Boris Johnson is gambling that voters will credit him for his tough stance on crime while forgiving the cuts made by his predecessors
is ready for the onslaught. “They’ll all be down here in the next few weeks,” she says, with a hint of resignation. The charity she runs, St Edmunds Society, which gives training to disadvantaged youngsters, sits just outside Norwich North, among the most marginal of Britain’s 650 constituencies. Chloe Smith, the incumbent Tory, won only 507 more votes than her Labour rival at the last election. Both parties are flooding the seat with activists.
This might not have troubled voters much had crime rates continued a long decline that began in the mid-1990s. Yet, whereas overall rates have stayed stable, violent crime has jumped. Newspapers talk excitably of “Wild West Britain”. There are many explanations for the surge, including the emergence of the county-lines model. But police and oppositions have blamed the budget cuts. And voters have clocked that overstretched cops are falling behind.
Mr Johnson chose as his warm-up act Priti Patel, the home secretary, whose speeches sometimes read like tabloid editorials. Activists cheered as she pledged the Tories would take their “rightful place” as the party of law and order. Harvey Redgrave of Crest Advisory, a criminal-justice consultancy, says Mr Johnson has spotted that police cuts were one of the least popular aspects of austerity. “It makes a whole lot of sense politically.
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