Jeremy Corbyn has slammed in comments to The Guardian current UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for politicizing the deaths of two prison rehabilitation advocates in a terror attack on London Bridge last week and claimed that more must be done to fund prisons and review the probation service
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 06th December, 2019) Jeremy Corbyn has slammed in comments to The Guardian current UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson for politicizing the deaths of two prison rehabilitation advocates in a terror attack on London Bridge last week and claimed that more must be done to fund prisons and review the probation service.
Johnson has used the deaths of Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones, who were advocates for a prison rehabilitation and re-education scheme called Learning Together, to call for tougher sentences for terror offenses after it was revealed that the attacker, Usman Khan, was previously convicted on terror charges.
"I think it's right to ask those questions but not to leap to immediate conclusions. I think he did it far too much," the Labour leader said.
Speaking to the newspaper before a rally in Birmingham, Corbyn outlined that more must be done to review the entire judiciary process in the United Kingdom, and that the deaths of Merritt and Jones should not be politicized ahead of next week's general election.
"I deliberately tried not to politicise it. I simply said I think there are questions to answer about the way our prison service operates. The underfunding of the prison service, the role of the parole board and the role of the probation service," the UK Labour leader said, as quoted by the newspaper.
On Monday, Jack Merritt's father, Dave, published a strong piece in The Guardian in which he demanded that his son's death not be used in political campaigns to increase punitive prison sentences.
"He would be seething at his death, and his life, being used to perpetuate an agenda of hate that he gave his everything fighting against. We should never forget that," Dave Merritt wrote in the newspaper column.
Usman Khan, convicted in 2012 for terrorism offenses and released in December 2018, stabbed Merritt, 25, and Jones, 23, on London Bridge last Friday. Both victims later died from their injuries, while the attacker was shot dead by police. Merritt and Jones were both Cambridge graduates and worked for Learning Together, a University of Cambridge-led scheme that advocates for prison-based education and rehabilitation.
