One of the problems with how politics works is that we elect people to govern us who on the whole don’t know very much of practical use. They say they want to bring unemployment down, inflation down, growth up, prosperity up.

And they all say they want to be tough on crime.

Over the last 15 years I’ve chaired a number of bodies aimed at improving the criminal justice system. Ministers and secretaries of state would always take meetings with me when I asked. It’s staggering what I’ve heard some of them say. One asked me why businesses weren’t offering inmates the chance to come and work on day release so they could get a taste of a life away from crime, to which I replied: “That would be because your department stopped that programme six months ago.”

I told another minister there was a very successful collaboration in America between students in a university who would go to their local prison and teach inmates skills in coding with many ending up following a career doing that, to which he asked: “How can prisoners understand coding?”

With the Labour Party (my party) being led by a former Director of Public Prosecutions, maybe I shouldn’t be so disappointed with their announcement yesterday that a future government led by them would re-visit sentencing and involve victims of crimes to have more of a say in how perpetrators are treated. Nothing wrong with that, in fact a welcome move. But it’s not going to change much.

The party sadly doesn’t seem to have learned much since Tony Blair’s vote-winning slogan “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” as they also said yesterday they wanted to understand the routes to crime more, such as whether people broken homes were more likely to drift that way, which sounds more like an A level student’s essay assignment because if they had done their homework they would have known there’s stacks of evidence already available about this.

I once wrote an article about the entrepreneurial skills of gang leaders and that 79% of prisoners in a survey said they wanted to run their own (legitimate) business, twice the national average. In Texas a prison had set up a fund to back inmates who had decent business plans, again with students helping them. In another article I suggested there should be ways here for us to do the same, though instead of students we invited big firms like PWC and EY to get volunteering placements going and on the back of that I was invited to No 10 to meet one of the PM’s advisers who told me they really liked the idea and encouraged me to pursue this.

He quickly added: “Of course, we can’t be seen to support this.” And that was because they couldn’t fear the wrath of The Daily Mail.

It seems Labour’s announcement yesterday was at least in part to court Daily Mail readers, with the shadow justice secretary saying he was once a victim of a knife crime and therefore understood the desire for retribution.

I haven’t seen anything from Labour about the biggest route to stopping people re-offending is to train them inside with skills to get them jobs on the outside – about 70% of young prison leavers are back in within a year but that figure drops to roughly 15% if they have a job. It’s costing us billions and making us no less safe.

Maybe they needed to say the things they did yesterday because that what’s required to get them elected. I hope they do and then they embark upon more radical measures. Those of you who are kind enough to read his blog regularly know I like to quote from shows I’ve watched on TV. Yesterday I jotted down this gem from The West Wing: “Let’s achieve things we can’t imagine yet.”