The Future of Britain

POLITICS: FEATURE
The Ricardian interviews Chris Grayling MP
Lewis Bizaoui, Felix Clarke and Oliver Northover Smith met Mr Grayling; Oliver writes:
The Ashtead Conservative
Party office, tucked in the
back of the high street
Conservative Club, is not a
glamourous place.
A pre-fabricated, rather dilapidated
building, this place is where Chris
Grayling spends much of his time.
It is clear that Mr Grayling much
prefers his constituency to the bustle
of London. Sitting down at half past
eleven, Mr Grayling had obviously been
working for a few hours. Indeed the
brevity of our encounter reflected upon
his saturated schedule (so much for
politicians being lazy!) We spoke to the
Justice Secretary across a put-up table
in the Conservative Club’s hall. Indeed,
the photographs of Mrs Thatcher on the
Chris Grayling, MP.
walls illustrated the love for hard work
and individualism so prevalent in this
leafy, Home Counties retreat.
We began the encounter on Justice –
Mr Grayling’s schedule and his plans
for Britain’s Justice system. The ring
running through his reforms was clear
– we need to do more for less. Indeed
by extrapolation this has been the
single most prominent theme behind
this cabinet’s reforms. There was a
caveat however – we cannot, Mr Grayling
asserted, stop the courts from sending
an offender to prison. The key to saving
money in the justice system, he said, was
not through keeping dangerous people
out, but “stopping them from coming
back.” Successive governments have
tried to tackle Britain’s embarrassing
rate of reoffending, and little has been
done in the past to keep the percentage
down –two thirds of people who get short
sentences go on to reoffend. It must be
said that this has been taking place
among a broader fall in crime, but the
problem persists.
The big problem, Mr Grayling told us,
was that those who were in prison for
less than 12 months “got no support
or supervision whatever when they got
out.” Hence the Justice Department is
“changing the way the probation system
works.”
Grayling’s answer is a three-pronged
attack. Bringing out the best of the
“public, private and voluntary sectors”
would tackle the problem, Mr Grayling
said. The young men from poor
backgrounds, who make up the majority
of the prison population, “find it
difficult to get their lives back together
afterwards.” Mentoring, Mr Grayling
said, was the answer, rather than mere
“supervision.”
Switching swiftly to the issue of legal
aid, Mr Grayling was confronted with
the question – should we ring-fence legal
aid? In the criminal sphere, Mr Grayling
agreed we should. When a “matter of
liberty,” one must always be defended
in court, Mr Grayling explained. The
matter becomes “more difficult” on the
civil side. Does it? Should a married
woman with an abusive husband be
denied legal aid for court appearances?
Regardless, Mr Grayling asserted that
this branch of the law was where cuts to
legal aid were necessary. Despite all that,
we spend “twice as much per head” as
other common law jurisdictions on legal
aid. It seems crazy to think so when the
UK faces a much higher burden of crime
than Canada, New Zealand or Australia.
The cuts are “difficult but necessary,”
and have been mostly “on the civil side.”
What about the government as a whole?
The Cameron cabinet has pushed
through a plethora of unpopular budget
cuts, but we still have a deficit equal to
5.4% of GDP each year. How do we get
from there to the “sustainable position”
Mr Grayling hankers after? In a standard
party-line response about balancing the
budget, Mr Grayling underlined the fact
that it would be us that would inherit
the debt accumulated by government.
He, like most of the cabinet, suggested
the Eurozone crisis was the principal
reason for Britain missing its deficit
elimination target, but that we would
balance the books “eventually.” As
Keynes said, “in the long run we’re all
dead” so it’d better come sooner rather
than later. If this government is to be
reelected in 2015, it will need to get
real about the deficit and start giving
concrete deadlines. Mr Grayling and I
are in agreement about the necessity of
spending cuts in order to avoid “taxes
going up.” This government needs to
stop talking and start doing.
Is getting things done even possible in
Westminster? The left, the teachers’
unions and the media have vilified
Michael Gove, the coalition’s most
prolific reformer. If reforming means
getting voted out, how are we going to
get the necessary reforms underway?
Mr Grayling told us that nobody who
is “affected by changes” is likely to be
happy about them. But as the education
establishments see the “benefits” of
“Michael’s reform programme” they
will come around. The Marxists in the
teachers’ unions are unlikely to warm to
Mr Gove any time soon – but if results
take so long to materialise, could reform
be impossible in our democracy? A
common theme of our discussion was
that lots of things “needed to happen.”
They do need to happen, but the
political difficulty involved is likely to
be incredibly hard to mitigate.
Mr Gove’s legacy is yet to be seen, but
how would Chris Grayling like to be
remembered? As Secretary of State for
Justice, probation reform was top for Mr
Grayling. He “hopes and believes” that
such changes will lead to a “sustained
fall” in reoffending. As successive
governments have wrestled with this
issue, history will tell if Mr Grayling
did the right thing. In the end, it will
all come down to how receptive those
leaving prison are to the mentoring
programme. Indeed, in a society in
which manual-labour jobs are being
progressively phased out by machines, it
is hard to see a place for unskilled male
workers in the future. Here’s hoping Mr
Grayling’s programme can stop these
circumstances dictating a fall back into
crime.
In Mr Grayling’s new Youth Offender
institution in the midlands, there have
been allegations that a return to the
use of corporal punishment may be on
the cards for misbehaving delinquents.
Mr Grayling painted a rosier picture.
This new institution, an £85m “secure
college” in Leicestershire, would be
aimed at removing the images of “iron
bars.” The goal was to achieve, according
to Mr Grayling, an “educational
institution with a fence around it.” Yet
the use of force to keep order may well
contravene the EU convention on Human
Rights – if a child refuses to leave a room,
can a “couple of officers pick them up
and make them?” That is a choice for
the courts – but Mr Grayling assures us
that there are “tight rules” surrounding
this procedure. The caricature of
the institution as “Victorian” was an
invention by a “left-wing pressure
group,” Mr Grayling explained. They
want small, communal facilities of 20
people for young offenders – obviously
that’s impossible, as Mr Grayling
explained. “You can’t build a serious
educational institution for 20 people.”
In the adult prisons, the “books for
prisoners” issue caused quite a stir
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