Labour's 'two tier policing' headache

Coffee House Shots

The Spectator

News, Politics, Government, Daily News

4.4 • 2.1K Ratings

🗓️ 6 March 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

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Summary

Labour have found themselves facing accusations of enabling ‘two tier policing’ following new guidelines from the Sentencing Council. Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick has been quick to criticise the government, but Labour’s Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood has also urged the council reconsider their recommendations.

Yvette Cooper’s former adviser Danny Shaw joins Katy Balls and James Heale to discuss the row. While Danny points out that the issue is more nuanced than the row makes out, to the public the very perception of ‘two tier policing’ will damage the government - and at a time when confidence in the justice system is at an all-time low. How will they fix the problem?

Produced by Patrick Gibbons.

Transcript

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0:51.4	Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm James Seal and I'm joined today by the spectator's political
0:55.7	editor Katie Balls and Danny Shaw, former advisor to Yvette Cooper. Now this morning there's been a big row
1:00.8	about the Sentencing Council guidelines. Katie, do you want us to talk us through how we got here?
1:04.8	So effectively what's happened is a sentencing council has issued new guidance for England and Wales
1:10.4	on sentencing on how this should go about
1:13.7	and it suggested that ethnicity or faith of an offender should be taken into account in the sense
1:19.3	that it can mean that you reduce the sentence, maybe there's not a custodial sentence,
1:23.6	it should be a factor which makes you think about going for a less harsh sentence and then the
1:28.7	alternative. Now, Robert Generic quickly, you know, found this out and has been pushing it quite
1:34.4	hard, saying, you know, Kirstama said there was no such thing as two-tier policing what a couple of
1:40.2	months ago. And now we have in plain sight a rule that would mean if you were perhaps
1:45.1	from an ethnic minority, if you were a Muslim, for example, would you be less likely to go to
1:50.6	jail than a white working class male? Of course, women already have a situation where they try and
1:55.8	put fewer women in prison. But this is what's being latched on by Robert Jenrick. And what's
	...

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