Katy Balls Katy Balls

Why the Tories are talking tough on crime

Although Brexit remains the top of the news agenda, the Conservatives believe they will need to talk about more than just leaving the EU if they are to triumph in an early election. Boris Johnson used his conference speech to push a domestic agenda beyond Brexit. The areas he focussed on were the same ones that Downing Street has repeatedly pushed since the summer: the NHS, law and order, education and investment in the north.

Johnson singled out tackling crime as a priority:

‘The first thing we must do in spreading opportunity is to insist on the equal safety of the public wherever you live to make your streets safer and that is why we are recruiting 20,000 new police officers and that is why we are committing now to rolling up the evil county lines drugs gangs that predate on young kids and send them to die in the streets to feed the cocaine habits of the bourgeoisie.’

The comments chime with Priti Patel’s speech on Tuesday. The Home Secretary used the set piece event to declare that the Conservative Party was taking its “rightful place as the party of law and order once again” and send a message to criminals: “We are coming after you.” The tough rhetoric (and plan to give more police officers tasers) has also come under criticism in some quarters.

While Johnson is keen to pitch himself as a liberal Conservative but there is one area in which those around him concede there has been a move to the right – and that’s on crime. The view in Downing Street is that in an election it’s hard to be too tough on crime. As I write in the i paper, there’s a sense that Westminster is out of touch with the public mood on tackling law and order.

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