Rishi Sunak is pretending to be 'tough on crime'

After 13 years of Tory criminal justice ruination more and more criminals are getting away with it. Rishi Sunak is pretending to be 'tough on crime'.

This week Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman have been parading around pretending to be ‘tough on crime’, but the actual evidence is absolutely damning.

As a result of the Tories’ deranged austerity agenda literally half of the magistrates courts in England and Wales have been shut down and flogged off to property developers.

As a result of Tory austerity cuts to the criminal justice system people are waiting longer than ever for their cases to come to court. The average wait for serious cases in now almost two whole years!

It’s not just the amount of time people are being forced to wait for justice either, because Crown Court conviction rates have been declining, crime rates have risen to the highest level in decades, and the amount of recorded crimes being prosecuted collapsed to just 5.6% in 2021-22!

In the wake of the Lucy Letby case Sunak cynically sought the headlines by promising even tougher sentences for the most heinous crimes, but how does performatively acting tough on the tiny minority of extreme criminals really benefit the public when almost 19 in 20 crimes aren’t even being prosecuted?

Tory austerity cuts have also wrecked Legal Aid meaning that huge numbers of people are left without legal representation, and it took an unprecedented barristers strike to force the government to increase the paltry fees they were paying to lawyers who take Legal Aid cases.

Suella Braverman was on the television bragging that the Tory government has hired 23,000 extra police, but it’s an astonishingly misleading use of statistics because she neglected to mention that Tory austerity cuts had reduced the police force by 20,000, meaning it’s actually only a net gain of 3,000.

Then there’s the wider context to consider. Is it really a smart use of money to pay off 20,000 experienced police, then spend money hiring and training 23,000 new police to replace them?

Then there’s the closure of well over 600 police stations to take into account.

Consider Northallerton in Rishi Sunak’s constituency. There’s no way that he’s unaware that the town’s police station has been shut down, sold off, and turned into a pub, leaving the town without holding cells.

So now cops in Northallerton have to waste the best part of an hour doing a round trip to Harrogate every time someone needs to be put in a holding cell!

How many of these extra police are simply wasting time acting as glorified taxi services for the drunk and disorderly, because Tory austerity cuts mean literally hundreds of towns no longer have a police station or holding cells?

Another factor that Braverman refuses to take into account is population growth.

Since 2009 the UK population has risen by 5.6 million, meaning that there are actually significantly fewer police per capita than there were before the Tories came to power, down from 2.31 police per thousand in 2009 to 2.06 per thousand in 2022.

But it’s not just the catastrophic Tory destruction of policing and the criminal justice system that needs to be taken into account.

Consider the unelected Tory peer Michelle Mone who hid her personal connections to Medpro UK to recommend them into the corrupt Tory PPE VIP lane during the covid pandemic. Her husband took a whopping £70 million dividend from the company, mainly funded by obscene profits from government PPE contracts, £29 million of which was paid into an offshore trust for Mone and her adult children. Much of the massively overpriced PPE supplied under the contract ended up being unusable.

Despite this astonishing corruption Mone has not been arrested and remains a Tory member of the unelected House of Lords.

Then consider Iain Duncan Smith’s comments saying that he’s happy for criminals to vandalise ULEZ cameras in his constituency.

Here’s exactly what he said:

"A lot of people in my constituency have been cementing up the cameras or putting plastic bags over them … I am happy for them to do it because they are facing an imposition that no-one wants and they have been lied to about it."

What does it tell us about the Tory party that one of their most senior MPs feels free to support criminal behaviour, and that Sunak hasn’t even removed the Tory whip over these lawless comments?

The Tories haven’t just smashed the police, and wrecked the criminal justice system, they also do nothing about corruption and crime glorifiers in their own ranks.

You’d have to be absolutely stupid to fall for their "tough on crime" posturing.