This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Welcome to Downing Street, Prime Minister! Now let us tell you how bad things really are. At least, that is the narrative the new Labour government is pushing across the board, feigning indignant surprise at the state of the country they are now governing.

Nowhere is this more evident than with the crisis in England’s prisons. Barely a week after his victory, Sir Keir Starmer is already telling journalists left and right that he hadn’t realised how bad the lack of prison spaces in England and Wales had become before he became prime minister, even though all the relevant figures have long been on the government’s website.

Indeed, his plan to tackle the crisis — releasing thousands of prisoners after they have served 40 per cent of their sentence instead of 50 per cent — had been publicly floated months earlier by Alex Chalk, the former Conservative Lord Chancellor; it was then vetoed by Rishi Sunak, who correctly judged that doing so would be politically toxic, but who despite his famed quantitative skills could not offer a solution which satisfied the fundamental laws of arithmetic.

Everything else being equal, and unless one has a delusional degree of faith in the Prison Service’s rehabilitative programming, the release of thousands of prisoners, many of them convicted of violent crimes, will translate into many new victims of crime.

The problem, for Tory MPs who wish to make political hay out of this, is that there aren’t any other obvious solutions. For all the talk of double-bunking cells (they already are) or of deporting a large number of foreign offenders (the number of deportations has been in decline for at least a decade due to structural issues), they cannot hide the fact that the Tories are largely responsible for this mess.

As the journalist Henry Hill acidly noted, between 2010 and 2024, the Conservatives shut down 17 prisons, four of which are now being run as tourist attractions. One prison, the photogenic HMP Lancaster Castle, was shut down in 2011 despite having the second-lowest reoffending record nationwide.

But Ken Clarke, patron saint of the Tory Sensibles and a man widely admired by those who get their opinions from centrist political podcasts, simply did not think that it was very 21st century to have a prison in a castle (“I accepted that the prison installation in the castle had been extensively modernised but it seemed symbolic that we were still using a facility hundreds of years old,” he wrote in his memoirs.)

HMP Lancaster Castle is now home to a police museum. At least it’s free

The former prison is now home to a police museum, dedicated to the commemoration of another defunct national institution. Admission, at least, is free.

Partly in response to these criticisms, a former Tory Spad took to Twitter to defend the last government’s record. The plan, he said, had been to sell off Victorian prisons in premium locations and use the profits to build new prisons elsewhere.

On further inquiry, he had to admit that the second part of the plan never materialised, the building programme having been delayed by planning objections, nutrient neutrality regulations, anything but the Tories’ own incompetence and willingness to do literally anything except to govern, by reforming planning regulations, and to use their statutory powers to force through projects of national importance, of which prisons, unglamorous though they may be, undoubtedly are.

At this point, it should not surprise anyone that a party which sacrificed the country’s economic prosperity to satiate Theresa Villiers’ hatred for new housing should have also compromised public safety by making it all but impossible to build new prisons for fear of offending easily-provoked pensioners who ended up voting for the Lib Dems anyway.

What Labour will do with prisons, once the current crisis is behind it, is more interesting. Starmer has publicly stated that too many people are being sent to prison, as has James Timpson, the prison reformer and now prisons minister.

In fact, the latter has said that only a third of current inmates should be in prison at all, an interesting proposition when one considers that 32 per cent of those who are currently serving prison sentences are there for committing a crime of violence against another person, and that another 20 per cent have been convicted of a sexual offence.

One wonders which one of these groups Lord Timpson, an undoubtedly good but naïve man, would like to release en masse.

This is the sort of question surviving Conservative MPs can ask the government at any point during the next five long years in opposition. But every time they do, Labour will be able to retort that, as a result of 14 years of Tory rule, the police no longer investigate most crimes, criminal courts are beyond breaking point, and thousands of additional criminals will roam the streets.

If Labour strategists are really as smart as they are said to be, they will never, ever let the public forget this.