Popping champagne, skulking off to smoke a spliff and pledging to become a life-long Labour voter. Anyone concerned about criminal justice in Britain will find the well-documented glee of the 1,700 prisoners given early release around the country this week galling indeed. As domestic abusers and career criminals walk free, many will have been struck by the contrast with the government’s response to last month’s riots, bringing to mind that most irresistible of epithets: ‘two-tier Keir’.
In the Commons, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage duly used his first ever question at PMQs to punch this bruise. Many of those leaving prison will be effectively swapping places with those arrested last month in the disturbances following the barbaric Southport attack. While some of those locked up were violent rioters, others, said Farage, were merely ‘those who have said unpleasant things on Facebook and elsewhere on social media’ (like the grandmother and sole carer to her elderly husband, Julie Sweeney, given 15 months for a single crass Facebook post). Then came the question: ‘Does the Prime Minister understand that there is a growing feeling of anger in this country that we are living through two-tier policing and a two-tier justice system?’
Unsurprisingly, Farage’s question met with loud groans and jeers from the Labour benches, and with the PM not answering. Labour really does not want to talk about two-tier policing, with Starmer insistent it is a ‘non-issue’. Last month, after the billionaire owner of X, Elon Musk, stung the Prime Minister by labelling him ‘two-tier Keir’, Labour MPs had to be warned to steer clear of the topic entirely on social media by their chief whip. Others are rattled, too. Think of prickly Sir Mark Rowley, the Met commissioner, slapping away a reporter’s microphone when pressed on it, or attempts in the mainstream press to dismiss it as a ‘myth’.
Yet the question continues to be asked. Labour’s technocratically minded politicians would no doubt love to be able answer it by saying that the police, the courts and the justice system are independent of ministers and should be left to get on with the job. But such an excuse is no longer credible.
After all, the whole country has just witnessed how the wheels of British justice, just as they did in 2011, can be made to speed up or slow down at the command of Starmer the prosecutor.
The PM’s crackdown on the riots was fierce. At their height, Starmer was giving regular press conferences denouncing all those involved as ‘far right’. As they raged, he notably refused multiple opportunities to say that while the violence was wrong, it might reflect some underlying grievances that ought to be addressed. Instead, he pledged to raise a ‘standing army’ of police offers against his own citizens, introduce authoritarian facial recognition technology and so-called ‘preventive action’ to snag prospective rioters ‘pre-crime’. His Home Office proved so eager to boast of reaching 1,000 arrests on social media that, as the Free Speech Union has argued, it may well have placed itself in contempt of the very court system it’s in charge of.
Labour has sought to take political credit for all this, with Starmer pledging to ‘take all necessary action to keep our streets safe’. Indeed, just as grandmothers and 11-year-olds were being fast-tracked into custody, the PM is in the process of fast-tracking honours for those who helped put them there – especially, as Guido Fawkes reports, ‘community leaders’, who ‘made sure targeted groups felt safe’.
Yet while Starmer may have enjoyed playing the tough guy, his highly visible crackdown will in the coming years pose a major problem for Labour when it comes to law and order and two-tier policing. He has demonstrated a simple principle: where there is sufficient political will, criminal justice can be swift and unforgiving. Which means that every time it appears lackadaisical and soft-touch, it will be seen as a political choice – as indeed it is. Post-Southport, anytime anything even smacks of two-tier justice, the cry of ‘two-tier Keir’ will inevitably go up.
Back in July, two men were caught on camera appearing to assault three police officers inside Terminal 2 of Manchester Airport, leaving all three with head injuries, including a female officer with a broken nose. Yet the suspects, brothers Muhammad Fahir Amaaz, 19 and Amaad Amaaz, 25, have not yet been charged. Why has Starmer, who has long sought to position himself as defending the police, or the Home Secretary, who this week called anti-police violence a ‘stain on our society’, said nothing about this? Could it have anything to do with the fact that after their initial arrest, a sectarian mob assembled at Rochdale police station to demand their release and issue threats?
Indeed, it seems the authorities are more interested in pinning the blame for this incident on the police officers who were attacked. Two officers remain under investigation by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, with one suspended, after footage emerged of the infamous head kick against one of the suspects. It was only when the Manchester Evening News published further footage that showed the men attacking the officers that this narrative started to unravel. Now, the MEN reports that it is being menaced by an IOPC investigation asking it to reveal its source. (Quite rightly, the paper is refusing to be bullied.) It seems that an alleged leak of the footage of this potential offence is deemed more serious than the offence itself.
Or take the case of Mohamed Osman, who threw a can at protesters amid disorder in Bristol following the Southport attack, and pleaded guilty to violent disorder. Mohamed will not do jail time: last week, he received a two-year suspended sentence, though he did get a measly 150 hours of community service. A stark contrast with the fate of Bradley McCarthy, who, also in Bristol, shouted at police and a police dog and engaged in ‘racist football-style chants’ – and received 20 months behind bars. Does anyone think that’s fair?
With the summer holidays over and the anniversary of 7 October looming on the horizon, the capital can likely expect the weekly pro-Gaza marches to soon start up again in earnest. This is another case where apparent double-standards in policing have been on regular display. In a recent report on the matter by Policy Exchange, even the man responsible for the force’s response to the protests, assistant commissioner Matt Twist, concedes that ‘we didn’t get everything right’.
So try as Starmer might, two-tier policing is not an issue that his blunt denials will make go away. Reform, sensing weakness, has in recent weeks been enthusiastically hammering the two-tier button and will no doubt continue to do so. Even some braver Tories outside the parliamentary party are doing the same. In this, they are only responding to demand: YouGov finds that public perception that there is two-tier policing is now widespread. After all, everyone remembers that Starmer’s response to the 2020 Black Lives Matter ‘protests’ in London – after dozens of police officers were injured – was to take the knee. It’s something his critics will not let him forget.
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