Interview
Yvette Cooper barely bothers to disguise the electoral calculation behind putting town-centre yobbery at the heart of Labour’s crime blitz.
It is in towns where Labour has been losing out to the Tories, which it needs to win back if Keir Starmer is to make it to Downing Street.
For many the street-drinking, drug taking and violence so vividly portrayed in the “troubled town” of BBC ‘s Happy Valley, set in West Yorkshire’s Calder Valley, was more documentary than drama.
In citing Catherine Cawood, the show’s star, as an inspiration, the shadow Home Secretary showed a populist touch unexpected from a politician that likes to be regarded as serious.
In a speech this week announcing Labour’s plans to restore neighbourhood policing, she said: “Catherine Cawood may be fiction, but the stories of police officers like Catherine, who know their communities, who pick up the things that everyone else misses to solve crimes and keep people safe, are very real. And we need more of them.
“There’s been a 30 per cent increase in cases of criminal damage in town centres in the last 12 months alone,” she says when pressed for evidence, adding that there’s been a “big increase” in the number of attacks on shop workers.
The electoral calculation is there too, however. “We know that in a lot of these constituencies, crime and...
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