The Prime Minister has discovered a judicial ruling so offensive that it required immediate intervention via press statement. Two boys convicted of raping teenage girls in Hampshire received suspended sentences instead of custody. Starmer was appalled. He said so. Twice. The sentences are now being referred to the Court of Appeal because apparently that’s what happens when a politician discovers the judiciary exists and disagrees with it.
This is the part where we’re supposed to pretend this is leadership. A girl told the BBC that the judge’s decision felt like a rock in her face. Starmer responded by saying it was appalling and that the review was right. He did not explain what took him until a rape victim gave a BBC interview to notice that the justice system had failed her. He did not explain why the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom needs a viral news cycle to identify an obvious miscarriage of justice.
What Starmer actually did was discover that calling judges cowards on Twitter—sorry, “X”—costs nothing and polls well. The hard part, the part that requires legislation, funding, training, and actual structural reform of a sentencing system that has been broken for decades, remains untouched. That work would require him to spend political capital. That work would require him to fight his own party’s fiscal constraints. That work would require him to sit in a room with judicial reform experts and admit that the problem is not one bad judge but a system designed to keep prisons nominally empty.
Instead, he got to be appalled. He got to use the word “urgent.” He got to refer something to the Court of Appeal and let someone else make the hard decision. If the appeal succeeds, he takes credit for caring. If it fails, he blames the judges for being the cowards he accused them of being.
The judiciary, naturally, is furious. Not at the sentencing—judges don’t tend to reverse their own decisions because a Prime Minister finds them inconvenient—but at being publicly shamed for applying the law as written. The law that Parliament wrote. The law that Starmer’s government could change tomorrow if it wanted to. The law that has sat unchanged because changing it would require him to make an actual choice about how much punishment society wants to inflict, and that is the sort of thing that loses focus groups.
So now we have a judicial review of a judicial decision, triggered by political pressure, which will be decided by judges who are already aware that the Prime Minister thinks they’re cowards. This is not how any of this is supposed to work, but it is exactly how politics works when the alternative is admitting that fixing something broken requires more than a statement and a referral.
The girl who described the judge’s decision as a rock in her face will not be part of the appeal process. She will wait to see if other people in suits decide to overturn what other people in suits already decided. Meanwhile, Starmer has moved on to the next crisis that can be solved with outrage and a press release. The judicial system remains exactly as broken as it was before he discovered it.