.
This time, rates are rising, money-
printing by the Bank has ended and the
scope for more government spending is
greatly reduced. Rishi Sunak struck the
right note at the CBI’s annual dinner last
week when he referred to a perfect storm
of global supply shocks: “There is no
measure any government could take, no
law we could pass, that can make these
global forces disappear overnight. The
next few months will be tough. But where
we can act, we will.”
A confused tax policy is not a good
starting point for action, though. National
insurance contributions have gone up,
despite the obvious detriment to working
families. Corporation tax is going up,
despite Sunak’s encouragement to invest.
A windfall tax on North Sea oil and gas
producers is being considered, despite
the effect this would have on international
sentiment towards the UK, and even
though it would raise an estimated £2 bil-
lion — a drop in the ocean of the £18 billion
needed to offset the pain of energy bill
increases for households alone.
Lazy cries of, “Something must be
done,” from campaigners miss the point
that no new money can be created. The
brutal reality is that if the government
wants to channel more help towards the
poorest and small businesses, it has two
options, neither palatable. It can borrow
more than the chancellor would like, or it
can tax the middle class and the rich even
harder and redistribute the proceeds. The
Tories could reap the backlash from either
in the economy and at the ballot box in- Whatever way ministers decide to
go, they must be clear in their thinking
and honest in the way they explain it.
As Metropolitan Police commissioner,
Lord Hogan-Howe presided over one of
the greatest scandals in the force’s history.
It was on his watch that the Met fell for the
fantastical lies of a paedophile known as
“Nick” and launched Operation Midland,
the investigation of a supposed VIP abuse
ring. With its terrible mistakes the Met
blackened the reputations of public fig-
ures such as the former chief of the
defence staff Field Marshal Lord Bramall,
the late Lord Brittan of Spennithorne and
the former Tory MP Harvey Proctor, who
bravely blew the whistle on the whole
fiasco and was awarded £900,000 in
compensation.
Hogan-Howe later apologised reluc-
tantly for the atrocious failings of Opera-
tion Midland, which was described as
“riddled with errors” by an independent
review in 2016. It will astonish decent-
minded readers to learn that Hogan-Howe
is now a leading candidate to run the
National Crime Agency (NCA), Britain’sequivalent of the FBI, and that his candi-
dacy is being pushed by Boris Johnson.
We report today that two other highly
qualified police chiefs were rejected by
No 10 after being interviewed by the home
secretary, Priti Patel. Hogan-Howe, 64,
was close to the prime minister during his
time as mayor of London and recorded a
video backing Johnson’s Tory leadership
campaign in 2019. Johnson’s attempt to
crowbar a tarnished friend into one of the
most influential roles in British policing is
disgraceful. If successful, it would damage
confidence in the NCA.
This is far from the first time the prime
minister has tried to install an ally into a
plum post. It is simply inappropriate for
him to take such a keen interest in public
appointments, especially for roles in the
police, who have largely withstood politi-
cal interference. Johnson should give up
on Hogan-Howe. Chumocracy is not the
way to run one of the most important
bodies in policing.Policing is not a good pie for
the PM to have his fingers in
Finally, a food innovation that will benefit
the masses. Wipe away your Michelin-
starred foam and your liquid-nitrogen ice
cream. The crisps brand Tayto has pro-
duced a more perfect delicacy: cheese
and onion chocolate.
As any child who surreptitiously mixes
a mouthful of Walkers and Dairy Milk
knows, the combination of salty crunch
and sweet melt is close to heaven. The
shoppers of Northern Ireland, whereTayto has unleashed this beautiful mon-
ster, seem to agree. A first run of 480,000
cheese and onion chocolate bars sold out
in three weeks.
This newspaper has never been afraid
to stand up for consumers, and in these
straitened times we would like to send a
clear message to Tayto: please, produce
some more — and send them our way. The
Northern Ireland protocol should not get
in the way of this taste sensation.Crunch time for food taboos
ESTABLISHED 1822Ministers should be clear: there
are limits to their largesse
Dominic Lawson
And what counts as “serious”? Not burglary,
unless carried out while the homeowners are
present. If your home has been ransacked by
someone on parole, even if you haven’t been
tied up or bludgeoned in the process, you may
not be impressed that the parole board has
found a way of exempting your experience
from its statistical self-vindication.
It is only when very well-known criminals
are given the benefit of the parole board’s
doubt that politicians become anxious
(because of public awareness). Most notable
was the board’s decision in 2018 to release the
serial sex offender John Worboys — the “black
cab rapist”. A very rare judicial review
overturned the decision, though not on
grounds of public safety: Sir Brian Leveson’s
ruling was made on the basis that the board
had been “inadequately prepared”. It had not
even studied the original judge’s sentencing
report. Given the notoriety of the Worboys
case, as I wrote at the time: “If the parole
board lacks thoroughness and rigour when
assessing a case that was always going to attract
mass media attention, what can be its
standards in cases where it has no need to fear
such scrutiny?”
