Ian Dunt

The whole of the press was behind austerity.

The Conservative Party was behind austerity.

And then when the Conservatives got to power, it led to them, at the worst possible moment in the wake of the crisis, just slashing budgets.

And the worst thing was, because they protected certain budgets...

Like the NHS, you can't do anything on health because people will lose their minds.

It means that you cut really deep in other areas.

For instance, as I mentioned before, the Ministry of Justice.

Ministry of Justice had 25% cuts.

They started getting rid of prison wardens all over the place.

With prisoners, you can't move the prisoner from one bit of the prison to another bit of the prison unless they're accompanied.

Obviously, they don't just have freedom to mosey around wherever they want.

So when you just start cutting the prison officer numbers...

what you end up doing is just keeping a prisoner in their cell for about 23 hours a day.

They have the one allocated hour of exercise, but the rest of the time they're just locked in the cell.

That means you can't do the classes, the technical classes, the university classes, the school classes, the basic literacy and numeracy classes in many of these cases, the therapy sessions, all of the provisions that might allow you to rehabilitate someone, to stop them from reoffending, to establish relationships that aren't based on conflict.

and trauma and to embed them in a community in a working life all the things that we know reduce reoffending were impossible because of the cuts that were done of course in the end you don't save any money because the person goes out and does more crimes and it's really expensive to put someone in jail for that period let alone the money you're not getting as a result of the taxes that they will not pay but in the short term

it saves you money.

And so we entered into this period of unbelievable self-harm from which we are yet to recover today.

And that was mostly, ultimately, it may have been triggered by the financial crisis, but the cause really is austerity more than it is the financial crash itself.

The same force that has defined British politics for basically my whole adult life now, which is the mainstream shifting to placate the far right.