Are you even a proper veterans’ minister if you’re not on “resignation watch”? Al Carns is the current holder of that role, and he is conforming to the unspoken requirement in the job description for the minister to always be quite close to quitting in protest at the Government’s treatment of veterans.
This week, his “resignation watch” has been over how Labour plans to deal with the Legacy Act. A previous incumbent, Johnny Mercer, spent so much of his tenure on resignation watch that it was difficult to tell whether he was ever fully in the government or not.
The veterans’ minister is quite an odd role within any government: it usually goes to a veteran so that the minister has credibility and authority. The flipside of that is veterans still care more about their standing with their fellow servicemen and woman than they do about how Westminster views them, hence the 24-hour resignation watch.
The role has also had an interesting effect on other ministerial roles held by veterans of other sectors. For a good while now, resentment has been brewing in the violence against women and girls (VAWG) sector towards the Government’s commitment to its own pledge of halving VAWG within a decade.
The minister is Jess Phillips, well-known to the charities in this area. She came into Parliament having worked for Women’s Aid as a refuge manager in the West Midlands. Tackling domestic abuse and rape is clearly her main identity and source of motivation as a politician. So expectations were high when she became the minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls. Campaigners had grown used to trying to work out the cut of a new minister’s jib for a few months: here was a ready-made ally, right in the heart of the Home Office.
The sector now seems to have reached a point where many of its members are wondering if Phillips should also be on resignation watch in protest at the Government’s failure to make as much progress as expected on its pledge. They want to keep faith with the Phillips they know, a campaigner who, like Carns, isn’t prepared to compromise. But they are wondering when they will see her impact on government policy.
They were already contrasting Carns’ latest “resignation watch” with the relative compliance of their own minister when a surprise move from the Home Office this week sparked fury among campaigners.
They had not expected a £53m funding announcement for a programme called Drive, which aims to change the behaviour of particularly high risk perpetrators of domestic violence – but no accompanying money for their victims.
Ciara Bergman, chief executive of Rape Crisis England and Wales, tells me: “We were aware that there was a commitment to domestic abuse perpetrator interventions, but had been given no detail as to the scale or nature of the investment. Rape Crisis England and Wales had raised our concerns about the plight of women’s services on multiple occasions, but that was the point at which all our worst fears were realised.”
Drive is by its nature quite controversial: some campaigners think it is wrong to focus on only high-risk perpetrators when VAWG is so widespread. Others argue that it cannot exist in isolation from support for victims.
The Home Office points to an evaluation from 2019, which found that Drive cut physical abuse by 82 per cent, sexual abuse by 88 per cent, stalking behaviours by 75 per cent and jealous and controlling behaviours by 73 per cent. But a more recent report found that sexual abuse actually reduced more in the control group where perpetrators received no action, and that the reduction of other behaviours was only between 4-9 per cent higher for the Drive group than control group.
Underlying the angry reaction from charities across the sector including Women’s Aid, Rape Crisis England and Wales, Victim Support, Southall Black Sisters and others, is an anxiety that the Government just isn’t putting enough effort into a pledge that was always going to be nigh-on impossible to meet. One charity boss says: “A mission to halve VAWG wasn’t achievable, but it was exciting and galvanising. It has taken a year to completely erode this goodwill.”
Perhaps campaigners just need to wait a little bit longer before they turn on Phillips. After all, the Government hasn’t yet published its full strategy on VAWG, and I am told that this (delayed) document is now expected around the time of party conferences this autumn.
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It isn’t clear how ambitious it will end up being. It will be a cross-government strategy, forcing departments which have traditionally shrugged off VAWG as not their problem to engage fully, including Education, Health and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology.
The Home Office wants it to focus on prevention, with a source explaining: “In recent times, VAWG has been treated as an inevitability, with the focus only on how to respond to these crimes once they have occurred, rather than intervening early to prevent them happening in the first place. Effective support remains absolutely crucial as part of this mission, but we also need interventions to stop VAWG in its tracks. To meet this ambitious mission, we have to do things differently.”
Home Office sources argue that there has been important action already on policing, and protection orders, and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper has been travelling to other countries, including Spain, to examine how they tackle abuse and violence against women. Cooper repeatedly says that VAWG is the driving mission of her department.
Carns hasn’t resigned yet, of course: the threat is often more powerful than the act itself. Perhaps the level of disquiet within a sector that is currently on its knees as it tries to tackle VAWG will have a similar effect on the Government – or maybe just on Phillips herself.
Isabel Hardman is assistant editor of The Spectator magazine
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