The serving justice secretary, Dominic Raab,
has made it his mission to reform the parole
board and is proposing legislation that will,
among other things, require a certain
proportion of those on the board to have
experience in law enforcement (in other
words, to be ex-coppers), make it easier for the
secretary of state to intervene to block a release
on public safety grounds and allow victims to
attend parole board hearings. There is no
parliamentary time yet set aside for Raab’s
proposals, but if the prime minister was
remotely serious when he told the cabinet in
its first meeting of the new parliament last
week that “the crucial duty of our government
is to make our communities safer”, then he will
find the time.
But I have a simpler solution. Scrap the
entire early-release system. And stop making
judges deceivers of the public. Just carry out
the sentences they pass. This would not
prevent the prison service from doing its best
to reform inmates through educational
programmes (I am a supporter of the Chess in
Prisons initiative). But if the government truly
wants to restore the public’s faith in the
criminal justice system, as it claims, it knows
what it must do.
[email protected]L
ast Tuesday justice was done — 35 years
late. Donald Robertson was found
guilty of the murder of Shani Warren.
She had become known as “the Lady
in the Lake” after her body, gagged
and bound with a jump lead and a tow
rope, was found in Taplow Lake in
April 1987. Extraordinarily, the
pathologist on the case did not take the
necessary swabs from her body; it was only
when the case was reopened in 2020 that
residues of Robertson’s DNA were found on the
cloth used to gag the victim. The police in the
original investigation had suggested she might
have drowned after tying herself up. Even in
the trial that ended last week Robertson’s
defence lawyer attempted to introduce
spurious evidence that the victim “had shown
an interest in bondage”.
But the real scandal in this case goes far
beyond the failings of the initial police
investigation; it lies in the judicial system as a
whole. Specifically, the way Robertson, who
had committed numerous sexual attacks in
that part of England, had been freed and freed
again before serving his full sentence.
In 1977 he was found guilty of the attempted
rape of a teenage girl, handed a five-year
sentence but freed in 1981. Within months he
had raped a young girl: he was given a sentence
of eight years but walked free in October 1986.
Six months later he murdered Shani Warren.
And two months after that, in June 1987, he
raped a 17-year-old girl. He was not caught, but
in 1990 Robertson was found guilty of another
attempted rape, given a sentence of ten years —
and released after six.
A year after that early release, in 1997, he
was found guilty of the indecent assault of an
11-year-old girl. In 2011 he finally received a life
sentence (although with eligibility for release
after eight years) when, after a cold case
review, he was convicted for the June 1987
rape. It was while serving that sentence that
Robertson, now 66, finally faced trial for the
murder of Shani Warren. Her parents,
however, died last year, denied even the bleak
relief of seeing their daughter’s murderer
convicted.
As for the repeated early releases of
Robertson, this is a feature of the judicial
system, not a bug. Acts of parliament had been
passed that meant even without a parole board
assessing him as safe for release this rapist
would have been freed automatically after
serving no more than two thirds of thesentence passed by the judge — which is exactly
what happened.
In the vast majority of cases criminals are
freed automatically after serving only half their
sentence in prison. However, in 2020 the
government mandated that those serving
sentences of seven years or more should serve
two thirds of their time in jail before being
eligible for release. But their release into the
community would still be automatic. Last
month another measure was passed, which
applied the two-thirds rule to “certain serious
violent sexual offenders” serving sentences of
between four and seven years. Again, though,
two thirds is the maximum fraction of the
sentence spent behind bars.
This is the system that hoodwinks the public
and makes liars of judges. I became painfully
aware of it in 2004 when my wife’s cousin was
murdered by a man who had been released
from prison only weeks earlier. Damien
Hanson had served just half of a 12-year
sentence for attempted murder (with a
machete), and the requirement by the judge
in that case that Hanson serve at least nine
years was ignored by the parole board. The
board ignored it even though the risk
assessment it was required to undertake found
that he had a “91 per cent risk of reoffending”.
Of course such precise figures are inherently
suspect. But still...
A friend who was a psychiatrist in the prison
service for many years told me: “We know that
a certain proportion released on parole will go
on to reoffend almost immediately; the trouble
is, we don’t know which ones.” The parole
board likes to point out that in 2020-21 only
0.5 per cent of those it released “went on to
commit a serious crime”. That is highly
disingenuous, if not dishonest. It knows only of
cases in which charges have been brought. At
present just 7 per cent of offences result in
charges. Detection rates are lamentably low.V
ictoria Beckham said last week that
wanting to be thin was “an old-
fashioned attitude” — quite the
statement from someone who,
according to her husband, has eaten
only steamed fish and vegetables for
the past 25 years (I did not make this
up). Maybe she’ll now steer herself
pasta-wards: “Women today want to look
healthy and curvy,” she said, adding that she’d
seen “really curvy women” on Miami Beach
“with not a lot of clothes on, and they look
fantastic”.
