Unconvincing on crime

How fitting that in the week that dozens of MPs have been accused of defrauding taxpayers, Gordon Brown has today decided to make his first ever keynote speech on crime. The speech comes nine months after the Prime Minister last warned that crime would rise in the downturn, and was briefed as “an attempt to update Labour’s discredited slogan, tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’.  It also comes just a day after a new report by Policy Exchange laid bare the Government’s abject failure to deliver on this sound bite and revealed that crime costs every household in the UK around £3,000 a year.

Much of this morning’s speech was a re-announcement of measures contained within the 2008 Youth Crime Action Plan or the Community Justice Green Paper, published a fortnight ago. (Although Brown got the publication date wrong.) The consultation period for the paper was supposed to run until the end of July, but this morning Brown pre-empted the consultation period, announcing the go-ahead for a £4 million scheme to give the public more of a say over how criminal assets seized by the Government are spent.