Courts knowing more about the people they are sentencing is a good thing. Last month’s attack by the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, on guidelines recommending that individuals from ethnic and religious minorities, as well as women and young adults, should have pre-sentence reports written about them, typifies the corrosive cultural politics he specialises in.

Mr Jenrick wants to undermine the independence of the judiciary by changing the law so that the secretary of state, and not the 14-member Sentencing Council for England and Wales, has the final say. The guidelines have now been paused, after the government introduced legislation that would make parts of them illegal.

Mr Jenrick is playing with populist politics. In claiming that courts following the guidelines would be biased against Christians and “straight white men”, he was fomenting racial and religious divisions. Since there is nothing in the guidelines about sexual orientation, and “faith minority community” could include many Christians (such as Catholics or Quakers), his claims were not only damaging but false. Inflammatory claims about “two-tier justice” deliberately raised the temperature on what ought to be a calm, expert-led process. They also distract from important practical issues such as the high vacancy rate in the probation........

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