Who will win the summer battle over crime – Boris Johnson or Keir Starmer?
The prime minister hits back as Labour accuses him of being ‘soft on crime’, writes John Rentoul
It feels as if politics has gone back in time. Not just to the time before Covid-19, but to the time before Brexit, before David Cameron, and before 13 years of New Labour government. The latest photo opportunities for the prime minister and the home secretary with police officers take us back to the mid-1990s, when Michael Howard and the shadow home secretary, Tony Blair, fought it out over crime.
People’s fear of crime was a huge unexploited issue for the opposition then, and Blair made the most of it. It is not such a big deal today – it doesn’t feature in the top 10 “issues facing Britain today” in the latest Ipsos Mori survey. But then people used to say that about the question of EU membership, and activists who canvassed in the four recent by-elections will tell you that crime and the wider issue of antisocial behaviour kept coming up on the doorstep.
Keir Starmer and Nick Thomas-Symonds, Blair’s successors as Labour leader and shadow home secretary respectively, were astute enough to spot this early and to attack one of the government’s potential weaknesses. With a simple message about cancelling the plan for a national yacht and spending the money on measures against antisocial behaviour instead, Labour put Boris Johnson and Priti Patel on the defensive, reworking Blair’s slogan to accuse them of being “soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime”.
What really takes us back to the politics of the 1990s, though, is today’s response from the government. This isn’t an issue like the pandemic, where the opposition has to tread a line between cooperation and constructive opposition; or like Brexit, where there is a huge gulf between the values of both sides. This is old-fashioned centre-ground politics, where both parties claim to want the same things, and the opposition has a built-in advantage because the government is blamed for every stabbing and every stolen car raced down suburban streets.
What is striking about today’s launch of a government initiative that is instantly forgettable (I have just looked it up, it is called the “Beating Crime Plan” – that really is rubbish) is that it shows that the prime minister is as attuned to subtle chords of public opinion as he ever was. This is further evidence that, behind the chaotic and jocular exterior, lurks the “other” Boris Johnson, identified by Dominic Cummings, his former chief adviser. The “other” Boris Johnson is motivated by self-preservation, hyper-sensitive to opinion polls and focus groups, and ruthless in defending himself against threats from inside and outside his own party.
The opinion polls have turned against Johnson recently. That may not last: if the UK has passed the peak of the Delta wave of infections, his decision to go ahead with stage four of the easing of lockdown restrictions will be vindicated and he may benefit from a minor boost of post-viral euphoria.
And the recent narrowing of the Conservative lead has been driven by issues other than crime, of course, but a governing politician in permanent campaigning mode – Johnson has learnt from Blair who learnt from Bill Clinton – has to react quickly to reinforce against any potential vulnerability.
Hence the photos and announcement of “new” measures. The measures themselves are pretty thin, and feel like leftovers from 1990s “headline-grabbing initiatives”, of the kind Blair demanded from his policy wonks. Labour is right to dismiss many of them as re-announcements, but on the principle that the median voter doesn’t notice anything a politician says unless they say it a hundred times, some of them will cut through. The idea of a named officer being responsible for following up each reported crime, for example, probably does chime with the common complaint that it’s not worth reporting minor crime.
The stiffer test for Johnson and Patel, though, is whether they can deliver the kind of improvements that voters will notice and which can be used credibly in campaigning at the next election. This is not so much a matter of winning votes as of denying Labour the chance to attack.
But, as Blair discovered in government, such progress is much harder to deliver than it looks. Johnson will need his new No 10 Delivery Unit to be as successful as the Blair-era unit, which it copies. He and Patel will also need to turn round relations with the public servants who have to deliver results on the ground – in this case, police officers, whose trade union, the Police Federation, has just gone into full opposition mode, declaring that it has no confidence in the home secretary.
This is going to be a hard-fought political battle all the way from now until polling day.
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