CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson quoted: "Home Secretary: Yvette Cooper | Ian Acheson: Yvette Cooper has two enormous challenges that can’t wait for a honeymoon. The first is making her Border Command, the latest iteration in a long line of failed initiatives on controlling illegal migration, actually deliver. The second is restoring the status and importance of community policing in neighbourhoods marooned in criminal impunity with demoralised cops leaving in droves. Both require agility and energy from a Home Office with neither. Her formidable toughness needs to be turned inward. This is a hot seat on fire. "

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "With prison capacity running at 99 per cent and new jails still on the far horizon, the first priority of the new Lord Chancellor is to stop the criminal justice system grinding to a halt. Keir Starmer, aware that the shelf life of ‘inherited mess’ will be brutally short, has gone on TV to prepare public opinion for the emergency early release of prisoners to continue and go even further. The party’s tough on crime poetry pre-election will collide with the prosaic reality of full, anarchic prisons."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "It’s Monday afternoon and I’m walking through the estate where I was born on the outskirts of Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. Here in the United Kingdom’s most westerly and most marginal constituency, politics continues to be war by other means. The Unionist marching season beckons and as well as the usual red white and blue bunting, there are a sea of Israeli flags fluttering in the drizzle. Across town, in nationalist estates, Palestinian flags abound. These adopted tribal identities epitomise the immutable sectarian character of the competition for the seat in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. While Northern Ireland is slowly becoming a more homogenous society and progressive politics makes progress in the urban east, out here on the rural edge of the union, it’s different."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Prisons aren’t a new problem. Ian Acheson wrote about the decay of the high-sec estate for us last month; David Gauke painted a bleak portrait of the current spending settlement in December. A year ago, I examined the abject failure of the Government’s promise to have delivered 10,000 new jail places by 2020 (actual number delivered at that point: 206)."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson interviewed: "The state of Britain’s prisons is under renewed scrutiny as report after report describes more and more jails as overcrowded, filthy places, rife with vermin and violence."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "There’s precious little room for manoeuvre. We are perilously close to a time I can remember back in the mid-90s when governors refused to take convicted prisoners from court because there was no cell space left in their establishments. While numbers at the top fluctuate week by week, the trend only ever goes up, driven by courts getting rid of their backlogs and our tendency to sentence more offenders to longer spells in custody that only make prisoners worse."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson quoted: "Labelling the situation “scandalous”, former prison governor and Tornado section commander Ian Acheson noted that these include prisons where previous riots have caused “huge disruption and damage”, as well as those in remote locations and with complex populations."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Michael Gove has a reliable track record for sounding the alarm on ideological hatred, so are his latest proposals on redefining extremism a cure for what ails us? The communities secretary has unveiled a plan to broaden the definition of extremism. The new official meaning aims to ban those with a ‘violent or intolerant’ ideology from government links and funds."

"Professor Ian Acheson, Senior Advisor, Counter Extremism Project said: “These are necessary next steps to confront and deter those who advocate for violent extremism.""