EDITORIAL : THE GUARDIAN, ENGLAND

       

 

Prisons: Reaction resurgent

Balancing the proclaimed newly muscular liberalism with a new muscularity of reaction is not a recipe for coalitional harmony

In so far as there is a serious liberal case for the coalition, it is that this administration has drawn a line under the dismal authoritarianism of the past 20 years. For a moment last year, it really did feel as if an entire agenda that had seamlessly passed from home secretary Howard in the Tory 90s to home secretaries Blunkett and Reid in the Labour noughties had finally been laid to rest. Mass-produced new offences, restrictions on defendants' rights and bone-headed terror laws: these things were simply not on the to-do list of a proclaimed small-L liberal Conservative prime minister who governed with a big-L Liberal support. The cleanest break of the lot concerned prison, whose use in England and Wales had doubled since the Howard era. Justice secretary Kenneth Clarke did not merely mouth warm words about alternatives to custody, as his predecessors intermittently did while squandering their budget on building more cells. He published a quantified plan to arrest the growth, and thereby free up resources for imaginative rehabilitative work.

Yesterday's news that Downing Street may rip one major plank out of that plan will – if it happens – effectively sink the whole thing. Well over half of the 6,000 prison places that Mr Clarke had wanted to free up were to be found by his pragmatic proposal to extend the discount on sentencing for a guilty plea from up to a third to up to a half, a policy with the important auxiliary advantage of encouraging offenders to ease the workload of a creaking court system. True, some judges had grumbled about the details, as Mr Howard relished pointing out yesterday. But the truth is that the country can no longer afford the race towards mass incarceration. If Mr Clarke's specific proposals are not to be pursued, meaty alternatives must be found. There are other options – such as decriminalising drugs – but these will not appeal to authoritarians such as Philip Hollobone, the Tory MP who called on Mr Clarke to retire in the Commons yesterday. All is not (quite) lost, since it is still unclear whether the guilty-pleas change is being abandoned outright or merely ditched for the most heinous crimes, but the mood music is hardly encouraging.

What is especially dismaying is that the panic on Downing Street appears to have been whipped up by a media storm that has already passed. Mr Clarke's words about rape a few weeks ago were desperately ill-chosen, and betrayed a crass if unwitting insensitivity. But after a foolish delay, he made his apologies, and explained he was merely attempting to convey the reality that there are some particularly violent rapes that quite rightly attract particularly harsh sentences. He even persuaded one victim who had previously broken down on the radio that his early-pleas policy may spare people who have suffered terrible attacks from a second ordeal in court. He did not, however, succeed in persuading those Fleet Street purveyors of fear and loathing who never tire of demanding the throwing away of every last key to every cell door. The praise the Sun poured on Ed Miliband after his kneejerk demand for Mr Clarke's head may have particularly spooked Mr Cameron if he discerned that his allies at News International were revealing themselves to be fair-weather friends.

The other sense weighing on the prime ministerial mind may be a need to throw a bone to Tory backbenchers. They are getting restive about concessions to the Liberal Democrats, particularly over health. But balancing the proclaimed newly muscular liberalism with a new muscularity of reaction is not a recipe for coalitional harmony, but a recipe for incoherence. If Mr Cameron gains a reputation for being blown hither and thither by every passing gale, while leaving colleagues to swing in these winds, he will pay a high price in the end. Far better to stick up for the liberal principles which he once proclaimed, and hack a way through the detail that salvages the thrust of the Clarke plan.

Peru: Revolution, the Brazilian way

Peru's elite swooned at the electoral choice that confronted the nation, but the country needs a role model

Peru has just held the sort of election that can give democracy a bad name: a choice between Aids and cancer, according to the country's revered novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. In the first round of the presidential contest the centrist vote split, allowing a runoff between Ollanta Humala, a former army officer promoting a leftist brand of Andean nationalism, and Keiko Fujimori, whose claim to the job rested on the fact that her father was Peru's controversial president for most of the 1990s. Reluctantly, Mr Vargas Llosa, along with a narrow majority of his fellow citizens, decided Mr Humala was the better candidate, and he won at the weekend.

The striking thing is how he did it. When Mr Humala last ran for the job, in 2006, he adopted the language, policies and dress of the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez. Back then, Chávez's Bolivarian revolution seemed to many to offer a decent hope of dragging South Americans out of poverty – flamboyantly anti-capitalist and anti-US, and apparently effective and popular. But Chávez has gone out of fashion, especially in Peru, as the reality of his rule has soured. A poll last year by Latinobarómetro found only 18% of Peruvians held a positive view of Chávez and only 23% thought Venezuela played a positive role in Latin America.

As a result, this time round, Mr Humala distanced himself from his old ally and promoted himself as a second Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the former Brazilian president and icon of the South American resurgence. Lula cut poverty dramatically by promoting economic growth and responsible spending. So, in a lesser and more unequal manner, did Peru's outgoing president Alan García. Lima is full of new restaurants and shopping centres, and its population demonstrably richer. President Humala's task will be to spread the benefits to the Peruvian highlands, where things have changed less. He will be constrained (to the relief of some Peruvians) by the constitutional requirement to serve only a single term, by congress and by a hostile media, mostly in the hands of business and – as elsewhere in South America – determinedly opposed to everything, good and bad, about Chávez.

Despite valid scepticism, there is a chance Humala could succeed. Latin America is already richer than outsiders think, its total economic output a third bigger than India's. Democracy is established; military dictators in mirrored sunglasses have been swept aside by leaders attempting to appeal to a common hunger for education and a middle-class lifestyle. Peru's elite swooned at the electoral choice that confronted the nation, but the country needs a role model and it has found an effective one in Brazil.

In praise of … camels down under

Australia's population of wild camels may soon be shot in order to earn carbon credits in an emissions trading scheme

It's enough to make an even-toed ungulate weep. Australia's population of wild camels, the Financial Times reveals, may soon be shot in order to earn carbon credits under the country's forthcoming emissions trading scheme. Each one of the creatures is estimated to produce a tonne of carbon dioxide a year – about the same as a 7,000km flight – not to mention the environmental havoc they cause in a fragile desert landscape more suited to amiable marsupials. Outback Australia, argue the promoters of the scheme, is being terrorised by up to a million feral camels, the unwanted descendants of beasts brought to the country a century ago to carry loads in the desert, and let loose once trucks took over their role. These unloved burping, grunting ships of the desert now face mass slaughter as a token of Australia's slow-off-the-mark battle against climate change. By some measures, Australians are the biggest per capita emitter of carbon dioxide on the planet, ahead of even the United States. Yet some might think it odd that camels are being singled out, when that other invasive species, the human, is really the cause of the problem, and ask whether climate change is more an excuse than a justification for the cull. The country certainly has too many camels, and animal rights campaigners may be oveoptimistic when they suggest feeding the animals birth-control tablets. But the camels didn't ask to be sent to Australia in the first place. They are just doing what camels naturally do.