David Shipley

Just before the second anniversary of his horrific murders, it has emerged that Southport killer Axel Rudakabana has been transferred from Belmarsh prison to Broadmoor, a high-security psychiatric hospital. Although this does not change the fact that he is serving a prison sentence, Broadmoor is a more comfortable and safer environment than a jail like Belmarsh. It’s also far more expensive. Instead of the approximately £100,000 per year Rudakubana cost us as a prisoner, he will now cost over £300,000 per year. He will remain in Broadmoor until psychiatrists decide he’s well enough to return to prison. Rudakubana has previously been described by a senior mental health clinician as having a ‘lack of empathy’ and a ‘fascination with violence’.

Louise Haigh is back in government. The former transport secretary resigned in November 2024 following news reports that she had a conviction for an offence of fraud by misrepresentation, which she committed in 2013. The conviction was the result of Haigh pleading guilty to having lied about the loss of her company Blackberry so that her employer would replace it with an iPhone. She had reported a ‘terrifying’ mugging in London to police, claiming that her work mobile had been stolen. Her sentence was a ‘conditional discharge’ – essentially, she was set free with the promise to not do it again. Such a conviction did not bar her from standing for parliament, although it does not appear that she disclosed it during the 2015 election campaign which saw her elected as an MP.

On his last day as Justice Secretary, David Lammy was accused of ‘fighting to cover up foreigners’ crimes’. This is because the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) which he led is taking legal action against the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), seeking to overturn a ruling which instructed them to publish conviction data by nationality and offence type for the past seven years. This ICO ruling followed a Freedom of Information request by the Centre for Migration Control (CMC). Why are they so determined to avoid publishing the data?

Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, has often been criticised during his two years in the role. For his decision to authorise Lucy Connolly’s prosecution, his angry denials that two-tier justice exists, his ‘fanatical devotion to international law’, being ‘dangerously wrong about the ECHR’, an apparent dislike for the British state and its soldiers, and for ludicrous hyperbole such as when he claimed that critics of the ECHR want migrants to drown. It’s been easy to picture him as a sinister figure, using domestic and international law to serve his politics rather than the interests of his people.

Just eight months ago Shabana Mahmood’s Home Office published a document called,  ‘A Fairer Pathway To Settlement’ which described the Boriswave as an ‘extraordinary open border experiment’, in which an additional 2.6 million people moved to this country between 2021 and 2024. Many of these arrived under the health and care visa. This was a disastrous policy – as the Home Office pointed out at the time, in an ‘attempt to fill between 6,000 and 40,000 jobs’ in the care sector, we imported ‘616,000 individuals from 2022 to 2024’. Even worse, over ‘half were not even arriving to work in that sector but were instead dependants of those who were’. The Home Office added that ‘fraud… was rife’.

Electronic Monitoring – ‘EM’ or ‘tagging’ – is at the heart of the government’s plans for the justice system. Tags are used to enforce curfews, prevent drug and alcohol abuse, and even ensure that people stay away from certain areas. In 2021, there were 13,400 tagged people. From September, as part of the new sentencing regime, the Ministry of Justice is introducing a presumption to tag all prison leavers, meaning that from 2027 the government expects an additional 22,000 people will be tagged every year. And as the new Sentencing Acts takes effect, people will be serving shorter sentences and spending more time supervised by probation, meaning that the number on tags is going to rise and rise.

Shabir Ahmed, the leader of the Rochdale rape gang, is for now a free man, living in the UK, having served 14 years after being convicted of 30 child rape offences. Ahmed is a British citizen – he gave up his Pakistani citizenship. As the law stands, he can not be deported because of provisions in the Immigration Act 1971. The law states that because Ahmed arrived in the UK before 1973, and lived here for more than five years before his deportation was considered, he is immune from deportation.  This, naturally, has provoked great outrage, with Andy Burnham having said he wants the home and foreign secretaries to do everything they can in order to deport Ahmed.

It’s clearly asylum week at the Home Office. On Sunday, destructive new ‘safe and legal’ routes for asylum seekers which will create a Burnhamwave were unveiled. Monday brought a commitment to replace employment tribunal judges with specially recruited members of the public. And today we a new plan was revealed which, according to the department’s press release, means ‘asylum seekers [are] to pay’ towards the cost of their accommodation and support. We know from Home Office research published last year that those granted asylum have very low levels of employment (less than 50 per cent), even years after that grant The media management model is familiar to those of us who’ve followed Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s team since they were at the Ministry of Justice.

