Latest news with #Blairites
Telegraph
22-05-2025
- Politics
- Telegraph
This shameful plan to cut prison sentences must not pass
As the 9/11 terrorist attack unfolded a Labour aide sent a memo around Government suggesting that it was a 'good day to get out anything we want to bury'. 'Councillors expenses?', she suggested. The Blairites are back in charge and channelling the same approach to Government communications. Yesterday the Government tried to bury their sentencing reforms under the spectre of high net migration figures, growing borrowing costs and the Chagos surrender deal, hoping the busy news day would avert attention. No 10 even went to the lengths of deploying a dead cat story that they will mandate the chemical castration of paedophiles. Pigs will fly before Starmer faces down his friends in the human rights lobby and forces these sick individuals to confront their actions. Under the plans the Justice Secretary announced yesterday there will be a presumption against short prison sentences of 12 month or less. To give a snapshot of the numbers that involves: in 2023 there were over 4,000 thieves, 3,000 thugs done for assault, and 1,000 burglars that were handed sentences that fall below the cut off. Those facing longer sentences – for offences like drug dealing, child abuse and arson – will be able to be eligible for release after serving just a third of their sentence if they behave well in prison. In fact, it gets worse. Criminals who plead guilty – and most do – already get a one third reduction in their sentence. So, under Shabana Mahmoood's new sentencing framework, a paedophile who pleads guilty to an eighteen-month headline term would spend just one fifth of that term in jail. That's a discount so big it'd make Aldi and Lidl blush. The public are already hacked off that criminals are serving half of their sentence – this change would see the whole system descend into farce. Instead the Justice Secretary said – with a straight face, may I add – that offenders will be placed in 'prisons outside of prisons' on tags. Words that lead most people in this country to conclude the Lord Chancellor has lost her marbles. Tags aren't iron bars: they can't stop a shop being ransacked again and again. If you just get a tag, why on earth would you think twice about doing it again? This is a recipe for a crime wave and a licence for hardened criminals to terrorise communities with impunity. Facing down Labour MPs in the House of Commons chamber yesterday, it was as if they thought the criminals were the real victims in need of our support (and taxpayer money) – not punishment. Starmer insists he has no choice but to give prisoners a get out of jail free card. But he does. The day he elevated James Timpson to the Lords – a man who said two-third of prisoners shouldn't be in jail – and appointed him as a Justice Minister, he revealed his aversion to prison. What Starmer is doing isn't practical – it's ideological. The Ministry of Justice forecast that they need 9,500 extra prisons spaces by 2028. Well, there are 10,800 foreign national offenders clogging up our prisons. That's one in every eight cells. And there are 17,800 people on remand, in prison, awaiting trial. In three years time that number could rise to as many as 23,600. Meanwhile, when I visited the Central Criminal Court last month, 40 per cent of the courts sat empty. The practical solution would be to introduce emergency legislation to disapply the Human Rights Act to deport these foreign criminals. Visa sanctions should be imposed on every country that refuses to take back their nationals that have harmed our citizens. Courts should be sitting around the clock to clear the backlog of cases backing up into our prisons. If Labour were serious they would commit to building more than the meagre 250 rapid deployment cells they are planning to build this year. Or strike a deal with one of the 13 European countries with spare prison capacity, as Denmark is doing with Kosovo. But instead of straining every sinew, they are reaching for the comforting option of freeing criminals. Ironically, the Justice Secretary claims her reforms are based on the Texan system. It's no such thing. The Texas system has cut crime and reoffending by having an incarceration rate five times higher than ours. Between 1993 and 1996 they built nearly 75,000 prison cells. If they can, why can't we? I would be the first to admit that the last Government didn't build enough prisons. We were also too quick to decommission the old Victorian prisons when space was invaluable. Labour say we can't build out way out of this problem – I say we have no choice but to.
