David Shipley

Our two-tier Attorney General, Lord Richard Hermer, is in the news again. The controversial lawyer and ‘old friend’ of the Prime Minister, has issued new instructions to government lawyers which give him an ‘effective veto’ over all government policy and which also create a network of legal spies within government departments. The Hermer doctrine revealed by these instructions relies on an extreme view of international law, which seeks to limit the power of ministers to govern and parliament to legislate.

The Sentencing Review, published in May, may not have had much to say about sentence length. But now we have the Courts Review, which does. Brian Leveson’s report, published today, is hefty, at 380 pages, with 42 recommendations, many of them sensible. But it is his proposal to reduce sentences for crimes which particularly affect women which are likely to prove most controversial. The problem Leveson is trying to solve is that the courts, like the prison and probation systems, are broken. As of December 2024, there were more than 75,000 outstanding cases awaiting trial in our crown courts, which is double the level pre-pandemic. Last year the crown court system received almost 122,000 new cases, but only managed to conclude, or ‘dispose’ of, around 114,000 cases.

Charlie Taylor, HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, has published his first annual report since Labour took office. It will make grim, embarrassing reading for the government. The report shows that despite a year of efforts to control drugs, violence and crime in prison, our jails have become even worse under Labour. The report says they found that ‘in many jails, there were seemingly uncontrolled levels of criminality that hard-pressed and often inexperienced staff were unable to contain’. Even in open jails like HMP Kirkham, whose former governor was recently jailed for a relationship with an inmate, ‘drugs had become a major problem with inspectors regularly smelling cannabis as they walked around’. This is a failure of leadership.

Lord Hermer, the Attorney General who personally authorised the prosecution of Lucy Connolly for a tweet, has broken his silence on the claims that we have a two-tier justice system, and he’s angry. Hemer is also very wrong, as an investigation into Palestine Action demonstrates. Hermer, like much of the British regime, prefers convenient pretence over honesty The Attorney General was interviewed for Starmer’s Stormy Year, a new Radio 4 programme assessing how the government’s first year has gone. When the discussion turned to last August’s riots, Hermer became audibly angry, describing the two-tier claim as ‘frankly disgusting’.

Baroness Casey’s ‘national audit’ of child sexual exploitation was published this afternoon, and it’s now clear why the government changed course so quickly over the weekend, and why they’ve immediately accepted all of Casey’s recommendations. She doesn’t hold back. She identifies the scale of the rape gangs, the specific ethnic groups who make up the majority of perpetrators, and makes it clear how much the state has failed victims over decades. Of the 51 local child safeguarding reviews listed by Casey ‘where perpetrator ethnicity and/or nationality is identified’, just one describes the perpetrators as white, while nine mention Asian perpetrators of one kind or another. Another 35 of these reviews didn’t report ethnicity or nationality at all.

Keir Starmer has repeatedly promised to smash the gangs to secure our borders. But the reality is rather different. Yesterday, the Prime Minister tweeted a short clip once again attempting to reassure British voters that the government is ‘going to the source to smash the people smuggling gangs'. The video is an odd, cheap thing. Set to possibly the most generic soundtrack available and voiced over by an utterly bored-sounding young man, it shows images of small boats full of migrants, foreign police, and open water. Eye-catchingly, it promises to reveal just 'how we’re controlling our borders’. Unfortunately, almost every single claim it makes is misleading or laughable.

Officially, blasphemy was abolished by New Labour in the 2008 Criminal Justice Act. But today, with the conviction of Hamit Coskun, blasphemy laws now exist in England.  This law has been created by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and District Judge John McGarva. Between them they have prosecuted and found a man guilty of a ‘religiously aggravated public order offence’ because he burned a Quran outside the Turkish consulate. The CPS mounted a prosecution conflating the religious institution of Islam, with Muslims as people, and a British judge has accepted this. Islamic blasphemy codes are now being enforced by arms of the British state, via what the National Secular Society describes as ‘a troubling repurposing of public order laws as a proxy for blasphemy laws’.

When Tommy Robinson walked out of prison this week, he was unrecognisable. The far-right activist, who was jailed for contempt of court, was sporting a huge bushy beard as he emerged from HMP Woodhill. Robinson looked more like a man who had been marooned on a desert island, or lost in the mountains, than someone who had spent a few months in a Category B prison in Milton Keynes. Robinson’s prison beard made me think of my own. When I was locked up at HMP Wandsworth, I grew a beard even wilder than Robinson’s. For the first six months in prison, I didn’t touch my facial hair, letting it grow and grow as the fat fell off me, until I looked nothing like my prison ID photo. Eventually I looked so different that I had to ask the prison officers for a new ID card.

Another day, another sign of the British state’s acceptance of criminality. This time it’s the news that almost half of people caught in possession of Class A drugs avoid criminal sanction, with the police either issuing a ‘community resolution’, which does not create a criminal record, or avoid any action at all ‘in the public interest’. This represents a dramatic change since 2016, when only 7.5 per cent of those caught in possession of hard drugs avoided prosecution. Why has this happened? And what does it mean for the drugs trade in Britain?

Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor, has called for the possession of cannabis to be decriminalised, because he believes that the police disproportionately target black Londoners when policing drug possession. This announcement by Khan is in response to a report by the ‘London Drugs Commission’ (LDC), a body set-up by City Hall, chaired by Tony Blair’s old flatmate, Lord Charlie Falconer, and with an ‘Expert Reference Group’ including David Gauke, whose Sentencing Review reported just last week. Amongst other topics, the lengthy report reviews cannabis policies across the world, and identifies that black people in London are more likely to be searched for cannabis, although those searches are no more likely to find cannabis than when white people are searched.

David Gauke’s long-awaited Sentencing Review is here. If its recommendations are accepted, we will see thousands of people spared jail and thousands of inmates released as early as a third of the way through their sentence. The government is relying on the review to save the justice system from collapse. As the Lord Chancellor explained just last week, despite plans to build another 14,000 prison places, the system simply can not keep pace with the growth in our prison population. For months now, ministers and officials have been focused on keeping just enough space in the prison system until the Sentencing Review can be implemented. So now it has arrived, will it avert disaster? Probation will need every penny In some ways, Gauke’s recommendations are radical.

If you are ever unfortunate enough to need legal advice after being charged with a crime, and you can’t afford to pay for a lawyer, you will probably end up turning to the Legal Aid Agency (LAA). I’m familiar with the system. When I was charged with fraud in 2018 I applied for legal aid. When you apply, the LAA asks you for a great deal of information, including your national ID numbers, criminal record, employment status, financial information and even any debts you have and regular payments you make. In the wrong hands this data could be used for identity theft and potentially blackmail.

Peter Sullivan, a man of ‘limited intellectual capacity’ and ‘suggestibility’, has been exonerated after spending 38 years in jail for a murder he didn’t commit. Now aged 68, Sullivan has spent most of his life in high-security jails. DNA evidence has demonstrated that another man was responsible for the brutal assault and murder of 21-year-old Diane Sindall in Birkenhead, Merseyside, in 1986 . How could such a horrific miscarriage of justice happen, and what has Peter endured these past four decades? Peter has lost the best years of his life After being arrested, Peter was interviewed without any lawyer present, with the police saying that legal advice would have been ‘a hindrance to the enquiry’.