Justice secretary keen to stress it’s the Tories at faultpublished at 16:42 12 July
Harry Farley
Political correspondent
The language the new justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, used was pretty stark.
She talked about “vanloads of dangerous people circling the country, with nowhere to go,” if prisons were full and warned: “We could see looters running amok, smashing in windows, robbing shops and setting neighbourhoods alight.
“In short, if we fail to act now, we face the collapse of the criminal justice system.”
The reason Mahmood was painting such a bleak picture is she knows that allowing some prisoners out early – as she announced today – will not be popular with many people.
She wants to stress that, in her words, she has been with “left with no choice at all”.
The speech was framed around blaming the previous Conservative government for the crisis. Given Labour have only been in power a week, that is perhaps not unreasonable.
But Mahmood also knows that the questions and criticism will quickly come her way if this scheme does not work or leads to a rise in offences.
Her repeated description of Rishi Sunak’s government as “the guilty men” showed a politician still in campaign mode. The election may be over. But Labour know that before the next one they will have to take difficult decisions.
And they want to argue it’s not them, but the Conservatives, at fault.
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