Despite the row in March 2025 over discriminatory Sentencing Council guidelines, the British government actually sneaked out new rules and advice for its probation service two months beforehand—enshrining a two-tier system for setting bail conditions.
Labour justice secretary Shabana Mahmood, who formally opposed last month’s almost-accepted guidance to judges from an unaccountable domestic NGO (or quango), actually supports bail conditions that rest not solely on the facts of an individual case, but also on ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. This would oblige the probation service to consider the traumatic impact of “important historical events”—code for colonisation and slavery—when working with an offender.
To Reform UK’s Gawain Towler—the former Brexit Party director of communications—the new bail guidance “proves that Labour has willingly embraced woke discrimination.” Such rules, he says, “represent a deliberate and calculated erosion of the bedrock of our legal system: equality before the law.”
