A thought...

Mark Oaten on Today this morning, expounding the virtues of ‘tough liberalism’, which will involve community panels sentencing offenders to clean up graffiti and put vandalism right. He was asked how it was all going to be paid for. His response? Flog off the prisons in the cities and build new ones out of town.

Can you see it now? Planning applications for prisons in North Dingly Dell-under-Lyme with irate protestors and NIMBY-types refusing to have a bunch of criminal types placed down the road.

Haven’t we learned anything from the asylum seeker protests a few years ago? At this rate once we’ve sold out the inner city prisons, Mark will find himself having to float the idea – quite literally – of putting them all out on ships or an island off the mainland, a la Oliver Letwin…