Telegraph
14-03-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
Westminster's net zero consensus is about to collapse and it's not a moment too soon
As the latest (non) growth figures show, the economy is moving very slowly, if at all. In consequence, politics is moving fast. In policy towards defence and security, housebuilding, welfare spending, NHS England, immigration, foreign aid, shedding useless civil servants and two-tier sentencing, Labour is moving fast to the Right. It has been spooked by the failure of its first six months. This change may be more rhetorical than real, driven by the imminent Runcorn by-election. After all, in its attitudes to property rights, farming, inheritance, small businesses, independent schools, academies and House of Lords reform, Labour remains hostile to property, enterprise, tradition, and free-standing institutions. Its underlying belief that government, not people, is the secret of success, has not changed. Nevertheless, the Blairites are now in charge of Sir Keir Starmer. He seems grateful for their protection, whether in the dangerous imperial arena of the Oval Office or the bearpit of the House of Commons. The young Blair invented New Labour 30 years ago in times of economic boom. The vibe was Things Can Only Get Better. Today, Western civilisation is falling apart, so the tone is different – Blair post-September 11 2001, not tender Tony blushing in the May dawn of 1997 – but it is Blairism all the same, complete with Sir Jonathan Powell and Lord Mandelson. That means, among other things, 'triangulation' – the magic trick that elevated the politician's habit of saying one thing to one person and something else to another into the status of a dogma. So three parties are contesting for the Right. We already have a serious fight between Reform and the Conservatives. Now Labour's triangulators are muscling in, too. As Diana, Princess of Wales, put it in quite another context, it is 'a bit crowded'. In my view, Kemi Badenoch has been wise to defy the expectations of both her most ardent supporters and her critics that she would, after winning the Tory leadership, start pronouncing fiercely on all subjects. Shouting does not earn you the right to be heard. As I learnt from my biographical studies of Margaret Thatcher, the later-to-be-legendary Iron Lady spent her more than four years as Leader of the Opposition battling to win respect from her doubting party and from voters who had seen the previous Conservative government collapse under its own economic mismanagement. Despite the ardour of her personal beliefs, she knew she must progress step-by-step. All the same, any opposition needs to indicate a direction of travel, and Mrs Badenoch is doing so, and planning to announce her policy groups next week. When it has become the opposition after a period in government, the defeated party must work out how much error to admit before it can move on. Strangely, it can be harder to break with a bi-partisan policy than one of your own. In the 1970s, both main parties usually adhered to the belief that inflation must be held down by 'prices and incomes policies'. Government, business and trade unions, assisted by a specially created board of worthies, would adjudicate how people's wages should be adjusted in the light of price rises. This approach did nothing to stop inflation and handed political and industrial power to often militant trade union leaders. Mrs Thatcher understood, at least from 1974, what nonsense it was. She began to advocate quite different policies, such as 'monetarism' and reform of trade union law, but she moved cautiously to avoid blaspheming against the bipartisan pieties of the age. The strikes of the Winter of Discontent of 1978-9 convinced enough voters that her new approach was right. The equivalent bipartisan nonsense of today is not strictly economic, although it has dire economic effects. It is net zero, first legislated for by Ed Miliband' s Climate Change Act of 2008. With the support of all but five Conservatives (the most important Tory to oppose it was Peter, now Lord, Lilley), it passed. Mr Miliband then set the 2050 target of reducing by 80 per cent the UK's carbon emissions in excess of their 1990 level. In 2019, the Conservative government, led by Theresa May, hardened that target to 100 per cent. It was able to do this by statutory instrument, not new legislation, so one of the most momentous set of costs ever imposed upon the British taxpayer was agreed, without a vote, after only 88 minutes of Commons debate in which Tories and Labour fell over one another to be the greener. We live with the consequences. These include the highest energy prices in the developed world, the decline and sometimes collapse of our remaining heavy industries (eg, aluminium), the closure of the Grangemouth oil refinery, a nervous breakdown in the car market, heat pumps that don't work, a shareholder revolt against green BP, risk to continuous electricity supply and a sentence of death upon our remaining fossil fuel extraction, mainly North Sea oil and gas. Mr Miliband – for it is, again, he – is trying to build 5-6,000 pylons by 2030 to facilitate the march of progress by wind power. Because Britain leads the way, we are suffering from 'first mover disadvantage', making ourselves uncompetitive against comparable countries and outsourcing higher emissions by importing things (including wind turbine parts) produced by fossil fuels. Mrs Badenoch has always been sceptical about wilder green claims, and now the mood among both voters and the party is with her, so I would be amazed if the Conservatives do not quite soon come out against the current date and stages towards net zero. How they do so will make a great difference. Such a change would break the main-party consensus, so the Tories must be ready for the deluge of posh ordure which will be poured upon their heads by the usual experts. The unaccountable Climate Change Committee created by the 2008 Act is no longer, I am glad to say, the force it was, and is having trouble finding a permanent chairman; but you can be sure that almost 100 per cent of the public-sector/professorial classes paid to have opinions on the matter will denounce the Tories with 'risking the future of the planet'. The best answer is not to contest 'the science', nor deny the existence of climate change, but to weigh the costs of current policy against the benefits. The first are extremely high, the second, speculative. As Lord Lilley points out, even the high priests, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), do not predict the imminent catastrophe you hear from Mr Miliband, the BBC etc. The IPCC 2018 assessment report stated that 'for most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers' such as 'changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance…' Its most recent assessment report suggested that global economic impacts of climate change might be higher than estimated in 2018, but that it had 'low confidence' in this point. It seems rational, therefore, to suggest that our heavy public investment in immature technologies wastes money. Our incredibly expensive effort to prevent climate change – which Britain, being responsible for only 1 per cent of global emissions, cannot materially affect – would be better replaced by spending, probably lower and slower, on the necessary adaptations required by global warming, in which free enterprise can lead. Existing climate change legislation puts British business and British taxpayers on a treadmill in which we must work much harder for each megawatt hour consumed. The simple question the Tories can ask once they have broken with the orthodoxy is: 'Why?'
