It’s taken a year but Keir Starmer can finally say his government’s brought down knife crime, says Fleet Street Fox. It’s a shame people won’t notice
If it seems to you that the government can’t do anything right, it may be because the Opposition, the media, and all the other problems you can see, combine to provide a constant drumbeat of national collapse.
It is that sort of tone which did for the Tories, although it took 14 years, Brexit, Partygate, AND Liz Truss to put the last nail in their coffin. In a country where most newspapers are Tory-supporting, most people are socially conservative, and all previously-existing problems have not magically evaporated, it’s not a surprise – if you think about it properly – that the same tone applies to a single year of Labour being in power.
All journalists kick a government harder than an Opposition. That’s the problem with a pedestal. But this column is nothing if it is not scrupulously fair and accurate, and so one year and one month into Keir Starmer’s administration it is time to announce that he is finally able to declare a win on one of the most hideous trends in living memory.
Knife crime is down. Overall, the figure is 6%, and in some places as much as 25%, but it’s down in all the worst hotspots except Greater Manchester. That means less pressure on courts, on hospitals, on police, less trouble for teachers, and more importantly, fewer parents and siblings sobbing over a teenager who has suffered unsurvivable wounds by the sort of blade John Wick would think twice about using.
Finally, it’s safe to leave the house without checking your will is up-to-date. You can send your children to school with a little more confidence they won’t be getting shanked on the way home. And the horror headlines so many have had to live the reality of – ‘machete thugs’, ‘teen stabbed at bus stop’, or ‘Idris Elba asks for help’ – can finally start to ebb from the front pages.
The knife crime surge was directly linked to the austerity years’ slashing of community centres, youth mentor schemes, and outreach work by charities and local authorities which was considered worthless by the Bullingdon thugs who ran the country and our capital city for so long. Fixing that damage was so overdue, and the means so bleedin’ obvious, that the bar was low enough to qualify as an archaeological dig. And it’s only a 6% drop, which means there’ll still be plenty of knife crime next week for Starmer’s enemies to wave around.
But the real problem the Prime Minister faces is not that politicians and media can always find something to criticise about whoever’s in power. It’s that the win is completely intangible – no mother will be aware that her child was otherwise not going to come home today, and that instead of fish fingers for dinner it would have been a trip to a hospital mortuary.
All good deeds that avert disaster have the same problem. The Covid vaccines, state education, the NHS in general – because we do not live in the world that does not have them, we do not see what it saves. We count only the cost, of the vaccine-damaged, of teacher pay deals, hospital scandals. We look at the budget column we can see, and not the one we can hug.
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For years politicians vowed to get tough on crime, and all they did was redefine “tough” and what counted as a “crime”. There’s a thousand mothers out there who’d say shutting community centres should have led to jail time, and the cemeteries are evidence enough that all the trumpeted crackdowns did was break a few more hearts.
If you ask a stranger which is the “party of law and order”, they’d probably shrug and say whichever one whose leader last took a picture with a police dog, or attended a dawn raid with TV cameras. And you can bet your bottom dollar some cycnical so-and-so in Westminster is, as I type, trying to find an asylum seeker who committed a knife crime, just so they can prove a link with a different dog whistle.
The truth is that knife crime didn’t get tackled by the Tories because they caused it, because it was usually poor kids, and because it was usually black kids. The real force behind this win isn’t Starmer but his Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who actually listened to police officers, to parents, to community groups, and then put in place what was needed.
She gave an interview today in which she spoke about meeting the parent of a murdered teen, and the ‘privilege’ of seeing some footage of their last hug before he left the house on the day of his death. The reporter said she teared up, then spoke of all the policies she put in place as a result. That’s good politics, effective leadership, real commitment – normal, human, determination to do better. And it won’t resonate as it should in an August news lull, because there’s plenty of bad news still churning about.
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Yvette achieved a feat of political alchemy. She turned a foundational failure into meaningful, life-saving change, with grown-up, boring competence of the kind we haven’t seen in Westminster for a decade. And she won’t get the plaudits she should from people who can’t see what they didn’t lose.
But that’s what happens when you treat bad news as a problem to solve, and not a stick to hit your rivals with. It’s not surprising so many young people have grown up to lash out, over-react, and fail to think things through, when their formative years were spent in a nation led by people who jerked the knee twice a day and only ever sought to escalate anger.
That may be Starmer’s real win. A national conversation that is unexciting, but competent. It won’t make Twitter explode but for thousands of families, it means the world. The centres of their universe, their sense of security and ease, their pride, their hope. The generation who’ll learn how to be grown-ups. The sort of thing that nobody notices, because you can’t put a price on it.