Do nothing until there is a crisis, then manage the crisis. That is the supposed tradition of the British civil service. What prime minister Johnson and Robert Buckland are proposing is a cheap gesture. Without the radical improvement in the chronic understaffing of gaols in England and Wales, which has led to a vicious spiral of worsening conditions, there will be little effect on home-grown terrorism. What efforts there are at de-radicalisation in prisons will be diluted as the convict population swells yet again.
The liberal solution - increase the number of prison officers and reduce the number of "crimes" for which people can be imprisoned - may be costly in the short term but will save money in the long term, as the Netherlands have shown. Of course, this would incense the likes of the Express, Mail and Sun who would rather stoke the fires of violence for the sake of money-making headlines. We should at least be thankful that Johnson has not followed the Nazi programme in this respect by demonising Islam and encouraging violent reprisals against innocent Muslim.
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