Boris Johnson’s law and order push will turn Britain into a crime factory

A personality never absent from British politics for very long, “Laura Norder” has been called upon once again to provide the newly energised Conservatives with a pre-election boost.

Whether Boris Johnson is forced to go to the polls in the autumn, before or after he has “delivered” Brexit, or whether he prefers to win his own mandate at his leisure next year, he is preparing the ground assiduously. Scarcely a day goes by without some bold new policy launch.

So it is with law and order. In recent days we have seen the government commit “new money”, obviously claimed to be “fully funded” for some self-consciously populist causes. The announcement of 20,000 extra police on the streets, for example, is conveniently precisely double Labour’s pledge and, less conveniently, restores only about half of the cuts on numbers made since 2010. There then followed a new prison building programme. After that, essentially in tandem, a rethink on sentencing and early release.

Then there was more cash for the criminal justice system, as the courts will be made to work much harder, locking up the knife gangs. The police will gain stronger powers to stop and search. You hardly need the political genius, if such it is, of a Lynton Crosby or a Dominic Cummings, or even a Priti Patel, to invent these crowd pleasers. They go down well, and particularly well with those voters the Conservatives have lost to the Brexit Party and Nigel Farage. They want their defectors back, and are prepared to promise peace on the streets to do so.

Hence, to the latest initiative, on bearing down on crime within prisons. Another £100m has been found to finish the job begun by the last prisons minister but one, Rory Stewart, who famously said he’d resign his job if he hadn’t restored order to the worst institutions. Instead, he found himself quitting after failing to bring calm to the hard-bitten old lags banged up on the Conservative Party’s isolation wing. He should see his time on the backbenches as parole.

In any case, if speeches about Laura Norder and her sister, Lauren Forcement, were all that was needed to solve crime, Britain would be a more peaceful society than it is. The truth, of course, is that crime and conviction rates are only tenuously linked to police numbers – though extra resources are always welcome – and longer sentences generally do surprisingly little to deter criminals or to reduce reoffending, often achieving the opposite.

Successive Conservative ministers concerned with the prison service, from Ann Widdecombe to Ken Clarke to David Gauke and Mr Stewart have, eventually, had to come to the conclusion that “prison doesn’t work”. The only exception to that was Michael Howard, in the 1990s, who put the public desire to see retribution above rehabilitation.

There is no doubt that new prison buildings and modernised accommodation are needed to relieve the pressures on the estate. Yet by increasing custodial sentences, the improvements may soon be cancelled out by an influx of new inmates, all ready for a further education course in crime, with optional modules in smuggling, drone technology and drug abuse. They may soon not even have the incentive of early parole to prevent them from misbehaving.

Will the criminal justice system be able to withstand the effects of widespread lawlessness that these reforms threaten? Random stop and search, ever since the 1970s, has had a baleful effect on community relations. It was why Theresa May scaled it back when she ran the Home Office. Policing, generally, has to be sensitively conducted, by consent. It seems the riots of 2011 and the 1980s are too readily forgotten.

Mr Johnson says he wishes to stop prisons becoming factories “for making bad people worse”. Quite right, but the answer is not to simply build more crime factories.