Poppy Coburn is a journalist.
It’s a strange time indeed when the Labour Left and Conservative Right join hands to unite against a common enemy: the so-called sensible centre. But that’s exactly what’s happened this week, after the Labour Party’s comms machine released adverts attacking Rishi Sunak for failing to act on crime.
“Do you think adults convicted of sexually assaulting children should go to prison?” reads one tagline, next to a smiling photograph of the Prime Minister. “Rishi Sunak doesn’t. Under the Tories, 4,500 adults convicted of sexually assaulting children under 16 served no prison time. Labour will lock up dangerous child abusers”.
The response was swift and sharp. John McDonnell, the Corbyn-era Shadow Chancellor, said ““This is not the sort of politics a Labour Party confident of its own values and preparing to govern should be engaged in.” Rory Stewart, the centrist former Conservative Justice Minister, condemned it as “nasty politics”. Even Lee Anderson, darling of the Tory Right, described the advert as “vile and desperate”. Some may think that a politician known for his wholesale embrace of “Nasty Party” policies such capital punishment would do well not to moralise at Labour. But no matter: Anderson has near-unanimous backing for his position on the campaign – at least amongst the Westminster set.
Never mind the general public, who might be more concerned with the substance of the attack rather than the tone. Starmer clearly believes that the campaign was the right choice, since he has refused to condemn it. Perhaps the fact that the original advert has already racked up 21 million views helped him hold firm.
Yvette Cooper, the shadow Home Secretary, made no attempt to justify the campaign. Instead, she distanced herself by claiming that she wasn’t forewarned about the release by Labour’s strategy team. At least Emily Thornbury came to Starmer’s defence – although the Labour leader may have wished she didn’t. In a disastrous Radio 4 interview on Monday, she floundered after being confronted with the fact that Starmer sat on the sentencing body as Director of Public Prosecutions that liberalised restrictions on child sex abusers.
In fairness, the accusations of hypocrisy aren’t without foundation. The failure to deal with grooming gangs targeting white working class girls, in part due to political correctness, occurred under Labour-controlled local councils. This abuse is still occuring. And violent crime has continued to rise in London under the tenure of Sadiq Khan. This can all be true, without removing agency from the party that has governed for the past 13 years.
The problem with Labour’s push to be seen as the party of law and order is that, according to their own openly-admitted statements, they have no desire to embrace the ‘nasty’ policies that actually ensure criminals are removed from public life. Far less attention has been given to Thornbury’s other admission in her interview: that Labour has no plans to fund the development of more prisons.
As Michael Howard, who oversaw a 16.8 per cent decrease in recorded crime, once said: “prison works”. Getting tough on the causes of crime is all well and good. But all the good will (and expensive social engineering programs) in the world can’t erase criminality entirely. 80 per cent of recorded crime is committed by repeat offenders. There’s a legitimate argument to be made that prisons as they currently operate fail to tackle the problem of reoffending. But they at least remove the said reoffenders from public life, if only temporarily. The prospect of even this basic physical deterrent being weakened is hardly a cheery one.
Labour has made much of cuts to police budgets that occurred under the Conservatives. A lack of cash is a major impediment to the proper processing of justice, and the criminal court backlogs, paired with chronic overcrowding in prisons, are problems created in large part due to a failure to allocate appropriate funds. But the problem is more complex than to be fixed simply by throwing money at the police and the courts.
You’ll be lucky to get a chance to even speak to an officer after you’ve been mugged. But somehow the cash-strapped service can spare six to raid a pub over an offensive doll collection. A report from More In Common published earlier this year found that nearly seven in ten people believe that the police have given up on trying to solve minor crimes altogether. This polling, paired with Public First’s discovery that 41 per cent of people believe that the police are more interested in “being woke” than solving crime, reflects a dangerous trend.
Mismatched responses are thanks in part to the College of Policing (founded in 2012), which introduced the much-maligned practice of recording ‘non-crime hate incidents’. While their recommendations are technically just guidance, that hasn’t stopped the officers from recording 120,000 Britons under the framework. It wouldn’t be enough for Labour to find the funding for thousands more police staffers if they don’t push back against bureaucratic overreach.
History tells us that Starmer is unlikely to bother with this. It was legislation primarily introduced under New Labour that helped distort the remit of police forces from traditional crime-fighters to meddlesome social workers. Thanks to Section 127 of 2003 Communications Act, the police have been given powers to arrest someone for “an offence by persistently making use of a public communications network for the purpose of causing annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another person”.
The enforcement of this law has become highly politicised, with a Catholic mother-of-five arrested for allegedly making anonymous posts critical of transgender ideology. Those in charge of our criminal justice system need to be crystal-clear that their primary job is not to indulge progressive activists or engage in social engineering, but to catch criminals and protect the public. Labour’s push for “tougher” hate crime laws is unlikely to make this vision reality.
One of the party’s campaign ads focused on how 937 adults convicted of possessing a gun with intent to harm were spared prison. Starmer has called previously for tougher gun laws targeting legal owners after gun-related gang crime. That might seem uncontroversial – until you realise that Starmer’s Shadow Cabinet ministers have repeatedly lent support to activist groups that seek to reduce police powers to crack down on those very same gun-toting gangs, under the auspices of reducing racial prejudice. This is nothing less than anarcho-tyranny, where the full oppressive power of the state clamps down on minor infractions while allowing dangerous criminals to operate with impunity.
Smearing Labour’s tough-on-crime posturing as being “nasty politics’ is a foolish endevour. If Labour truly does intend to lock up those who commit serious, life-ruining crimes, we should all welcome it. Unlike utopian dreams of police abolition and total rehabilitation, the evidence is clear that it can make innocent people safer.
But the problem with Labour’s posturing is that it looks like just that: posturing. We could end up entering the 2024 election with the Labour perceived as the more right-leaning option for those who care about public safety – in direct contradiction to their revealed policy preferences. Scrambling to score points against Labour for advocating eminently sensible positions only exposes how ideologically hollow the modern Conservative Party has become. Perhaps that was the intention of the former’s campaign all along.