Omnishambles Update 44

A customer enters a pet shop.

Mr. Praline: 'Ello, I wish to register a complaint.

(The owner does not respond.)

Mr. Praline: 'Ello, Miss?

Owner: What do you mean "miss"?

Mr. Praline: (pause)I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!

Owner: We're closin' for lunch.

Mr. Praline: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.

Owner: Oh yes, the, uh, the Norwegian Blue...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?

Mr. Praline: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. 'E's dead, that's what's wrong with it!

Things are getting a little surreal, as Frances Crook reveals in her latest blog:- 

Dead budgies and prison rules

Chris Grayling is really getting down and dirty with the detail of prisoners’ lives as the new rules he has introduced stipulate that you can have an alive budgie but not a dead one. Prisoners have been getting in touch to tell us that the time on the phone to families has been cut to 10 minutes when the phone just goes dead.

The ban on sending in books and other essentials has received massive publicity and generated public opprobrium because of the Howard League campaign. The support of the country’s top writers for our campaign has gone alongside criticism from experts like HM chief inspector of prisons who slammed the secretary of state for justice’s propensity to micromanage prisons.

The 66 page Incentives and Earned Privileges instruction from the National Offender Management Service covers every detail of prison life and is bureaucracy gone bonkers.  Prison governors and staff will have to scour the details to ensure that the rules are being applied. They also have to refer to the links with other 22 other voluminous instructions documents which all have to be read together and cross referenced. It won’t leave them much time for doing any real work.

The instructions apply to both public sector and private prisons, even though prisons like the newly privatised Northumberland jail has just divested itself of 200 staff. How the few remaining staff, who had to deal with a major disturbance at the weekend, will find the time to search for dead budgies is a mystery.

Governors are clearly being forced to take these rules very seriously as it was a governor who raised with me his concern about the dead budgies. He was furious at the micro management of prisons emanating from the top of the Ministry of Justice that is tying senior staff into bureaucratic knots.

The new restrictions go alongside staff cuts that impede family contact and, as we know, access to libraries and learning through reading.

The regime introduced by the new ministerial team is in stark contrast to that of the first couple of years of the Coalition government when the emphasis was on work and activity. Now there is shut down, nothing goes in and nothing happens within. It is no coincidence that there have been riots every few days, and things will get worse.

Meanwhile the prisoner book ban story refuses to die and the POA have now got on board as reported here on the Politics website:-

The campaign against Chris Grayling's ban on prisoners being sent books was backed by prison staff themselves today, as doubt was cast on a key plank of the justice secretary's argument. The general secretary of POA, the trade union for prisoner workers, insisted staff had never had a problem dealing with the parcels being sent in to jails, casting doubt on Graylings assertion that it would not be "secure or practical" to allow parcels to be sent to prisoners.

The comments came as Gareth Davies, former governor of Pentonville prison, branded the book ban "barbarous". They also coincide with an intervention in the debate by the chief inspector of prisons, who branded the policy a "mistake".

Steve Gillan, general secretary of the POA, told Politics.co.uk that Grayling's insistence that prison guards could not scan parcels for drugs or other contraband was ridiculous. "For decades prison officers have dealt with parcels. They searched them," he said. "The reality is it was never really a problem. Now and then people tried to smuggle drugs in that way. But as professional prison officers we found these items. "The majority of these books and magazines that came in didn't have any drugs in them at all. "People have been having their books sent in for 20, 30 years and now all of a sudden it's become a big issue for the secretary of state."

The comments cast doubt on Grayling's argument, made in Politics.co.uk earlier this week, that a ban on parcels across the prison estate needed to be imposed for security reasons. The Ministry of Justice tried to bolster its case by sending images to the press of contraband hidden in gifts sent to prisoners from friends and family, such as Weetabix with a chamber inside them for drugs.

Gillan's comments are particularly damaging because they come from a figure who otherwise supports Grayling's Incentives and Earned Privileges scheme. "I agree with the secretary of state on stopping Sky TV and letting prison officers have control of the incentive and privilege scheme," he said. "We agree with some of what the secretary of state has done, but not the book issue – that's never really been a problem." Gillan's comments come as frustration against the book ban policy grows among current and former prison staff.

In a letter to the Times today, former Pentonville prison governor Gareth Davies described the "deliberate deprivation" of books as "barbarous". He said the policy "filled me with shame that such a thing was being perpetrated in British people's interests".

