Sheryl Mcintosh's Blog: Polly Toynbee is (Sometimes) Right

... about once a decade, I suppose. She's an odd mix. On the one hand she has a dreadful propensity to write up in the ever-gullible Grauniad whatever rubbish she's been told over a congenial lunch one-to-one with someone she's girlishly in awe of. Her cavalier attitude towards easily-checked facts once spawned a small industry under the banner of Fact-Checking Pollyanna.

On the other, she is capable of painstaking (if not actually painful) feats of empirical research, e.g. taking on menial jobs for months at a time to find out what's really happening somewhere, in order to write a book with some serious underpinnings. She's an interesting contradiction; and the psychology of all this is a real puzzle.

Anyhow: she's had one of those once-a-decade moments (as usual, in the Graun).

Squalid prisons are just the start. The entire justice system is in meltdown ... From the police to legal aid to the courts, savage cuts mean a nightmare is unfolding largely out of public view

You scarcely need to read the article. She's right, of course. My own vantage-point on this is a friend in the CPS, whose stories from the front are frequently quite appalling. Plus, of course, we all have the reports of our own eyes.

And we know who's at least partly to blame: yes, the woman who was Home Secretary for six long years. It's plain that (in her manifest cowardice, by now so transparent she is the laughing stock of Europe) she bowed all too readily to the budget constraints demanded by Osborne, and concluded the only priorities to be maintained were (a) counter-terrorism and (b) various crazy social policies inflicted upon the police. Both she and Osborne richly deserve to languish in one of our choice prisons, doing some Toynbee-style first-hand research for themselves.

Recall the 2011 riots: does anyone imagine they could be handled again today? Even then it was wholly unsatisfactory for the first few days: but at least, on Cameron's insistence, a mighty and unrelenting effort was mounted to run to ground as many of the miscreants as possible over the following months. Today? Well, we may find out. As one of our perceptive BTL commenters wrote in 2011, on that occasion there was no officer-class of motivated malcontents in evidence to coordinate the street-scum: but what if there was?

Seven years later and it's not just in existence, it has a positive virtual Sandhurst of its own. We may be grateful its titular leader is the utter plonker he is; that his No.2 holds no popular attraction whatever for the voters at large; and that Diane Abbbottt is a national joke. That said, imagine her as Home Secretary ... well, we may find out.

ND