In January 1993 Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary Tony Blair announced a key pillar of the opposition’s future election policy in a New Statesman op-ed. He wrote that a Labour government would be ‘tough on crime and tough on the underlying causes of crime’ – a phrase that would be often repeated after he ascended to the Labour leadership in 1994.
This policy was symbolic of New Labour’s third-way centrism. It focused on personal responsibility and punishing offenders, while also implementing grassroots programmes to stop the root causes of violent crime.
With an election likely around the corner, the current Labour leader would do well to take a page out of Blair’s book and focus on law and order as a winnable battleground issue. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that knife crime in England and Wales is currently at an all-time high.
In the year to March there were 43,516 recorded offences – a 42 per cent increase since March 2011.
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