Johnson blames Labour and Tory predecessors for release of the latest London Bridge bomber

The parochial thought occurs that since the Omagh atrocity of 21 years ago, Northern Ireland has been relatively fortunate in not experiencing more of the dreadful recidivism by released terrorists similar to that which occurred on Friday around London Bridge. Not that recidivism has been entirely absent in the actions of dissident republicans and  loyalist mobsters. In both republican and loyalist areas they’ve been schooled and even run by former veterans of the main paramilitary groups. But overall, a negotiated and monitored peace has held.

In contrast, jihadist violence is committed by groups which are irreconcilable and therefore not subject to negotiation. It’s therefore even more dangerous and hard to contain. How can individual jihadists who are caught and convicted to be judged as reformed?

Already the case of Usman Khan seems to show that someone can play the system as a reformed character while acting as a sleeper prepared to wake up and strike at an ideal moment.  By wearing a fake explosives vest he may also have been preparing his own death. Fanaticism can hardly be more intense.

On the Marr show Boris Johnson said there were 74 other individuals in the same situation as the London Bridge attacker. He immediately identified weaknesses in the system he claimed he’d long anticipated.

“I don’t want to go into the operational details. I am sure that people can imagine that what we are doing with the other 74 individuals is to ensure that they are being properly invigilated to ensure that there is no threat and we took that action because we were concerned.”

He could have made a statesman-like case for reviewing the system for releasing convicted terrorists and thereby probably fairly  winning  some political capital. Instead he decided to go partisan from the off, not only against Labour but under pressure, including  his two Conservative predecessors .

He blamed Khan’s release on legislation introduced under “a leftie government”, insisting the automatic release scheme was introduced by Labour..So first, it was all Labour’s fault  1But then when an increasingly irritated Marr began to shout at him time and again to try to staunch Johnson’s flow: ” But you’ ve been in power for ten years”, the Prime Minister denounced them too, as a neophtye in office for only 120 days: “I’m a new prime minister…. We take a different approach.”

 

BBC Fact check goes through the sequence.  

2003 – The Criminal Justice Act meant most offenders would be automatically released halfway through sentences, but the most “dangerous” would have their cases looked at by a Parole Board. Sentences with no fixed end point, called Imprisonment for Public Protection (IPP), were also introduced.

 2008 – Criminal Justice and Immigration Act removed review process by Parole Boards, meaning more offenders were released automatically halfway through sentences. Judges could still hand down life sentences or IPPs for dangerous offenders.

 2012 – Usman Khan was handed a sentence with no fixed end date because of the risk he posed to the public. In the same year, the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act scrapped IPPs and reintroduced the role of the Parole Board for extended sentences of 10 years or more – this time after two-thirds of the sentence has passed. But that did not mean those already serving IPPs would have them lifted. (i.e. Khan had been convicted under the former system and the new system could not be applied retrospectively).

 2013 – During an appeal, Lord Justice Leveson ruled that Khan’s indeterminate sentence should be substituted for an extended sentence with automatic release at the halfway point.

The prime minister continues..

Nowhere in the judgment did Lord Justice Leveson suggest that Khan’s release would have been subject to the Parole Board approval. Indeed, Lord Justice Leveson did not have the power to require that because of how Labour changed the law in 2008…

Those changes meant that although four senior judges considered that Khan was dangerous, he was to be automatically released half-way through because of Labour’s 2008 law. That is why we are determined to change this & ensure dangerous terrorists serve their full sentence…

“I opposed it both in 2003 and 2008, and now that I am prime minister I’m going to take steps to make sure that people are not released early when they commit… serious sexual, violent or terrorist offences,” ……

I absolutely deplore that fact that this man was out on the streets… and we are going to take action against it.”

But  Johnson  confused automatic early release (Labour, 2008) with the end of indeterminate sentences (Con, 2012)  It was the Conservatives who introduced the automatic halving of the sentence in 2012 without a role for the Parole Board !

Ian Acheson an Ulsterman, a former prison governor and now an academic  carried  out a review of the system for Michael Gove as Justice Secretary   His 68 recommendations were reduced to 11 by  the Conservative majority government  which made 40% cuts in the Justice Department budget, as he recounted in the Sunday Times.

During the review we encountered constant low-level opposition from senior officials who challenged and opposed our robust truth-seeking ways and feared exposure from the conclusions. But Gove’s close support ensured that we prevailed. We eventually made 69 recommendations — he accepted 68 of them. The accepted recommendations were plastered all over the walls of a room in the headquarters of the Ministry of Justice on the one occasion, in the autumn of 2016, that I was invited to see progress on their implementation.

These recommendations were conflated into the 11 that made it into the official response to my report, of which eight were accepted. Of the dozens of other urgent recommendations, many covering the sort of risk management relevant to the Khan case, I can only guess at whether they were seriously given any thought by a dysfunctional organisation that was — and remains — in full-on defensive mode.

What has this got to do with Khan? Many of the recommendations I made related to what I saw as serious gaps in the management of terrorist offenders into custody and “through the gate”. There was a lack of expertise and appropriateness in the arrangements for probation supervision of these most potentially lethal offenders.

Will Corbyn benefit politically? Not like this as John Rentoul of the Sunday Independent tweets

“Seumas Milne has written that “terrorism is our fault” speech for Corbyn again – to be delivered in York today.  

From Guardian Live

Some clear blue water between the response of Corbyn and the prime minister to the attacks are opened up by the Labour leader’s answer to the question of whether people convicted of terrorism offences should serve a full prison sentence.

“I think it depends on the circumstances, it depends on the sentence but crucially depends on what they’ve done in prison,” says Corbyn.

The interview moves on to the issue of shoot to kill – one that has landed Corbyn in some controversy before, when he said in 2015 that he was “not happy with the shoot to kill policy in general”.The Conservatives are not being given any attack lines this time, however.

Corbyn says that the police who shot dead the knife attacker on London Bridge on Friday had no choice. They were stuck with a situation where there was a credible threat of a bomb belt around his body and it’s an awful situation for any police officer, any public servant to be put in,” he says.

The Labour leader says  that the points he made in the past had been particularly in relation to Northern Ireland. There was a concern in Northern Ireland that the police were adopting a shoot to kill policy when it was possible to arrest people rather than shoot them and that’s my point…There should never be the first alternative to shoot people, but if there is no other alternative then that’s what you do”.

And more local interest..

Asked about his Brexit deal, Mr Johnson insisted there would be no tariffs and checks on goods moving from Northern Ireland into Britain.

He tells Andrew Marr: “There will be no tariffs and there will be no checks, and what we will ensure is that the whole of the UK – Northern Ireland and the rest of us – can come out.”

Asked how many EU directives and regulations would apply to the people of Northern Ireland that do not apply to the rest of the UK, the PM said: “That will be a matter for the people of Northern Ireland.

“The point is that Northern Ireland and the whole of the rest of the UK will be able to come out, do free trade deals, do things differently, we’ll have free ports in Northern Ireland, we’ll be able to cut VAT on sanitary products in Northern Ireland – all the advantages of Brexit will be there.

“Yes, for a period, Northern Ireland can remain in alignment with the rest of the EU if they choose to do so. If after four years the people of Northern Ireland decide that those regulations that you cite are not suitable for them, they automatically fall away.”

But as Anand Menon tweeted “If the people of NI vote to end the arrangement with the EU, they’re voting for a border with the Republic.