Incomplete sentences

You can’t explain why a political party won an election by quoting just two sentences from its manifesto. But I’m going to explain why Labour won the election by quoting just two sentences from its manifesto. Here they are.

Labour has a straightforward vision for policing and criminal justice.

When you call the police, they should come.

Look at that. That’s such a low aspiration, such a basic assertion of the absolute bare minimum you should be able to expect from an emergency service, that it should be funny. But it isn’t funny, because it’s an actual political dividing line that Labour was able to make with a straight face and without, so far as I’m aware, anyone calling them out on it.

After 14 years of the Tories, we live in a country where, when you call the police, they don’t come. And that’s as good a shorthand explanation as any of why Labour won the election.

Of course, there’s a downside to living in a country where, when you call the police, they come. If the police turn up, they might fulfil the (basic, bare minimum) aspiration set out in the next sentence of Labour’s manifesto, which is “When you report a crime, it should be properly investigated no matter who you are, or where you live”. If the police properly investigate a crime, they might catch the people who did it. If they catch the people who did it, they might get convicted. If they get convicted, they might get sent to prison. And that’s a disaster, because the prisons are full.

That awkward fact is the reason behind what I initially wrote was “the most difficult decision of the early days of Keir Starmer’s government” before rethinking that phrasing on the grounds that for a decision to be difficult, you have to have a choice. Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced last Friday that, given that prisons had been operating at over 99% capacity since early 2023, and with prison cells on the verge of running out, some prisoners would be released having served 40% of their sentence rather than the 50% previously required.

This is very obviously a decision with downsides. But it has the important upside that the prison system does not simply break down within weeks.

In my last post I discussed some of the baseline attack statements being made by various incoming Labour ministers about the situation they have inherited, setting out the mess they have been left by their predecessors as a way of attacking the record of the last Conservative government, making it clear that things are not going to improve quickly and pinning the problems that are unlikely to disappear any time soon on the last lot. Mahmood has perhaps the toughest immediate crisis of any incoming minister, the immediate action she has had to take is the most drastic and risky, and the baseline attack statement is, by a long way, the most righteously angry.

“Those responsible – Sunak and his gang in No 10 – should go down in history as the guilty men. The guilty men who put their political careers ahead of the safety and security of our country. It was the most disgraceful dereliction of duty I have ever known.

“Time and again, they ducked the difficult decisions that could have addressed this challenge. Instead, they kept the public in the dark about the state they had left this country in.”

She has a point, although you can overdo the “kept the public in the dark” bit because it’s not as if we didn’t know there was a problem here. Prison overcrowding was on the internal “risk register” drawn up in opposition by Labour’s chief of staff Sue Gray and referred to as “Sue’s shit list”.¹

In March, the Sunday Times reported on the frustration of then-Justice Secretary Alex Chalk over the refusal of Rishi Sunak’s No 10 to make a decision over how to deal with prison overcrowding.

For weeks the Ministry of Justice has been pressing to introduce legislation on sentencing to ease the pressure on prisons, already full and approaching breaking point. For a government on the ropes it was politically unpalatable, but so was the alternative.

When the issue came to a head, witnesses to the phone call between Chalk and Will Tanner, the deputy chief of staff in No 10, said Chalk exclaimed: “Pass the bill or start releasing people early. Those are your only choices. Would you please just pick one!” Officials were so staggered by Chalk’s display of temper and concerned by Downing Street’s indecision that the story spread to senior civil servants and ministers.

“Alex is one of the few Rishyites left,” a cabinet colleague said. “But even he’s beginning to wonder how long this can go on. No 10 doesn’t like making decisions.”

I said above that it wasn’t a difficult decision. But as it turns out, it is if you just don’t make it.

If you’re the Conservatives, you have to be very careful about how to respond to Labour’s decision to release prisoners early. On the one hand, you obviously don’t like the fact that prisoners are being released early, and all things being equal you’d want to criticise anyone who decided to authorise it. On the other hand, all things aren’t equal: the prisons are full and so either you release prisoners early or you have nowhere to send newly convicted criminals. And, if you’re the Conservatives, the prisons got this full on your watch, so shouting about how terrible it is is quite risky.²

One solution is to deny there’s a real problem in the first place, which was the idea behind a quote from a Conservative spokesperson which was the basis of this Daily Mail splash.

A senior Tory source said: 'This is shameless scaremongering from the Labour Party that risks causing mass panic.

'Labour have come into government with hundreds of prison places available – but they've lost their nerve, and are now stoking public panic for political gain.' 

It is true that there are “hundreds of prison places available” - to be precise, on 8 July there were 708 places available in adult male prisons, out of a total usable operational capacity of 84,463 - but when you put it like that, “hundreds” sounds dangerously low. And in any case, it is not entirely clear what the argument is here. Labour are pretending there’s a problem, and releasing prisoners early, and unnecessarily, for political gain? Have the Conservatives noticed that releasing prisoners early is not something most people welcome? Do they think that Labour just wanted to release prisoners early all along, and are trying to find excuses? Is everything… fine?

Former Home Secretary³ Suella Braverman does not think that everything is fine. She decided, across two tweets, to do both the “on the one hand” and the “on the other hand”.

Now. It is quite difficult to make sense of an argument that goes “We have to stop the early release of prisoners, and we haven’t got enough prison places”. The only thing the two tweets have in common is that they both attack the last Conservative government, first for proposing that prisoners should be released early, and then for not building enough prisons, and Labour researchers will be gleefully cataloguing both tweets for future use for that reason. It is not at all clear what Braverman thinks should be done now, given the unavailability of a) a time machine or b) a magic prison tree. But characterising Labour releasing prisoners early as “picking up Tory ideas” is, to be fair, a pretty sick burn of her own side.

Suella Braverman is, in her defence, not running for the Tory leadership as the sensible candidate. Which makes it all the more surprising that someone who does look likely to run for the Tory leadership as the sensible candidate, Tom Tugendhat, tweeted something equally silly.

The obvious answer to this question⁴ is “In a world where there aren’t any prison places left because the previous government neither built enough new ones nor made effective efforts to reduce the prison population by means other than emergency early release”. Tom Tugendhat is, surely, smart enough to recognise this. And it is striking that the one thing that could have redeemed his tweet, which would have been a follow-up setting out a plausible explanation of what the hell he would do about the problem, was not forthcoming.

It’s quite funny, incidentally, that both Braverman’s “I stopped the Tories releasing prisoners early” and Tugendhat’s “releasing prisoners early is bonkers” lines are somewhat undermined by the news that the Conservatives let 10,000 prisoners out early themselves between October and June, although not on the same basis as last week’s announcement.

It is tempting to attack Labour for releasing prisoners. Attacking the early release of prisoners is an opposition party comfort zone. But it’s a trap. It’s not even a deliberate trap: Labour are not releasing prisoners early to bait Suella Braverman and Tom Tugendhat into saying something silly. That’s just a byproduct of what they sincerely believe is the best policy decision available in the circumstances. But policy decisions can be political dividing lines whether that’s their primary purpose or not. “When you call the police, they should come” should not be a political dividing line, because we should never have got to that point in the first place. “If the prisons are full, you have to let some people out” should not be a political dividing line, because we should never have got to that point in the first place. But we are where we are.

1. It might seem a bit odd to have “FT research” on the list, but let’s just see what they uncover.

2. Alternatively, you could blame badgers or water-weed.

3. Twice! Twice!

4. It is a question, despite the fact that it ends with a full stop or, as it’s known in my household, “a Dan Hodges question mark”.