Politicians love a dead copper when the polls are sliding. Andy Burnham wants you to believe he can block the parole board from ever granting freedom to the men who killed PC Andrew Harper. It sounds brilliant on a Tuesday morning breakfast television segment. It plays well to the baying mob on social media. It is also entirely, dangerously, unconstitutional garbage.
The lazy consensus in Westminster and Manchester is simple: if a crime shocks the public conscience enough, the elected class should be able to rip up the rulebook and keep the perpetrators locked in a box forever. Burnham knows this is what the public wants to hear. He also knows the Parole Board of England and Wales operates under statutory guidelines that he, as a regional mayor, has zero power to alter. Yet he postures anyway, treating the grief of a murdered officer's family as a convenient ladder to climb higher into national relevance.
Stop cheering for the headline and look at the mechanics of the state. If a regional mayor can arbitrarily veto independent judicial decisions based on public outrage, you no longer have a justice system. You have mob rule with a ballot box attached.
The Myth of the Political Veto
Let us dispense with the emotional blackmail immediately. The killing of PC Andrew Harper in August 2019 was an atrocity. The three teenagers convicted of manslaughter—Henry Long, Albert Bowers, and Jessie Cole—received sentences that many felt were too lenient, leading to Harper's Law, which introduced mandatory life sentences for those who kill emergency workers.
When politicians step into the arena of parole, however, they corrupt the machinery designed to manage risk.
Parole is not an award for good behavior. It is an administrative risk assessment. The board does not ask whether a prisoner deserves to walk free based on moral redemption; they ask whether the risk of reoffending has dropped below a threshold where public protection is no longer compromised. Handing that decision over to elected officials means parole boards stop looking at actuarial tables and start looking at opinion polls.
Imagine a scenario where a populist mayor secures the power to block parole for high-profile killers indefinitely. Tomorrow, a different politician with a different ideological axe to grind decides that environmental activists or political dissidents should face the same indefinite administrative detention. When you break the firewall between executive power and penal administration to satisfy a righteous bloodlust today, you build the executioner's scaffold for political prisoners tomorrow.
The Convenience of Powerless Posturing
Burnham is a master of the proxy fight. He postures against institutions he cannot control because it costs him nothing when he fails. If the parole board rejects early release, he claims victory for his pressure campaign. If the parole board grants release in accordance with the law, he blames a broken system and positions himself as the reformer ready to fix it.
He is not alone. The entire British political apparatus has developed an addiction to outsourcing responsibility while pretending to seize control. They write ambiguous laws laden with emotional rhetoric, hand them to overstretched agencies, and then scream from the sidelines when those agencies execute the law as written.
The legal reality is stark. The parole system operates under the Criminal Justice Act 2003. Changing how long prisoners must serve before consideration requires primary legislation in Parliament, not a press release from a combined authority mayor in the North West. Burnham has no statutory locus standi here. He is performing a public relations exercise using a grieving widow as his shield.
The Dangerous Logic of Retributive Permanence
Proponents of blocking early release argue that certain crimes forfeit the right to ever breathe free air again. If that is your position, be honest. Abolish the concept of a determinate tariff. Abolish parole entirely. Return to the scaffold or the lifetime dungeon.
What we have instead is a hypocritical middle ground. We maintain a human rights framework and a penal theory based nominally on rehabilitation and risk reduction, but we throw tantrums whenever that framework produces an outcome that offends our sensibilities.
When you tell the public that a sentence of twenty years can be retroactively extended because the Daily Mail ran an outraged front page, you destroy any remaining incentive for prison reform. Why should an inmate engage with rehabilitation programs, psychological interventions, or vocational training if the goalposts move every time a politician needs a media cycle?
You do not make society safer by creating hopeless inmates. Hopeless men in concrete boxes do not rehabilitate; they radicalize, they stagnate, and they pose an even greater threat when their sentence finally expires by absolute operation of time.
Facing the Uncomfortable Truth About Justice
We live in a culture that treats justice as an emotional outlet rather than a utilitarian mechanism for social order. We want the catharsis of vengeance without the responsibility of building a functional penal state.
Burnham’s intervention isn't leadership. It is pandering. It tells the public that their feelings of revenge override the rule of law, and it degrades the independent judiciary into a subsidiary of the mayor's office.
The next time a politician promises to keep a killer locked away by sheer force of personality and press conferences, remember what they are actually trading away: the predictable, boring, vital restraint that keeps the state from turning every prison into a political prison camp.
Let the parole board do its grinding, unglamorous, evidence-based job. And let the politicians go back to fixing potholes.
