Fixating on Lucy Letby skiving her sentencing hearing is missing the point

If you think forcing criminals like Lucy Letby to attend their sentencing should be a legislative priority, you've clearly been paying no attention to the austerity destruction of the justice system.

Lucy Letby is a coward.

It’s hardly possible to think of anything more cowardly than attacking premature babies, is it?

So is it really all that surprising that she refused to appear at her sentencing hearing, to listen the impact statements from the families she devastated, and to be given the rare whole-life jail term that’s reserved for the worst criminals of all?

It’s hardly surprising that a coward would do the cowardly thing, but Britain’s depraved media class and popularity-seeking politicians have whipped up a furore over this predictable display of cowardice.

Both Labour and the Conservatives are attempting to profit from the public outrage by promising to bring in new rules to force criminals to attend their sentencing.

The Tory Justice Secretary Alex Chalk has said that the Tories are "looking at changing the law so that offenders can be compelled to attend sentencing hearings".

While Labour’s Kim McGuinness (the Starmerite nodding dog who usurped Jamie Driscoll’s candidacy for North East mayor) has insisted that "the law should be victim centred" and that "Letby should have had to hear victims in court".

So the political class are pretty much unanimous that criminals should be compelled to attend their sentencing hearings, but what does that actually mean in practice?

If unwilling criminals are forced to attend, what’s to stop them disrupting the proceedings by shouting, abusing the judge, insulting the victims, interrupting the victims’ statements … until they get themselves thrown out for contempt of court?

What’s to stop them putting their fingers in their ears and closing their eyes so they don’t have to see or hear any of it?

What’s to stop them loudly protesting their innocence?

Adding time onto their sentences for such disruptive behaviour would be all well and good, but what about cases like the one that’s triggered this ridiculous discussion in the first place?

Would adding another year to Lucy Letby’s full-life sentence really make any difference at all?

Is "the rest of your life plus one", really that much worse than "the rest of your life"?

Does it really "centre the victims" to actively make chaotic scenes like this more likely?

And what if the criminals just outright refuse to attend?

Who is going to have the job of physically dragging them into court?

Low-paid contractors working for private prison profiteers such as Serco or G4S most likely.

In 2015 a custody officer called Lorraine Barwell was brutally kicked to death by a prisoner who was due to go for sentencing that day.

If politicians are insistent on forcing prisoners into court, what measures are going to be taken to protect the staff who are given the unenviable job of physically manhandling unwilling and potentially violent criminals on long journeys from prison cells to courtrooms and back again?

Or is the risk of another Lorraine Barwell killing a price that politicians are willing to pay with other people’s lives, in order to pander for the approval of the reactionary mob?

If the politicians want to change the law, they should also have to explain how much all of this extra required manpower is going to cost, and where the money is going to come from.

Is the extra money to pay for this going to be taken out of already depleted court budgets? Or would it be extra money?

And after 13 years of devastating austerity cuts to the justice system, what’s the justification for spending £millions on forced attendance at sentencing hearings, when there are such vast case backlogs that other victims are waiting literally years to have their cases heard at all?

There’s a backlog of literally tens of thousands of criminal cases waiting to be heard; cases are now taking an average of almost two whole years to come to court; Legal Aid work is so poorly paid that there simply aren’t the lawyers to take on the excess work in any case; literally half the courts in England and Wales have been closed down and flogged off to property developers since 2010; and many of the courts that remain are literally crumbling into disrepair.

Maybe politicians who insist that money should be spent on forcing criminals to attend sentencing hearings should have to explain why the £millions it would cost should be spent on populist pandering like that, rather than on any of the massive problems that 13 years of deliberate Tory austerity ruination have inflicted on the justice system?

How does it "centre the victims" to know that if the suspect is eventually found guilty they’ll be physically forced to attend their sentencing hearing, but only after the victims of their crimes have had to suffer waiting literally years for the case to come to trial because the justice system is now so catastrophically under-funded?

The media have driven the debate in this ridiculous direction by asking politicians whether Letby should have been forced to attend her sentencing, which can only have one answer, because any politician brave enough to even attempt nuance, or contextualisation, or resource prioritisation runs the risk of being framed by Britain’s venal and abusive media hacks as "politician sides with baby killer".

The media hacks know that hardly anyone clicks on articles detailing the diabolical mess the justice system is in, and the politicians know that virtually nobody is going to pay any attention to fact-based analyses. But they all know that piggy-backing on a high profile case like Lucy Letby’s is an excellent way to get the clicks and attention they crave, no matter whether what they’re talking about makes any sense or not.

So the cowardly actions of a cowardly criminal inspire cowardly media hacks to ask cowardly questions that they know the cowardly politicians will only ever dare to give the simplistic answer to, and it’s all being done for clicks and attention, and at the expense of much more serious and pressing issues.

And there’s little to nothing that anyone sensible can do about it, because we know that post-Brexit Britain has "had enough of experts" and that the political discourse is increasingly monopolised by the most obnoxious and opportunistic attention-seekers in politics and the media.

So we get this kind of stupid knee-jerk pandering, rather than the massive justice system investment and reforms that are needed to undo 13 years of wanton Tory austerity damage.