I can't believe I'm having to explain this, but petty vandalism is nowhere near as bad as rape.
The Tories have proposed 10 years in jail for people who damage statues and war memorials, which would be a longer sentence than most convicted rapists end up facing.
It's beyond obvious that damaging war memorials is both stupid and extremely counter-productive to whatever cause a person may be protesting, but the idea that it's somehow worse than most categories of rape is utterly absurd.
According to the Sentencing Council guidelines, only rapists who have committed the most serious category one offences face sentencing starting points of of above ten years.
In order for a rape to be classified as a category one offence, meaning a guaranteed sentence of above ten years, the rapist must have been particularly violent or abusive during the rape.
It's beyond absurd to believe that daubing a slogan onto a monument deserves a longer sentence than a category two rape (re-read the factors that determine a category two rape above).
The idea that minor damage to a statue or monument deserves harsher punishment than a crime like rape is the latest manifestation of the depraved Tory mentality of "property above people".
So what if you were violently raped, can't you understand that it's nowhere near as serious as someone daubing a slogan onto a piece of stone!
Even if supporters of this absurd sentencing proposal try to argue that the rape sentencing guidelines should be toughened to make all rape offences carry 10 years+, they're still blatantly anchoring their attitude to rape on the perceived worth of property, and demonstrating their warped attitude that it's a logical and moral stance to attempt to measure the harm a rape victim has suffered in relation to petty vandalism of an object!
Then there are all the outrageous and sickening crimes committed by capitalists and the establishment class that carry no punishment at all.
- Nobody was even prosecuted when HSBC laundered £billions for Mexican drug cartels, Islamist terrorists, and rogue states.
- Nobody has faced prosecution over the dreadful Grenfell Tower inferno that left 72 people dead.
- Nobody has faced criminal proceedings over the fraudulent under-valuation of the Royal Mail property portfolio when the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition flogged it off to their city speculator mates on the cheap.
- Nobody has been jailed for the unlawful arms sales to Saudi Arabia when government ministers knew for a fact that British weapons were being used to commit war crimes in Yemen.
- Nobody has faced prosecution over the unlawfully racist Tory "Hostile Environment" scandal, that saw thousands of black British citizens systematically discriminated against, and scores actually deported to live in exile overseas!
To Labour's shame they've decided to go along with this disproportionate depravity instead of opposing it (or just staying out of it), in the hope that they can appeal to the baying Daily Mail mob and the far-right thugs who rampaged through London at the weekend.
The sad thing is that in Tory Brexit Britain stuff like facts, evidence, morality, proportionality, etc simply don't factor into the equation.
We know that it's a myth that longer sentencing deters crime. We know that it's immoral to jail a petty vandal for longer than a violent rapist. We know this Tory proposal is venal headline-grabbing hard-right idiocy. But the purpose of it was never to make sense.
The ludicrous 10 year proposal is intended to do three things.
First: It's designed to to subvert the mass Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality and systemic racism into a frenzy of extreme-right ultranationalist statue-shagging.
Second: It's meant to distract attention away from the fact that three years after the Grenfell Tower fire, absolutely nobody has been held legally accountable for the inferno (it's absolutely no coincidence that they released this depraved nonsense proposal on the three year anniversary).
Third: It's intended as a trap for social liberals, who will rightly try to argue that 10 years for petty vandalism is massively disproportionate, because the Tories will deliberately misinterpret all of these legitimate concerns as being "soft on" or "in favour of" war memorial vandalism.Just try to imagine the depravity of people who honestly believes that daubing a slogan onto a piece of stone is deserving of a harsher punishment than violent rape, and realise that this is the mentality of the people that both the Tories and Keir Starmer's Labour are intent on pandering to.
We're in a situation where both main parties are intent on pandering to the vile attitudes of the absolute worst among us, which means that we're in very serious trouble as a nation.
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