For a Government which has had an absolutely torrid time of things since almost the moment it took office, the aftermath of last summer’s riots was a rare high point.
For once, Keir Starmer got to strike a convincing pose as the tough-minded former prosecutor cracking down on disorder. Both the press and the public supported the Government’s aggressive prosecution of both those directly engaged in the riots and, albeit more controversially, those promoting it online.
But even in those halcyon days, there was a clear-and-present long-term danger: that Starmer was setting the bar on criminal justice at a height his ministers had no chance of clearing over the long term.
Most obviously, the rash of stern sentences for inflammatory social media posts was set against the backdrop of inmates being released from prison early for want of cells. Footage of felons walking free to showers, and praising the Prime Minister (and popping champagne) as they did it, is a terrible image for any government at any time.
We should also be clear that the Conservatives were considering exactly the same thing, and must shoulder much of the blame for the dire state of the prison estate after fourteen years in office. But Starmer has nonetheless doubled down on the problem, not least in ennobling and appointing a prisons minister who thinks only a third of inmates belong inside.
There is additional danger, however, when the Government is still bent on sending some people to prison. For each hateful or stupid Facebook post that landed someone in prison, that’s one fewer cell for other sorts of criminal.
Even if the public supported Starmer’s crackdown in isolation, how many voters really think unwise posting deserves imprisonment more than burglary, or sex offences? Especially when – and it was always ‘when’ – they started reoffending?
Again, Britain’s soft-touch approach to law-and-order is not a new problem; stories such as ‘Violent offenders let off if they say sorry’ were deeply corrosive to the Tories’ reputation on what ought to be one of their core issues. But there is being generally weak on crime, and there is being selectively tough on crime; Labour have chosen the latter, and it is more dangerous.
When a former Royal Marine spends 20 days remanded in prison over a Facebook video, and has to wait five months to have his name cleared, while another man gets a suspended sentence plus 12.5 days of community service for possessing a library of material recording violent child abuse, people will notice – especially with paedophilia, which both holds a particularly hateful place in the public imagination and seems especially prone to receive soft sentencing.
Stories of serious criminals receiving palpably inadequate sentences are not hard to find. Ed West maintains an infamous and long-running thread of such stories, and he surely doesn’t catch them all. Drip, drip… like poison, or acid, do such reports fall on the Government’s reputation.
And the specific timebomb ticking away under the Government may not go off for a year or two yet.
While Labour has – entirely commendably – drawn up proposals to fast-track prisons and bulldoze them through local opposition, any such programme is going to take years to implement, even assuming ministers see it through. Nor would more places, on their own, assuage the chronic crisis in the prison system chronicled by Ian Acheson in his must-read ‘Screwed’.
That means that at some point before the next election, perhaps more than once, the Government is going to have to take more tough decisions about early release – and not whether to let people out, but whom to let out.
At that point, the riots will be some time in the past, and those jailed for social media posts will have spent a couple of years inside. Ergo, they will be not a fresh tranche of convictions but part of the existing prison population, to be considered for early release alongside the muggers, housebreakers and the rest.
Ministers will be in an invidious position. Starmer will surely be understandably reluctant to start letting out rioters and agitators, both because of sincere contempt for their motivations and beliefs and fear of undermining his moment of triumph. But it would be a brave choice to keep a poster behind bars at the expense of letting a serial criminal (who will almost certainly offend again) walk free.
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