CHARLES CLARKE’S announcement that he is limiting the compensation available to those wrongfully imprisoned has been met with the hoots of derision it deserves. What is more important to work out is why the Home Secretary made such a lunatic decision in the first place.

The proffered reason, to save £5 million a year, is simply beyond satire. The Government, in its infinite wisdom, annually disposes of about £500 billion of the nation’s production: denying those innocents unjustly banged up will save some 0.001 per cent of public expenditure. Just to provide some context, the £5 million saving is less than the £5.7 million spent in 2003 on subsidising the swill bins at the Houses of Parliament. No, it can’t be about the money.

The mark of a liberal society is that more care and attention is paid to those innocents wrongly found guilty, than to the guilty who escape justice. Any criminal justice system designed and run by fallible human beings will make mistakes. The important thing is how we react when a miscarriage of justice occurs. Shamefully, under the Home Secretary’s proposals those who find their guilty verdict overturned at their first appeal will have no right to compensation. For others compensation will be capped at £500,000.

But let’s remember this. It takes from 20 months to two years to get a first appeal against a conviction heard: long enough for those convicted to lose careers and jobs, marriages and houses. Yes, there always will be those who unjustly enjoy Her Majesty’s hospitality, and whatever compensation we offer in a monetary form will not be enough to fill the gap of years of liberty denied, lives wasted, opportunities lost and families sundered.

But do we really expect those afflicted by the mistakes of the state apparatus simply to shrug and smile it off as just one of life’s unfortunate things? Can the Home Secretary not see that it is our solemn duty to those wrongfully convicted that we both apologise and make amends as best we can?

Perhaps he can’t, for the very job of Home Secretary is something that appears to affect the mind. Possibly it’s the collective mindset of the Home Office itself: we Britons are simply a problem to be managed in the best interests of the bureaucracy, nothing else. You get the impression that Home Secretaries don’t regard our liberties as inalienable; rather they are obstacles to be flattened in the name of smooth management.

It is not for nothing that out in Blogistan — the Republic of Blogs, where we are all much freer than in the real world — the Home Secretary is known as Charlie the Safety Elephant. There has been no issue of civil liberties where he has even dreamt about extending rights, rather than restricting them in the name of public safety.

Remember what his reaction was when the judges in the Belmarsh case ruled that the unlimited confinement without trial of foreign terror suspects was illegal because the law should not distinguish between liberties for foreigners and natives? Yes, he applied to have the State’s powers extended to British citizens, so that any and everyone could be detained indefinitely without troubling the courts or juries.

His predecessor, David Blunkett, was no better. On the subject of identity cards he once said: “No one should fear correct identification.” Those words always remind me of one the more distressing details of the Eichmann trial: how he told his executioner that the fate of those killed in the Holocaust was sealed by their answers to the 1939 census on religious background recorded on paper for a Hollerith machine, an early mechanical computer. Quite literally, their cards were marked.

Restrictions on jury trial, abolition of the ban on double jeopardy, 28-days’ detention for interrogation of terror suspects, house arrest, even attacks on the presumption of innocence: the list goes on and on. It’s difficult to look at the record of recent Home Secretaries and not jump to the conclusion that the Home Office is suffering from sick building syndrome, or perhaps a sick bureaucracy disease?

Out on the wilder shores of that Free Republic of the Blogs, a consensus has emerged. It is that the restrictions on compensation have nothing to do with budgets. Rather, the restriction is an attempt to head off future trouble.

Given that more and more laws have been passed that hack away at our rights, and given that the courts rule, time and again, that these are illegal and in breach of the Human Rights Act, perhaps he expects a logjam of cases of wrongful imprisonment to come before the courts? A series of wrongly jailed innocents, people jugged by one or other restriction, will be freed by the first appeal court they reach that declares that the very law under which they were convicted was itself illegal?

Yes, I realise, tinfoil hat time again, but why else no aid or apology for those freed on first appeal? We know it’s not the money. That’s a pittance in the scheme of things, so it must indeed be something else. You wouldn’t have to be a cynic to think it was about saving the Government from future political embarrassment.

Whatever the motivations for this decision they do not change the fact that it is a disgrace. Just as mother always said: you make a mistake, you apologise, make what amends you can and promise not to do it again. When the State makes a mistake and steals someone’s liberty it is indeed our duty, to compensate those wronged. Whether the Home Secretary is ignorant of this moral fact, or simply wishes to ignore it for other reasons, it is appalling. Shame on you, Mr Clarke, shame on you.

The author blogs here: timworstall.typepad.com/timworstall/

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