The Independent
25-02-2025
- Politics
- The Independent
Of course the police should have the power to enter homes and seize stolen phones...
We are all Blairites now, said home secretary Yvette Cooper as she launched the huge Police and Crime Bill on its journey through parliament. Those weren't her exact words, but we got the gist. Her demeanour was reminiscent of Tony Blair 's frustration at the rise in street crime in 2002 – which newspapers at the time called a 'crisis' driven by 'mobile phone theft among young people in major cities.' He was determined to put himself on the side of anxious citizens, as he railed privately at the lack of urgency on the part of police leaders in getting to grips with the problem. Cooper did the same today, saying: 'You've got victims saying 'I can see where my phone is, I can track it, and yet the police can't act.'' This has been a problem for years. People have complained on social media that they know where their stolen phone or laptop is but that the police refuse to act. So one of the 35 measures in Cooper's bill is to give the police a new power 'to enter premises to search for and seize electronically tracked stolen goods' without having to obtain a search warrant. This is long overdue, and Cooper deserves praise for overcoming the resistance of senior police officers to a change in the law. But the new power may not be the solution. The reason the police are reluctant to break into places to try to recover tracked devices is not so much the need for a search warrant but the cost in officers' time of such operations. The new law might send a signal to police forces about the need to re-order their priorities. Cooper is well aware of the danger to the government of stories of police officers knocking on the doors of people who have exercised their right to free speech on Facebook – even if the police claim, for example, that they were only 'informing' the woman in Stockport that she had been accused of harassment. The difficult part will be when local police forces say that they need more funding if they are to go after every snatched phone. Which is why it is worth going back to 2002, the last time there was a sharp increase in 'snatch theft'. Twenty-three years ago, Blair and then-home secretary David Blunkett got on top of the problem by the means of getting police leaders into a room and exhorting them to divert resources into dealing with street crime. Blair had recently discovered Cobra, the thrilling acronym for the Cabinet Office Briefing Room (there was no 'A'), which was a way of convening bosses across public agencies with a sense of urgency. But what solved mobile phone theft in the early years of this century was the phone companies designing it out. By rendering handsets useless if stolen, they destroyed the incentive to steal them, and for the best part of two decades, phone thefts ceased to be a significant problem. In the past two years or so, though, the tech arms race between the phone companies and the criminals has tilted in favour of the thieves, as they have found ways round the security. Which means that phones can be re-used and are worth something if they can be taken out of the country – which is why the police have to act quickly to recover phones before they make their way on 'Find My iPhone' to the airport. Cooper summoned law enforcement agencies and representatives of the phone companies to a meeting three weeks ago to 'discuss what more could be done to break the business model of mobile phone theft'. This is the hope of 'taking back control', as Cooper put it, in the longer run, but in the meantime deterring phone thefts will be labour-intensive and therefore expensive police work. Given the long list of new police powers and new offences created by the Police and Crime Bill, all of them with implications for police resources, let alone for the need for more prison places, some scepticism about how this will all be paid for is justified. Blair and Blunkett were able to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime because tax revenues were rising during the New Labour years. Keir Starmer and Cooper have no such visible means of support.
