Should the law take class into account?

Aug 3rd 2011, 10:43 by A. McE | LONDON

WELL now here's a summer fuss dividing London social life and legal opinion. Should a posh student who gets himself involved in a riot and ends up climbing up the Cenotaphthe city's most sombre memorial to the war deadand attacking a convoy with the heir to the throne in it, get a particularly tough sentence for a first offence: 16 months behind bars? Martin Narey, the former director general of the prison service, has weighed in. In theTimes today, he argues that the sentence meted out to the student protester was excessive and that a non-custodial sentence would have been more appropriate. Eric Cantona, the footballer, argues Mr Narey, kicked a fan in the face and ended up doing community service, rather than time in jail. So why should vandalism, even on the rather epic scale attempted by this foolish Cambridge undergraduate, earn a prison sentence when so many other infractions of the law these days are treated to other punishments? In the arguments over Charlie Gilmour's sentencing, a number of facts are unignorable. The first is that, in the rough and tumble of the student-fees demonstration in December last year, Mr Gilmour's behaviour stood out in its offensiveness and extremity. He was out of his mind on drugs and drink. He threw a bin at a convoy carrying the Prince of Wales and his wife, was part of a mob attacking a business in the centre of town and topped off the day's activities by swinging from the Cenotaph. But the underlying dissent has been as much about Mr Gilmour's background as his activities. As the privately educated and wealthy step-son of the Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour and a prominent journalist mother, Mr Gilmour is, as his mother plaintively put it "perfect to use as an example". Judge Nicholas Price, passing sentence, explicitly noted that "You, of all people, should have known better." That's an instinct many share when it comes to assessing crime and punishment. But it is always a controversial way to interpret the law and requires limits, lest it tip simply into anti-toff populism or other forms of selfrighteousness. When Cherie Blair QC , sitting as a judge, admonished a Christian defendant in a case that he should have behaved better because he was a religious believer, she had her knuckles rapped by a more senior judge. In the Gilmour case, however, his education and standing as a Cambridge undergraduate is relevant to his argument that he did not realise the Cenotaph commemorated the war dead. (Parents may feel that this is a poor advertisement for history studies at Lancing private school, Gilmours alma mater. For a history undergraduate, it is a frankly daft line to take.) Now his mother and rock-star father are urging politicians to support their appeal against sentence. It does appear to be on the long side, though siding with a posh student revolutionary might not be high on the list of many politicians' priorities. His family maintain that Charlie's imprisonment is "a waste of taxpayers money". That could be said of much incarceration of people far less well-connected that the Gilmours and without their access to publicity. The key question is a different one: whether the punishment fits the crime. As stupid and dangerous as Charlie Gilmour's behaviour was, it doesn't.