Mrs May needs a win, and I know just the thing…
‘It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” So goes the well-known Warren Buffett quote. Conservatives, please sit up and take notice. Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last week saw a 10 per cent rise in police recorded crime in England and Wales.
The crimes that have risen ranges from theft to knife attack, but the one that stood out was acid assaults. Acid attacks have gone up by a tenth across the country. Looking at the London figures, the spike is particularly alarming – more than
73 per cent. This mode of attack is “becoming a fashionable crime”, according to a London Assembly member. It is hard to imagine a more shocking criminal innovation, guaranteed to appal, and it needs to be nipped in the bud.
To say very little is going well for the Government at the moment is an understatement. Losing a majority while preparing to take the nation through Brexit negotiations was never going to be easy to bounce back from. Reports of senior ministers struggling to conceal their ambition and impatience with a weakened leader dealt a further blow to the authority of the Prime Minister – and, by extension, the Government.
Then there are the absurd demands to produce tangible results after a mere four days of intensely complex Brexit negotiations. It is a rare person who’d be willing to swap lives with Theresa May at this point in time, which, ironically, is providing her with whatever little job security she has.
But none of this can be allowed to distract the Prime Minster from grasping the nettle on this rise in crime rate and showing real leadership. In fact, if the Prime Minister could muster the strength, then tackling this particular challenge of acid attacks and fighting off the danger of a reputation for being soft on crime in general could be the very thing to save her premiership from going down as one of the worst in history.
It should make instinctive good sense to her, too, resonating with her declared agenda of promoting social justice. Violent crimes tend disproportionately to affect people living in deprived areas and ethnic minorities – a third of the acid attack victims in London were Asian, for example.
Deliveroo and UberEat drivers – who were repeat victims in the latest spate of acid attacks – called for a crackdown in a protest outside Parliament last week. These are the very much the “JAMs” – those just about managing – whom Theresa May sought to champion when she first took office. Now is her chance. Firm measures must be considered, such as harsher sentences for this barbaric crime and sanctions for repeat offenders.
Unchecked, the insidious return of violent crime would be immeasurably damaging, reversing a critical trend which has made our cities great places to study, settle down, raise families and do business. No party can hope to win an election or govern with a reputation for being weak on law and order. Dear Conservatives, set your minds to reversing this worrying new trend in the crime rate and you might be able to weather this political storm. FOLLOW Dia Chakravarty on Twitter @DiaChakravarty;
at telegraph.co.uk/opinion
Cars crossing from Italy into France are being stopped and searched. Their drivers and passengers are being interrogated and made to show their national identity documents. So much for open borders. Presumably France is being permitted to puncture the spirit of the Schengen agreement because Emmanuel Macron is the current darling of European Union optimists.
He is taking apparent liberties with what Michel Barnier constantly reminds us is the sacred EU principle of free movement of people, for which the leaders of countries such as Poland and Hungary would be castigated. Mr Macron and his border enforcement teams would, of course, argue that these procedures are not designed to prevent the populations of member states from exercising their right to live and work anywhere within the EU, but to prevent an unlimited influx of migrants from the rest of the world being transported across the continent illegally.
That justification for the vigorous policing of the crossing point between the migrant camp at Ventimiglia on the Italian side and the open country of To order prints or signed copies of any Telegraph cartoon, go to telegraph.co. uk/cartoonprints or call 0191 603 0178 telegraph. newsprints.co.uk