If there’s one sure
sign that a Prime Minister thinks he or she is sailing in troubled waters, it’s
when he or she reaches out for the Golden Oldies. And there are few Oldies quite
as Golden as the mantra about ‘more bobbies on the beat’ which is, apparently,
Starmer’s topic
of the day. It’s a well-played tune, previously deployed by Rishi
Sunak, Liz
Truss, Boris
Johnson, Theresa
May, David
Cameron, Gordon
Brown, Tony Blair,
and John
Major. I’m pretty sure that I remember it from Thatcher and Callaghan as
well, although the online fossil record is harder to follow from such primitive
times.
There are another
two certainties which follow on from any promise to increase the numbers of
police on patrol. The first is that it won’t happen. And the second is that it
would make little difference, even if it did. Crime is a complex phenomenon, which
has no one simple cause, and whilst seeing more police walking around,
preferably armed at least with tasers and big batons, appeals to a certain
electoral demographic (a demographic which obviously suffers from a combination
of short memory and gullibility), there is no real evidence that it makes a huge
difference to the volume of crime – and it may not even be the best way of
using any additional resources which can be dedicated to policing. As one anonymous police source put it, “We’d rather take the money with no strings
attached and invest in other things”.
One report
on Sir Starmer’s anticipated pearls says that the measures are being introduced
amid “fears there is a lack of visible police presence which is driving
street crime and in turn more serious and violent offences”. It’s utter
nonsense, of course. Lack of visible policing doesn’t ‘drive’ crime, it merely
makes it marginally easier to commit. The ‘drivers’ of crime are many and
varied, but include drug abuse, greed, poverty and desperation, to say nothing of crimes of passion. There was once
a politician
who promised to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”, but
when he got into office, he discovered that the second was too difficult and would
require too much effort, and the first was more easily addressed by empty
rhetoric than actual action. Still, empty rhetoric makes for a good chorus line
in a golden oldie.
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