CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Whatever the latest banalities issued by the Ministry of Justice in response to claims by Steve Gallant – a hero of the London Bridge terror attack and former inmate of HMP Frankland – that Islamist gangs have orchestrated a shift in the “balance of power” at the prison, the state is not fully in charge of our prison system. Nowhere near. Years of criminally stupid austerity cuts to front-line staff, supine leadership and incompetence by unaccountable senior mandarins have combined to produce a battle for power inside jails that we are losing."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "We know our prison system is awash with drugs but just what are they smoking at the Ministry of Justice? A shocking story in the Times yesterday revealed what a desperate state Britain’s jails are in. Paul Morgan-Bentley, an undercover reporter, was hired at breakneck speed to work as a uniformed Operational Support Grade (OSG) escort at beleaguered HMP Bedford. He lifted the lid on a security nightmare."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Soldiers are trained in war fighting and they have no powers of arrest so it is likely that they could only be used in very limited circumstances, for example during a raid on suspected terrorists. It is plainly a necessary but insufficient stop gap to ensure that we are still able to respond to an attack by violent extremists, still judged by our security services to be ‘highly likely.’"