Coffee House Shots
Can our prisons take these 'thugs'?
The Spectator magazine is home to wonderful writing, insightful analysis, and unrivaled books and arts reviews. Subscribe today for just £12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online. Alongside that, you get a £20 John Lewis or Waitrose voucher. Go to spectator.co.uk/voucher. Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots, the Spectator's Daily Politics podcast. I'm Oscar Edmondson and I'm joined today by Katie Bowles and Ian Hson, Senior Advisor at the Counter Extremism Project. So, Kia Stone will be chairing his first COBRA meeting today as the government tries to grapple with the rioting that's broken out across the country after the tragic stabbings in Southport. The weekend saw numerous examples of violence, including some aimed at hotels thought to be hosting asylum seekers, and we had a new statement from the Prime Minister which we can hear now. No doubt, those that have participated in this violence will face the full force of the law. The police will be making arrests, individuals will be held on remand, charges will follow, and convictions will follow. I guarantee you will regret taking part in this disorder, whether directly or those whipping up this action online, and then running away themselves. This is not protest, it is organised violent thuggery. So Ian, is the government getting a grip at this? Well, the government must get grips with this and there has to be a decisive response from the state because the violence is completely unacceptable, it's totally unjustifiable, it ought to be condemned without any equivocation or context, now is not the time for doing that. I suppose in terms of the logistics Oscar, it's going to be an interesting Cobra meeting if Shabana Mahmood is invited with the whom secretary, the our justice secretary, because it's one thing for that Cooper to say, we've put in train this juggernaut now, where your doors will be coming in and people will be getting arrested. Some people in particular will be criminalised, there's going to be stunned conversations between perpetrators in magistrates' courts and solicitors who say, bring a bag, you're going away, that sort of thing is probably going to happen, I say probably because the other end of the equation, which is run by Shabana Mahmood, is our prison system. Now if you go back to 2011, and you look at the metrics after the civil disorder that followed the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan, which was widespread and is the kind of comparator, you will see that for example, remand rates in magistrates' courts following the disorder when people were being arrested and processed, went from 10% to 65%. Average sentences for people who were involved in rioting disorder, including thefts and looting and so on, so lower order stuff were about 17 and a half, 18 months and the problem is now that we have a prison system that doesn't even resemble what it did in 2011 in terms of the capacity and capability to deal with a large influx of pretty angry, I would say, and bewildered young men who have been quite rightly, don't get your own criminalised as a result of this. The prison service, the population back in 2011 was smaller than it is now, so the wiggle room was larger in terms of finding space. The prison service at the moment is running at about 99% capacity, as we know, and it's so full and so full of disorder that the incoming labour administration, for whom no blame can attach to this, have that introduced fairly draconian legislation to let a lot of people out, to create the headroom to restore order inside prisons and to think about rehabilitation, but that won't come into effect really until September, so we've got a month now where we've got a huge number of people potentially, dozens, perhaps hundreds of people, who are coming into the system, which is not able to cope with what it's dealing with at the moment, so there's huge potential here for the disorder being replicated off the streets and into prison establishments, and I hope that just to say that Shabana Mahmood isn't yes ministered by officials who've plainly lost control of the prison system as it is, who are saying to her, yes, we'll cope somehow. I hope there's a bit more rigour put into it than that, because as I say, we do risk serious disorder happening inside jails. If we transplant a large number of people who've been convicted of assaults on the outside and another riot-related activity. And Casey, just picking up that point about Shabana Mahmood, you spoke to the now Secretary of State for Justice, the force took a role in Cabinet for your win with Ball's podcast, and a lot of that conversation centred around the issues that we're seeing in prisons and in the Justice Department more widely. Do you think she's the sort of person who can really lead on this? Well, the problem for Labour, I suppose one of the several problems, is of course they've inherited a situation where prisons are really at capacity. Obviously, the release that Ian just mentioned in terms of releasing prisoners is the plan they have, and yet, Keir Starmer's main response to this is saying we will lock people up, and we will increase crime and punishment, you won't get away from this, and everyone will feel the full weight of the law. Now, it's not that that's necessarily contradictory. You can be pledging to have fast justice, caught sitting at long periods of time, and people