The rules, which came into force last November, "shows a system that has discarded an important principle by which I lived for 26 years, that prisoners are incarcerated as punishment but not for punishment", he added. "Reading is essential in the educative processes. These have been acknowledged for many years as a key element of rehabilitation. What on earth is the minister thinking?"

In a related development, chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick said the book ban policy was a result of ministers trying to control prison policy from the centre. Hardwick told the Independent that the broad objectives of the incentives scheme were "sound", but added: "The problem in this case… is trying to micro-manage this from the centre, with the centre describing very detailed lists of what prisoners can and can't have.

"I think that's a mistake. I think that once the policy intention is clear, how that's implemented should be left much more to the discretion and the common sense of governors, so that they can reflect the needs of their particular prison population."

The intervention from prison professionals comes amid a huge backlash against the policy from leading authors, including Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Alan Bennett. A Change petition set up to make the justice secretary revise the policy has now acquired over 19,000 signatures.

The issue is covered in the most recent offering from retired PO Mike Guilfoyle writing on the LeftCentre website in a wide-ranging piece entitled 'What Price Justice - The demise of Probation'. Here's a taster:-

"It was a piquant moment for me, reading that the prominent Human Rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC had been broached to consider instigating legal action.  This in response to the ill-considered and mean spirited move by the ‘ Hard line’ Justice Secretary Chris Grayling MP, prohibiting the sending into prisons of books by families and friends under recently imposed restrictions introduced last November via a Ministry of Justice edict, with the Orwellian prefix PSI 30/2013 (Incentives and Earned Privileges Scheme). This policy recalled for me, the redoubtable prison reformer Sir Alexander Paterson, who coined the famous adage `that men (sic) come to prison as a punishment, not for punishment’. 

Whether this embargo on books breaches the 1689 Bill of Rights as Robertson opines, such that this constitutes  `cruel and unusual punishment’ only time will tell. But the unbridled enthusiasm with which Grayling has embarked on this more populist approach to the treatment of prisoners, citing in another blunt historic allusion to the need to introduce ‘ Spartan prisons’. Those terrorised by the Spartans being the ritually mistreated Helots, perhaps this unsavoury atavism relishing as it does such an oppressive apparatus of control, befits a Justice Secretary who regularly derides the inconvenient demands of the Human Rights Act.  Not to mention his utter annoyance of judicial review."

Meanwhile, I've had a response from the BBC to my complaint about poor news coverage of the London Justice Alliance/Napo rally and strike last week. Judging by a glance at Facebook, it seems I wasn't the only person to complain, but this person at least got an extra paragraph in their standard letter:-

Thanks for contacting us regarding BBC News.

I understand you feel there was insufficient coverage on a large protest on changes to the justice system that took place in London.

When deciding on the level of coverage appropriate to a certain issue, there are several factors that we take into consideration. These can include whether the story is new and requires immediate coverage, how unusual the story is, and how much national interest there is in the story. We know that not everyone will agree with our choices on which stories to cover, and the prominence that we give to them. These are subjective decisions made by our news editors, judgement calls rather than an exact science and we accept that not everyone will think that we are correct on each occasion

Nevertheless I would like to assure you that I have registered your comments on our audience log. This is the internal report of audience feedback that’s compiled daily and made available to management throughout the BBC.

The audience logs are seen as important documents that can help shape decisions about future programming and content.

Thanks again for taking the time to contact us.

Kind Regards

Gerard Magennis

BBC Complaints

It's just not a good enough response from 'Auntie', but to be honest I gave up watching BBC tv news in favour of Channel 4 and Jon Snow ages ago, the former being so shallow. It's interesting to note that critics of the NHS 'reforms' feel the same about our state broadcaster as revealed in this GP's blog:-

The role of the BMA here is paramount in highlighting the disastrous changes occurring in the English NHS—nothing short of a major publicity campaign will suffice. We cannot rely on the media, and especially not the BBC who were hopeless at highlighting the privatising Health and Social Care Bill during its long and tortuous passage through parliament in 2010-2012.

As we head up to a General Election, this is not a good omen, but at least there looks to be no sign of the Maria Miller expenses scandal dying down - in fact quite the opposite as it proves an excellent opportunity to give our elected representatives another good kicking as they confirm once again that they simply cannot be trusted.