Starmer wants to steal crime from the Tories

It’s tempting to see Keir Starmer as a political wind-up merchant given the number of times he likes to quote people who annoy his own activists. Recently he adopted the ‘take back control’ slogan and today he approvingly quoted Margaret Thatcher. Hell, the man has even praised Tony Blair. 

The Thatcher quote today was in a speech about crime. The Labour leader told his audience in Stoke that: ‘The rule of law is the foundation for everything. Margaret Thatcher called it the “first duty of government” – and she was right.’ He later accused the Tories of having ‘thrown in the towel’ as he promised, like Blair in the 1990s, to make Labour tough on crime. 

Starmer and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper have been doing the ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ riff for a while and they’ve been back performing it again this week because of the Casey review into the Metropolitan Police. Starmer used today’s speech to unveil the details of the second of his five ‘missions’, which is to ‘make Britain’s streets safe’. He promised four new targets in this mission: to bring public confidence in the police and criminal justice system to its highest ever level; to halve knife crime incidents; to improve the proportion of crimes solved by the police; and to drive down violence against women as improve conviction rates. 

Labour sees an opportunity in the rising salience of crime among voters. But, as I said yesterday, the attacks haven’t always worked: because this is now a political battleground, the knockabout can sometimes jar with the talk of victims and neighbourhoods living in fear. Meanwhile, some of the targets Starmer is setting are already getting slightly closer to being achieved: the conviction rate is rising, albeit from a very low base.

Starmer is of course on home turf with crime. The only thing he does more than pay tribute to controversial politicians is to say ‘I ran a public service for five years’. However, he is reluctant to set out policies that substantially deviate from current government or longstanding Labour policy – and many of his frontbenchers at least are quite happy with that. The big tension in Labour in the coming months will be over the question of radicalism, not merely over whether things can be done better.