Post by captainconfident on Aug 10, 2023 9:26:11 GMT
Problem in the UK is that you don't pay enough tax to have efficient public services.
New article by Sam Freedman discusses the problems of the courts and criminal justice system, but leads to broader conclusions. Well worth a read.
samf.substack.com/p/the-disconnect
"Add all this together and we can see that the criminal justice system is stuck in a precarious balance of incompetence. If the police increase the number of people charged, which is necessary to restore public confidence and deter repeat re-offenders, then that will overwhelm a court system that already has a massive backlog, and a prison system that already doesn’t have enough places. Likewise significantly reducing the existing court backlog, which would increase convictions and give certainty to victims, would overwhelm the prison system.
Which means the next year of debate about crime in the run up to the election is going to bear no relationship at all to reality. Both parties will continue to emphasise “toughness”. Yvette Cooper wrote an op-ed this week demanding higher rates of charging. But no one will acknowledge that there is simply no space left in the prison system to allow for any of these policies in the short to medium term. Nor is there any prospect of building enough space in time to make it so, or any money being pledged to build more. If charging rates do go up, or if the backlog is cleared faster, then whoever is Justice Secretary will have no choice but to let out an arbitrary selection of prisoners on early release, causing inevitable public outcry and bad headlines. If one was cynical one might think the current government’s strategy is just to hope it ends up being a Labour politician that has to do this."
"The waves of cuts that were made between 2010 and 2016 were very deliberately targeted at the most vulnerable. The NHS and schools were “protected”, as were pensions. That meant that welfare benefits, local government, and departments like the MOJ, took most of the hit. The most vulnerable in society were made poorer. Services like children’s social care, the courts system, and local family support schemes, which were predominantly used by that group were cut back. This was, initially, a successful political strategy as it meant Tory voters were protected from austerity.
Thus universal services, upon which the wider public rely, have come under more and more pressure, even as their budgets are, relatively speaking, protected, because they have to deal with the fallout. This has caused political problems for the government, with austerity becoming a lot less popular.
It is, though, extremely hard to recover from this situation. The services that the most vulnerable depend on can’t be rebuilt overnight, even where the government is putting some cash back into the system (as with the courts and legal aid). Benefits remain way below 2010 levels with no prospect of improvement any time soon. There have, of course, always been wide gaps between the rich and poor in Britain, it’s not a phenomenon that started in 2010. But it has been made worse. A larger chunk of the population has been disconnected from the rest of us. And we will all bear the cost of that for many years to come."
Comment is Freed is a reader supported publication + posts like take a lot of work! A monthly subscription is £3.50 and an annual one £35. It includes at least four subscriber only posts a month.
New article by Sam Freedman discusses the problems of the courts and criminal justice system, but leads to broader conclusions. Well worth a read.
samf.substack.com/p/the-disconnect
"Add all this together and we can see that the criminal justice system is stuck in a precarious balance of incompetence. If the police increase the number of people charged, which is necessary to restore public confidence and deter repeat re-offenders, then that will overwhelm a court system that already has a massive backlog, and a prison system that already doesn’t have enough places. Likewise significantly reducing the existing court backlog, which would increase convictions and give certainty to victims, would overwhelm the prison system.
Which means the next year of debate about crime in the run up to the election is going to bear no relationship at all to reality. Both parties will continue to emphasise “toughness”. Yvette Cooper wrote an op-ed this week demanding higher rates of charging. But no one will acknowledge that there is simply no space left in the prison system to allow for any of these policies in the short to medium term. Nor is there any prospect of building enough space in time to make it so, or any money being pledged to build more. If charging rates do go up, or if the backlog is cleared faster, then whoever is Justice Secretary will have no choice but to let out an arbitrary selection of prisoners on early release, causing inevitable public outcry and bad headlines. If one was cynical one might think the current government’s strategy is just to hope it ends up being a Labour politician that has to do this."
"The waves of cuts that were made between 2010 and 2016 were very deliberately targeted at the most vulnerable. The NHS and schools were “protected”, as were pensions. That meant that welfare benefits, local government, and departments like the MOJ, took most of the hit. The most vulnerable in society were made poorer. Services like children’s social care, the courts system, and local family support schemes, which were predominantly used by that group were cut back. This was, initially, a successful political strategy as it meant Tory voters were protected from austerity.
Thus universal services, upon which the wider public rely, have come under more and more pressure, even as their budgets are, relatively speaking, protected, because they have to deal with the fallout. This has caused political problems for the government, with austerity becoming a lot less popular.
It is, though, extremely hard to recover from this situation. The services that the most vulnerable depend on can’t be rebuilt overnight, even where the government is putting some cash back into the system (as with the courts and legal aid). Benefits remain way below 2010 levels with no prospect of improvement any time soon. There have, of course, always been wide gaps between the rich and poor in Britain, it’s not a phenomenon that started in 2010. But it has been made worse. A larger chunk of the population has been disconnected from the rest of us. And we will all bear the cost of that for many years to come."
Comment is Freed is a reader supported publication + posts like take a lot of work! A monthly subscription is £3.50 and an annual one £35. It includes at least four subscriber only posts a month.