If the Bill’s aim is to reduce the crisis in prison capacity, we must avoid funnelling people into suspended sentences where a community order would be more effective and safely promote rehabilitation Continue reading “Sentencing Bill Committee Stage Day 1”
This is obviously a Bill with good aims: to reduce the prison population and put more resources into probation and rehabilitation. However, the problem is that the prison population is going up in the long term because Governments keep coming up with new reasons to lock people up. Continue reading “Sentencing Bill Second Reading”
Not only have the Labour Government accepted all the draconian laws of the Conservative Government, but they continue to add to them
Baroness Jenny Jones speech on her Regret Motion:
“There are many reasons why proscribing Palestine Action is a bad idea. Listening to the Minister, I thought that his descriptions of the three organisations had very distinct differences and that the actions of Palestine Action did not appear to have the same calibre of evil as those of the other two. Therefore, collectively organising these three into one SI is perhaps a little bit sneaky of this Government. Palestine Action is not like any other group that the British Government have so far declared a terrorist organisation. I was 12 years on the Met Police Authority and in that time I had lots of anti-terrorist briefings. To me, the actions of Palestine Action do not ring true as terrorist activities. Continue reading “Terrorism Act 2000 (Proscribed Organisations) (Amendment) Order 2025”
There are a few issues that were not covered in the King’s Speech that ought to have been. I shall raise those and would like to hear the Government’s response and, hopefully, what they plan to do about them. Continue reading “My response to the King’s Speech”
My Question for Short Debate: To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the Practical toolkit for law enforcement officials to promote and protect human rights in the context of peaceful protests, published on 7 March by the UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association, and how they intend to ensure that the United Kingdom aligns with United Nations standards on the use of surveillance technology at protests. Continue reading “My debate on Peaceful Protests”
On 5th March Biofuelwatch and the Stop Burning Trees Coalition held an emergency demo outside the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in response to the Government’s proposal to offer billions more in new ‘transitional’ subsidies for unabated wood biomass burning. This goes back on previously government policy to stop all subsidies for unabated biomass burning in 2027. The only two power stations eligible for these subsidies are Drax (the UK’s biggest carbon emitter) and Lynemouth. These subsidies have no clear end date in sight, so if approved, could lock us into decades more of forest destruction, pollution of communities and carbon emissions. We called on DESNZ to scrap these plans to keep funding tree burning, and invest in genuine renewables and climate action.
Continue reading “Our right to strike and the Lords right to block”
After 13 years of Tory Britain, you can spend three years in prison for erecting a climate crisis banner while sexual predators are quietly fast-tracked for release to help with prison overcrowding.
We all know who is not facing jail time: the water company CEOs who fleeced customers for billions of pounds, filled our rivers with sewage and are now asking for our bills to go up so they can take even more of our money; the Conservative Party members who benefited from the billions handed out via the PPE fast-track scheme and numerous other scams; the Tory donors from the oil and gas industry who have had their payback through tax breaks, new licences and delays in the net-zero policy. Those are climate criminals who are costing us a fortune now and costing future taxpayers billions to clean up the mess and mitigate the damage caused by flooding, wildfires, food shortages and other climate catastrophes. Continue reading “The start of a new Parliamentary session”
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb 