Systemic Failure Of The Criminal Justice System.

One of the first duties of the State, one of the most potent arguments for the very existence of government, is providing safety for the citizenry. In an attempt to create that, the State has developed a criminal justice system whose explicit aims are - the deterrence of crime, the detection of crime, the punishment of crime, and the rehabilitation of the criminal.

If this system of connected agencies functioned correctly, it would be simply demonstrated by the merest glance at crime statistics. Alas, any criminologist will happily tell you of the many deficiencies in such data, and how they invariably require unpacking. Many factors play into crime numbers, and perhaps the least important part is the actions of the criminal justice system. Population growth, population ages, economic conditions, social mores and conditions, cultural shifts, and technology are amongst some of the factors that go into increases or decrease in crime. Not to mention changes in the way statistics are defined and collected. That said, we can see broad moves and judge whether the components of the criminal justice system deliver what we expect from them, and what we pay them handsomely for.

The police are the first line in our response to crime. You may be rather shocked to discover that the clear-up rate for crimes now stands at under 6%. So 94% of crimes are left unsolved by the police. Expanding on this, the solved rate for murder remains extremely high, the solved rate for property crime is incredibly low. But across the board, the police are just not solving crime. There are many, and complicated, reasons offered for this but at its root is the reality that the police no longer bother investigating crimes such as burglary. You'll receive a nice letter from Victim Support long before you see an actual copper at your door in response to a call. While campaigners complain that rape prosecutions are so low that rape is effectively decriminalised, the reality is that nearly all the crime that blights our lives is effectively decriminalised. The police are utterly failing to deliver the outcomes we demand and pay for.

Assuming you are one of the very few unlucky criminals to get caught and hauled before the Courts, you'll have the obstacle course of finding a legal aid solicitor - whose ranks have been decimated - and an available empty court with an actual judge in attendance. The backlog in trials now runs into years. This wreaks havoc on the lives of the accused and the victims alike. If the role of the courts is to judge those accused in a timely manner, the court service joins the police force as being a gross failure that has only got worst over recent years.

But let's assume you were unlucky enough to get caught in your nefarious deeds, and a lawyer, a court and a judge was found, and you find yourself carted off to the Scrubs. While we all have many and varied views on what prison is meant to achieve, reducing crime is on most of our lists, else prison becomes a hideously expensive empty performance. It is depressing, then, to realise that crime doesn't stop at the prison gates, that there are hundreds of thousands of assaults in prison each year. Prisons are riddled with crime, most of it unknown to the authorities.

Whilst we too easily shrug off what happens within prisons, prisoners are released. And on the measure that matters - reoffending - then the prison service returns to society people who have a 50% chance of reoffending. The economic cost alone of this reoffending is estimated to be 50 billions. If prison is measured by how it cuts crime, it has failed from the time we laid the first brick. By now it is horribly clear that the Golden Thread that weaves through criminal justice is failure. Failure by the police, failure by the Courts, and failure by the prison service. Individually and systematically they fall far short of what any reasonable person can expect from them - safety of our property and person. There is no other part of government that delivers so much failure for such a large cost. And while we may grumpily accept poor performance from other parts of government, failure in criminal justice corrodes the very sinews of society and dissolves the bonds between us. As political philosophers have long pointed out, no society can function if what one produces can be randomly appropriated by another.

As civilised as we may be, there remains deep within our species atavistic urges that require some censure and control by the State for the common good. We occasionally need saving from ourselves as well as other people. This is the primary state of government, and recent disorders remind us that when belief in the competence of criminal justice is eroded, some are disinhibited from cooperating with that system and maintain social order.

There is no simple remedy for these gross, systemic failures. There is no set of alternatives shining like a beacon in the darkness. All we can do, what we MUST do, is take the first step and admit the failures of criminal justice to cut crime. We will never search for solutions unless we can honestly look the problem in the eye.

In Defence of Billionaires

The populist vision of the wealthy being sons of Smaug, looting the populace to sit forever on a pile of gold is so utterly bizarre that I can only assume that such critics are utterly economically illiterate. Or communists.

Jeff Bezos, Sergey Bryn, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates are totemic Bad Guys. (I wont include Musk. He relies on such high levels of debt and government contracts that his actual wealth can be seriously disputed). Because they have absurd levels of wealth. To give you a context - A million seconds is 11.5 days. A billion seconds is over 32 YEARS. That is the scale of money we are addressing, levels beyond our imagination.