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The national accounts are full of cons and tricks – no wonder investors see us as a joke
This column often focusses on the UK's national accounts – with good reason. Britain's public finances are in a parlous state, teetering on the brink of systemic meltdown. In 1997, when Tony Blair took office, the economy was growing at a rate of 4.9pc a year and the national debt was 36pc of GDP – low by historic standards. Growth continued at 3-4pc per annum for the rest of that parliament – so a relatively small government debt pile remained manageable as a share of total output, allowing the state to borrow and spend more. Keir Starmer's incoming administration faced a different situation. Over the previous 14 years, the Tories had overseen a decade of tough fiscal rhetoric during which the national debt actually ballooned, followed by a wildly over-stringent Covid lockdown that weakened our public finances even more. As a result, Labour entered government last July with Britain in a high-debt, high-tax, low-growth doom loop – with growth at a historically paltry 1.1pc and national debt near 100pc of GDP, a 60-year high. But Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves, leading a government far more ideologically Left-wing than the Blairites, doubled down. Last October's Budget raised taxes by another £40bn a year so Reeves could jack up spending even more, not least by awarding sweetheart pay-deals to Labour's public-sector union paymasters. This strategy has proved disastrous, as some of us warned from the outset. Government borrowing costs have soared, with the 10-year gilt yield up from 3.7pc in mid-September to 4.5pc now – consistently way higher than during the 'mini-Budget crisis' of October 2022 which saw Liz Truss drummed out of No 10. The pension funds and insurance companies that lend governments serious money are spooked because, far from picking up under Labour, growth has slumped with Britain now probably in recession. Investors judge that a faltering, heavily over-taxed UK economy will struggle to raise the revenues ministers hope for, while Labour lacks the political grit to rein spending in. The market consensus is Starmer's Government will keep borrowing and spending even more, raising tax rates ever higher in a desperate bid to plug the gap, driving the economy ever deeper into the doldrums, making our fiscal position even worse. That's why gilt yields remain stubbornly high, forcing the Government to spend evermore billions on debt interest each month, despite the Bank of England repeatedly cutting its base rate in a bid to lower economy-wide borrowing costs. The UK's national debt looks set to soar above 100pc of GDP – which will unnerve financial markets even more. Yet, as tough as the fiscal outlook appears, the underlying reality is worse. Britain's headline national debt figure is actually a serious under-estimate of the Government's true debt burden. Official public sector net debt (PSND) is £2,674bn on the latest 2023/24 data – equivalent to 98pc of GDP. That's sharply up from 80pc of national output prior to lockdown and less than 40pc just before the 2008 global financial crisis. This figure, though, is way lower than it should be if you include additional liabilities under three headings: the Bank of England's asset purchase facility (APF); contractual debts accrued under the private finance initiative (PFI); and, the really big one, mammoth state obligations represented by the still very generous, inflation-proofed pensions enjoyed by millions of public sector workers. As a result of the APF, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) makes a huge multi-billion-pound deduction from official national debt attributed to 'The Bank of England' in our national accounts. This, in my view, is entirely unjustified. In reality, the Bank is sitting on big losses as a result of its quantitative easing (QE) programme, under which the central bank bought hundreds of billions of pounds of mainly sovereign debt in a bid to boost the economy over the last decade or so. The value of those assets has since fallen. Yet instead of adding those losses to the national debt, the ONS – in a strange metaphysical twist – subtracts them from the UK's headline debt figure. 'As well as being unjustified, this deduction is dangerous in that it normalises the routine understating of the nation's indebtedness,' says Bob Lyddon of Lyddon Consulting, a highly-respected economic consultancy specialising in the scrutiny of bank balance sheets. 'Such creative accounting leads only to one place: the invention of illusory headroom for further public sector borrowing'. If APF liabilities are added, the headline PSND figure, rises by £179bn to £2,853bn – from 98pc to 105pc of GDP. To that should also be added the huge liabilities that are still outstanding under hundreds of PFI contracts, a trend which began under John Major's Conservatives before accelerating sharply under Blair. PFI was used to disingenuously keep public investment off the state balance sheet by relying on private capital instead, with investors guaranteed huge, taxpayer-backed returns for years to come. Often what was delivered under these contracts were extremely shoddy schools, hospitals and other public infrastructure. Add in £94bn of PFI liabilities, all of which must be legally met by the state over the coming years, and our national debt climbs further to £2,947bn, or 108pc of GDP. Then there is the often-ignored bill for the very large, index-linked pensions due to civil servants, NHS staff, teachers and some other state workers – paid for not out of invested funds, but current and future tax receipts. That bill, officially estimated at £1,442bn but according to many experts much higher, takes the national debt to £4,389bn – an astonishing 161pc of GDP, two thirds above the headline figure. The UK's national accounts are a morass of statistical cons and tricks designed to make our national debt look smaller than it is – a culture Chancellor Reeves has embraced. It's no way to run a serious country. No wonder serious financial analysts, and the bond traders they advise, increasingly view Britain as a joke. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more. Sign in to access your portfolio
