PM is right to want to reform sentencing

The first responsibility of government is to maintain law and order. The last few governments – Labour towards the end, the Coalition and Theresa May’s – all too often forgot this. Budgets were squandered, police time wasted, prisons fell into anarchy, priorities were mangled and, most recently, the violent crime rate started to rise again, reversing earlier progress.

Thankfully, Boris Johnson seems to understand what went wrong – and the first, promising sign of change is a major package of reform to be unveiled in the Queen’s Speech to keep violent and sex offenders in jail longer. Under some of the plans being considered, killers of babies and toddlers would never get out of jail, and Labour’s policy of making some prisoners automatically eligible for release at the halfway point in their sentence might be dramatically rewritten. The latter policy, which came into effect in 2005, is so bizarre that some might struggle to believe it exists: if a criminal is given a five-year sentence, doesn’t that mean they will serve five years inside? Not necessarily, no.

The practice of letting some offenders go early has presumably been maintained by successive governments out of a mix of misplaced liberal idealism and expedience: Britain’s prisons are crowded and this is one way to reduce inmates. Under Mrs May, there was a dramatic increase in the number of prisoners released into the community on tags – up from 9,320 in 2017 to 14,769 in 2018. In the first three months of this year, there was a surge in the number of released criminals re-offending or breaching their licence conditions and being recalled to prison. Numbers were up 45 per cent compared with the same period in 2015.

Mr Johnson wants to alter the direction of travel. Among the reforms proposed are rules to require serious violent or sex offenders to serve at least two-thirds of their sentence, as well as a move away from automatic early release towards a system of earned release and risk assessment. Whole-life orders could be forced upon men and women who murder young children.

If this works, it will keep the public safer. It will also remind voters of the vast difference between the revived conservatism of Mr Johnson and the modern Labour Party.

Jeremy Corbyn comes from the school of socialism that believes crime is a symptom of the failure of capitalism: the answer isn’t locking bad people up but handing out more money. This defies common sense and it is contradicted by lived experience, but still the radical Left clings on to the lie as though it were a theological tenet. It’s an example of not just how delusional they can be but how dangerous. On some strange level their immediate sympathy isn’t for the person whose house was burgled but the professional thug who broke into it.

With these kinds of domestic policies, Mr Johnson will undoubtedly appeal to many people who never previously voted Conservative, as well as many Remainers who care about law and order. There has been too many jittery nerves of late in the Tory party, both in and out of the Cabinet. This is incredibly short-sighted, given the threat of a Corbyn government. Conservatives have got to pull together and unite behind their leader on a programme of serious reform. Anyone who imagines, most importantly, that there is an alternative Brexit strategy to the Prime Minister’s is fooling themselves.

Either there is a proper Brexit, with or without a deal, or there is no Brexit, a Tory defeat and Mr Corbyn in No10. This wouldn’t just be a catastrophe for Brexiteers but for the whole nation.

‘With these kinds of domestic policies, Mr Johnson will appeal to many people who never previously voted Tory’