Critics of these people will have you believe that they have generated such fortunes by impoverishing others. That if their wealth was spread around the population the world will be a better place for it. Somehow. None of this is how capitalism works, it's not how business works, and it's not how finance works.

None of these people have a billion dollars sitting in their bank accounts, ready to be wheeled out on pallets at their whim. Because contrary to what their critics assume, billionaires aren't hoarders of money. They are CREATORS of wealth, And that wealth is not a dusty pile of gold, but rather is perpetually flowing around the financial markets, working to increase its value. It's in your pension funds, your pay-checks, and your mortgage payments, it helps fund government itself.

Billionaires spend money. This is the niggling detail critics overlook. Bezos spent $500 of his millions on a rather nice super-yacht, the world's largest schooner. I feel his pain; as a boat owner I am all too aware of the maintenance costs, the servicing, the mooring fees, the licences. Estimates have it that a super-yacht costs 10% of its costs to run - annually. That's $50 million dollars a year that flows from Bezos to the crew, marine engineers, fuel companies, port authorities, food suppliers, flag makers, and a hundred other suppliers of goods and services. That money goes to other businesses - and into the pockets of the employees. The company that built that yacht is itself very valuable, and its employees rely on the billionaires existing to spend their money.

Microsoft and Google underpin our lives, like it or not. Their existence has created over 400,000 jobs. That's direct employees. Employment that rests on the use of these companies products must reach the billions. All to enable people and companies to use their products to improve their outcomes. The value that Microsoft and Google has added to daily life is incalculable.

And yet there are seemingly endless critics of these wealth generators. Much seems to rest on an incoherent screech that it is inherently wrong for individuals to control such vast wealth. A more coherent and pertinent criticism rests on the amount of power that can flow from controlling so much wealth. Billionaires don't merely focus on their core business, some become more politically and socially active. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are dispersing their absurd wealth to charitable causes, old school philanthropy. People complain about the causes so endowed, especially Gates’ interest in healthcare. They can't win. If they sit on their wealth, they are wicked. If they spend it, they are evil.

This is just nonsensical. It signifies a disconnect between what billionaires do and what some believe they do. Not so far back in our economic development, it was accepted that the wealthy conduct good works. The likes of Carnegie built libraries and other causes for the greater social good. The landscape is littered with institutions commissioned by the wealthy. But this was when philanthropy filled in for the absence of government. We now have an expectation that government will fulfil all our needs, reducing the demand for private charity. We have a different outlook - We EXPECT government to do this. We DEMAND ever expanding government.

These shifts in our perception of government have warped our perceptions of billionaires and their social role. Wealthy individuals are seen as ‘bad’, and government is seen as ‘good’. The perilous basis of this belief in benign government contrasts with a belief in the malevolent view of the wealthy, and history tells us this faith is touching - but deeply corrosive on individual's freedom.

We need to treasure our wealth creators. Not because they can add a little flamboyant colour to a dull world, but because they benefit all of us with the way they put their money to perpetual work. Oh, and everyone forgets this detail - the super rich pay for around 60% of the US federal budget. All the services and aid we demand from government is largely paid for by the rich. We may be better served if we cut out the government middleman in this wealth redistribution and give the billionaires the credit they have earned.

Fellow Romans

The speech Starmer won't give.

The first duty of any government is the safety of its citizens. That requires an efficient, moral and reliable criminal justice system.

I stand here today because our criminal justice system is not achieving these aims. I have to explain to you what this difficult situation is, how we arrived at this point, and what we are compelled to do to address this situation.

The criminal justice system is in crisis. We have all seen the stories around prisons. But criminal justice is far more, it is an interlocked system encompassing the police, probation, courts and prisons. They rely on each other, and a weak point in that chain can damage the whole system.

The police have all but abandoned dealing with crimes they feel are less important. But a person breaking into your home and taking your goods IS important. You rightly expect this to be dealt with quickly and efficiently. The police are failing in their core duties of detecting and solving crime.

The courts service is straining at the limits of its capacity. Court buildings are crumbing. We have insufficient numbers of Judges, and lawyers are overburdened to a shocking degree. Waiting times for trials can now stretch into years.

The probation service has been fragmented, overburdened by bureaucracy, and is short of staff. We rely on the work of the probation service to monitor those offenders in the community, and they are unable to fulfil this to the extent we would desire.

And then prisons, the centrepiece of our criminal justice system. Our prisons are full. They do not rehabilitate offenders well. There is also a shortage of staff to do this difficult job of trying to work with people who obviously don't want to be there.

