Midweek roundup

I’ve been neglecting Substack over the last couple of weeks. Long time readers will know I am prone to intensive bursts of productivity followed by a spell of writer’s block where I go mute for days on end. I’m a firm believer that if you have nothing to say, say nothing. Tonight, though, I’m doing a two-for-one post.

The first matter, sadly, is that of the Tory leadership contest. It’s now starting to heat up. I have only a passing interest in this since the party has much bigger problems than just the leadership, but there’s one point I want to make about Kemi Badenoch, which is linked to a broader questions of national identity and immigration.

I am implacably opposed to Kemi Badenoch becoming Tory leader. There are tangible reasons but the intangibles are just as important, if not more so. I've advanced to an age where potential prime ministers are now slightly younger than me. My generation will soon be calling the shots. I want to know that the PM had roughly the same experience as me, who remembers not just the important stuff, but also what it was like to grow up in this country.

It matters to remember what was on TV on Sunday nights, who Gordon the Gopher was, what it was like to worry about a relative deployed to the Gulf in 1991, and the lyrics to the Spitting Image Chicken Song. They need to remember what British Rail food was really like, what British schools were like, the Coca Cola yo-yo craze, and instinctively understand the cultural significance of a Spitfire flying overhead. They need to know what it was like before mass immigration, what Red Nose day was, and grow up with British humour.

It matters to know various Blackadder quotes, what late night Christmas shopping was like when we still had thriving town centre retail, and what going to visit Santa at Rackhams department store was like. It matters to remember dismal and boring British summers; austere trips to the seaside in your mum's second-hand Vauxhall, and going to see the Red Arrows at the local RAF base. It matters to remember the price of beer in 1995, Donington Monsters of Rock festival, and who was in the charts for weeks on end. It all matters.

A lot of this may be dumb trivia, but it's all part of what makes us who we are. It's the little idioms and eccentricities. It's the shared experience of a certain timeline. It's an instinctive, unspoken bond we have with each other. It forms our shorthand communication. It shaped our accents and attitudes. I simply do not have that connection with a foreigner.

As such, Badenoch lacks the basic qualification to lead this country. She is not in any meaningful sense British. Though born in Britain as an anchor baby, Badenoch spent her formative years in Nigeria. She has no idea what makes us tick because on a fundamental level, our culture is alien to her - in subtle ways that she herself can never comprehend.

You may think this parochial, but I simply do not agree that a people can be represented adequately by a citizen of nowhere with divided loyalties, and a foreign experience of growing up. Badenoch is an admirable MP at times, but she is arrogant in the extreme to believe she has any real right to lead this country. That absence of humility ought to be a disqualifier in its own right.

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Meanwhile, work continues on the manifesto projects. I’m creeping up on 40,000 words, and it’s over 100 pages. Once I hit 40,000 words I’m going to do an edit sweep and a coherence read then publish it as an initial draft for comments.

When I started this I envisaged it being close to 100k words, but what I’ve written already covers most of the core areas. There is room for expansion, which will happen in time, but in its current state, shorter than the 2023 Ukip manifesto, I’ve managed to say more with fewer words. What matters about this is that policy is developed inside a coherent principle-based framework and towards a series of broader objectives.

With that in mind, I’m now less inclined to go into minute detail on every imaginable issue. Steering the ship back on course is fundamentally a question of repairing the apparatus of state, fixing our broken democracy, getting energy back on track, resorting the primacy of British law, fixing immigration, and resorting our justice system. Frankly, almost everything else can wait.

One lesson I’ve learned so far is that the reason all the party manifestos are crap is because writing a good one is actually really hard. Cataloguing the problems isn’t all that hard, but solutions are not easily come by, and those solutions are going to require hard, unpopular choices. The state is doing too much and we simply cannot afford to go on as we are. Policy is one thing, but finding the political will is the greater challenge.

All the same, I’m confident that when I do publish it (which will be soonish), it will be better than anything else currently in circulation. It would struggle to be worse.

