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Policing and Crime

I have been a Member of the House since 1997, and I still naively expect this Chamber to be a place of rational debate. However, there has certainly been no evidence of that from the Labour Front-Bench contributions today, either during the previous debate on sentencing or during this one on policing. There is no recognition of their share of the responsibility for the significant cuts that the coalition is having to make. They are tougher than we had expected because the finances we inherited were deteriorating faster and the international climate was tougher for countries that were not tackling their deficits. There is no willingness from Labour to demonstrate how the £7 of savings it was going to make, as opposed to the £8 that the coalition is having to make, would safeguard police numbers. Indeed, Labour Members are not even listening to their own party leader, who said in his speech to the Progress conference on 21 May:"““There will be those who say it is enough for Labour to hunker down… I hear it quite a lot: let's be a louder… Opposition””," but he then went on to say:"““But to think that it is enough is to fail to understand the depth of the loss of trust in us and the scale of change required to win it back. We must recognise where we didn't get things right””." So their leader is asking Labour Members to adopt a more honest and considered approach, but they do not listen to their leader, as we found out during the AV campaign when he said, ““I'm right behind it”” and half of them walked off in the opposite direction. It was the Opposition's choice not to have a debate about what is achievable from an efficiency savings point of view and what is achievable in terms of police numbers. We heard in an intervention that police numbers in Staffordshire had been maintained.