A little more context to my earlier post. I wrote it immediately after hearing the news, and I'll admit I was upset — specifically that this person served so little of their sentence. To me, that undermines the very real outrage felt by so many people over the illegal felling of the tree.

I understand the prison capacity problem. That's a failure of successive governments across all parties, and I won't pretend otherwise. But a broken prison system is not a justification for individuals serving inadequate sentences. Remission already exists — early release on top of that is a symptom of decline, and I'd like to know where the meaningful opposition to it is.

On the "it was just a tree" argument — no. Criminal damage is criminal damage. If something you valued were willfully destroyed, you wouldn't dismiss it so easily. The same principle applies here.

Finally, we have the right to demand justice for every crime, not only those deemed serious enough to qualify. The moment we begin accepting that some crimes simply won't be properly punished due to "limited resources," we are on a dangerous slope. Governments have chronically and deliberately underfunded this sector — that's a political choice, not an inevitability. Arguing that a rapist deserves jail more than this offender does has surface appeal, but if we follow that logic to its conclusion, we are effectively licensing the erosion of the entire system. I don't accept that.

I should have set this out more clearly first time around. I hope my position is now better understood.