If you want to know how much Labour’s political skills have atrophied just consider how it has failed to land a hit on the Tories—and David Davis in particular—over their stance on civil liberties.
Take the Tory position on removing the DNA of all those who have been charged but not convicted of a crime from the national database. On Tuesday, Gordon Brown claimed in his speech that if DNA had not been retained from these people,
“8,000 suspects who have been matched with crime scenes since 2001 would in all probability have got away, their DNA having been deleted from the database. This includes 114 murders, 55 attempted murders, 116 rapes, 68 other sexual offences, 119 aggravated burglaries, and 127 drugs offences.”
Brown’s speech was overshadowed by events, notably the theft of Hazel Blear’s computer which had government data improperly stored on it. But just imagine if Labour had put the victims of these crimes, and their families, in touch with the media.
If Labour’s political operation had done its job properly, on Wednesday morning when David Davis announced his resignation as an MP, the mother of a murder victim would have appeared on GMTV asking why the Tories want to take away from the police the tool that had caught her daughter’s killer. This could have been followed by newspaper interviews with other victims, all making the same point.
This would have put the Tories in an extremely difficult position. They couldn’t have attacked the messenger—taking on a grieving mother or a rape victim isn’t good politics—so they would have had to explain why they thought the balance between liberty and security required letting some guilty people get away with their crimes.
To my mind, the Tories are right about removing the DNA of those not convicted from the DNA database. Anecdotal evidence, though, suggests that this is not a popular position. But Labour is simply failing to make its case, or cause the Tories any discomfort on these issues.
To those who think that the explanation for this is that Labour does not wish to resort to this kind of emotive politics, playing on peoples’ fear, I’d ask you to think about Labour’s campaign in Crewe which was full of such appeals. The far more plausible explanation is that the Labour machine is broken.
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