Boris Johnson should learn from Tony Blair after his misfiring crime plan: Jayne Dowle

The whole thing seems to have massively back-fired. Even police chiefs have condemned his ideas – which include league tables for answering 999 and 101 calls, low-level criminals on community service being identified as ‘chain gangs’, and an online platform for connecting with a name local police officer – as “weird and gimmicky”.

In addition, plans to increase stop-and-search powers were criticised for ignoring the evidence and inflaming racism. “I don’t think that’s strong-arm tactics, I think that’s a kind and a loving thing to do,” he said.

This is a shame. Amongst the eyebrow raisers, Mr Johnson highlights crucial issues – tackling county lines gangs and promising to send a police officer to the scene of every burglary following a successful trial of a scheme in Greater Manchester.

It seems also that these proposals were also drawn up without consultation with senior police officers. As every politician must surely know, riding rough-shod over the informed opinions of chief constables is an absolute guarantee of trouble and will do nothing to add balm to the already-frayed relations between police leaders and Priti Patel, the Home Secretary.

He was half-right, I guess, in identifying that we do all worry about crime. I fear for my two teenagers almost every time they leave the house. If I’m not imagining my daughter being abducted if she walks to the park to meet her friends, I’m fretting about my son being stabbed (risk of this in Barnsley pretty low to be honest).

I’ve lost count of the number of friends and acquaintances who have had vehicles broken into or stolen, with nothing to follow up except a crime number for the insurance company. One acquaintance even woke up to find their huge camper van missing from the drive.

Then there’s the drug-dealing. Admittedly, it gets moved on by a patrol car every few weeks, only to pop up again in another layby further down the road.

If I can see (and smell) with my own eyes and nose the local houses where drug-related offences are clearly taking place, why is it that police officers seem powerless to kick out the occupants? And this in a fairly civilised semi-rural village, not a town or city centre.

However, context is all. It might be news to the Prime Minister, but many crimes – except for online and financial fraud – have been falling in the last 18 months and, in part, due to the pandemic. It seems decidedly odd to launch this headline-grabbing initiative now.

If Mr Johnson really is serious about getting tough on crime, he needs to get inside the heads of the individuals who have no respect for the law and then join up the dots between poverty, isolation, substance dependency and whole communities running to their own rules.

Certainly this is a big stretch for a middle-aged man with a Classics degree and all the trappings of a privileged upbringing and life.

But should he find himself with time on his hands again at Chequers, he could do worse than look up an essay that Tony Blair wrote for the New Statesman almost 30 years ago. “We should be tough on crime and tough on the underlying causes of crime,” argued the-then Shadow Home Secretary who went on to lead Labour. It was a theme he would refer to again and again as Prime Minister.

Reading again the cogent and compassionate arguments put forward by Blair – that poverty, lack of opportunity and peer pressure in deprived communities must be tackled alongside meting out justice – it’s clear that, whatever his failings in office, he did have a clear understanding of why crime happens. “Crime… is a problem that arises from our disintegration as a community, with standards of conduct necessary to sustain a community,” he warned in 1993.

And still those with the power to make a difference are not getting the connection. Or, if they are, they are wilfully refusing to do anything about it because it is easier to emerge from isolation at Chequers chuntering about chain gangs in hi-vis vests rather than committing the Government and country to a sustained policy of social reform to prevent crime.

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