going to share these sentences. But Shabana Mahmood has said from opposition to her colleagues before, you know, only pledge longer sentences, more spaces, if you are going to increase the funding and the capacity. So I think there is the question to just in terms of space and how there's chimes for some of the other things they're doing. And then to Ian's point, the point about there are ready warnings about potential prison riots over the summer because of the overcrowded issue. If you are then putting on mass groups that have just been writing on the streets and to these prisons, it's not just the capacity, but also what it does to the ecosystem in the prison. So I think it's going to be adding, I think, to the challenges for Shabana Mahmood. And it was already, if you think about, you know, Sue Gray's list of the government risks and so forth, there's a reason prisons have always been at the top of that list, where Labour have been thinking about the crises that they could have on entering. I think this is just exacerbating that in terms of the challenges they're facing. And it's also, I think, for Kirstalma, probably his first big test since entering 10 Downing Street. He's had quite a lot of luck in some areas since becoming prime minister. If you think about the European political community that he got to host at Blenheim Palace, I think when Labour came in, a few things have just naturally gone quite right for them. And I think this is the first thing where it is something they didn't expect to be happening. Obviously, this all links back to what triggered this wave of riots. It's a response to what happened in the South, in terms of the stabbings. And from these spates of almost quite random violence across the UK, you know, Belfast, Hull, robbery and popping up in lots of different places. And that's something Labour just couldn't and wouldn't have planned for. So I think how Kirstalma handles this. And, you know, it's small things, such as Kirstalma was saying during the campaign that he didn't really want to work Friday nights. Now, I think the comments were misconstrued a bit at the time in the sense of saying, oh, this is going to work in the evenings, it was just Friday nights and actually saying, it's good to have family time and you can. I think there's now a question, which is, is Kirstalma going to have the political space to go on a summer holiday. That's supposed to be happening at the end of the week. I think in the current climate, we're here to go away. And if this doesn't peter down at all, it's going to be politically impossible for him to do that and not face a backlash. And Ian, you wrote a blog on Coffee House over the weekend about what would constitute a more complete response from government and in particular, you wrote about the need to tackle all forms of extremism. Can you speak a little bit to that point? About four or five years ago, I walked an idea into Dining Street, which got applied a fairly baffled reception about extending our counterterrorism policy into a community-based, non-securitized policy called promote. So if you contest, our counterterrorism strategy has got these four Ps, which I won't list because I won't ever remember them. But there needed to be something else. And there's something else is the thing I think that is still missing in terms of how we turn this crisis into an opportunity, because it is a crisis. We've got to act decisively. But this is just the beginning of a conversation. I mean, I sometimes get laughed at by saying terrorism and other forms of violent extremist action is a conversation. So we've got to work out what's being said. We've got to work out what's being said in this conversation about this spasm of quite serious social disorder beyond we have the numbers and we can do what we like. There's something else that we need to talk about, which speaks to how we cohere as a country. A lot of noises and a lot of nonsense has talked about this concept of community cohesion. And I think there's a kind of reflexive and rather pious reach for this concept by liberal progressive opinion that says, we're a great country and we're a country that sticks together. And largely, that's the case, but not exclusively, because we've got areas, the middle times, for example, in the northwest of England and around the eastern seaboard, potentially down into the Midlands, where there has not, you know, social integration has not worked. And the assimilation of different ethnicities is creating parallel societies. And where these parallel societies, and believe me, coming from Northern Ireland, I think I know what I'm talking about here, where these parallel societies get entrenched, then when you have trigger events like the, you know, disgusting massacre of children in the southport, you're going to have to expect those events are used and misused by, you know, populist politicians and agitators to create an effect. I'm not going to mention any names here, but I think you know, probably who I'm talking about, including agitators who are, you know, lying in their sun loungers in Greece, who have, you know, added to the burden here. We need to have a strategy that's basically saying, how do we look at what rights people have in this country and connect them to the responsibilities they have as citizens on the obligations and duties we have to each other? And I know what that sounds like when I say it, but we need to find a way to promote those ideas