We have entered government to find all these problems coming to a head, and unlike the Conservatives, we WILL address the problems, we MUST address the problems. It is fundamental to good government and a stable society that people have a criminal justice system that detects crime, catches criminals, and gets them before the courts for due punishment, with space in prisons to take them.

We currently don't have such a system. We have inherited a shockingly underfunded and neglected criminal justice system.

This brings us to the immediate crisis - there is no more room in prisons. The Tory government KNEW from their own statistics that this was going to occur, and they decided to avoid addressing what is now a crisis. They ignored the problem and handed it to us. Well, WE are competent and confident enough to address what the Tories created then ran away from.

We are bitterly disappointed that the party of law and order has reduced criminal justice to disorder and lawlessness. People now have little faith in the system to keep them safe. This is fully a result of Conservative neglect. They chose not to deal with the prison population. They produced a plan to build new prisons, then failed to implement it. And in winning your votes, it is now left to us to pick up the pieces.

These are the difficult decisions, decisions no government should be put in the position of having to make. We are going to have to continue the Tory plans to release more prisoners early, and delay sending some people to prison from court.

I can understand how this will be shocking. People sentenced to prison should go to prison, and those in prison should serve their sentences. That we cannot now guarantee to do that shows the deplorable state of the system the Tories have left us all.

We will make every effort to ensure that the prisoners we release will be low risk. These will NOT be violent or sexual offenders. We are determined to use the space we have in prison to protect you as best we can.

The prisoners we release will be low risk, non violent criminals. Nevertheless, there is a chance that something will go wrong, that one of them will cause significant harm. We will use every lever in our power to prevent this. But we must also face this sad reality.

This decision will be condemned by some. And these are not decisions we would ever make in any other circumstances. We can only apologise that we are in this position and stress that it is not one we created. This mess was a Tory creation, but now our problem as a society to deal with.

This scandalous situation highlights many problems. But it also provides opportunities. We could just keep building ever more prisons, with each cell costing tens of thousands to build, and each prisoner in them costs 40 thousand pounds a year. And what do we get for this huge investment of your taxes? A shocking rate of reoffending.

We don't believe that this is good enough. You deserve better outcomes for your money. We need to reduce crime effectively. And prison isn't delivering what we need.

We are going to use this Tory created crisis to examine every part of our criminal justice system. Every nook and cranny. And we are determined to make it better. And I dont mean merely making the current system more efficient. The present system fails to cut crime. We must look at every avenue, every idea, every nation, to discover ways where we CAN cut crime, not merely recycle criminals endlessly through prisons.

This period of crisis is the best time to have a national conversation on crime and punishment.

I need your help to do this. I need your support and your patience while we carefully examine all the options. No government has had the courage to do this in decades. Now we have been led into crisis by the last government, it is time to face hard realities and search for affective solutions.

Crime is a blight on society. It causes huge harm to those effected. Let us use this moment to determine the future of an effective criminal justice system.

Thank you.

Prisoner Power

I have been sharing my views on prison across every forum for decades. From printing samizdat magazines in prison to Newsnight, I have foisted my views on others by whatever means the circumstances allowed. It can be fun, it can be entertaining and it can be informative.

Which is why I don't do it as much as I used to… For the most part, it is preaching to the choir. Having spoken everywhere from church halls to universities, I can’t recall once having a hostile audience. Questioning, certainly, and challenging but never outright hostile. My audiences were either already in broad sympathy with my views, or were very willing to be persuaded. They had, after all, paid my costs to be there and rarely are people prepared to pay to listen to someone they disagree with. If they were, I’d be the King of Twitter.

Which is all very interesting. But if the purpose is to try to provoke people to think about prison, and to prompt change, then preaching to the converted is very frustrating. There are many good reasons other than that to give talks, but when there are no minds to change then it is a different experience. And above all, provoking change is my ideal outcome. Otherwise I’m just an entertainment act.

Added to being dulled by talking to those who agree with me, is the sheer frustration of prison reform. Having began my sentence in a compulsory striped shirt with an AM radio being the height of convenience, I was in my later years confronted by endless stream of cons insisting that protesting for change was pointless - while wearing their own clothes and watching a TV in their cell.

