What we tolerate becomes the norm

Organised by the Zahid Mubarek Trust, which was set up by family members to honour his memory and to press for lasting change in the prison system, the event was both uplifting and sobering.

Early on, Imtiaz Amin, Zahid Mubarek’s uncle, asked for a minute’s silence to remember a prisoner beaten to death by his racist cellmate wielding an improvised weapon: the broken wooden leg from a piece of in-cell furniture.

The prisoner he asked us to remember was not, however, Zahid Mubarek. Rather, it was Sundeep Ghuman: murdered in his cell in Belmarsh prison in 2020, in circumstances distressingly similar to Zahid Mubarek’s murder 20 years earlier, in Feltham Young Offender Institution.

It is difficult to imagine a more compelling way to make a simple but important point.

The prisons minister Lord Timpson followed, with the keynote address.

He started well enough: reflecting on the awfulness of Zahid Mubarek’s murder, the ongoing pain and distress his death has caused, and praising the impressive work of the Trust set up in his memory. After that, his speech degenerated into the kind of routine Ministry of Justice talking points familiar to anyone who has had to sit through a ministerial address.

It was a missed opportunity. The muted applause that followed spoke volumes.

I have been around criminal justice reform circles long enough to remember Zahid Mubarek’s murder, the inquiries that followed, and the resulting Prison Service activity to embed a commitment to race equality.

There were, and continue to be, impressive people in the Prison Service pushing the race equality agenda. Those speaking at and attending this week’s event were also clear that the institutional commitment has weakened in the intervening years.

The Zahid Mubarek Trust’s own response to this weakening is a new Manifesto on Race Equality in Prisons, calling on those who care to get involved. It is an important initiative that deserves support.

The event also left me wondering whether the way we do policy discussion and debate is as effective as it could be.

A few months after Zahid Mubarek’s murder, the then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was heckled and jeered at the Women’s Institute national conference, after trying to use a speech to score political points.

Some years later, Theresa May’s speeches, as Home Secretary, to the Police Federation were regularly met with barely disguised disdain. Only this month, Donald Trump’s attempt to lecture the top brass of the US military was met with stony silence.

Yet at the event this week, I and others sat, listening politely to a ministerial speech that fell some distance short of what the occasion demanded.

I feel uncomfortable writing this, in part because Lord Timpson is someone who does appear to care about prisons and prisoners. Had he said what he thought, rather than what the government message grid demanded, he would probably have given a better speech.

I also feel uncomfortable writing this because I was one of those sitting politely and listening, rather than making my views plain. I can hardly claim the moral high ground.

This, for me, is the nub of the problem. When it comes to system change, it matters what senior politicians and leaders say in public, and not just in private. And while we should always have high expectations of our political leaders, I wonder whether we should also be better at making our expectations clear: in public settings, as well as in private meetings.

I am not arguing for routine boos and hisses when the minister comes to speak. Nor, though, should we be self-censoring for fear of being consigned to the naughty step.

In politics, as in other walks of life, what we tolerate tends to become the norm. The current norm in relation to prisons, and criminal justice more generally, is pretty unappealing. Perhaps it’s time for us to work for a new one.