Blunkett pledges to close scandalous legal loophole

Home Secretary David Blunkett today pledged to close a loophole in the law which has allowed thousands of suspected criminals to laugh in the face of Britain's creaking justice system. From next month it will be an offence punishable by death for anyone caught red-handed by the police to plead "not guilty" when the case comes to court.

In a move which will anger bleeding-heart "civil liberties" campaigners, Blunkett said he wanted to shift the balance of power "away from the criminal and towards the big boys with the truncheons". He continued, "It cannot be right, in the 21st Century, for people to get away with murder by insisting on their innocence in the face of all the evidence that has been concocted against them.

"Hardworking police officers are seeing their hard work in fitting people up go to waste because of the lottery of trial by jury, which carries the very real risk of the defendant being acquitted. These new measures will allow us to meet our target of raising the conviction rate to 120 per cent while cutting unemployment by making it far easier to throw anyone without a job in jail."

The measures are also expected to help speed up the criminal justice system by ditching the quaint Victorian practice of putting people on trial before they are convicted. In future, trials will be held after the suspect has been jailed, allowing courts and prisons to merge while property developers boost the economy by turning court buildings into luxury city-centre flats. And juries will be replaced by panels of police officers, sparing middle-class people the trauma of cancelling their skiing holidays at short notice.

Ben Tandthick, chief constable of East Midlands Police, said: "At last we have a Home Secretary who understands the importance of cutting red tape and banging up as many suspicious characters as possible. "Time and again our officers have suffered ritual humiliation in the gutter press when their creative use of evidence is torn apart by 12 so-called "good men" who in reality are little better than ordinary members of society.

"We look forward to working with the Home Secretary on scrapping the antiquated process of interviewing criminals, which wastes hours of valuable police time when we could be out on the beat clobbering people."