CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson: "Every morning, men and women serving on the front line of His Majesty's Prison and Probation Service pull on a cheap uniform and go to work in what's been called the most hostile work environment in Europe.

The endemic violence in our jails means many of them are ending their shifts in hospital rather than home with their families.

A month ago, an officer went on duty on B wing in HMP Whitemoor, one of our maximum security prisons. He left in an ambulance and was put on a ventilator, unconscious, after a vicious assault."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "The high-security prison system – the specialist jails where hundreds of the worst offenders in the system such as predatory rapists, child murderers, organised crime bosses, and terrorists end up – is in trouble."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson interviewed: "The state of Britain’s prisons is under renewed scrutiny as report after report describes more and more jails as overcrowded, filthy places, rife with vermin and violence."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Synthetic drugs exploded across the prison estate causing devastation and helping entrench a drugs economy led by organised crime that is now almost too big and too lucrative to fail. My independent Government review of Islamist extremism revealed a senior management of the prison service defined by endless, useless layers of bureaucracy unable or unwilling to stop terrorists in the making. Instead of tackling these major problems, this invisible and unaccountable boss class busied itself with virtue signalling. I still can’t get over the Director General of the Prison Service piously ‘taking the knee’ outside a prison where you would hesitate to house cattle. A vivid representation of a law enforcement agency in terminal decline."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Whatever the latest banalities issued by the Ministry of Justice in response to claims by Steve Gallant – a hero of the London Bridge terror attack and former inmate of HMP Frankland – that Islamist gangs have orchestrated a shift in the “balance of power” at the prison, the state is not fully in charge of our prison system. Nowhere near. Years of criminally stupid austerity cuts to front-line staff, supine leadership and incompetence by unaccountable senior mandarins have combined to produce a battle for power inside jails that we are losing."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "We know our prison system is awash with drugs but just what are they smoking at the Ministry of Justice? A shocking story in the Times yesterday revealed what a desperate state Britain’s jails are in. Paul Morgan-Bentley, an undercover reporter, was hired at breakneck speed to work as a uniformed Operational Support Grade (OSG) escort at beleaguered HMP Bedford. He lifted the lid on a security nightmare."

CEP Senior Advisor Ian Acheson writes: "Soldiers are trained in war fighting and they have no powers of arrest so it is likely that they could only be used in very limited circumstances, for example during a raid on suspected terrorists. It is plainly a necessary but insufficient stop gap to ensure that we are still able to respond to an attack by violent extremists, still judged by our security services to be ‘highly likely.’"