New Justice Secretary

Over a week ago the report into bullying allegations by the Justice Secretary Dominic Raab was finally published. Whilst he did resign, he failed to actually take on board the points made in the report or even apologise. Instead, he tried to frame the whole situation as some kind of Kafkaesque plot by civil servants to oust him. An absurd and disgraceful statement to make and just further evidence of the utter incompetence amongst the senior ranks of this government. See my tweet on the subject here. 

Alex Chalk has now been appointed as the new Justice Secretary and I hope this means that some of the legislation Raab has brought forward, that we have been doing a lot of preparatory work for in the background, will now be shelved. This includes the Bill of Rights which seeks to tear up the Human Rights Act and the Prisoners section of the Victims and Prisoners draft Bill which contains some concerning measures.
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But after 13 years of the Tories and 11 different Justice Secretaries our Criminal Justice System has been broken. I recently outlined in Politics Home how as the party of Law and Order, Labour in government will fix it and make the system ‘trauma-informed’ to help tackle the deep-rooted trauma that often lies behind offending and prevent further crime. See here.