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Jail perverts
PAEDOPHILES caught with the worst child sex abuse images MUST go to prison.
No special pleading about mental health or allowances made for their “remorse”.
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No excuses.
Let the shocking leniency shown to the BBC’s Huw Edwards be the trigger for a new intolerance towards perverts fuelling a heinous global trade which destroys children’s lives.
These illegal pictures and videos have different categories of severity.
Prison might not always automatically be the right course over the least serious.
But for truly sick individuals like Edwards who leer at horrific Category A material, we should change sentencing rules so jail time must apply.
It is both a fitting punishment and a meaningful deterrent for others.
What an obscene injustice that courts lock people up for failing to pay a fine for not having a TV licence, yet warped men walk free with a few rehabilitation sessions to attend, as Edwards did.
This Government was elected to bring about change.
Here’s one the public would be overwhelmingly behind.
Folly on fuel
THE low inflation which Labour inherited from the Tories looks precarious.
Although it stayed at 2.2 per cent in August it is mostly being held down by lower fuel prices, which fell 3.4 per cent in the preceding 12 months.
That should have alarm bells ringing for Chancellor Rachel Reeves.
Her Treasury is seriously considering hiking fuel duty, ending the 14-year freeze (and a further 5p cut) secured by our Keep It Down campaign.
What a masterpiece of self-harm that would be.
Higher fuel prices will not just slam the brakes on the economic growth supposedly central to Labour’s mission.
They will turbo-charge inflation too.
Rule it out, Rachel.
Revisit Rwanda
WE did warn Labour . . . but it turns out “smashing the gangs” won’t fix illegal migration after all.
That’s the damning conclusion of the man hired by the Government to, er, smash the gangs.
And, guess what, borders security chief Martin Hewitt says we need a deterrent.
We did have one, of course.
The Rwanda scheme was already starting to deter some migrants at Calais even before it began.
Labour then axed it.
It’s not that it wouldn’t have worked.
Labour did not want it to.
They hated the Tory plan on principle.
And 10,000-plus small-boat migrants have now landed on our beaches since the election.
Not only is there no deterrent, there is a magnet — Labour’s apparently speedier asylum processing now providing a fast track to a new life in Britain.
So what’s the next idea, Sir Keir? Your man says the current one won’t work.
