David Shipley

I had hoped I would never have to write about Hamit Coskun again. After the Quran-burner won his appeal in October, it seemed that this particular battle in the free speech wars was over. Unfortunately the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) have other ideas. On Friday evening the state prosecutor announced that it was going to appeal Coskun’s successful appeal. The language in their appeal application is particularly revealing. In that document the CPS describes burning a Quran as ‘an obviously provocative act’, which is ‘highly controversial’ and ‘has led to widespread international protests and condemnation, particularly from Muslim communities and governments, and has provoked numerous well-documented incidents of disorder and violence’.

After the pandemic the Boris Johnson government took a fateful and disastrous decision to suppress rising inflation by massively expanding migration. It was one of the worst decisions made by a British government in my lifetime, made all the more appalling because it followed a solemn promise that Brexit would bring a tough, ‘points-based’ migration system. Instead, we now know, we got the Boriswave. A vast influx of low-skilled migrants with many dependants, who would cost the country hundreds of billions once granted residency. In a lengthy document published yesterday, the Home Office describe the scale and disaster of what Shabana Mahmood calls ‘this extraordinary open border experiment’.

‘This is a moral mission for me, because I can see illegal migration is tearing our country apart, it is dividing communities. People can see huge pressure in their communities and they can also see a system that is broken, and where people are able to flout the rules, abuse the system and get away with it.' These are not my words, the words of a Tory or Reform MP, or of Rupert Lowe. They are the words of Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood, who is to announce a number of new asylum policies today. The Home Secretary’s goal is to ‘make it less attractive’ for illegal migrants to come to Britain and ‘make it easier to deport illegal migrants off British soil’.

Yesterday His Majesty’s Prison Service released a sex offender by mistake. That would be bad enough on its own, but this particular sex offender was Hadush Kebatu, the Ethiopian migrant whose assault on a 14-year-old girl sparked weeks of protests in Epping. Kebatu was only sentenced last month, receiving a 12-month sentence for two sexual assaults which he committed just eight days after arriving in the UK. Kebatu had been held at HMP Chelmsford, and was due to be handed over to a Home Office operated immigration removal centre before his deportation from the country. Instead of doing this, the prison released him this morning.

Quietly, day-by-day, the inquiry into the Southport killings is revealing how disastrous failures of the British state led to Axel Rudakubana murdering young girls in August 2024. Yesterday it was the turn of the killer’s former headteacher, Joanne Hodson, to give evidence. She first met Rudakubana in 2019 when he enrolled at the Acorns School in Lancashire, aged 13. The boy was sent there after taking a knife into his previous school.  Acorns is a specialist school solely for children who have been permanently excluded from mainstream education. It’s also a good example of such a school, getting many of its pupils into work or further education after their time at Acorns. It’s also familiar with knives.

Should Jess Phillips resign? That’s the demand made by four survivors of the ‘grooming gangs’ in a public letter to the Home Secretary. The letter came after days of chaos which have left the inquiry in disarray. The collapse began on Monday morning when Fiona Goddard, a survivor from Bradford, quit the inquiry. Fiona was groomed and repeatedly raped by more than 50 men during the late 2000s. In 2019, nine men were found guilty of offences including her rape and child prostitution. In her resignation letter she described a ‘toxic, fearful environment’, ‘condescending and controlling language used towards survivors’ and her ‘serious concerns’ about members of the inquiry’s links to the government.

It’s not often the Ministry of Justice gets it absolutely right. But they have today. It has been announced that the Victims and Courts Bill will be amended to stop coercive and controlling fathers from using their parental rights to control their children and former partners even from inside a prison cell. This long-overdue change in the law means that fathers convicted of rape, and parents of either sex convicted of serious sexual offences, will have their legal right to parental responsibility restricted. The current system has allowed this legal right to be abused.

Failing institutions don’t like challenge, let alone being shown up. Few institutions are failing more tragically than our prisons – and the situation is getting worse. This is because the officials who preside over this debacle are purging the few people who have actually been making a positive difference. The latest organisation to be banned from prisons is Sycamore Tree, a Christian charity which arranges meetings between prisoners and people who have been the victims of similar crimes to those they committed. It charged prisons nothing and had operated successfully for more than 25 years, running courses for more than 40,000 prisoners. The story of its banning was broken by Inside Time, the prison newspaper read by inmates and staff at jails across the country.

Prisons across the country are slashing education funding. According to the Guardian, public money for prison education courses is being reduced by almost 50 per cent. As a result, basic English and maths courses are being scrapped. This appears to breach Labour’s 2024 manifesto commitment, in which they promised to ‘work with prisons to improve offenders’ access to purposeful activity, such as learning’. If the government hopes to save the justice system from collapse, then it needs to bring down reoffending. The Sentencing Bill and the coming reforms to the court system will significantly reduce the use of imprisonment, and Labour hope that jails and probation will be able to help more offenders reform. Cutting prison education budgets runs directly counter to that goal.

Data published yesterday has piled yet more pressure on the government to change its asylum policy. Analysis by the Telegraph has shown that 211 people living in asylum seeker hotels have been charged with crimes since the beginning of the year. This includes eight who have been charged with 12 sex offences against children, 32 sexual offences against adults and 109 violent offences. A 24-year-old who was charged with ‘attempting to engage in sexual communication with a child’ failed to appear at his trial on 20 June.