David Shipley

Reform are in the headlines again, this time over confusion about their policy on trans prisoners. Yesterday Vanessa Frake, former prison governor and Reform’s UK justice adviser, said that trans women should not automatically be removed from women’s prisons, preferring an individual risk assessment. Nigel Farage seemed to echo this view, deferring to her experience

The government desperately needs to save the justice system, and it believes that technology might be part of the solution. The Ministry of Justice has announced that it will be using AI to ‘stop prison violence before it happens’. The need is urgent. There were over 30,000 assaults in prisons during the 12 months to

However bad you think the rape gang scandal is, it keeps getting worse. Yesterday, the BBC published a detailed investigation which stated that ‘five women who were exploited by grooming gangs in Rotherham as children say they were also abused by police officers in the town at the time.’ The report, based on interviews with

The people of Epping have a message for Tommy Robinson: stay away. The far-right activist is currently mulling joining protestors in Essex who have taken to the street outside a hotel used to house asylum seekers. While there have been violent clashes between police and demonstrators – and a number of arrests – many of

It’s hard to disagree with Nigel Farage’s diagnosis that ‘Britain is lawless’. The Reform leader painted a bleak image of London in particular, as he unveiled his party’s crime crackdown in Westminster. Farage’s message for criminals is that a Reform government would have ‘zero tolerance’ Farage spoke of a city where ‘moped gangs [are] running

Our trees – oak and beech, soft and ancient, sycamores, whose seeds spin and tumble away every autumn – are one of the most beautiful things about England. I love them all – and have nothing but contempt for someone who needlessly destroys a tree which has taken decades, or centuries, to grow and might

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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