Last week, almost a thousand more illegal migrants entered the country via small boats. Over 204,000 have arrived since 2018. And of them, 76,352 have broken into Britain since Labour’s election win, just under two years ago. Almost all of them claim asylum. Almost none of them are ever deported. Meanwhile the migrant crime wave rolls on. On Friday, three Afghan men who raped a teenage girl before fleeing the country in the back of a lorry were found guilty. Our borders are not secure. It would be an act of wilful neglect to introduce another route for those who wish to live here at our expense On legal migration too, the signs are bleak. The Home Secretary’s long-promised reforms to Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR) are yet to be enacted.

Jamie Varley has been sentenced to a whole life order for the murder of Preston Davey, his adopted son, who was aged just 13 months at the time of his death. This means Varley will never be released from prison. In addition to the murder charge, Varley was found guilty of two counts of assault by penetration, five counts of cruelty to a child, grievous bodily harm, sexual assault of a child, 13 counts of taking indecent photos of videos of a child, one of distributing an indecent photo of a child, and one of making an indecent photo. Varley’s partner, John McGowan-Fazakerley, was sentenced to 25 years for allowing the death of a child, two counts of child cruelty and one count of the sexual assault of a child.

On Monday night, a video from Belfast was shared on social media. It shows a black man raising his bloodstained hand as he pins a white man to the tarmac on a suburban Belfast street. Onlookers shout. ‘He’s trying to cut his head off,’ a man yells. Locals try to drive him away from the limp victim. Finally, the police arrive. On Tuesday, it was reported that the victim, a man in his 40s, is alive, and in hospital with serious injuries to his eyes, neck and back. A 30-year-old Sudanese man has been charged with possession of a blade in a public place, threats to kill and attempted murder. The suspect, who has been charged, had been granted ‘leave to remain’ for five years by the Home Office in 2023.

Henry Nowak was 18, and at the end of his first term at Southampton University, when he was murdered. Around 11:30 p.m. on 3 December last year, Henry was walking back from a night out with his university football team. He hadn’t drunk heavily – during the trial we heard that he was below the drink driving limit. On the way home Henry encountered Vickrum Digwa, the 23-year-old Sikh man who would murder him. Given the seriousness with which our police take racism, of course their response to this was to handcuff Henry Digwa was carrying two blades, an eight-inch ‘shastar’ openly displayed, and a smaller ‘kirpan’ around his neck and under clothing.

The Makerfield by-election matters hugely. Not only is Andy Burnham seeking a return to Parliament, he will also likely become prime minister if he succeeds at defeating Reform in the contest. The stakes could not be higher. Which makes the impact of Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain particularly important. With Labour and Reform neck and neck in the polls, Restore’s estimated 7 per cent of the vote share could split the right-wing vote enough to carry Burnham to victory. Now, more than ever, it seems a good time to try and understand what Restore stands for. But after attempting to do so this past week, I’m not sure I succeeded. This was supposed to have been an interview with Rebecca Shepherd, Restore’s candidate for Makerfield.

A gang of teenage traveller boys who filmed themselves raping lone schoolgirls on two occasions have been spared jail. It seems from Judge Nicholas Rowland’s remarks that ‘none of you need to go to prison today’ that he didn’t find this a difficult decision to make. I can only imagine what the two girls must have felt when they learned that their rapists would walk free The details of the case as reported make the judge’s choice incomprehensible. Two of the rapists, both 14 at the time, targeted a 15-year-old girl on Snapchat and lured her to an underpass where they filmed themselves laughing as they raped her. On one video one of the boys is heard saying ‘don't film it mush’.

The government has been in a celebratory mood since the release of the latest immigration figures. The Home Secretary tweeted that the latest ONS figures show that ‘net migration is down 82 per cent’, to 171,000 people a year, and ‘asylum hotel use is down 36 per cent since last year’. But these headline statistics hide bleak truths, and in reality the picture is dire for Labour and for the country. High net migration is not the problem – it is merely a symptom of the rapid and destructive pace of population transformation In truth, ‘net migration’ is a misleading measurement, because it is produced by subtracting departures from arrivals.

After all the noise about Reform slipping in the polls, and a Green surge, it turns out that the British electorate really, really care about immigration. That’s the only sensible conclusion to draw from the local election results. With high turnout nationwide, including the highest ever for the Welsh Senedd (which Labour have conceded they’ve lost), Reform have surged, and Labour have collapsed. In some ways the results are even flattering Labour. In Wigan, for example, they’ve retained control of the council despite losing all 22 seats which were voted on yesterday, because two-thirds of the seats weren’t up for grabs this time. The British electorate soundly rejected the Tories two years ago, and now it is clear they’re also done with Labour.