Crime

It always amazes me that people think it is normal and acceptable to have hate-crime legislation. To have laws which allow for the harsher punishment of people who entertain prejudiced thoughts while committing an offence. To have it written into the actual statute books that the man who punches a Buddhist because he hates Buddhism can be punished more severely than the man who punches a Buddhist because he hates that individual Buddhist for some reason. When are we going to twig that this represents the punishment of thought, of ideology, of belief (warped belief, but still)? I don’t like that Britain has become a country in which people, especially the political class, think it is okay for the state to punish individuals for what they think.

Historically the Conservative party has been known as the party of law and order. It is now in the process of losing that reputation and Home Secretary Amber Rudd’s recent remarks show why. Stung by complaints that cutting the number of police officers by over 20,000 since 2010 has contributed to the rise in violent crime, she said: ‘In the early Noughties, when serious violent crimes were at their highest, police numbers were rising. In 2008, when knife crime was far greater than the lows we saw in 2013/14, police numbers were close to the highest we’d seen in decades.’ Reduced resources were not, therefore, to blame for rising violence.

The former director of research at Cambridge Analytica, the data-mining firm notoriously suspended by Facebook for harvesting details of up to 87 million Facebook accounts without their consent, has told Andrew Marr that the 2016 referendum on the UK's membership of the EU should be re-contested. Wylie's suggestion comes after it was highlighted that Vote Leave - the official Leave campaign - had employed the services of AggregateIQ (AIQ), a company which Wylie claims to have founded in order to support Cambridge Analytica. AIQ was also suspended from Facebook on Saturday for improperly receiving users' data, charges which AIQ denies.

With more than fifty murders in London already this year and knife crime up by 21% in England and Wales according to the latest figures, there’s a clear need for action on violent crime. As I write in The Sun this morning, the government’s long awaited violent crime reduction strategy is out next week. The Home Secretary Amber Rudd briefed the Cabinet on this strategy a few weeks ago. Cabinet Ministers tell me that it is impressive but very much focused on early intervention: the aim is to stop people from turning into violent criminals in the first place. This is a sensible strategy. But there is a need for action now. First, there needs to be more use of the Section 60 power which allows the police to stop anyone in a given area.

Theresa May’s Home Office record is normally off limits at cabinet. But when ministers discussed the government’s strategy for reducing violent crime on Tuesday, Boris Johnson took issue with what the Prime Minister regards as one of her key legacies: the dramatic reduction in stop and search. He argued that more stop and search was needed to deal with a spike in crime. What went unsaid — but what every-one around the cabinet table was acutely aware of — was that this was the opposite of Mrs May’s approach as Home Secretary. The exchange was pointed. ‘They irritate each other,’ one cabinet minister observed to me afterwards. They also have form on these matters.

Theresa May has a very big failure to her name, but strangely few people seem to want to pick her up on it. The latest crime figures show a sharp increase in recorded offences in England and Wales, especially in knife crime, which rose 21 per cent to 37,443 incidents. This continues a trend which began four years ago, since when the number of recorded knife offences has risen by half. It reverses an equally sharp fall in recorded knife crime between 2010, when Theresa May became Home Secretary, and 2014. What happened to bring about the end of what looks like a very successful period of tackling knife crime?