There is something so wearily predictable about it, isn’t there. Less than two months after Kemi Badenoch made a virtue of the Conservatives’ willingness to take tough decisions by backing a new prison on the site of the former Carver Barracks in Wethersfield, Essex, Guido Fawkes digs up that Sir James Cleverly — whom she so recently put back on the front bench — is campaigning against it.
It’s simply the latest instantiation of the mantra, or a mild variation thereupon, tweeted once by a Conservative MP but which might as well be carved into the very soul of the party: “More homes yes — but not here!”
Braintree Conservatives are not particularly villainous. Politicians of all stripes, and in all ages, have tended to be keener on difficult problems in the abstract than the specific. As Anthony Eden once put it: “Everyone is always in favour of general economy and particular expenditure.” And if that’s true of politicians, we must accept that it is in part the fault of the voters, who are often not keen even on general economy and are fiercely supportive of any particular expenditure which applies to them.
Yet whilst this might have been a problem in all ages, at least in democratic countries, it is today an existential problem for the Conservatives. Objecting to particular developments may appease local voters, but it has accumulated into a general catastrophe for the country — for which the Tories are rightly being lumped with much of the blame.
In the case of prisons, we have an acute shortage of cells. Both major parties helped to create the crisis: New Labour by introducing tens of thousands of new criminal offences, the Conservatives by shuttering over a dozen prisons and paying off the most experienced officers to retire early under George Osborne’s austerity programme. Critically, however, neither party has chosen to adapt to it by softening sentences.
That’s no bad thing — despite what the prison reform lobby might tell you, Britain is already a very soft touch when it comes to sending people to jail. As David Green of Civitas has noted, a majority of people with 75 or more previous convictions receive a non-custodial sentence, including three in ten convicted of violence against the person, sexual offences, and robbery.
But continuing to insist on tough sentencing without building the necessary capacity has produced a system of soft sentencing by default, as judges avoid trying to send people to overcrowded jails, and more recently an acute political crisis by necessitating the early release of criminals, the imminence of which is probably one reason Rishi Sunak called an early election.
During the previous government, we saw time and again that fine words from ministers count for nothing if their local forces aren’t on board. MPs would talk tough on law and order and then oppose new prisons in their constituencies; Robert Jenrick’s housing bill was killed off by a backbench mutiny against the ‘mutant algorithm’ assigning homes to places where demand was high.
As such, we should treat the willingness of local parties — especially the local parties of shadow cabinet members — to fight the corner of construction as a litmus test of whether or not the Conservative Party is actually serious about making itself fit for office.
It is not that it would be impossible, in theory, for an especially ruthless and strategic Tory government to get a lot of stuff built whilst concentrating it in places which don’t vote for it, using mechanisms such as development orders or the new rules for critical infrastructure being proposed by Rachel Reeves — although in a decade and a half in power the party showed no evidence of such qualities.
But not only would this only actually fix the country if an equally-ruthless Labour government followed up by doing the same thing unto the Tory shires, but it wouldn’t actually fix the problem. New construction is what allows people to own their own homes and build families, i.e. to become Conservative voters. Tory MPs really ought to take care that these processes occur in their own seats.
Most importantly, however, committing to a construction programme focused exclusively on other parts of the country is a bit like committing to a diet on behalf of someone else: it’s very easy to do, but as a result says nothing about your own actual commitment.
Conservatism’s basic model of virtue is that you start close to home and work outwards
Conservatives of all people ought to understand this. Conservatism’s basic model of virtue is that you start close to home and work outwards — from yourself and your family to your community and nation. This contrasts with the universalist model often employed by the left, which dreams up grand utopian designs and then struggles (as they see it) towards them.
To its critics, the conservative approach might seem selfish and parochial. But one big advantage of starting small with virtue is that it is a much better way to check if you are actually being virtuous, whether you practice what you preach. It avoids the problems which arise from the “presumption of virtue”, whereby people give themselves a pass for all manner of bad conduct because it is conducted in service to a good cause.
The idea of the Party as good on the economy, or tough and law and order, is a meme and a mantra
Sadly, today’s Conservative Party seems riddled with presumption-of-virtue thinking. One thinks of Rishi Sunak campaigning, with apparent sincerity, on his merits as a “tax-cutting Conservative” despite having presided over huge hikes in stealth taxes. I have lost count of the number of times a Tory MP has said that people in 2024 voted “against their economic interests”, apparently without realising that what might have been true in 1992 or 1997 was not true in 2024. The idea of the Party as good on the economy, or tough and law and order, is a meme and a mantra, a belief which does not require to be actually demonstrated in policy.
The task of local persuasion is difficult, but not impossible: one Tory candidate at the election had the nerve to make the case for more housing (or so they told me), and apparently won people round by highlighting the impossibility of their own children finding homes in the area.
On prisons, the need is especially acute because smaller prisons are often better than the vast, remote mega-jails our planning system militates towards. HMP Lancaster, a small prison inside Lancaster Castle which the Conservatives closed in 2011, had the second-best record on recidivism in the entire country.
Smaller prisons can be closer to towns, making work placements easier, as well as to families, allowing more frequent visitation. They can keep small-time offenders local, if that is helpful, and reduce the scope for an inmate being further criminalised by exposure to organised crime networks in a larger prison.
Indeed, this is one area where Britain might do well to learn from the United States. In the American system, there is a sharp distinction between “jail” and “prison”. A jail is a local institution — every county has one — wherein are housed those serving a sentence of less than a year; a “prison” is a federal institution for those serving longer sentences for more serious crimes.
It would surely not strike us as surprising if, reading a history book about Britain 50 or 100 years ago, to find mention of a “town jail”. Nor would the reality of one be much noticed by local residents, provided any day-release system was well-managed. But a network of such jails would vastly increase both capacity and outcomes in the prison sector.
Or it would if MPs, and the local councillors which make up the shrivelled rump of their local campaigning base, were prepared to make the case for them. If the Conservative Party wishes to win back its laurels on law and order, “don’t oppose prisons” is the absolute bare minimum we should expect.
