MPs’ anger as Trump blames UK crime rise on Islamic terrorism
DONALD Trump sparked fury yesterday after linking an increase in recorded crime in Britain with ‘radical Islamic terror’.
The US President tweeted about official figures showing police had registered a total of 5.2million offences – up 13 per cent on the previous year.
He wrote: ‘Just out report: “United Kingdom crime rises 13 per cent annually amid spread of Radical Islamic terror.” Not good, we must keep America safe!’
His interpretation of the statistics was met with an angry backlash by cross-party MPs, who accused him of ‘ignorance’ over the issue and told him to ‘butt out’ of UK domestic matters.
Tory MP Crispin Blunt said: ‘I think it is a bizarre lack of selfawareness from a supporter of keeping Americans armed to the teeth with wholly predictable consequences. Less surprising is the ignorance of the unreliability of using police-recorded crime as a basis for analysis.’
Mr Blunt, former chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, added: ‘Linking overall crime levels to Islamic extremism is utterly bonkers. Fake news, to coin a phrase.’
Labour MP Yvette Cooper, who chairs the Commons home affairs committee, wrote in response to the tweet: ‘Hate crime in UK up 29 per cent – sadly encouraged by ignorant tweets like this. Not good POTUS [President of the US].’ Winston Churchill’s grandson, Tory MP Nicholas Soames, described Mr Trump as a ‘twerp’ and suggested that he should focus on fixing American gun laws.
Labour’s Chris Bryant MP said: ‘Butt out of it Mister President.
‘You have more murders in New York or Chicago every year than we do in the whole country so we’re not going to take any lessons from you.
‘And you clearly don’t understand the difference between causation and correlation.’
Caroline Lucas, co-leader of the Green Party, retweeted Mr Trump’s post, and called on the Prime Minister to respond, writing: ‘OK @theresa-may, this is a test. Will you publicly condemn this outright fear-mongering?’
The Office for National Statistics
‘Utterly bonkers’
report stated: ‘The 13 per cent increase in police-recorded crime from the previous year, reflects a range of factors including continuing improvements to crime recording and genuine increases in some crime categories, especially those that are well-recorded.’
The figures cover England and Wales, not the whole of the UK as Mr Trump asserted.
Of the 664 murders reported – down 2 per cent on the previous year – 35 were related to the London Bridge, Westminster and Manchester attacks. The figure means only 5 per cent of such killings were due to terrorist atrocities.
There was a 59 per cent rise in the number of attempted murder offences, with 1,147 recorded last year, according to the report.
The ONS said the rise was largely due to the London and Manchester attacks, where police recorded 294 attempted murders.
Neither the ONS nor crime minister Sarah Newton suggested that Islamic terror had contributed to the increased numbers overall.
The latest statistics on hate crime were published in a Home Office report this week. In 2016/17 police recorded 80,393 offences where hate was deemed a motivating factor, compared with 62,518 in 2015/16.
Mr Trump has repeatedly pointed to terror in Europe as evidence of the risk from jihadists in the US.
But his tweets on terrorism in Britain have strained ties with London and put a planned state visit on ice. Last month Mrs May publicly rebuked the President for speculating on the causes of a botched London train bombing.