Rory Stewart on Prison Sentencing & the London Bridge Attack

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: In this atmosphere now, that may resonate with people. We see the Conservatives, the Tories, even despite a real tilt to the hard right, picking up votes. They seem to be doing better.

RORY STEWART, FORMER BRITISH CONSERVATIVE MP: Absolutely. So, particularly with a shocking thing like this, it’s going to be a very, very strong intuitive sense that this person shouldn’t have been released. But there is, of course, a more complicated story underneath it, which is that when somebody is sentenced, particularly like this, he hadn’t committed a life sentence, so the judge can only give him a limited sentence. He will come out of prison at some point. And the real question is, what work do you do with him in prison to reform and turn that around, and then how do you work with him when he’s back in the community to try to keep people safe? And there’s no way of getting around the fact that, in the end, of course Parliament can set some of the legal guidance, but the judge has to make that decision. And the judge in this case decided this guy shouldn’t have an indeterminant sentence and we need a system that’s able to work with that. And a lot of that’s about focus and details. So, I think the prime minister isn’t saying now, is that the Conservative government has been in power for 10 years, right. He’s a Conservative prime minister after 10 years. So, these things need to be fixed, and one of the most important things is we have no proper through-follow of these people. So, we need to connect the police to the prisons to the probation, and that individual, particularly a terrorist, you need a much more focus on the setting of who he is, what his motivations are and have real professionals working with him. The way to solve this isn’t these big ideas that if we just locked everybody up forever, we’d solve all of these problems. That isn’t not going to happen. Kind of unfortunately now, we don’t have prison places to do that. And in any case, we don’t have a legal system to launch that, because the judges are going to ultimately make the decision on what sentences to give people. A lot of the things that are going to make the difference are going to be about how you work with someone through that system and in the community.

AMANPOUR: I mean, it’s so timely, because whether it’s a Donald Trump, whether it’s many of the right-wing governments in Europe, whether it’s the right-wing Tory Party here in power, law and order, crime, terrorism, I mean, it fits right into their bailey wig. And it’s very moving that the father of one of the murdered young people, there were two Cambridge students. The father of Jack Merritt has written in memory of his son, he, Jack, would be seething at his death and his life being used to perpetuate an agenda of hate that he gave his everything fighting against. What jack would want from this (INAUDIBLE) is a country where we do not slash prison budgets and where we focus on rehabilitation not revenge. I just want to know, given the polarization of society, given this very dramatic election, which is mostly being fought on Brexit in the U.K., which will be held next week, are we going to see this swing even further to the right?

STEWART: I believe so. I mean, I believe that if Boris Johnson wins this, he will win it by picking up votes in in — often in the Northeast of England for more socially Conservative voters.