Christopher Grayling

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Universally dubbed "Failing Grayling"

Articles

  • Feb.09.2019: Chris Grayling’s glassy-eyed confidence doesn’t help with Brexit debacle. Transport secretary’s apparent contingency planning smacks of insouciance and desperation. There is a very good reason that Ramsgate has fallen out of use by ferry companies – yet Grayling signed a deal with a firm with no boats or experience. One director's previous companies had been wound up leaving HMRC £millions out of pocket. He is, as psychologists term it, an unconscious incompetent, the worst kind of useless. Gwyn Topham, The Guardian.
  • Jan.12.2019: Grayling claim Brexit block could boost far right is 'gutter politics'. MPs accuse transport secretary of dangerous scaremongering in attempt to prop up PM’s deal. Liberal Democrat Brexit spokesperson, Tom Brake, said: “Chris Grayling has lost the plot. This kind of scaremongering is not only dangerous, but it is embarrassing." Aamna Mohdin, The Guardian.
  • Jan.12.2019: Grayling under fire as serious crimes committed on parole soar by 50%. Ex-justice minister’s probation reforms have led to huge rise in serious offences, data shows. The problems are blamed on former justice secretary Chris Grayling’s reform programme, which saw some probation work outsourced to 8 private providers, who were given responsibility for running 21 Community Rehabilitation Companies working with low and medium risk offenders. “Since the private contracts were let there have been staff cuts of up to 30%, offices have been merged and the quality of supervision has fallen sharply,” said Harry Fletcher of the Victims’ Rights Campaign. Amid signs the system is struggling, the government is ending the contracts for the eight private providers two years early and reducing the number of community rehabilitation companies from 21 to 10. It is also spending £22m improving support for ex-offenders. Jamie Doward, The Guardian.
  • Jan.02.2019: How on earth is Chris Grayling still a cabinet minister? Officially secretary of state for transport, unofficially minister for blunders, incompetence and general disaster. That Grayling continues to be paid £141,000 a year is a sign not only of shambolic govt, but of national and political decline too. A ferry company that doesn’t have any ferries, rail fares and punctuality, fanatical ideology (see Dec.07.2016), Owen Jones, The Guardian.
  • Jan.02.2019: Grayling defends giving Brexit ferry contract to company with no ships. Transport secretary says Seaborne Freight’s £13.8m deal is support for new UK business. He said the firm would be ready to deliver services from April and had been “looked at very carefully by a team of civil servants who have done due diligence on the company and reached a view they can deliver”. The contract is one of 3, worth a total of £107.7m signed by the govt to help ease congestion at Dover by securing extra lorry capacity in the event of a no-deal Brexit. Jessica Elgot, The Guardian.
  • Jun.22.2018: Part-privatisation of probation sector 'is a mess', MPs say. The critical report comes at the end of a week in which Grayling faced a no-confidence motion in parliament over his ability to carry out his current role as transport secretary, following the rail timetable fiasco. MPs narrowly backed him in a vote on the motion, although few of his fellow Tories rallied to his defence. Jamie Grierson, The Guardian.
  • Jun.05.2018: If Chris Grayling can’t sort out the railways, what’s the point of him? ... Whitehall mutterings that any minister following Grayling into a department can expect to spend a fair while sorting out the mess. The Ministry of Justice is still grappling with the legacy of his 3 years there, including legal aid cuts that have recently brought barristers out on strike. Anyone using the Northern or Govia Thameslink rail lines, meanwhile, will know just how well his current brief is going. Yet somehow Grayling lurches on, towards an issue that has defeated wilier transport secretaries than him for over a decade: expanding Heathrow. The politics of Brexit suggest he’s unsackable at least until the prime minister has struggled through the EU withdrawal bill process (and associated threats to her tenure), even as the laws of electoral physics suggest he should go. And so he serves as a handy reminder of everything that’s hamstringing this government: too many people in high office for the wrong reasons, a perceived tin ear for northern England, and a not unrelated fatal inability to deliver on the central promise of May’s premiership. But in practice the chaos is absolutely feeding Labour’s argument that the railways should be under direct political control; as voters hear Grayling wailing – much as he did during the Southern dispute – that there isn’t really much he personally can do to sort this out, they naturally enough wonder what’s the point of him then. Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian.
  • Apr.30.2018: ‘Abandon empathy, all ye who enter’ — the Home Office has long turned MPs to monsters. The Home Office is a muggy, closed department which keeps out fresh air and light. Almost every Home Secretary seems to turn paranoid, defensive and authoritarian. They leave their liberal values, like muddy boots, outside the door. On R4 this morning Chris Grayling accidentally called the govt "the regime". Don’t know about the whole of govt, but that description certainly fits the Home Office. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, The iNews.

