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11:30
Since time immemorial, every political party which aspires to government has pledged to clean up the streets. Knowing as they do the extent to which crime is a touchstone issue on the doorstep, opposition leaders are usually desperate to present their party as being on the side of the law-abiding majority and more committed than the other lot to making our communities safer.
Yet in spite of the endless promises over many years by politicians of every stripe, lawlessness and disorder remain widespread, court sentencing an open joke, clear-up rates atrocious, and the police too absent from our neighbourhoods and seemingly more interested in virtue-signalling than they are the business of preventing and detecting crime.
So we should be sceptical about Labour’s recent declaration of itself as the party of law and order and accompanying pledge to tackle anti-social behaviour. Sure, the move makes sense politically, not least because the highest levels of support for a tough approach to crime are usually found in the same working-class communities that are most blighted by it, and which just happen to form the kind of constituencies that the party must win back if it is to secure power again.
But we have seen this film many times before, and whether or not the fine words would ever translate into reality under a Labour government is, let us say, debatable. That is in no small part...
An FIR has been filed against a woman for allegedly disseminating misleading information and attempting to attribute a communal motive to the Yamuna Expressway bus fire incident in Greater Noida, ...