Jack and the Jesuits

Sad to say, I remember the Great Train Robbery of 1963 very well. I first heard about it while on a hiking trip in Northumberland. My mother had one of them new-fangled transistor radios, and we listened to the BBC news while brewing tea with the brown water of the North Tyne. (Those were the days, eh?) The perps were caught fairly quickly and sentenced to stretches of up to 30 years in jail.

I also remember one of the Jesuits who were teaching me at the time bringing up those sentences as part of a religious instruction class. The much-feared Father MacPhillips was known as Waffles because of his chuntering style of speech -- if you're a Radio 2 listener, think a posher Ken Bruce. Waffles took great pains to express the view that the extraordinarily long sentences were savage, and disproportionate to the crime. (No-one was killed and only one railwayman injured in the robbery). You don't often hear Jesuits calling for greater leniency, so this episode has stuck with me.

Only one of the robbers is still in prison: Ronnie Biggs. You can, of course, argue that's his own fault. Ronnie broke out of stir near the beginning of his sentence and moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he became a bit of a celeb and sired a few children. However, he tired of Rio and began to miss London (as you do), so he returned to the UK of his own volition in 2001 and was promptly locked up again. He has remained in prison ever since, despite serious health problems and his advancing years: he's now 79.

Ronnie had a parole hearing recently, and the parole board recommended his immediate release. Usually the Home Secretary signs off on the board's recommendations without question, but on this occasion Jack Straw has countermanded the decision, and Ronnie has to stay inside. Straw notes that Biggs has never adequately expressed regret for the robbery (which the parole board accepts, though Biggs's family disagrees); more bizarrely, he fears that Ronnie, who cannot speak or walk properly, may offend again. Ronnie, Jack "the Hat" McVitie and Mad Frankie Fraser knocking over a bingo hall: there's an image to conjure with. (To cut Jack a tiny bit of slack, maybe he's read about a spate of bank robberies by old-age pensioners in Germany).

I don't know if cracking down on geriatric recidivists is Jack Straw's contribution to Labour's pre-election repositioning. Judging by some of the comments on the web, there are a lot of people prepared to take a "do the crime, do the time" stance, even in the case of a dying man, so he may be onto something. For those of us of even a slightly more liberal disposition, though, the notion of Jack Straw being more zealous than the Jesuits is hard to stomach.