Crime rise adds to
Blair woes

Policing crime: special report

Nicholas Watt and Alan Travis
Monday July 10, 2000

Tony Blair will attempt to bury details of
an alarming rise in violent crime across
the country by publishing a series of
embarrassing Home Office statistics on
the same day as Gordon Brown unveils
his headline-grabbing spending review.

In a sign of the growing panic in Downing
Street that ministers are losing the
initiative on law and order, the annual
crime figures will be slipped out on July 18
at virtually the same moment as the
chancellor announces a massive hike in
government spending on health and
education.

Ministers are said to be deeply alarmed at
the Home Office figures which are
expected to show that recorded crime in
England and Wales has risen by about
3% in the past year and is accelerating,
with violent crime rising by more than
10%.

Ann Widdecombe, the shadow home
secretary, last night accused the
government of a cynical attempt to
manipulate the news. “Ministers are so
transparent,” Ms Widdecombe said. “This
is yet another pathetic attempt at spin,
but the difference now is that people are
wised up to the ways of this government.”

Her criticism came as the government
underlined its concerns over crime by
appointing the former BBC director
general Lord Birt as a special unpaid
adviser on crime.

At the personal invitation of the prime
minister, Lord Birt will work unpaid for the
government one day a week to tackle
“deep-seated issues”. Downing Street
said that Lord Birt, who will continue to sit
in the Lords as a crossbencher, had been
chosen because he could bring an
outsiders’ view to crime.

His appointment was criticised yesterday
by the Tories and Liberal Democrats as a
poor response to rising crime. Simon
Hughes, the Liberal Democrat home
affairs spokesman, said: “After 18 years
in opposition and three years in
government and the huge amount of facts,
figures and research already available,
what has Labour been doing? Soundbites
and supremos are not enough.”

John Prescott defended the appointment,
saying that Lord Birt would help the
government to continue to be tough on
crime.

However, the appointment, which comes
hard on the heels of the prime minister’s
ill-fated “cashpoint initiative” to tackle
drunken yobs, indicates a growing worry
among ministers that they are losing the
initiative on crime.

Ministers will attempt to play down the
crime increases by focusing on the
continuing fall in domestic burglaries
which have dropped by 28% over the past
five years to their lowest level for a
decade.

The prime minister, who believes that
Labour’s “tough on crime tough on the
causes of crime” message was a crucial
factor in his landslide election victory,
attempted to regain the initiative at the
end of last month by floating the idea of
marching drunken yobs to cashpoints to
pay on-the-spot fines. Within days this
was shot down as unworkable by police.

Whitehall sources were surprised when
Mr Blair continued to talk about law and
order initiatives after his embarrassing
climbdown. The sources expected that
the prime minister would move on to other
issues in the immediate aftermath of his
son’s arrest and reprimand last week for
being drunk and incapable.

The panic over law and order comes amid
signs that senior ministers fear that the
government is failing to communicate
effectively with voters. It was confirmed
yesterday that the prime minister’s official
spokesman, Alastair Campbell, has been
instructed to report to Mr Prescott once a
week on how he is succeeding in selling
the government’s achievements.

In a defensive letter to the deputy prime
minister Mr Campbell insisted that he did
have “a reasonable success rate in
getting our agenda up”.