My latest chapter is about the court system. I’ve still got some work to do on legal aid but cursory research shows the entire system is in a mess. I’ve offered some minor solutions but would appreciate any other input. See what you think…

The Party is alarmed by the deterioration of the justice system to the point where it is no longer a justice system. Between 2010 and 2019, over half the courts across England and Wales were closed.

Troubling figures released in 2024 show the backlog of cases in our criminal courts continue to grow leaving victims and defendants waiting years for justice. At the end of April this year, there were 68,125 outstanding cases in the Crown Courts and 387,042 in the magistrates’ courts.

There simply are not enough judges and lawyers to work on all the cases, and there are concerning reports that court buildings are not being used to their full capacity. For context, the X account “Court States” tweeted “Today, 19 August 2024, 127 out of the 498 Crown Courtrooms in England & Wales will not be sitting. That's 26% of them”.

A recent report by the National Audit Office (NAO) correctly highlighted the decline in lawyers working in the criminal defence profession which is due to a reduction in legal aid fees, increasing levels of stress and poor working conditions.

The Party is also alarmed by the rise of defendants without qualified legal representation. Thousands of defendants appearing in magistrates’ courts and facing possible prison sentences are representing themselves. Increasing numbers of people representing themselves means harsher outcomes for themselves as well as causing further delays in the courts.

Analysis shows that in 2022, 6,602, or 35 per cent, of defendants charged with those offences, which are triable only in the magistrates’ court rather than by a judge and jury in the crown court, did not have a lawyer. In the first six months of 2023, the figure rose to 48 per cent of the total, or 9,240 defendants. This includes 2,944 — almost 42 per cent — of defendants charged with assault by beating and 838 — nearly 46 per cent — of those charged with common assault, both of which carry a maximum sentence of six months in prison.

The streamlining of the court system was supposed to be augmented by increased investment in digitisation, but research published by the Law Society of England and Wales found that the government’s digitisation programme is adding to the delays and undermining people’s access to justice when they need it most. Three in five (62%) respondents reported delays in court proceedings as a result of the probate portals. One respondent remarks that “We have gone from a system that cost £45 and took two weeks to a system that costs £273 and takes 16 weeks”.

By every measure the justice system is getting worse. Often there are complex reasons for dysfunction in civic governance but this is primarily a financial issue. The government is trying to save money on the whole justice system, while creating ever more offences and increasing the severity of penalties. There simply isn't an easy fix. The only way to tackle much of the problem is to prevent the work from entering the courts in the first place.

The Party will reform the way lower tier offences are handled. Such cases can move away from the traditional adversarial system where each side have lawyers who argue a case in front of a judge. We would move to a model of examining magistrates where there are no lawyers, and the magistrate interviews and cross examines directly the witnesses, and calls for police and technical investigations as needed, deciding a case on the basis of the evidence examined. This would be similar to a coroner's court, where in most cases there are no lawyers, even though it is formally a court. This would save millions and speed up the system immensely.

With such a system we would not need specialised buildings with detention facilities. Many cases could be heard in ordinary meeting rooms, church halls or hotel function rooms, hired for the purpose without racking up the enormous costs of providing court buildings – offering evening sessions where practical. We should also seek to keep family disputes out of courts and divert such cases to voluntary arbitration.

Regardless of innovations, however, successive governments have attempted to run a core function of the state on the cheap. The establishment simply does not value justice. Such bean counting, though, has a profoundly negative impact on society. With criminals being reasonably assured of a lenient, administrative sentence, the rule of law is gradually collapsing, passing the externalities of crime on to taxpayers and insurance companies. Essentially, the collapse of the justice system is a consequence of political indifference. It is as much to do with the culture of politics, which is why the Party believes a fundamental reboot of the state apparatus is required.

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This is not by any means exhaustive, but I’m hoping it’s enough to start a wider debate. If I’m completely wide of the mark, please chime in.

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