Whose policy is it anyway?

The mayor of London has unveiled a new strategy to tackle knife crime in London, the creation of a Violence Reduction Unit, and everyone seems to want to take credit for it.

 

Sadiq Khan says the decision to form the unit, announced on Wednesday, will adopt a ‘public health’ approach towards the problem, and comes after researching and investigating ‘the public health approaches in Glasgow where their own long-term approach over more than a decade has delivered large reductions in violence’.

 

According to City Hall, the new unit will ‘improve co-ordination between the Metropolitan Police, local authorities, youth services, health services, criminal justice agencies and City Hall’ and an initial £500,000 has been put aside to establish the new unit.

 

The unveiling of the new tactic was on the front page of today’s Evening Standard, edited, of course, by former chancellor George Osborne, with the headline ‘Sadiq Khan’s Crime U-turn’. The paper claims it is a policy it ‘demanded’ two months ago and the editorial jibes that the mayor ‘didn’t find time to credit us’.

 

Curiously, the paper itself didn’t manage to find space to mention the role of a certain former Chancellor of the Exchequer who oversaw an 18% fall in police funding between 2010/11 and 2015/16, after taking inflation into account. It also didn’t mention the fall in police officer numbers of more than 21,000 since 2010. Or even that the Metropolitan Police has had to make £1billion of savings since 2010. It’s a pain when a story has to be cut for space. And I wonder what happened to that ex-chancellor; he must feel terrible about his legacy.

 

Meanwhile, London Assembly member Andrew Boff, who hopes to be selected as the Conservative Party’s mayoral candidate to challenge Sadiq Khan at the next election in 2020, claims the current mayor has lifted the policy from his manifesto.

 

In a release sent out today, Mr Boff claims he has been advocating the policy ‘for some months now’ and far from being the mayor’s own idea, Sadiq Khan is ‘just playing catch up with the Conservatives’. He then, teasingly, suggests the mayor reads more of his manifesto for some other good policies.

 

And now this evening, the Liberal Democrats have pitched in and said it’s their idea and the mayor has picked it up after years of ‘tireless campaigning’ by the assembly member Caroline Pidgeon.

 

Clearly, then, this is a popular idea. But after more than 100 murders in the capital this year, Londoners will be more interested in whether it proves effective.