Robert Jenrick

How did we get here? It takes a special kind of uselessness to engineer a crisis entirely of your own making and then to come to this House asking for applause as you legislate your way out of it. Let us remind ourselves what actually happened here. The Sentencing Council, an unelected unaccountable quango created by the Labour party, issued guidance that would have divided our criminal justice system by race, religion and identity; a two-tier system as offensive to common sense as it was to the most basic and important principle of equality before the law. The Justice Secretary, asleep at the wheel, either did not know or did not care. Her officials signed off the guidance, her Ministry nodded it through, and the council published it; the guidance was due to come into force. Only then, after I raised this issue with her in this House, and in the face of fierce opposition from the Conservatives, the press and the public, did she rouse herself from her stupor—only then did she discover her principles. Even at that point, however, the Justice Secretary did not act decisively. She did not use her powers to sack the architects of this shameful guidance, support my legislation or bring forward immediate legislation of her own to stop it. What did she do instead? She wrote a letter begging the council to reconsider. Such is the pace at which she moves—or, rather, crawls—that it took a further seven days to put her thoughts in writing after a meeting. When the council did not move, the Justice Secretary threatened action—only to be humiliated by the chair of the council, who made clear that if she tried, he would take legal action and potentially challenge his own Justice Secretary. So incompetent was she that the Opposition had to take it upon ourselves to prepare a judicial review to do the Justice Secretary’s job for her, and such was the level of chaos over which she nominally presided that the Government’s own legal service was trooped out against us to defend the very sentencing guidelines that the Justice Secretary had denounced as two tier.