Controversy about our council candidate raises the same question as Andy Burnham’s prisoner release scheme: what do punishment and rehabilitation actually mean?
Should second chances depend on your politics?
Last week, controversy erupted over the decision to allow Joshua Bonehill-Paine, a campaigner against extremism, to stand as a Conservative council candidate. He had previously served a prison sentence for multiple offences including antisemitism, before repudiating those views and his previous life.
The argument occurred at the same time as Andy Burnham is embroiled in a row over releasing rapists, paedophiles and killers out of prison early. The two controversies may look unrelated. In fact, both raise the same question: what do punishment and rehabilitation actually mean?
In 2012, the Labour Party selected Margaret Burke as a council candidate in Milton Keynes. Burke had once been heavily involved in an openly neo-Nazi organisation whose members wore Nazi-style uniforms and recruited young people to distribute racist literature and paint swastikas. Labour knew about her past before selecting her. Burke herself did not try to hide from it. She expressed profound regret and said that her subsequent community work had been an attempt to make amends.
She was elected as a Labour councillor, re-elected two years later and served until 2018. Similarly, Joshua promoted vile antisemitic ideas, harassed Jewish people and committed other crimes for which he went to prison.
Nobody should minimise that history. But he served his sentence in jail and has since rejected the beliefs that took him there. He now works to explain the evils of antisemitism, training organisations on extremism, the dangers of radicalisation and how both take root. This does, of course, not oblige his victims to forgive him. Forgiveness is personal and rehabilitation should never mean pretending the past did not happen.
But it does prompt a difficult question: if somebody serves the punishment imposed by the courts, and then spends years trying to stop others making the same mistakes, at what point do we recognise they’ve changed? If the answer is never, we should be honest about it and stop talking about rehabilitation altogether. I say this as someone extremely sceptical about the ability of prison to rehabilitate.
My view is that for the most serious of crimes we should, to coin a phrase, “lock ’em up and throw away the key”. Prison certainly punishes, but most importantly it protects the public by taking dangerous people off the streets. Rehabilitation is much harder. Most people leave prison without having changed at all.
Antisemitism is one of the great scourges of our age. In the last few years it has returned with a vengeance, with Jews being stabbed on the streets and outside synagogues. I will use every lever at my disposal as leader of the opposition to ensure the hatred that disfigured Europe a century ago never becomes normal again in Britain.
But defeating it will require more than government strategies, commemorations and well-meaning statements. We should want racists to stop being racists. We should want antisemites to stop being antisemites. And when somebody genuinely turns over a new leaf, we should want that change to last.
Otherwise we send a peculiar message to anyone inside an extremist movement today: you may serve your punishment and devote yourself to making amends, but respectable society will never allow you back in anyway. That is not a serious approach to rehabilitation. Nor is it much of a strategy for bringing a divided country together. This is why the reaction of Labour and Reform politicians to Bonehill-Paine has been so revealing.
Nigel Farage criticised Joshua’s selection as a council candidate, not realising that Reform had made multiple attempts to recruit him as a councillor. Yet, when the then-Reform MP James McMurdock’s conviction for assaulting a former girlfriend emerged, Farage defended him by invoking “Christian forgiveness”.
The contradiction becomes even harder to ignore when one considers Louise Haigh; convicted of fraud in 2014 and who only resigned from the cabinet when the conviction became public. Andy Burnham has now returned her to government as first secretary of state, managing the government in his absence.
I’ve never called for Haigh or McMurdock to be permanently excluded from public life because of their convictions. There will of course be endless references to their past lives, but if second chances are good enough for one of the most senior jobs in government, it is hard to argue that someone who has served his sentence should not stand for a local council. A principle which applies only to your opponents is not a principle, just an excuse.
Hypocrisy now sits behind Labour’s approach to criminal justice. At the very moment Labour politicians lecture Conservatives about council candidates, their own policies have created a situation where offenders, including the killers of PC Andrew Harper, are being released before completing their sentences.
There is something confused about a politics that releases people before they have completed their punishment, but insists that somebody who completed his sentence years ago and subsequently repudiated his crimes must remain permanently beyond civic life. Voters understand that political parties will disagree. What they cannot stand is hypocrisy where politicians ask for selective forgiveness for their own side while demanding tougher rules for their opponents.
It’s why I have been very careful to ensure that I criticise the Labour Party for the category of prisoner they want to release early and the sheer scale of it. The Conservatives also had early releases. We released 10,000 prisoners early over our 14 years in government. Labour has released 60,000 in just two years.
People need to understand that the Conservative Party under my leadership is now the party of personal responsibility and law and order. That means insisting on consequences by punishing wrongdoing and protecting the public, especially victims.
We need fewer double standards and instead higher standards in a system that is repeatedly failing to protect the public. We should be tough enough to stand by our beliefs, even when they are politically inconvenient, wise enough to recognise rehabilitation and consistent enough to apply the same principles to friend and foe. That is a harder politics than joining a pile-on. I think it is also a better one.
