When does the rot start in a politician?  For some, it commences the moment election to office is confirmed.  Others need to become cabinet ministers before being wholly blighted.  UK Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood may provide a classic case study.  Given that security matters fall within her purview, it was probably too much to expect her to be enlightened on the issue of penology.  As with previous occupants of the office, compassionate originality is not their strong suit.  Preferred operating rationales are perceived toughness, punitive inclination and a closed mind.

Mahmood has, however, outdone her more recent contemporaries.  She assumes that the British public, supposedly gorging itself on the populist starch of Nigel Farage from the UK Reform Party, wants more surveillance, more police, more monitoring.  Talk about such matters must be tough, uncompromising, even cruel.  Her well of inspiration is that much misunderstood genius of legal theory and philosophical provocation, Jeremy Bentham.  Karl Marx thought that mighty figure of utilitarian thinking worthy of derision, calling him “that insipid, pedantic, leather-tongued oracle of the ordinary bourgeois intelligence of the nineteenth century.” 

In an interview with former British Prime Minister and overpaid consultancy glutton Sir Tony Blair, the Home Secretary spoke of “my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon.  That is that the eyes of........

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