The many tiers of British justice

Civitas has just published an invaluable report on how identity politics and progressivist causes are undermining the impartiality of our criminal-justice system.

Civitas has just published a new report by Hardeep Singh, The Many Tiers of British Justice: When identity politics and progressivist causes trump impartial policing. Hardeep is a freelance journalist, deputy director of the Network of Sikh Organisations and assistant editor of The Sikh Messenger. The report is hugely important, and I was very happy to provide a foreword for it, which is reproduced below.

You can download the report from the Civitas website.

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On 5 March this year, the Sentencing Council – an unelected quango set up in the Gordon Brown era – published the revised Imposition of community and custodial sentences sentencing guideline, which was due to come into force on 1 April.

The revised guideline states: ‘When considering a community or custodial sentence, the court must request and consider a pre-sentence report (PSR) before forming an opinion of the sentence’, and that a PSR ‘will normally be considered necessary if the offender belongs to one (or more) of the following cohorts’, which includes those ‘from an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/ or faith minority community’.

Justifying this change, the Sentencing Council said the quiet bit out loud, admitting its aim was to help address racial and other disparities in outcomes in the criminal-justice system. In other words, it moved from its dispassionate, impartial role of sentencing advice, based on judicial fairness, to a politicised attempt at manipulating sentencing outcomes to fix its perception of ‘institutional racism’.

There was a huge backlash against this blatant racialising of criminal justice that would – in effect – mean that minority defendants would be far less likely to serve custodial sentences for the same offences. It shouldn’t surprise us that the public were horrified by proposals that were such a blatant slap across the face of impartial justice. Perhaps more surprisingly, however, one of the most vociferous critics of the guideline was the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood. She was uncompromising when stating on X: ‘As someone who is from an ethnic minority background myself, I do not stand for any differential treatment before the law.’ She went on to vociferously oppose a ‘two-tier sentencing approach’.

That mention of ‘two-tier’ justice from a government minister is important. After all, over the past year – specifically in the wake of the civil disturbances following the stabbings in Southport in 2024 – any mention of the phrase has been sneeringly dismissed as a far-right conspiracy theory. One article in the Guardian was titled ‘England riots: how has “two-tier policing” myth become widespread?’. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley described ideas of two-tier policing as ‘complete nonsense’. In April 2025, the Home Affairs Committee Inquiry into the 2024 riots doubled down, talking about ‘Unsubstantiated and “disgraceful” claims of “two-tier policing”’, which have ‘served only to undermine police officers’. Yet now, the government has been forced to introduce new emergency legislation – the Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill – precisely to ensure that two-tier justice doesn’t become embedded in the system.

Hardeep Singh’s report is an invaluable record of why this all matters. It is rich in detail and doesn’t flinch from complexity and nuance. It’s important we understand this two-tier phenomenon beyond the phrase, which is fast becoming a meme-like cliché, either used as an insult to denote ‘far-right’ adjacent wrong-think or a short-cut slogan to signify distrust in the establishment.

At its heart is the story of rot at the heart of criminal justice, and state institutions more generally. Under the guise of ‘diversity is our strength’, we are in danger of allowing police impartiality to be fatally compromised and a divisive, identitarian ideology to shatter the public’s belief in even the possibility of the state’s ability to treat everyone equally under the law.

While reading Hardeep Singh’s substantial investigation into the underlying causes of the riots and the arguably one-sided responses from the police, the Crown Prosecution Service and media commentators to the riots in the summer of 2024, I could feel my blood pressure rising. Indeed, my blood was boiling at the injustice of it all, especially reading sections dealing with government blind spots in relation to, for example, the white working class versus the counter-protestors, or the differential custodial sentences doled out for some social-media posts, but not others. ‘Thank goodness this is being documented’, I reflected. In our rapidly changing world, with so much extraordinary news being created daily, it can be too easy to forget details. And we should not forget.

But even more invaluably, the report helpfully creates a broader context. So much is covered: the ‘non-crime hate incident’ phenomenon; the Black Lives Matter and Edward Colston protests; the pro-Palestinian demonstrations since the 7 October attack by Hamas; and other examples of civil disorder, including at Manchester Airport, Harehills (Leeds) and the Notting Hill Carnival. It knits together a series of threads to reveal a fully formed garment that all policymakers, legislators, journalists and activists should read to help make sense of seemingly disparate phenomena.

Inevitably, the issue of ‘grooming gangs’ features in the report. I write this foreword in the aftermath of a furore about Lucy Powell, Labour’s leader of the House of Commons, making controversial remarks during BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions? about a Channel 4 documentary, Groomed: A National Scandal, which detailed shocking accounts from victims of sexual exploitation. Powell’s retort, ‘Oh, we want to blow that little trumpet now, do we? Let’s get that dog whistle out, shall we?’ is likely to join the history book of infamy, alongside Gordon Brown’s ‘bigoted woman’ slur. Too often, identity politics are used to demonise opponents and shut down debate.

This Powell incident reminded me of a recent exchange in parliament when Tory MP Katie Lam gave a harrowing account of one victim’s ordeal. She was then accused by other MPs of chasing headlines and privileging only one type of child abuse to stir up anti-Muslim tensions. Such uses of identitarian tropes – whether about race, ethnicity, religion or gender – to chill political debate is a scandal all democrats must confront. When I made a speech in response to the Inquiry into Telford Child Exploitation in the Lords some years ago, several of my fellow peers heckled ‘SHAME’. This was not aimed at the rapist perpetrators but at me, for daring to raise the issue.

This report arms us all with details and arguments that should ensure readers will not be shamed into silence about the problems associated with the many tiers of British justice.