OPINION
I’ve never much liked Yvette Coooper because while she’s always looked like a grown-up responsible politician she’s actually glaringly ineffective and deathly boring.
However now, under Keir Starmer, she’s lost the plot entirely. Never mind her abject failure to deal with anything immigration-related, this week she announced a raft of tough penalties for selling knives online with lengthy jail terms as the ultimate punishment. And she’s announced four year jail terms for anyone carrying a knife with intent for violence.
Two things occur to me. We can’t give lengthy jail sentences to anyone for anything these days because there are no prison places. Last year less than one in four offenders were jailed for knife crime. And just this week it was announced that we now only have a total of 1,000 jail places left out of a total of 88,618.
Yet THIS is the week dopey Yvette Cooper chooses to announce her totally useless proposals for tackling knife crime. Also this week we hear that a new report commissioned by Labour has laid the ground for jailing fewer criminals and has blasted longer prison terms as a “knee-jerk reaction.”
Does the Home Secretary know about this report? Clearly not or she wouldn’t be introducing new lengthy jail sentences for knife offenders.
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But isn’t it just bloody typical of this government — it talks BIG but does sod-all. Worse, it takes us all for fools — telling us it’s going to come down hard on knife criminals with tougher sentences when its own report rubbishes that idea and slates long sentences as a “knee-jerk reaction.”
Does the left hand really not know what the right hand is doing? In September last year, our joke of a PM said: “Knife crime is a national crisis that we must tackle head-on.”
Really? So what does that actually mean? "Head-on" to me suggests having the streets crawling with coppers. It means jailing offenders immediately. Its means rigorous Stop and Searches although we’re limited to how many of those we can do now because certain elements will claim it's discriminatory, racist, divisive.
But the reality will be that while a handful of “stabbers” and those carrying knives will be sent to jail courtesy of these new laws you can bet your sweet life that the people selling them online to underage people (without knowing or because of fake IDs) will be hounded like dogs because they’re easy targets. But as there are no jail places they’ll just be fined heavily which will damage their businesses but do nothing to bring down knife crime.
Then we come to Luther star, Idris Elba’s, solution to the problem. He spent a year making a BBC documentary about knife crime and his conclusion is that all kitchen knives should have their sharp ends cut off which he reckons would help tackle the UK’s violent gang crisis.
No, it wouldn’t because the rest of the bloody knife can still be as sharp as a razor and can cut through flesh like butter. And it you shove it hard enough, even with a blunted edge, it’ll still go in.
Also if he thinks blunted kitchen knives will in some way deter violent gangs then he’s learned absolutely nothing about them or how they operate.
Kitchen knives aren’t the problem. The people using them are And if the only knife they can get their grubby hands on is one with a blunt edge they’ll find a way of making it do what they want it to do.
Anyway why should every kitchen knife be rendered useless because the Government and the cops are incapable of tackling the crisis.
The fact is if someone is intent on getting a knife they will. And they don’t actually have to go farther than their own kitchen drawer.
The only proper way to tackle knife crime is to Stop and Search and for people to be immediately jailed if found in possession of a knife. And if we need to build more prisons to make that happen then Labour needs to get on with it.
Successive governments and the police are forever talking about tackling knife crime but none of them can actually be bothered to do it.
So, what they do instead is talk about it, bring in in a bits of new legislation to make it look like they give a damn when they actually don’t. Proof of that came via stats released in January which revealed that last year knife crime hit record highs in multiple police forces. In London alone the increase was more than 18% which in human terms amounts to more than 16,500 incidents and then Starmer pipes up and says: “Our mission is to take back the streets and halve knife crime in the next decade."
Seriously? You just want to laugh out loud when hear him spouting tosh like that because he knows its rubbish. And we know it's rubbish.
But it’s no laughing matter because people are bleeding out on our streets every hour of every day and this Government is doing beggar all to stop it!!
