Back to the party of law and order
Boris unveils crime crackdown as Election looms Sweeping new stop-and-search powers rolled out nationwide £2.5bn for an extra 10,000 prison places
BORIS JOHNSON t oday attempts to reclaim the Conservatives’ reputation as the party of law and order with a sweeping £2.5 billion crime clampdown amid Election fever at Westminster.
With soaring knife crime and gang violence blighting the country, the Prime Minister declares that ‘the time for pieties is over’ as he signals a hardline approach to restore control of the streets.
And he has put his staff on red alert for an Election this autumn.
Writing in The Mail on Sunday, Mr Johnson says: ‘We need to come down hard on crime. That means coming down hard on criminals.’ And he criticises ‘a growing culture of insolence’ on the part of thugs who believe they can destroy lives with impunity.
The Government will this week announce a sweeping roll- out of stop- and- search powers across the country, with an additional 8,000 officers granted powers to question and search suspects at will.
Mr Johnson frequently clashed with his predecessor Theresa May over stop and search that she vowed to reform, despite a growing knife crime epidemic.
Taking aim at his critics, Mr Johnson acknowledges that stop and search is controversial and that ‘Left-wing criminologists will object.’ But he insists: ‘The people who back this intervention most fervently are often the parents of the kids who are so tragically foolish as to go out on the streets equipped with a knife – endangering not only the lives of others but their own.’
And on top of his pledge to recruit 20,000 new police officers, Mr Johnson and Chancellor Sajid Javid today unveil £ 2.5 billion to update the creaking prison system with 10,000 extra prison places.
The increased capacity will be made up of new prisons as well as upgrading existing facilities, as promised in the Conservatives’ manifesto but until this week a broken pledge.
Mr Johnson told advisers on Friday that his administration will be judged on how it solves the knife crime crisis, and vowed to put his clampdown front and centre of a future Election campaign.
Westminster has been at panic stations since Mr Johnson took over Downing Street last month, with his wafer- thin grip on the Commons dramatically increasing the chances of an early Election. The Mail on Sunday can reveal that Mr Johnson’s team, led by Dominic Cummings, is preparing a ‘September offensive’ of policy ideas in preparation for a possible poll.
Mr Cummings told ministerial advisers last week to find every policy announcement planned for the autumn and winter and bring it forward to next month.
The order has vastly heightened Election fever in Westminster, with Mr Johnson’s fledgling administration facing a showdown with the Commons early next month that could prompt him to go to the country.
A Whitehall source said last night: ‘If it barks like an Election campaign it is an Election campaign.’ Another Downing Street insider added: ‘Even after we leave the EU on October 31, the maths in the Commons does not change. The country is ungovernable and that fact will not change.’ Privately, several Downing Street staff have told this newspaper that an early General Election is inevitable.
Crime, the NHS and education are consistently shown to be at the top of voter concerns, with Mr Johnson focusing the first three
‘Most important thing is to fund the police'
weeks of his premiership on increasing funding for schools and hospitals. Now turning his attention to crime, the PM will welcome police chiefs, judges and prison bosses to Downing Street tomorrow for a discussion on how to improve the criminal justice system and make sure criminals serve the time they are sentenced to.
Mr Johnson writes: ‘ When the police catch a violent criminal, it is vital they get the sentence they deserve. At present there are too many serious violent or sexual offenders who are coming out of prison long before they should.
‘In the last five years, we have seen literally hundreds of convicted rapists who have come out of prison commit another sexual offence... This cannot go on. I am afraid that as a society we have no choice but to insist on tougher sentencing laws for serious sexual and violent offenders, and for t hose who carry knives.
And adapting Tony Blair’s famous ‘ tough on the causes of crime’ slogan, he writes: ‘We need to be tough on all the causes of crime. But that effort is hopeless unless we are simultaneously tough on crime itself.’
Further distancing himself from his predecessor, the Prime Minister insists ‘the most important thing is to fund the police’. Mrs May consistently suggested crime reform was not simply a matter of increasing police budgets.
IT IS always welcome when a Prime Minister turns his attention to the problems of crime. For millions of people, the growing, unchecked menace of theft, violence, vandalism and street disorder is a pressing concern, and they often feel alone, abandoned and unheard.
Officials may dismiss this as ‘petty crime’ but it is not petty for those who suffer it.
So Boris Johnson is right to declare that the time for pieties is over. He is right to say that we need to reverse the balance of fear, so that we have a society i n which criminals are once again afraid of justice – rather than a country in which the lawabiding are afraid of criminals.
As our columnist Peter Hitchens reveals today, judges can now be reprimanded – by Tory Ministers – for not being nice enough to convicted criminals. What sort of balance of fear is that?
The problem with t he programme that the Premier discloses in his article for The Mail on Sunday is that it contains quite a few pieties of its own. We have heard many promises of tough sentences which are never actually served, and of more police on the beat, when the beat was abolished decades ago.
Politicians are not expected to be experts, but Mr Johnson must surely have noticed that the main problem with our police force is not its raw strength in numbers. The main difficulty arises from the policy of reacting to crime after it has happened rather than patrolling preventively to deter crime and disorder from happening in the first place.
This system is an utter flop. In fact, it generates work for itself. The more the police try to react to the crimes they have failed to deter, the longer the queue grows for their services, and the less they can do about it.
Something similar is true of our prisons. Groundbreaking research by Peter Cuthbertson for the Civitas think-tank shows that criminals do not in general experience prison until they are already hardened offenders.
His work exploded the widespread claim – repeated by Mr Johnson – that prisons are factories of crime, ‘making bad people worse’. For example, about 70 per cent of prison sentences are i mposed on criminals with at least seven previous convictions. An amazing 77 per cent of thefts do not result in prison time.
In an extraordinary paradox, the prisons are full because we use them too little and too late, so they fail to deter.
Growing evidence also suggests that the failure by police and courts to prevent the widespread use of cannabis may be linked with t he explosion of ultraviolence, not least the increasing use of knives. Mr Johnson is absolutely right to place crime and disorder in the tray marked ‘Action this Day’.
But action without serious thought and research will not bring long-term results.