Rupert Matthews is the Police and Crime Commissioner for the Leicestershire and Rutland.
With just one week to go until the Police and Crime Commissioner Elections, I thought it time to do a quick stock take. Where is the Conservative Party? Where is Labour? And how does it feel on the doorsteps?
Undoubtedly the Conservative Party has a good story to tell. We have delivered on the 2019 election promise to recruit 20,000 additional police officers. Crime is going down. The police are being given the equipment and kit that they need to do their job properly.
PCCs also look after a wide range of other responsibilities – victim support, crime prevention and other aspects of the law and order system. There too we have much to shout about when it comes to success stories.
Elsewhere in the criminal justice system all may not be as rosy, but when it comes to those aspects that PCCs look after then we are doing well.
For Labour, they have a harder sell. On average there is more crime per head of population in an area with a Labour PCC than in one with a Conservative PCC. Not only that, but the wheels are coming off Labour’s flagship policy for this election.
Labour has pledged to recruit an extra 13,000 police officers.
As my colleague Katy Bourne, the PCC for Sussex, pointed out recently in the Express, their sums simply don’t add up. For a start, Labour has not included any provision for the costs of recruitment, training or background checks. And £360 million of the funding is due to be found from unspecified “savings” in existing police budgets.
That has put my Labour opponent here in Leicestershire & Rutland in a bit of a bind. He has been calling savings in the current Leicestershire Police budget “cuts”. So what about the savings Yvette Cooper will expect him to make if Labour win the general election? No answer.
And that is before Labour start wriggling over whether they are going to recruit 13,000 police officers, or if PCSOs and staff are going to be included in that total as well.
No wonder my Labour opponent has given up trying to win the debate on policies and ideas and has instead turned to personal insults.
As Lady Thatcher said “I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”
So what about the doorsteps. The opinion polls would have it that the Conservatives are massively unpopular and that Labour are coasting to victory at the coming General Election. It is 1997 all over again, we are told.
Well, I was on the doorsteps in the 1990s and I can tell you that 2024 is not like it was back then. Not by a long chalk. Back then my blue rosette and I were spat on, had doors slammed on us and saw leaflets torn up and thrown out of doors. There as real anger with us Tories and a genuine enthusiasm for Tony Blair and his New Labour.
So far, and I’ve been pounding the pavements fairly solidly, none of this has happened. Even in the most Labour areas of Leicester there is no enthusiasm for Keir Starmer and his Labour Party. When I find a Labour voter door knocking I ask why they will vote Labour, but get only a shrug.
As for the Conservative voters who tell me “not this time”, there simply aren’t as many of those as the opinion polls tell us there should be. And they are not angry as they were in 1997, more fed up. Undoubtedly, they can be won back.
But there are seven days left to deliver leaflets, knock on doors and circulate social media posts. It is all to play for. Here in Leicestershire and Rutland that is more true than elsewhere. A statistician website recently put Labour and myself neck and neck on exactly the same predicted vote share.
We need only one more vote than Labour to win. That is why it is so crucial that every Conservative voter goes to vote, or fills in their postal vote and sends it back.
So if you will excuse me, I’ll stop typing, strap on my walking boots and get back to pounding the pavements.
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Author: Rupert Matthews
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