Just before Christmas, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Prisons (HMIP) walked out of HMP Swaleside on the Kent coast to issue a rare red flag warning to Ministers. The ‘Urgent Notification’ painted a dystopian picture of an institution no longer in the control of the state, wracked by staff shortages, violence and drugs. The prison was […]
This week, the think tank Policy Exchange delivered a mid-term report on the performance of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Mark Rowley, who was enticed out of an apparently lucrative retirement to take command of the capital’s beleaguered police service. He will not find it agreeable reading, but then little that crosses his desk these days is. […]
To paraphrase GK Chesterton, jury trial in the Crown Court has not been tried and found wanting, it has been found to require funding and thus has to be curtailed. Keen observers of the Ministry of Justice will not have been surprised by the demise of the Leveson Review’s proposal for a judge sitting with […]
I agree with David Lammy. The trouble is, I agree with 2020 David Lammy, who said this: A jury trial gives people the final say on the guilt or innocence of their fellow citizens. It entrusts the public to make life-changing decisions, rather than merely leaving it in the hands of lawyers. This is a […]
‘We must not speculate.’ That is a phrase that has been oft repeated over the airwaves in the days following the Huntingdon train attack. We know that Anthony Williams has been charged with 10 counts of attempted murder, one count of actual bodily harm and one count of possession of a bladed article following a […]
David Lammy didn’t cover himself in glory this week in Parliament. Our Lord Chancellor chortled and guffawed while his shadow Robert Jenrick tried to hold him to account for the release in error of a registered child sex offender from HMP Chelmsford whose crime sparked national protests. The shelf life of ‘but the Tories’ as […]
Two years ago today, on October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists stormed into southern Israel, murdering, raping, torturing and abducting men, women and children. It was the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Yet before Israel had even buried its dead, a different kind of assault began on Jews – not in the Middle East, […]
Over 76,000 serious criminal cases are stuck in a court backlog. Of those cases, nearly a quarter have been in the queue for over a year. The wait to be heard in the magistrates’ court is even longer: 310,304 hearings were in abeyance at the end of March, equivalent to roughly three months at current […]
Catching a train from deep Berkshire to London Paddington, there are a few things you expect to encounter. Trainspotters, tired campers and a Great Western Railway employee hawking shortbread from a trolley. So passengers on the Monday morning service might well have been surprised to behold, boarding at Slough, troupes of young people swilling home-mixed […]
We must leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) – that is mine and Suella Braverman’s conclusion, in a new paper we have co-authored for the Prosperity Institute. Britain was one of the founding nations of the ECHR. Back in the 1950s, in the aftermath of the horrors of the Second World War, and […]
We have much to thank Winston Churchill for. Not only did he save us from fascist tyranny, but evoking his memory now is always guaranteed to incense left-wingers. One thing you might never have thought of crediting Churchill for, however, is laying the foundations for the creation, and our membership of, the European Convention on […]
British businesses are under siege. Not from rivals or regulators, but from American hedge funds and their proxies. There is something profoundly flawed with the UK’s class action system: it allows hedge funds in Connecticut to quietly bankroll lawsuits against British companies, while lawyers take home millions in fees, claiming they’re fighting for justice. It […]
At the beginning of the year, Keir Starmer claimed that opposition politicians calling for a new national inquiry into grooming gangs were on the ‘bandwagon of the far-right’. Now he is apparently on the same bandwagon, having U-turned and agreed that a statutory national inquiry is necessary. That comes after Baroness Casey’s rapid audit into […]
It is time to choose your favourite cliché. Grasp the nettle, bite the bullet. Whichever it is, Kemi Badenoch has done it. For years, many eminent Tories have been aware that the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and its legal penumbra are causing problems here. But there were determined efforts at evasion. Just kick […]
Robert Jenrick is continuing to annoy all the right people. This weekend he turned his focus to the appalling attacks on front line prison staff, including by terrorists, that have left dozens of wounded, maimed and traumatised officers struggling to contain the threat in our High Security prisons. Jenrick asked me to produce a rapid […]
The most important thing to remember about the latest Sentencing Review is that it has been conducted in the shadow of one cold, hard fact: we don’t have nearly enough prison places, and aren’t going to get them anytime soon. At least, one must hope this is the only reason that David Gauke, the former […]