Granted, change in prison can be glacial on a large scale, even if the details are endlessly messed about with. Week in and out I see reports from the Prison Inspectorate putting the boot into some prison, in a headline that's been perennial for most of my adult life. It's so frustrating to see the same crap, endlessly repeating. That applies to everything related to prison. The issues prisoners complain about, what staff complain about, never seem to change. For many prisoners, it probably is often true that nothing much changes. Because most prisoners comprise waves of short termers, whose sentence may not straddle some fiddling around the edges. Those of us with a longer perspective do get to experience changes, slow as they may be.

I long ago decided that genuine prison reform - achieving a justice system that actually cuts crime and social harm - is never going to be delivered by either politicians or the technocrats running HMP. Which seriously reduces my interest in trying to persuade people to support such change. Rather, I argue that reform lays in the hands of prisoners.

A conversation for another day…

Hard v Soft

One of the pleasures of General Elections is that they clarify the minds of politicians. All of a sudden, blather has to be turned into policy that they can actually sell. One of the disappointments of Elections is that Labour and Conservative will retreat into an arms race on criminal justice. Any idea that Labour are reformists was shattered by New Labour and Jack Straw, who helped lever themselves into power by being tougher than the Tories on crime. Straw led up to the election trying to out-Howard Michael Howard. Once in office, Labour created ultra harsh “two strikes” laws that the years have shown to be so disastrous that even their creators have renounced them. Labour isn't instinctively harsh on criminals, but it will never forget the electoral lessons of new Labour. The myth that Labour is soft on crime should be long dead.

The Conservatives need no electoral nudge to be bilious against criminals. It is their natural home and one they invariably retreat to in the face of elections. This rests on a view of human beings and their decision making that criminology dropped about five minutes after criminology became a field. The Tories hold to the view that people are rational actors, and as such a calculus of benefits versus punishments can influence crime rates. Harsher punishments should invariably mean criminals rationally deciding it's not worth the candle. That over a century of knowledge shows us that this isn't true is not a detail that hinders Tory splenics.

And so we return to the perennial issue of being “hard” or “soft” on crime. The Overton Window doesn't seem to allow us to see outside of this criminological dimorphism that we are sold by our leaders. And it is deeply depressing. Everyone is pretending that the rise in sentencing that has been constant for decades has seen a concomitant fall in crime. This hard v soft discourse is deeply dishonest, partly because we insist it is. Its nice and simple. And we seem to be insisting that our politicians lie to us and feed us simplistic pseudo solutions rather than tell us “this is complicated, we can't guarantee we will get this right but we will do our best”.

And so the escalation continues, the waste of lives and billions of pounds, with no reduction in crime or social harm. The question of whether a measure is hard or soft is meant to relate to crime, but in reality applies only to criminals. Being hard on crime itself would mean measures that reduced it. Being hard on criminals means inflicting harsher punishments. The two are not connected, leaving us in a spiral of increasing sentences without any effect on crime rates. An absurdity. One we seem content to support.

Abandon hard v soft. Walk away from this dead end. The only question should be - Is this policy EFFECTIVE? Does it cut crime? Most current policy does not, it is expensive and stupid. And we will continue to vote for it.

Shouting over the wall.

I have spoken about the birth of this blog before, but for new readers the trouble is that I wrote several weeks worth of blogposts, sent them out to the Editor, and only then told the Governor that I was starting a blog that would go live the next day. He called the Ministry, who told him to stop me having any communications. This was unprecedented in prison history, and was somewhat undermined by my using my illegal mobile to phone the Guardian, who ran the story the next day. The Ministry backed down and so I began the first blog in British prison history. All I wanted to do was wind up the Governor and it sort of grew into something more.

And, you may ask, so what? Who gives a damn about just another blog on an internet full of opinions? It matters in that prisons are a closed world. One created specifically for the State to cause people suffering. That's its point. All done on our behalf, in our name, with our money. And the Government has strained with all its might to keep prisons a closed world with the minimal amount of information flow. Gaining the right to blog blew a massive hole in those efforts, which is why the Ministry reacted so stupidly to my efforts.

I had hoped that there would be many prison bloggers. I know that there are excellent writers in prison, as can be read in the prisoners newspaper, Inside Time. But I also recognise the barriers faced by prison bloggers. The practicalities themselves are a deterrent to blogging. A prisoner has no direct access to the internet, blogs must be hand written or typed, then mailed to someone outside, who can then upload them. You can appreciate that people who have served many years have very few outside contacts, let alone one willing to type up and manage blogs.

