Labour on crime. More Tory than Tories

It’s not just that Labour isn’t promising more money for services that desperately need it. On crime, they’re also promising to spend huge amounts where it’s not needed.

13,000 more police, costing £360m a year, even though we’ve got more police than ever in history, and crime has fallen by three quarters since the 1990s. More prison places to relieve a system near breakdown, with at least 17,000 more expected prisoners by 2028, at a cost of around £2.5bn plus £200m a year. Sounds good. But: numbers found guilty in the courts have fallen; prison numbers soar because of the never-ending increase in use of custody for the ever-diminishing numbers convicted, a pointless process for which Labour is every bit as responsible as the Tories. (Anyway,  it is utterly impossible to build that fast, as every Justice Secretary for the past decade has found.) If instead we used custody at the level of, say, Germany, we’d be closing prisons, not building them. And Germany is not awash with the blood of innocents.

So, cynical vote catching - and, ultimate irony, the public seem wise to this, with crime barely making it into the top 10 of peoples’ issues of concern.

At a time of continued, destructive austerity, Labour are throwing billions we don’t have at precisely the wrong targets.