Key eventsShow key events onlyPlease turn on JavaScript to use this featureChildren’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza has warned child strip-searches should only take place if a life is at risk.Dame Rachel told BBC Breakfast: “My argument is, they should only be done if it’s a life-threatening situation. Let me just remind viewers, this is pre-arrest, this is a child that’s just a suspicion, they’re taken – there’s meant to be an appropriate adult there: in 45% of cases there are not.“And their clothes are removed, and their most intimate parts are looked at and moved if necessary.“It’s really very intrusive and, you know, it’s hard to see, given that only about half of the strip-searches have further action taken – and a far smaller per cent actually end up with charges – that they’re being done because it’s really, really crucial for life and death that they’re being done.“And that for me is the benchmark that really needs to be there.”ShareUpdated at 10.10 BSTThe vice-president of the Prison Governors’ Association has said he is “not sure” how much Operation Early Dawn will help the prisons crisis.Mark Icke told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I’m not sure it does help, today, tomorrow, the next day, because, as was just suggested, we have been lurching from crisis to crisis for some time.“Running a prison is an incredibly complex business and so we don’t know which way to turn at the moment.”He added that short term measures “are not ideal”.“We have been highlighting this to the previous government, we’ve highlighted this to the new government, and we really do want to sit down and have a conversation about what the purpose of prison is moving forward,” he said.“We cannot carry on operating in this kind of environment, it’s just too much pressure.”ShareUpdated at 09.53 BSTOpening summaryGood morning and welcome to our UK politics blog. We start with news that ministers have activated emergency measures to ease prison overcrowding as more rioters are sentenced for their role in the recent unrest.The longstanding measures, known as Operation Early Dawn, allow defendants to be held in police cells until prison beds became available and could mean their court dates are delayed or adjourned at short notice.Labour have already said that the previous Conservative administration failed to deal with prison overcrowding and on Monday the prisons and probation minister Lord Timpson said:
We inherited a justice system in crisis and exposed to shocks. As a result, we have been forced into making difficult but necessary decisions to keep it operating.
The national chairman of the Prison Officers’ Association also blamed the Tories. Mark Fairhurst told BBC Breakfast:
It has been an extremely pressured situation for several months now because we are so full, and that’s down to the previous government, let’s be honest now.
They closed 20 public sector prisons, they didn’t build enough new prisons, they didn’t create enough prison space and people are serving longer sentences.
More on the prison crisis later. In other developments:
SNP MSP John Mason said he had not foreseen losing the whip over his social media post about Israel, saying: “I’m not someone who foresees the future exactly, but sometimes you have to do the right thing and just take the consequences.” He had written on X that the country’s actions in Gaza did not amount to “genocide”.
Jacob Rees-Mogg has said he is “very strongly” considering standing at the next general election after losing his seat to Labour. The former Tory cabinet minister told an audience at the Edinburgh fringe festival that the Conservatives had “deserved” to lose the recent election, and that he was not shocked after losing his North East Somerset and Hanham seat to the mayor of the West of England Dan Norris by more than 5,000 votes. Rees-Mogg had won it from Norris in 2010.
A Foreign Office official has resigned over the UK’s refusal to ban arms exports to Israel because of alleged breaches of international law. Mark Smith, a counter-terrorism official based at the British embassy in Dublin, said he had resigned after making numerous internal complaints, including through an official whistleblowing mechanism, but receiving nothing but pro-forma responses.
Rachel Reeves has been warned by Britain’s biggest manufacturers that her autumn budget must address a decade of decline in national infrastructure that is damaging economic growth. More than half of manufacturers surveyed by the industry group Make UK said that the country’s national road infrastructure had deteriorated in the last 10 years, making it slower and more expensive to build and export British products.
The number of asylum seekers who have died in the care of the Home Office has more than doubled in the last year, according to data shared with the Guardian, a development that has been described as “deeply troubling”. While some deaths were a result of illness or old age, others are thought to have happened as a result of suicide. Charities fear that the treatment of asylum seekers in the UK has adversely affected the health of an already vulnerable group of people.
Share
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2024/aug/19/prisons-riots-timpson-labour-conservatives-uk-politics-live