in places where that contract and that legitimacy has fallen down. And we see that legitimacy falling down in areas often with high degrees of economic deprivation, where people feel left behind, where people don't feel the politicians are talking to them or about them, or where political life has been almost subsumed by religiosity. We need to be able to have a message that comes from the state that says how we repair those places where the social fabric is starting to fall apart a bit. That's a really difficult question to answer. It's pretty inconvenient as well because it runs against this part fiction that, you know, we live in a massively tolerant society. We're not seeing tolerance exercise now when mobs are trying to incinerate migrants in hotels. We have to capitalize on the disorder in some positive way, but that includes being very honest. Government has been very decisive about how it tackles what it calls right-wing thuggery, and that's what it is, and that's what it needs to do. But there's an awful lot more that's going on that needs to be talked about. In fact, one of the ways this whole four or five days of civil disorder has been weaponized is taking what Keir Starmer is saying and saying, well, actually, there's a lot of other stuff that's going on, including riots and white chapel riots in harehills, in leads, the attack on the senior army officer, events like these that have distinct features of ethnicity. We can't just ignore that and simply say this is a societal problem that is focused on the far right. Otherwise, we risk in flaming the situation. Of course, what's happening now seems to be mainly have those characteristics. But when you take a step back and you look at why people are joining these crowds, this, by the way, this behavior is not mindless. This is the thing I'd like to emphasize. It's because that lets people off the hook. It is directed behavior. It is racial hatred, which is actually being met now because we have seen scenes of apparently armed Muslim gangs roaming the streets and assaulting white people. This is getting very serious. We have to look at the problem in its entirety and name the problem in order to be able to start repairing it. So you'd like to see a more consistent approach? Yeah. I think now is the time after we've had the criminal justice response that we must have, we need to start looking at what we can do to repair community relations. Somebody on social media who I follow and I've got a great deal of respect for a professor, Lucy Eastorp, who does a lot to do with disaster recovery, said, it's very memorable to me, that Starmer was acting like a prosecutor, but he also needs to act like a diplomat. So we need some unity now of purpose to look at some of these deep societal problems that are driving people apart and creating the absolutely ideal precursors for further violence, because I don't think this is going to go away without some effort. The effort starts with personal responsibility, no question about that, but the state has to probably be involved as well in assisting this repair of community relations. And, Katie, just finally, what's been some of the opposition response to Keir Starmer's handling of these of these protests? Well, what's quite interesting is, of course, you don't really have a proper lead of the opposition at the moment. You have Rishi Sunak, who's response has been since, I think, the violence escalated over the weekend. It's been less about attacking Keir Starmer or trying to score points, and more joining that general call for unity, condoning the behavior as a right-wing thuggery. Those are obviously the words Keir Starmer used, but I think that there's nothing of Rishi Sunak's statement, which was released on Sunday night, that is disagreeing with what Keir Starmer's saying or all saying it's misjudged. And then you have the Tory leadership candidates, who, of course, are acting as though they are leader of the opposition, because they are leader of the opposition's in training. And I think Pretty Patel's probably had the most impact, but you would probably expect that as a former home secretary. So she's pushing for Parliament to be recalled. And also saying, from my time here, I think they should be doing these various things and have written a letter to Keir Starmer. And then you have Robert generic saying Keir Starmer shouldn't go on holiday, also having worked in the home office previously. But I think that call for Parliament to be recalled. At the moment, I think it seems quite unlikely. I don't think labelled it because they planned to bite on that. And instead they're keen to look as though they're busy, you have a vet Cooper out this morning, you have Cobra and so forth. But I don't think there's a sense that Parliament needs to return. But if I think this keeps going on throughout the week, and there is a sense that there is not a grip on it, because there's almost a two step response. The first step is obviously to calm things down in the media. And then the second is more to Ian's point, which is longer term, how do you address these things? But I think if, you know, by midweek, it doesn't not, because though this has been brought under control or is reducing, there are more acts, there are more demonstrations. I think then you'll start to get more MPs joining the calls for Parliament to be recalled. Well, thank you, Katie. Thank you, Ian. And thank you very much for listening. [MUSIC PLAYING] You