CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "It’s Monday afternoon and I’m walking through the estate where I was born on the outskirts of Enniskillen in Northern Ireland. Here in the United Kingdom’s most westerly and most marginal constituency, politics continues to be war by other means. The Unionist marching season beckons and as well as the usual red white and blue bunting, there are a sea of Israeli flags fluttering in the drizzle. Across town, in nationalist estates, Palestinian flags abound. These adopted tribal identities epitomise the immutable sectarian character of the competition for the seat in Fermanagh and South Tyrone. While Northern Ireland is slowly becoming a more homogenous society and progressive politics makes progress in the urban east, out here on the rural edge of the union, it’s different."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Most normal people would have no hesitation in condemning what was done to Jim Dixon and the other townspeople murdered beside him as straightforward terrorism. That is beyond the capability of Pat Cullen, the Sinn Fein candidate standing for that constituency in the forthcoming Westminster elections."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson quoted: "Among those outraged by the move was Enniskillen native Ian Acheson, an expert on prisons and extremism, who had been serving as an adviser to outgoing cabinet member, Michael Gove.

In a resignation letter published in part by The Telegraph, Mr Acheson said he felt Mr Sunak’s actions were “a colossal act of disrespect,” with the Fermanagh author stating he would always put “country before party.”

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson referenced: "Ian Acheson, who has advised the communities secretary on extremism, said the Prime Minister’s choice to leave for an election TV interview was a “colossal act of disrespect” to the war veterans at what could be the last event they attend."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Prisons aren’t a new problem. Ian Acheson wrote about the decay of the high-sec estate for us last month; David Gauke painted a bleak portrait of the current spending settlement in December. A year ago, I examined the abject failure of the Government’s promise to have delivered 10,000 new jail places by 2020 (actual number delivered at that point: 206)."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson wrote: "Tommy Robinson, a self-invented English ‘patriot’, was free to attend yesterday’s St George’s Day event in central London which descended into ugly clashes between participants and police. Earlier in the day, he had been released from court after successfully arguing that a police dispersal order that resulted in his arrest and charge in November last year was unlawfully applied to him due to a paperwork blunder. He says he will now sue the Metropolitan police.

Robinson has nearly half a million followers on social media. They have, by now, fully absorbed the narrative that when it comes to protest, Britain has a two-tier system of policing."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Aldous Huxley’s dystopian best seller Brave New World, published back in 1934, envisaged a society where stability was enforced by a numbing drug called ‘soma’. Constant consumption of soma, mandated by the state, dulled the senses, vanished despair and discouraged rebellion. I was reminded of this by comments made by some of the Times‘ new crime commissioners as they launch a year-long project to fix our broken criminal justice system. They were speculating as to why we weren’t seeing a national jail insurrection similar to what happened here in the spring of 1990 when multiple prisons across the country exploded in violent disorder. After all, many of the precursors that existed then are now present once again: severe overcrowding, demoralised and overwhelmed staff, endemic brutality and squalor.” 

"Professor Ian Acheson, a former prison governor and author of Screwed: Britain's Prison Crisis and How To Escape It, was shocked when he came across the figures."