Gavin Lockhart

How fitting that in the week that dozens of MPs have been accused of defrauding taxpayers, Gordon Brown has today decided to make his first ever keynote speech on crime. The speech comes nine months after the Prime Minister last warned that crime would rise in the downturn, and was briefed as “an attempt to update Labour’s discredited slogan, tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’.  It also comes just a day after a new report by Policy Exchange laid bare the Government’s abject failure to deliver on this sound bite and revealed that crime costs every household in the UK around £3,000 a year.

Chris Grayling’s first major speech this week as Shadow Home Secretary has largely been written up as the latest blueprint of powers for ‘cracking down’ on hoodies. But there’s another issue at stake here: a future Conservative Government will likely inherit a public purse that’s pretty much empty which means Grayling will have responsibility to spend taxpayers’ money in areas that will achieve the most effective reductions in crime. In his speech, Grayling referred to stopping people getting on to the ‘conveyor belt’ of crime.  This goes to the heart of failure of Labour’s crime and justice policy.  He also said “tackling the causes of crime was a key part of my last job.