And He Marched Them Up To The Top Of The Hill...

And he marched them down again. Hard on the heels of the publication of the new Sentencing Guidelines, the fruit of a number of years' work by a distinguished committee, the Government proposes to bring in a Sentencing Commission to make sure that the judiciary do not get too excited and pass a lot of nasty expensive prison sentences, rather than really really strict community penalties or really strict fines. Ah yes, fines! They bring in money, they don't need the panoply of Probation and prisons - that's the way to go, chaps!