Blundering Abbott again gets her numbers wrong

SHADOW home secretary Diane Abbott weighed into London’s knife crime crisis yesterday – with a bogus statistic.

The gaffe-prone Labour MP laid the blame for the capital’s soaring death rate firmly at Whitehall’s door, saying it was time the Government took lessons in tackling knife thugs.

Writing in a newspaper yesterday, she warned against random stop and search by police and called for a more “holistic” approach.

She said: “We need to apply lessons learned from other parts of the UK and abroad in the fight against serious crime, including knife and gun crime.”

To emphasise her point, she highlighted how knife crime has been tackled in Glasgow, the biggest city in a country labelled “the Diane Abbott blamed Whitehall for the rise most violent in the developed world” by the United Nations in 2005. Interviewed later at the scene of Israel Ogunsola’s murder in her constituency, Ms Abbott continued: “Here in Hackney, we’ve lost one in 10 of our police officers since 2010.” And referring to the approach taken in Glasgow, she added: “But there also needs to be more done in youth work, in schools, even mental health,” adding: “They have brought the number of deaths from knife crime down to zero last year.” But knife killings continue to blight Scotland, including Glasgow. Scottish Tory MSP Liam Kerr said it was a “patently inaccurate” claim, adding: “Knife-related violence remains a huge problem.”