Away from the Biden clown show, some serious rubber is hitting the road back in the UK on criminal justice. ‘Mr Rules’ Starmer is planning to release thousands of serious offenders because of the ‘prisons crisis’ which the Labour government has suddenly discovered. Labour’s new spin machine is in overdrive attempting to shift the blame onto the Tories. Previous Tory governments of course knew the situation was bad, but former Justice ministers and SpAds tell Guido they simply would not consider a mass release of dangerous offenders…

Now the aunt of Zara Aleena – who was murdered by a man who had been out of prison on licence for nine days – warned that releasing inmates is “a dangerous gamble with public safety” if the probation service is unable to cope. Farah Naz told BBC Breakfast:

“If the system cannot deal with those people being released into the community, then those people are not going to be supervised adequately. And when people, perpetrators, even thieves are not supervised adequately, crime can escalate. It doesn’t always escalate, but it can. Then we’ve got unsupervised people because of a poor probation service in the community and people become emboldened – ‘well I can do what I like if nobody is supervising me’ – and that’s what happened in our situation. It was a man that was emboldened because he was not supervised, he was not assessed, he was constantly allowed to do what he wanted to do, and therein lies a dangerous gamble with public safety with this move right now.”

Meanwhile Lord Macdonald, Keir Starmer’s predecessor as DPP, made the consequences clear:

“If you release a big batch of prisoners, some of them will go on to offend….We have the worst recidivism rates in Western Europe. Overall, 25 per cent of people who are released from prison go on to reoffend. Of the juvenile population, it’s over 80 per cent.”

This is Starmer’s first real crunch with serious cut through and is a political choice – meanwhile CCHQ is populated by tumbleweed…