What is the role of government? It feels like a controversial area so it’s worth remembering that most of what the government does is stuff we all want doing. I’m using the term government in its widest sense, to include local councils and the various companies that now do things instead of the government as part of an ongoing scheme to keep logo designers in work and reassure Thatcherites that, even as their bins are being emptied, some free market capitalism is still happening.
Schools, roads, hospitals, police, sewers, courts, running water, electricity, trains, buses, rules about restaurants not serving rat meat, democratic elections, an army, navy and air force, bank holidays, poor relief and prisons. Almost everyone agrees that our society should have all this to a certain extent and also that it should be good and honest and professional and that it shouldn’t cost more than necessary.
This consensus doesn’t get much airtime because politicians are focused on how different they are from one another. Their main technique is to take a thing on the list of stuff that everyone wants, talk about how much they want, value and cherish it themselves – just like the great British public who should vote for them – and then claim that their opponents don’t want it and are going to screw it up. Their opponents, they insist, don’t care about hospitals because they’re “out of touch” or don’t value the police force because they’re “woke”. This is deemed effective politics because of its potential to evoke fear: “Oh no, the Tories are going to close the hospitals and I’ll die of a disease.” “Oh no, Labour are going to undermine the police and I’ll die of a crime.”
The other reason politicians ignore consensus in favour of asserting ideological differences is that it moves the conversation away from the fraught, complex and boring arena of competence. Competence is not a subject that, in general, politicians like talking about. The nitty-gritty of administrative detail doesn’t often appeal to the sort of person who has forged a career in the field of making speeches slagging people off. Obviously, the opposition must relentlessly accuse the government of incompetence – but they’ll do that whether or not the government is guilty of it, so those words have lost their power.
It seems to me that the government of recent years has been incompetent in many ways – I’m thinking about Liz Truss crashing the economy a year ago, all those schools found to be structurally unsafe, the chaotic Brexit negotiations, the overwhelming of the asylum system and NHS waiting lists lengthening at such a rate that they may eventually overtake average life expectancy. But I don’t think Labour reserved any superlatives of criticism for our current problems that they hadn’t already doled out during periods of lower administrative ineptitude.
This is why we’re having such a shit national debate about the last item in my list of things everyone thinks governments should provide: prisons. It has become clear over the past week that the prisons are full. This is not the triumph of incarceration planning that it may sound. It’s true that we’re not wasting money on maintaining empty unused prison space. But there’s a problem: any minute now someone else is going to commit a crime. Then another person will commit another one. And so on and so on. Telling them there’s no room in prison is apparently unlikely to stay their thieving hands. So we need somewhere to lock them all up before we throw away the keys. Or at least that’s the orthodoxy. I suppose we could try throwing away a load of keys without having first locked anyone up but there’s a risk that might be judicially unsatisfying.
So the prisons are full to bursting – how do we stop them bursting? The answer is obvious: go back in time and invest more in prisons 10 years ago. If that should prove temporarily impossible, there’s another answer: let some prisoners out. Also, stop putting so many in. These are the solutions justice secretary Alex Chalk has leapt to with the mental agility of a man fully across the physics of running a bath. Some prisoners are going to be released early, and custodial sentences of less than 12 months are to be scrapped.
The latter could be a positive development as there’s strong evidence that short prison sentences do more harm than good, with minor criminals who get locked up statistically more likely to reoffend than those sent off to wash a wall or weed a central reservation. Still, there’s something unsatisfactory about reaching this grown-up and merciful conclusion under emergency pressure brought on by rank logistical incompetence.
No one wants to have a proper discussion about when and whether prison works. Current political rhetoric is too vengeful. People are angry and broke so the politicians are keen to provide alternative objects of blame to themselves and criminals fit the bill. The current home secretary is very comfortable with this but Keir Starmer goes along with it too, promising longer sentences if he were PM. He’s running scared of accusations from the Tory press that he’s “soft on crime” or “an enemy of business” or “a member of the Labour party”, but the result is a failure on both sides of politics to discuss prisons properly.
This is an issue of competence. The public’s requirements are simple: 1) enough space in prison for everyone who’s sent there; 2) conditions of incarceration that don’t brutalise the inmates; and 3) a sense that people are locked up when that is the best thing to do and not when it isn’t. We want protection from the violent but we don’t want a hapless petty thief to be sentenced to a ruined life, inhumane conditions and a starter course in drug dealing.
This seems too nuanced for the current level of political debate. Or is it just that public money invested in the unshowy necessity of maintaining prison infrastructure is not money that is advancing any politician or party’s fortunes? It’s wasted on keeping civilisation ticking over. They get nothing for it. And using our money for their purposes is the true role of modern government.
David Mitchell’s new book, Unruly, is out now