Blogging puts a target on your back for the staff, who are suddenly having to deal with the public being informed of what they do. And there are a thousand ways that staff can mess with your life, all subtle and above board. Why adopt a path that raises your head above the parapet? Given all of these hurdles and harsh prison realities, the reality is that few prisoners have the ability to write well, have the stones to open their mouth, and have people outside they can rely upon.

One who surmounted this obstacle course was Adam Mac, whose blog was interesting but short lived. In a bizarre turn of events, this prison blog was stopped in its tracks by prisoners. Adam found himself in Grendon prison, a therapeutic community where prisoners committees have a significant effect on the daily lives of other prisoners. Despite assurances that he would respect anonymity of his peers in his blog, the prisoners voted that he stop blogging. Obviously I think this is ridiculously stupid, but here we are. Visit Adam Mac’s blog for his version, before he fell silent.

And now we are left with a void. There are no prisoners blogging. The closed world has again managed to close the gates to the outside world. This is deeply unsatisfying and highlights the barriers prisoners still face in finding their voices. I hope the risk I took and the efforts I made are not wasted and that somehow, a prisoner will again blog and drag prisons into the light of public scrutiny.

The Party Of Law and Order. And Stalinism.

Let me paint you a little picture of part of the justice system. Perhaps one of the most difficult parts - the assessment and release of Life sentence prisoners. More precisely, murderers.

Each Life sentence is divided into two parts. The first is the retribution and deterrence part, the punishment for the crime. We call this the Tariff. Post tariff is the second part of the sentence, where the Lifer continues to be detained until it can be established that he or she poses no more than a minimal risk to life and limb. Essentially, when he's judged to be safe to release. Tariffs can range from months to a whole lifetime, depending on the crime and the behaviour of the Lifer.

All so simple so far. Let's look at HOW the release and assessment process works. Firstly, the Lifer isn't told his tariff. He has no idea how long he is intended to serve. As the tariff expiry approaches, the interviews by prison staff begin. Everyone from the guy who unlocks your door to the Governor, taking in the Chaplain, education staff, and psychiatrists along the way. EVERYONE gets a say. They interview the Lifer endlessly and write their reports for the Parole Board.

Here's the interesting bit - the Lifer is not shown these reports. He has no idea what's being said about him. He has no way of checking or correcting anything he may dispute. The Lifer can make representations but he doesn't know what he's arguing against. These reports then go off to the Parole Board.

The Parole Board then looks at these reports and judges the Lifer against the release criteria - being no more than a minimal risk to life or limb. It then makes its decision. Release, or not to release. If not to release, the Board notes its concerns and the issues the Lifer needs to address before being released. The Board also sets the next review date, which may be a decade ahead.

Here's that interesting bit again - The Lifer isn't shown the Parole Board's answer. He is told “You aren't being released, come back in X years. Now off you go.” That's it. He has no clue whatever what the issues are preventing his release, has no idea what he needs to do to get released. This was called “Mushroom Management” - kept in the dark and fed on shit.

If the Parole Board does opt for release, this can then be stopped by a politician. The Justice Minister can overrule everything the specialists have assessed and substitute his own opinion. And as always, the Lifer Wasn't told why and left to blunder along in blind hope.

Would anyone call such a system fair and reasonable? When the Lifer is told nothing and can't argue against anything, can't defend himself against any wild claims made in staff reports? And to then have release blocked by a politician on equally secret grounds?

Well, the British courts were more than happy to uphold this system. They had no problems with it at all, at times tying themselves in ridiculous knots to defend it.

Which is where we get the European Court of Human Rights stepping in.

The ECHR stated what should be the bleeding obvious - that no, a secret system where you cant see what's being said against you isn't fair and just. And having politicians decide release was just absurd - no one should be detained for political purposes, a judicial body should control release, not a vote grabber. What supporter of the rule of law could argue against this?

The system above is, dear reader, history. It was the situation up to the early 1990s, when the ECHR rulings led to a new system. Reports were open - Lifers got to see every word written about them and be able to make informed representations. Release was decided by a three person Panel headed by a High Court Judge. The Minister had a representative there to give their views to the Panel. To all involved in these matters, it was universally accepted to be a better way. Even if it did put the brakes on prison staff's imaginative abuse in previously secret reports…

This system worked pretty well for the last 30 years. Public safety was upheld whilst a transparent due process was enforced. The rate of Lifers reoffending did not increase one iota. What's not to like?

Well, 2023 saw some opposition. Not based on any rational grounds. Tory politicians began grumbling that Lifers were being released that the public didn't want to be released. They want none released, obviously. This is a regular moan and can be dealt with by pointing to the Parole Board and saying “nothing to do with me, it's the law”.