2017

  • Oct.02.2017: Iain Dale’s 100 most influential people on the Right 2017. Secretary of State for Transport. Chris Grayling is in his dream job. Really. And he wants to stay in it for the duration, as he firmly believes he can make a real difference. He’s weathered the Southern Rail storm and is now often used as a lightning conductor, being wheeled out on the media to play a straight bat defending various unpopular government policies. He should be used more. Conservative Home, Iain Dale
  • Jan.28.2017: Michael Gove has scrapped the Government's planned legal aid cuts. The govt has scrapped major cuts to the criminal legal aid system in England and Wales, it has announced. Justice Secretary Michael Gove said he had decided not to go ahead with the plan, which was drawn up by his predecessor Chris Grayling. The proposals, to reduce legal aid fees by 8.75% and cut duty solicitors at magistrates’ courts and police stations by 66%, were highly criticised by the legal profession. Cuts of 8.75% to legal aid have already been introduced in Mar.2014 and this round of reductions would have been the second wave. The shadow justice secretary Lord Falconer accused the govt of wasting money on the enterprise. The policy is one of a number of proposals scrapped by Mr Gove that were introduced by his predecessor. The Justice Secretary also cancelled a contract to run the Saudi Arabian prison system and reversed a ban on prisoners being sent books in prison. Jon Stone, The Independent.

2016

  • Dec.07.2016: Transport Secretary Chris Grayling faces calls to resign after leaked letter. A leaked letter revealed he opposed handing over control of suburban rail to keep it “out of the clutches” of Labour. Pippa Crerar, The Evening Standard. Every time, it's always: "party before commuters, country, or anything else". It is nothing less than fanatical ideology.
  • Jan.12.2016: Tories vote down law requiring landlords make their homes fit for human habitation. Labour MP Teresa Pearce's amendment to the Housing and Planning Bill 2016, which would place a duty on landlords to ensure that their properties are fit for habitation when let and remain fit during the course of the tenancy, was defeated by 312 votes to 219. Marcus Jones said the govt believed that homes should be fit for human habitation, but did not want to pass a new law that would explicitly require it. Other ministers claimed the proposal would impose "unnecessary regulation" on landlords, and that it would push up rents. Chris Grayling, himself a landlord, was one of those who voted "No". The Independent, Jon Stone

2015

  • Nov.2015: Stop Prison Expansion. The Velvet Glove of Michael Gove. Gove is a proud ‘neoconservative’ and described the invasion of Iraq as a "proper British foreign policy success". Gove has even written in support of bringing back hanging as capital punishment. Allowing "business to proceed" is the heart of Gove’s efforts. Free market capitalism is at the beating heart of his reforms. This allegedly benevolent Minister really cares about those experiencing oppression as he continues with legal aid cuts and criminal charges that will change the face of the ‘criminal justice’ system forever. Designing them for ‘rehabilitation’ means designing spaces for workshops and businesses. At the centre of the design for the new prison in North Wales are two workshops allowing 800 prisoners to be employed by companies exploiting their labour. In 2013-2014, prisons in England and Wales signed contracts with private companies worth £14.7m. Prisoners can earn betweeen £2.50 to £25 per week working for prisons and private companies within them. It was also announced in February that prisoners will now be manufacturing items for the British Army. Research in the US shows that the Iraq war was underpinned by prison labour. (more...) Linkback: HM Prison and Probation Service Cape Campaign.

Earlier

  • Dec.08.2014: The ban on books for prisoners is over. But how did it happen in the first place? The ban on sending books to prisoners in England and Wales was finally declared unlawful by Mr Justice Collins in the High Court. The Howard League for Penal Reform kick-started the campaign to get the ridiculous ruling overturned. We know it was a mistake – and we know they know it was a mistake – because it was introduced by Chris Grayling in November as part of a new "incentives and earned privileges" regime: prisoners could get hold of new books, but only by buying them, and only when they had earned the right to do so. However, soon after the rule came under fire, he and his department began to claim it was a policy aimed at stemming the flow of drugs into prison (an assertion rapidly dismissed by the Prisoner Officers Association). So, right from the start, the Ministry of Justice knew its original justification was preposterous. And not a moment, too soon. 55 people killed themselves in prisons in England and Wales in 2012; and 90 in 2013. Mark Haddon, The Guardian.
  • Sept.08.2014: Chris Grayling used 'bluff and bully' tactics to push legal aid cuts, court told. The justice secretary, Chris Grayling, relied on "bluff and bully" tactics to drive through legal aid cuts that will close hundreds of law firms, the high court has heard. At the opening of a judicial review challenge brought by criminal solicitors, Grayling was accused of coordinating a "caricature of fairness" in a Ministry of Justice (MoJ) review. The changes being introduced provide for cuts of 17.5% in criminal court fees and reduce the number of duty solicitor contracts for attending police stations and courts in England and Wales from 1,600 to 525. The case has been brought by the London Criminal Courts Solicitors' Association and the Criminal Law Solicitors' Association, which say the consultation was unlawful. The challenge is focused on the adequacy of the MoJ's consultation process, crucial details of which, it is alleged, were withheld from the legal profession at the time. "The lord chancellor personally misled [criminal solicitors] about the matter of the independent research which had been commissioned to assist him to make decisions. He personally refused to disclose that research, it would seem, for no other reason than that it might provide ammunition to critics of his proposals." Owen Bowcott, The Guardian.