Beckham, for so long a poster girl for
skinniness, is on board with inclusivity, and so
is Sports Illustrated, a magazine that has been
going in the US since 1954. It still has an annual
swimsuit issue, in which attractive women
pose in, you’ve guessed it, swimwear, because
it’s a sports magazine and swimwear is sporty
and therefore wholesome, and so you can call
the whole thing a joyous celebration of health
rather than a creepy opportunity for ogling.
I have no idea whether the swimsuit issue is
still a thing now that celebrities are always
posting pictures of themselves in their pants on
their own social media accounts, but the
continued existence of the very dated format
throws up an interesting question.
Photographs of glossy-lipped women in wet
bikinis aren’t really where we’re at, culturally,
so how do you make it work?
By making one of them old. Inclusivity to the
rescue! There are four versions of the cover of
Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue this year,
each featuring a different woman. The wet
bikini slot is occupied by Kim Kardashian, but
it’s OK because one of the other cover stars is
Maye Musk, who is 74. Mrs Musk, who is the
mother of Elon Musk and his two siblings,
Tosca and Kimbal, is wearing a chic (dry) one-
piece and gold jewellery. She looks fantastic, as
well she might: she is an exceptionally good-
looking woman, which is why she has been a
model for 50 years.
It’s refreshing and cheering to see a
septuagenarian on the cover of a magazine,and I like it enormously. What I like less are the
wildly overoptimistic, wishful-thinking
conclusions people always draw from this sort
of thing — older models, bigger models and so
on — and the way they think they can be
applied to real life.
There aren’t really any. Maye Musk is on the
cover because she is beautiful — being old
comes second. The model Ashley Graham is in
demand because she is beautiful — that she is
so-called plus-size is, again, secondary. Lauren
Wasser, who lost her legs to toxic shock
syndrome at the age of 24, was on the Louis
Vuitton catwalk a fortnight ago because she is
beautiful, with or without prosthetic legs.
A woman called Kelly Hughes is on the
inside pages of the swimwear issue, posing in a
bikini that shows her C-section scar. She too is
beautiful. And so it goes on. The people we are
invited to see as living proof of greater diversity
or inclusivity are always outstandingly good-
looking, as doubtless were the women Victoria
Beckham admired on Miami Beach.
There’s a kind of sleight of hand in this: why
does no one point out that, no matter how
diverse the people portrayed (or the brands
they are representing), the common thread is
exceptional looks, which, as a concept, is not
diverse or inclusive at all?
It is true that the previously narrow
parameters of what defines beauty have been
expanded, which is great: more people are
allowed in the club, and that absolutely does
represent a welcome evolution. It is reallyimportant for all sorts of people to see other
people who look a bit like themselves doing
interesting things and being valued. But it also
often leads to crazy overstatements from
excited onlookers: normal-size models mean
the end of the super-skinny ones (nope). Plus-
size models mean the end of normal-size ones
(nope). Older models mean the end of teenage
ones (nope). Then there are the stressful
exhortations, best paraphrased as, “If Maye
Musk can look amazing in a swimsuit at the age
of 74, so can you!”
Well, it depends. You can’t just wish Musk-
level beauty or confidence on yourself simply
because you happen to be the same age. Maye
Musk looks amazing in a swimsuit at the age of
74 because she is Maye Musk, with Maye Musk’s
taut body and lovely bone structure. Most
people aren’t Maye Musk. That’s why she’s on
the cover of the issue and they aren’t.
We should be more able than we are to
differentiate between an expanded definition
of beauty, which is extremely welcome, and
the idea that you can eat all the junk food you
like because Ashley Graham exists, which just
goes to show ... what, exactly? Nothing at all
that pertains to anyone else, sadly, unless they
are similarly blessed in the looks department.
The message that trickles down is always the
same sweetly and scrupulously egalitarian
bromide: just be yourself, as fat or thin as you
like, and everybody will find you powerfully
attractive because you’re being authentic. No
one loves the idea of this more than me, but it’s
not honest. Some lucky people can be
dazzlingly attractive whether they are fat or
thin, just as some 74-year-olds can look
incredible in a swimsuit, but they are few and
far between. It’s not a given. Why pretend it is?
The models and celebrities who differ from
the norm are not outriders but outliers. The
fact that they exist is marvellous, but it has little
relevance to the rest of us. We are aware of
them less because of what they represent and
more because of the simple fact that they are
beautiful. There’s nothing new in that.
@IndiaKnightIndia Knight
Victoria Beckham claims being thin is passé. Maybe, but beauty isn’t
I see no plain person
on a magazine cover
The ‘Lady in the Lake’ murderer should never have been free to kill
The models who look
different are not
outriders but outliersI saw the system at
work when my wife’s
cousin was murderedAutomatic early release
makes liars of judges