This recent grumbling has been given an extra impetus - poor electoral prospects for the Tories. In their usual electoral spasms, they retreat to the high hill of “law and order” and start bewailing that everything is too soft, too short, too easy - the whine of politicians at every election in my lifetime.

Not that politicians were rendered completely useless under the new system. The Minister was represented at parole Panels. He had his say. And the Minister always has the ability to challenge the Parole Board in court if they thought their decision was manifestly irrational and have their decisions overturned. They never used this power.

Now, the Tories want to roll back time. They want the Minister to have the final say on release. They want to be able to override the considerations of the Parole Board and substitute their own views. These views are not constrained by the “life and limb” test. No, this schema abandons rationality completely. The Minister's criteria for release is “Will this lose me votes?”

No one should be detained in prison for political ends. No one's release should be a gamble based on electoral concerns. People's imprisonment should not be based on vote-grubbing and the whims of a politician. This is a return to mob rule - from the party that claims to be one of law and order. Lifers should be released when they have served their punishment and judged to be safe to release. Not based on the Minister's mood of the day.

While a politician grubbing for votes is hardly novel, electoral fear seems to have paralysed the political minds. As it stands, the release of the most serious criminals rests with the Parole Board. Ministers have a buffer against popular outrage at release decisions, being able to say “Nuffink to do with me Guv, it's the Parole Board.” In taking the release decision from the Board and back to the Ministry is to put a perpetual albatross around the political neck, THEY will now be directly responsible. This is a level of political idiocy that only the Ministry of Justice can think is a genius plan.

Politicians getting involved in release decisions undermines the rule of law. Which for the party of law and order is doubly deplorable. Add that to short term political panic and it's a recipe for gross injustice.

Ho ho, Ho no.

So I thought I had retired. Not by choice, but even so. Severe heart failure, cancer and a head full of demons saw the government sit me down, pat me on the head and say “there, there, you tried, but you are too messed up to work. Here’s some money.”

And so for the last few years I have been living on PIP, whilst winding up my cardiologist by staying alive. It was a strange existence, knowing that my brain was mostly still functioning but being unable to do anything productive (or financially rewarding). I took up lockpicking as a hobby. Deeply Freudian for an ex con to become absorbed in locks…

Now, however, the government has decided that I have the health of an Olympian, and took their money back. This was something of a blow, especially as I can now add a fractured spine to my list of annoying ailments. Bemused, I’ve been through two stages of the appeals process and await a third. So far, the fact I have what we now politely call a “life limiting illness” hasn’t effected their scales of judgement.

So like Grumpy, its off to work I must go.

And there lies the problem. On my release I sidestepped the regular job market and was able to use my status as “educated ex con big mouth” to get myself work in the criminal justice third sector, with a bit of TV tarting on the side. Of course with my retirement I have neglected all these contacts, as I slowly withdrew from prison issues. I was content to try and wash prison out of my bones, after a lifetime.

The passage of time has seen this niche advantage eroded, and the reality is that another favourite ex con is always around the corner. That can no longer be my beat. The obvious avenues are touting myself around the prison-ish charities but they are surprisingly averse to ex cons. I will be trying this nonetheless. Given the secluded corner of the world I now occupy, several hours from London, finding a job there would be nothing short of miraculous (and ridiculous) and London is the centre of these things.

I peer wistfully into the Job Centre window, seeing all the casual jobs floating around. Why are they not for me? I’ve done every job from scrubbing toilets to E-Commerce strategy. Stacking shelves isn't a step down. Alas, this is where that pesky heart failure hoves back onto the stage - there are just so many jobs that I am no longer physically capable of doing. Which points the way to “working by brain rather than hand”.

Which brings me to exactly the situation I have spent so much time trying to avoid - dealing with that little box on application forms that say “Do you have any unspent convictions?” Usually tucked away on the last page. An irrelevancy for most. A mountain for me.

You’re a random officer manager, looking for a quiet administrator. Along comes an old guy with a very patchy CV, likely to fall down dead, and oh yes, he killed someone. I mean, why would you even bother when there's  a queue of other, sane, applicants stretching round the corner?

So this is a pretty difficult situation. Jacob cat is being as well fed as ever. Apart from that, everything is getting just a bit ropey and gruel is getting boring.

So I will work for food. If I fail to find work I may be forced to begin an Only Fans.

You have been warned.