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Is Burnham’s prisoner release flip-flop his first mistake in office?
PM has ‘belatedly realised that the politics of the problem are simple’
Having already bowed to public pressure once to stop rapists and child sex offenders being released early, the PM this week insisted he was “increasingly confident” that the scheme can be adapted to exclude the killers of PC Andrew Harper.
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Keen to find a line of attack that sticks, his critics have branded Burnham a “people pleaser” and a flip-flopper who does not want to take difficult decisions.
What did the commentators say?
The “conundrum” of how to manage the early release of prisoners required to free up much-needed prison capacity is an “acute example of the tricky political decision-making that inevitably comes with power”, said BBC political correspondent Jack Fenwick.
But Burnham’s choice to focus on the type of crime, rather than the length of offenders’ sentences, has “caused a political storm of its own” which has left the government scrambling to stop Harper’s killers being set free ahead of time.
His shifting position, and the decision to go on holiday while the row snowballed, is “his first serious mistake on the job”, said The Independent’s political editor John Rentoul. He has “belatedly realised that the politics of the problem are simple” and his premiership “would be over almost before it had begun if those two killers were let out early”.
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But “the question posed by this course correction is whether the initial mistake was simply down to inexperience”.
While many politicians “seek to avoid the suggestion that they are swayed by public sentiment, Burnham has leaned into the idea that he is responding to Britons’ outrage”, said Lucy Fisher in the Financial Times.
U-turns are not necessarily a bad thing if they are judged to be the result of a government listening to the public’s concerns, as long as they don’t become a habit. Just ask Keir Starmer.
What next?
The row over exactly which offenders may or may not be eligible for early release “masks an uncomfortable reality”, said Rachel Cunliffe in The New Statesman: “our criminal justice system fails to keep people out of prison once they have left”.
If we were prepared to have a genuine debate about the issue, the “political fury” currently aimed at the government would instead “be directed at our dangerous reoffending rates” and how best to bring them down.
In place of that, the Home Office is pressing ahead with its aim to build 14,000 more prison places by 2031. In the meantime, in a Facebook post, Burnham has suggested removing foreign offenders more quickly, tackling the “long-running injustice of IPP sentences”, which have kept many minor offenders locked up for decades, and re-purposing some women’s prisons for male offenders, as ways to expand prison capacity.
But these are medium- to long-term solutions. The immediate task facing the government is trying to find a way to keep Harper’s killer behind bars without making a similar exemption for all manslaughter convictions.
Downing Street will hope its efforts over the past week “will be remembered as a PM who has forced the system to do what he wanted”, said Fenwick. They will “fear that the lasting impression could instead be of a misstep that’s left victims’ families in anguish”.
