UK prime minister Rishi Sunak was under pressure over the murder of Zara Aleena in Ilford – so one of his mouthpieces rushed in to claim there was no political element to the case.
Ms Aleena was murdered by Jordan McSweeney, who had been wrongly assessed as a “medium risk” offender, when in fact the violent, woman-hating racist should have been classed “high risk” and recalled to prison after missing probation appointments.
A Ministry of Justice review has found that probation officers were under mounting pressure at the time of McSweeney’s assessment, with staffing shortages and an increasingly-heavy workload.
These are both symptoms of government funding cuts – and, indeed, during PMQs, Keir Starmer raised a “botched, then reversed” attempt to privatise the service, and a decade of underinvestment.
And Ms Aleena’s family’s spokeswoman, her aunt Faraz Naz, made it perfectly clear that “Government bears responsibility too, it is not just the probation service. They have blood on their hands.”
But Tory MP Andrew Bowie, discussing the case on the BBC’s Politics Live, falsely claimed this had not been said – after trying to say that the failings of the Probation Service were not political:
Of course they were.
They were the result of political decisions to starve the service of staff and resources.
A Conservative MP was responsible. But once again, it seems, we are not likely to see anybody take responsibility.
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