Editorial: ​The Wandsworth prison escape raises questions about societal priorities

All of those responses are obviously correct. But they miss the point, in a way. Morale in prisons such as HMP Wandsworth is low. There is a grave difficulty in recruiting appropriate staff. There is also possible collusion in the escape, according to the Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley.

But while collusion, if identified, will be the central feature of this story there are also, as is the case with the PSNI and indeed the NHS in Northern Ireland, major value questions too. What, as a society, are our priorities? Do we really want a proper detention system or do we believe that culprits are not really to blame for their crimes? Khalife, it must be said, is only a suspect, yet the crimes of which he is accused are grave, including planting a fake bomb at an RAF base and gathering information that might be useful to terrorists or enemies of the UK.

We don’t want to pay for prisons, yet, periodically, we demand tougher sentences. We don’t want to pay for carers, yet periodically we demand much better care provision for the elderly.

It is not sufficient to say that there is no money. There is plenty of money. There is in NI alone scores of millions of pounds each year to pay for legacy investigations. There is inefficient and expensive hospital provision, despite health experts having called for reform for two decades. There is also a protected white collar public administration class with Rolls Royce pensions. Yet Stormont never even properly debated the idea that occasionally you need to trim back in one area of public life to fund another.

Expect chaos in many services for years to come.