Finishing with Fiona - thoughts on how to sack your MP

Three things about Fiona Onasanya's imprisonment and whether she should be sacked as an MP.

1. We might need a better mechanism for the voters (Peterborough's voters in this case) to recall their MP. Although that MP going to jail does allow for a recall petition under the current rules but only once any appeals against conviction are concluded. The problem is that collecting 7,500 names is not a small task even in a case as egregious as that of Ms Onasanya. It remains the case, however, that it should be the electors who do the sacking not some commission or board

2. Sending anyone to jail for three months is a waste of time effort and money. I get that there needs to be a process and that perverting the course of justice is a serious matter but three months is essentially symbolic - spent in a comfortable open prison where she can catch up reading, text her friends and write a book about how she was wronged by a corrupt racist justice system. If perverting the course of justice is so serious maybe the sentence should be two years? If not a suitably humiliating community sentence - cleaning public toilets, grubbing up roadside weeds, painting over graffiti - might be a better approach.

3. If Ms Onasanya had any semblance of honour or decency (and I appreciate that this case shows she's deficient in these respects) then she shouldn't be waiting to get kicked out, she should just resign and allow Peterborough to be represented by someone less tainted.

I do think we need a simpler and less constrained recall process - the Clegg reforms were welcome but, in the end, were a total fudge that didn't deliver on the central purpose of giving the electorate a tool to hold their MP's feet to the fire.

Did you listen to what your mother said?

There’s that classic comment from Arthur Dent:

"You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."

[Ford Prefect:] "Why, what did she tell you?

[Arthur:] "I don't know, I didn't listen."

And it seems that many of those debating sentencing policy weren’t listening to their mothers who, I’m pretty sure, will have said at some point:

“Two wrongs don’t make a right.”

Despite the efforts of all those mothers, this message didn’t sink in. Let me explain.

It is probably wrong that lots of wealthy folk, celebrities and such like who are guilty of crimes didn’t get the proverbial book thrown at them. Those fiddling MPs maybe should have been banged up for longer and perhaps celebrity druggies should be incarcerated in the deepest, darkest of dungeons.

But that doesn’t make it right to apply leniency to another wrongdoer in another circumstance. The failure to deal with one set of crimes shouldn’t dictate that we should also fail in our response to another set of crimes. So when magistrates give tough sentences to looters, we shouldn’t go about crying foul – those magistrates and judges only apply the rules given to them by parliament.

For my part, I do not think that the world out there thinks that tough sentencing is wrong – indeed most folk, as we found here in Bradford back in 2001, rather appreciate the thwack of tough justice on rioters.  If it was wrong to give bad MPs a lenient sentence and wrong to have a criminal justice system that petty thugs stick two fingers up at on a daily basis, then it must be right – and welcome – to see a little toughness for a change.

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