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Professor John Robertson OBA
What does the Scotsman not want you to know?
The maximum capacity of Scotland’s prisons is 8 475. 166 spaces available still – tight but not a crisis.
The UK Labour government is releasing prisoners at FIVE times the rate of the SNP government and including those serving more than twice as long as allowed by SNP government scheme
According to BBC Breakfast 11 August 2025, the Labour Government has released 26 000 prisoners early and 100s of them were serving sentences of more than 10 years, since they came to power one year ago.
While there are no statistics for that same precise period, in 2024, according to the BBC, the Scottish Government only released 477 early and only those serving less than 4 years: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c80e8n8pgv4o
The arithmetic to enable comparison will be all-too-familiar to you, I’m sure.
With 10 times the population, you might expect England to have only released 10 times 477 or around 5 000 but under Labour it has released 26 000, more than FIVE times as many!
Nearly 250 fewer in Scotland’s prisons after 18 years free of Con/Labour control
In 2024, a Council of Europe SPACE-I collection occurred on the 1st January and shows that Scotland continued to have one of the highest prison population rates in western Europe. On that date there were 140.5 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants in Scotland. On this occasion, while in Northern Ireland it remained far lower at 94.2 per 100,000 inhabitants, the prison population rate in England & Wales was slightly higher than that in Scotland at 145.0 per 100,000.1
‘Slightly higher?’ Once more, even among highly trained professionals, an inability to understand what small ratio differences in big populations can really mean for those from whom the data are collected.
A difference of 4.5 per 100 000 has to be multiplied by how many 100 000s there are in Scotland’s population of 5.5 million – 55. So, Scotland has 247.5 fewer in prison than it would have had the Cons and Labour been managing its prisons these last 18 years.
Source:
- chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.gov.scot/binaries/content/documents/govscot/publications/statistics/2024/11/scottish-prison-population-statistics-2023-24/documents/report-pdf/report-pdf/govscot%3Adocument/Scottish%2BPrison%2BPopulation%2BStatistics%2B2023-24%2B-%2BBulletin.pdf
Talking-up Scotland 'Albatraz' 
While you are, of course right to point out the low quality of reporting, with the political intent of misleading the public – and long may you continue – we really need to start sending fewer people to prison and to boost educational and rehabilitative services.
We also need to restore public services to the levels they were 20 years ago, and end the murderous policies of austerity. Poverty is and always has been a major driver of crime.
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Austerity being an English government policy imposed on Scotland of course, and for far too long now. Only independence can enable the Scottish government to make more progress in reducing and ending poverty, rather than having to mitigate against that disgraceful English government austerity.
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Were public services at a higher level 20years ago,? In Scotland? Like when people were dying of hospital acquired infections because the English Labour party in control of Holyrood, outsourced cleaning services to private profit driven companies. Hmm.
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Yes, public services were significantly better 20 years ago. The Blair and Brown governments made a significant redistribution of wealth towards the less affluent in society, particularly in education (early years in particular), health and employment rights such as the minimum wage.
However, because the Iraq War and other military adventures, plus Thatcherite rhetoric they refused to make the political argument for greater redistribution and the media portrayed their action as ‘stealth taxes’, which Labour did not challenge. In addition, Blair had an unhealthy relationship with Rupert Murdoch and his papers, Brown was quite cosy with the editor of the Daily Mail and David Blunkett was writing articles for the Telegraph.
They accepted the Thatcherite economic paradigm and the mendacious concept of ‘meritocracy ’..
Consequently, when Labour was voted out in 2010, following the financial crash, the Tories and Lib Dems portrayed Labour as economically inept and had ruined the economy. So the cruel policy of austerity was implemented, which, in effect meant scrapping within a year most of the redistributive policies. Thereafter, public services shrank.
As a senior manager in education during the period of the Blair/Brown governments, I had more money to deploy than during the previous 25/30 years.
As well as Blair and Brown, Labour had a lot of very able politicians who could, if allowed, set out a plausible alternative narrative, but, under the baleful influence of Mandelson, chose not to. The current Labour government does not have unchanged talent and has no coherent story to tell other than the vacuous,slogan ‘Change’ and a series of cliches – iron clad, laser focussed, ruthless….
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