Labour won the parliamentary by-election at Blackpool South yesterday on a swing of 26%, the third largest in a by-election since the Second World War according to an analysis for the BBC by the polling expert Sir John Curtice. The Conservatives, in second place, were only 117 votes ahead of Reform.
In local elections, Labour took control of Redditch, Thurrock, Hartlepool, and Rushmoor in Hampshire. Sky News reported that Boris Johnson was initially turned away from a polling station in South Oxfordshire because he had failed to bring an acceptable form of photo identification. It was his government that introduced the ID requirement.
Although we don’t yet know whether the general election will be held in the summer or the autumn, these results suggest that Labour will win it. According to my calculations, that would mean a KC becoming PM for the first time since Asquith in 1908.1
How would a government led by Sir Keir Starmer tackle the problems facing the criminal justice system of England and Wales? Writing in yesterday’s Times, Katy Balls reports that prisons are at the top of a risk list drawn up for Starmer by his chief of staff, Sue Gray.
Before reading that, I had concluded that reducing the prison population was the key to resolving those problems and only a political leader with a strong majority and deep experience of the criminal justice system could unlock the door.
You can read my analysis in the latest edition of the Law Society Gazette.
I overlooked Asquith my Gazette column. Apologies for this and thanks to the readers who pointed this out.
The short answer is carefully but well, I think. As the recent Society of Labour Lawyers anniversary event shows, Labour has no lack of links to the criminal justice community, and there is goodwill, alongside healthy scepticism, for a Labour government which is absent for any other Party. It is also well briefed, with former Law Society and Bar Council senior staffer, Ellie Cumbo, working for the Shadow Lord Chancellor. Starmer knows that he will receive a fair amount of support from certain sections of the Bar, and, quite possibly, the junior judiciary, who share the workload of the daily grind, from what I hear. The senior judiciary, mindful of the parsimonious way Rachel Reeves will manage finances, may be less so thrilled.
I do so hope that Sue Grey’s high prioritising of the shameful state of our prison estate will cause that particular imperative to be ratcheted up in the shopping list. Whilst I recognise that we are here contemplating “risk list” anxieties rather than the essential rightness of starting upon these Augean Stables, I am ready to settle for ANY honest motivation. The inexcusable slide - long identified and protested- into unheeding and uncaring has long been yet another reason for the regard abroad for our nation to have declined. And Joshua is right: We are (almost certainly) to have a PM who from an earlier incarnation ought to be steeped in knowledge and experience of the damage to our society’s fabric caused through our mindless NON- policy in this vital field. Is Sir Keir to be the final word in that leadership role? For sure he would be a grown up in a grown up’s job and with no silver spoon in evidence from the outset.