One wonders whether history will come to look back on the riots as the moment, or at least part of the moment, that Sir Keir Starmer set his government down the path towards a terrible reckoning.
This history might be looking back long from now, of course; it would be hubris of the first order for any Conservative to predict the immediate collapse of the new government on the basis of mishandling law-and-order. If any party appreciates just how long you can keep the show going whilst neglecting this topic, it’s ours, at this point.
Nor is it because of how he handled the riots themselves. Whilst the decision to start handing out jail sentences for people who posted inflammatory things on Facebook has ruffled some feathers, the public seem broadly to think the Government handled the riots well, even if Starmer’s overall favourability has fallen a lot since election night.
If anything, the problem is the opposite. The Government’s tough response to the riots shows what it is capable of when it takes crime seriously and wants to punish it. So what happens if – or as honestly seems more likely, when – it doesn’t live up to that standard on anything else?
This weekend saw the annual glut of arrests at the Notting Hill Carnival, at which a mother was almost stabbed to death. The official quote from the Metropolitan Police, which could not have been better drafted by its bitterest enemies, was that the Force was “tired of seeing crime”, followed by this:
“It is the responsibility of all who value this event, who want to see it as the celebration it should be, to speak out and speak up about the violence that continues to overshadow it.”
Someone unfamiliar with the Met might suggest that if anyone had a responsibility for preventing violent crime, it was the police, and that if “saying the same thing year after year” wasn’t having any effect then perhaps they ought to start policing it differently or imposing more stringent conditions on the event.
But we do know the Met, so let us shoulder our collective responsibility for not speaking up loudly enough about how stabbing mothers is bad and see what sort of fate might await those whom they did eventually arrest over the weekend: ‘Violent offenders let off if they say sorry’, reports the Daily Telegraph:
“More than 147,000 people accused of offences including sex crimes, violence and weapons possession were given community resolutions in the year to March instead of being prosecuted. Such resolutions do not result in a criminal record.
“Police guidance says community resolutions should be restricted to low-level crimes, with offenders required to apologise to the victim, accept “responsibility” for their crime and offer some form of recompense.
“But the resolutions, which are issued at the discretion of individual officers, have increased by 40 per cent since 2019 – when 102,574 were recorded – and are now nearly twice as likely as a criminal charge, according to an analysis of Ministry of Justice data.”
This feels unpromising; we had better redouble our efforts to speak up about how tired we are of crime.
The problem with these stories is not just that they each represent a terrible failure of the justice system, but that the nation has now seen the government and the judiciary stir themselves to a much higher standard.
Those videos of judges handing down tough sentences to rioters may have been intended to send a reassuring message, and perhaps they did. But video is forever, and can be recontextualised by later events. If those judges spend the next few years handing down lenient or non-custodial sentences to those convicted of serious crimes, it will look much more like a choice – by the system, and by them – than it did before.
Drip, drip, drip… there is already a steady diet of such stories in the press. Over five years, it could be truly corrosive – and that’s before factoring in the added danger that crimes committed by those released early (and they’re already reoffending) can be traced by angry voters directly back to the government in a way other crimes cannot.
But what is Starmer to do? He has ennobled as prisons minister a man who thinks two-thirds of current inmates should not be inside – which would certainly free up capacity, although one doubts if the public would share the assessment. Meanwhile Rachel Reeves is rolling the pitch for what seems likely to be a miserable budget; long odds, then, of the Treasury stumping up a capital budget for new prisons.
Yet if he doesn’t act now (perhaps using the riots to justify it to his party), will he have the room to act later, when budgets are even tighter and his backbenchers more restive? What good will be the planned crackdown on shoplifting if the courts won’t jail even persistent offenders?
If he doesn’t, the Prime Minister might be storing up a world of pain. It’s one thing to have a justice system that just doesn’t work; that people can acclimatise to, however miserable it makes life. It’s quite another to have a justice system that doesn’t work except when it wants to.
