HOME SECRETARY Priti Patel’s absurd claim yesterday that Labour’s policies would lead to an extra 52 murders a year was cooked up by the Conservative’s research department, so of course can’t be taken seriously, but it will still be used to reinforce the ruling party’s “law and order” narrative.

What the Tories don’t want you to know is that it’s actually their savage cuts to the criminal justice system and failed probation privatisation that have put the public at greater risk.

Everyone knows about the steep drop in police numbers, but at Prime Minister’s Questions back in March, Jeremy Corbyn revealed: “The number of rapes, murders and other serious crimes committed by offenders on parole has risen by more than 50 per cent since the privatisation of the probation service was introduced four years ago.”

He was using figures from The Guardian, which had reported that the number of reviews into serious further offences (SFOs), which are triggered when a convicted offender under supervision is charged with an SFO, rose from 409 in 2012/13 to 627 in 2017/18, according to Ministry of Justice figures.

And the number of these reviews that involved murder has almost doubled in just four years, from 71 in 2014 to 132 in 2018, an increase of 61 — which puts Patel’s wild speculation into perspective.

Shadow justice secretary Richard Burgon hit the nail on the head in May when he told a Commons debate: “The Conservatives’ part-privatisation of probation has been a reckless and costly experiment that has failed to protect the public, fragmenting and damaging an award-winning service.”

And he added that “serious reoffending has soared, supervision is severely overstretched and hundreds of millions of pounds have been wasted on bailing out a broken system.”

Just two days later, the government finally admitted defeat and announced that all offender management would return to public hands by 2021. But when it comes to undermining rehabilitation, the Tories are guilty of far more than just breaking up probation.

Mass redundancies in the prison service this decade, which saw the loss of 7,000 officers and an astonishing 80,000 years of cumulative experience, have created what can only be described as a state of emergency in our prisons.

Violence has gone through the roof, with the number of reported assaults in England and Wales soaring from 14,335 in 2010 to 34,223 in 2018 — a 140 per cent rise. Attacks on prison staff have increased even faster, from 2,848 to 10,213 in the same period — a 260 per cent rise.

And as Labour leftwinger Grahame Morris told the Commons in October: “Unless prisons are safe, secure and decent, rehabilitation is simply impossible. Our prisons have become, in many cases, universities of crime, with career criminals in control of prison landings.”

Although the government launched a desperate recruitment drive three years ago, there are still 2,500 fewer prison officers than in 2010 — and staffing levels have actually started falling again since the start of this year.

And while the prime minister claims he’s investing £2.5 billion into the service, almost all of this is for building more prisons, not fixing the ones we already have.

His pledge to create 10,000 new prison places is one of the Tories’ most recycled — and broken — promises ever. As shadow chancellor John McDonnell asked in his response to the government’s spending review in September: “Are they the same 10,000 prison places promised by previous justice secretaries in 2016, 2017 and yet again in 2018?”

Only £100 million of this money is for upgrading security — new scanners, for example — but although this might stop some drugs entering prisons through the main gate, criminals have many other delivery methods, such as stuffing dead rats and pigeons and throwing them over walls.

If the government is serious about tackling the prisons crisis, then it needs to invest in officers to stop them continuing to leave the service in droves. Prisoner education, training and other activities — even meetings with family or lawyers — are increasingly cancelled at short notice due to staff shortages.

Morale and retention of prison officers are at rock bottom — not just because of the soaring levels of workplace violence but also because they have seen their pay cut in real terms for almost a decade, their retirement age has risen to 68 and they are banned from taking any form of industrial action — even working to rule — to remedy this.

As McDonnell asked the Chancellor in September: “How many assaults on staff have taken place because of the government’s cuts to prison staff over the past nine years? Will he, or someone in the government, ever apologise to the Prison Officers Association for ignoring its warnings about the effect of staff cuts on safety in our prisons?”

The government should also apologise to all of us for putting the public in danger by damaging our prison and probation services — instead of stoking up baseless fears and smears about the opposition.

This Thursday, we have the chance to make it clear you can’t do justice on the cheap. Everyone needs to know that, when it comes to law and order, the Tories have let us all down.

Charley Allan organises the Justice Unions Parliamentary Group.