Just Stop Oil sentences show we need fewer police powers - not more

A quantum leap in housing plans. A sharp refocusing of Britain’s energy plans on renewables. A long, long overdue renationalisation of Britain’s joke of a railway system, and the beginning of tougher measures companies polluting our rivers. A ban on the dystopian practice of conversion therapy (and just as this rot began creeping into our professional institutions, as we reported earlier this year.) A few weeks ago, each of these plans would have been a sudden gleam of hope in an unremittingly grim, futureless political landscape. They are still worthy of celebration, while the fact that they are not only promises or aspirations but virtual certainties - guaranteed by a hard-won, insurmountable parliamentary majority - is still hard to fully comprehend. Relief, hope, faith in the legislative process are nowhere near the first emotions we reach for when reading news from Westminster. All this will take some getting used to. Even now, two weeks after the election, you feel the need to pinch yourself and maybe mutter that Jewish blessing: shehecheyanu, that we have lived to see the day.

This feeling is all the more poignant when we consider what might have been. A Conservative King’s Speech after the last election would have included mandatory national service, a departure from the European Court of Human Rights and sundry other monstrosities. But it would be a sad thing indeed to measure a Labour government on the same yardstick as the Tories. And when we consider the King’s Speech not against the ghastly political alternative but against Labour’s own values and common sense, there are two glaring flaws in the King’s Speech: one promise that is missing, and one that should never have been made.

The missing promise is the two-child benefit cap. The policy, so sadistic it would have made a Dickens villain blush, is effectively an attempt to sterilize the poor, and perhaps the clearest example of how close Conservative class hatred lies to biological racism. Like every Tory policy born out of fear and loathing it is also singularly inept even on its own twisted little terms: no, stopping benefits after a second child does not, in fact stop people on low incomes having large families. It only makes those families poorer, pushes more children into poverty, and ends up costing the taxpayer far more down the line - from healthcare to youth workers to law enforcement - than it would have cost them to ensure children get all the support they need, no matter how many siblings, no matter their social background. The absence of a clear end to the cap needs in this Speech to be explained, and whether Chancellor Rachel Reeves likes to or not, Labour need to be made to drop it in her actual Budget in the autumn.

The promise that should never have been made is fresh criminalisation of antisocial behaviour and migration - instead of repealing the Tories' odious protest laws. Criminalisation is not the solution neither to the Tory-engineered borders crisis nor to many other issues outlined in the speech (“rapid escalations in street drinking”? Let’s hope football's never coming home.)

Starmer’s prosecutorial instincts are well known - intimately known, to one member of The Lead team - and they served the Labour leader well on the campaign trail. But surely now that he is prime minister, he can leave his CPS pass in the drawer and start rolling back police powers instead of expanding them. Britain already has one of the world’s pettiest, bullying, most vindictive justice systems. This was aptly illustrated this week by the shocking prison sentences handed down to Just Stop Oil activists for the crime of peacefully blocking one road; it goes without saying no boss of a polluting fossil fuel company ever went to jail at all.

It makes no sense to appoint prevention and rehabilitation advocate James Timpson as prisons minister only to push more and more people into Britain’s overcrowded jails. None of the Just Stop Oil defendants should see the inside of a prison - obviously. But this is not enough.The system that produced these amoral sentences should be dismantled, and certainly not shifted up a gear. There must be as strong a cross-party movement to reverse the criminalisation tide as there is to striking off the 2-child benefit cap.

(D.R.)