David Shipley

There’s a strange pattern in how the UK discusses policy, and once you notice it you realise it’s everywhere. What happens is that there’s a problem, often something which makes us less safe. The problem will be fundamentally a result of policy, and often something we’re ‘forced’ to endure because of laws we have created. No one feels able to step outside our existing legal or conceptual framework, and often they don’t even really feel able to name the problem. So they propose a weird solution which just creates more costs and burdens, often falling on law-abiding Brits. Then the entire debate will take place within this limited space, ignoring the real problem and real solutions.

It’s a difficult Monday for the Prime Minister. Shortly after Keir Starmer expressed his ‘delight’ that Egyptian dissident Alaa Abd el-Fattah had arrived in the UK, it emerged that the PM’s ‘top priority’ apparently hates Jews, white people and the English most of all, if his past tweet are anything to go by. As a result, the government is now facing demands from Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, and even senior Labour MPs to strip el-Fattah of the citizenship he was granted in 2022 while a prisoner in Egypt. How plausible is this? In fact, although such demands are very unusual in British politics, the deprivation of citizenship is a long-established ministerial power.

British civil servants have almost never faced real consequences for their failures. If Reform come to power, that might change. Nigel Farage’s party has announced yesterday that they will introduce a new criminal offence of ‘dishonestly determining an asylum claim’. They will use this law to prosecute civil servants who have knowingly put British women and girls in danger by granting asylum to foreign sex offenders. These prosecutions will be retrospective, targeting those who have already made such asylum grants. The new crime would carry a prison sentence of up to two years, and could also result in offenders’ pensions being forfeited.

Shabana Mahmood’s plans to reduce migration hit a setback yesterday. It emerged that around 2,500 foreign national prison officers who no longer qualified to remain in the UK will have their visas extended. The officers, most of whom are from West Africa, were going to have to leave their jobs because the new skilled worker scheme requires that people earn £41,700 a year, above the level which most early-career prison officers are paid. Just six weeks ago it seemed that the Home Secretary wouldn’t budge, but it seems that concerted lobbying by Justice Secretary David Lammy and prisons minister Lord Timpson, along with an intervention from the Prime Minister, has caused the rethink.

Perhaps because it’s the week before Christmas, the Migration Advisory Committee’s (MAC) latest annual report has attracted little attention. Many people can’t have read it, because it is full of incendiary details which demolish the case for mass migration. The MAC is ‘an advisory non-departmental public body, sponsored by the Home Office’. It is not a political body, and its board is comprised of sober, sensible academics, who have set out to model ‘net fiscal impact’ – the costs, or benefits to the taxpayer of different kinds of migration. It’s worth noting that they do not seek to model second- or third-order costs of migration, such as housing costs, crime or long-term suppression of wages and birth rates.

It’s now over six weeks since Hadush Kebatu’s ‘release in error’ sparked a two day manhunt, and highlighted our prison system’s disastrous habit of regularly releasing inmates who should remain in jail. Since then we’ve heard about the accidental releases of Kaddour-Cherif, a prolific criminal from Algeria who overstayed a visa six years ago, and Billy Smith, released on the day he received a 45 month prison sentence. The government has promised to get a grip, but today we learned that another 12 prisoners have been released in error in the past three weeks, and that two of them are still at large.

Another week. Another video from within a prison. More words of outrage. This time it’s a video showing a prison officer inside a crowded cell, playing Fifa with a prisoner. Is this a problem? Is prison more of a holiday camp than a punishment? Is this another example of prison officer misconduct, just like the cases of female staff having sex with inmates? Having been in jail I would say not. Prisons are strange environments. They function – or don’t – depending on whether staff and prisoners work together. Every prison in the country relies on inmates to cook and distribute food, laundry, property and post. For this to happen, there have to be good, appropriate and boundaried relationships between prisoners and staff.

Just two weeks ago Epping lost its court battle to shut the Bell Hotel and expel unwanted asylum seekers from the town. Now it seems the state has decided to punish the town for its act of rebellion. Eight properties in the town are to be converted to ‘Houses in Multiple Occupation’ (HMOs) and will be used to house asylum seekers. The properties have been acquired by Clearsprings Ready Homes, which describes itself as ‘a provider of accommodation services to the Home Office’. The firm chose to join the legal battle over the Bell Hotel, no doubt because it had an interest in housing migrants in Epping. This is a multibillion pound industry which only exists because of successive UK government failures Locals are furious.

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.