Justice Week 8-12 December 2008

September 21, 2006

TUC Fringe

Napo was involved in organising two fringe events at this year’s TUC Congress.

The first, which was sponsored by the New Statesman, centred on ‘Social Justice – Safer Streets: is there a future for British justice’. However, Martin Bright, who chaired the event and who is political editor of the New Statesman, suggested a more fruitful debate might be on the subject of why the arguments had all been won on privatisation but the battle lost.

(Photo by Rod Leon. l-r Brian Caton, POA; Martin Bright, New Statesman; Judy McKnight,Napo)

John McDonnell MP, Secretary of the Justice Unions Parliamentary Group, was the keynote speaker. He described how the JUPG had campaigned endlessly over the past two years against the worst excesses of NOMS. That had included scores of parliamentary questions, adjournment debates and many meetings with Ministers. However, he said he felt the time had now come to change tack. If the Government insisted on introducing a Bill in the new Parliament it would be rigorously opposed by many MPs of all parties, enough he thought to put the Bill in jeopardy.

John McDonnell right

Judy McKnight, addressed the question ‘is there a future for British justice?’. The answer, she said, was yes: ‘but only if an evidence based approach is adopted and that applies both to criminal justice polices and the need for actual social justice, as opposed to criminal justice, policies - and it applies to criminal justice structures and services’.

‘The answer is NO if the Government continues to pander to penal populism and if the structures of the criminal justice system are based increasingly on feeding privateers'profit motives rather than pursuing the need for structures that are demonstrably effective’

Down load a fuller extract from Judy's speach.

The privatisation agenda

At the second meeting, on ‘Public Services not Private Profit’, attended by over 150 delegates, there was universal condemnation of the Government’s privatisation agenda Again John McDonnell was a main speaker and he was joined by trade union leaders Bob Crow from the NUT, Steve Synott from the NUT, Judy McKnight, from Napo, and Mark Serwotka from PCS. The meeting called for all unions, not just the smaller ones, to join together to fight privatisation.

Posted by kfalcon at 06:36 PM