Home Secretary Sajid Javid used a long and at times heated debate on knife crime in Cabinet yesterday to demand emergency funds for the police. He was rebuffed by Philip Hammond initially, but the Times reveals that hours later the Chancellor agreed to meet him to chat about more cash. Some Cabinet ministers felt that Javid was directly challenging not just the Treasury but the PM herself, especially after her tin-eared repetition on Monday of her line that there was no correlation between crime and police numbers.
The PM’s spokesman struck a notably different tone after Cabinet yesterday, telling us that the government wanted cops to get ‘the powers and resources they need’. He stressed that May wanted a ‘whole of government effort’ to tackle the knife crime problem, and ministers had been ordered to convene joint meetings to coordinate council and police responses. Javid today meets all the police chiefs of forces with the most serious violence. The Telegraph suggests Javid will within days unveil new powers on refined stop and search. Boris Johnson writes in the Mail: “It turned out to be a very grave mistake to tell the police to reduce stop and search in 2014”.
But with May having presided over a 30% cut in police funding, it’s surely an open goal for PMQs for Corbyn today to simply contrast May’s robotic quote with Javid’s call for more resources. Corbyn could cite ex-crown prosecutor Nazir Afzal saying if there’s no link between crime and cop levels, why have police at all? Most of all he could cite Sarah Thornton of the National Police Chiefs Council. She was scathing on Today, declaring: “We think we need much stronger leadership from government, there needs to be more leadership and there needs to be more funding.” Oh, and there is indeed a link between police numbers and crime, Thornton added.
Meanwhile Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson is facing ridicule after the Sun reported his remark that the military could offer help to tackle the knife scourge. The Armed Forces “always stand ready to help any government department”, he said. In fact, it was his predecessor Michael Fallon who first raised the prospect on Monday, and Met chief Cressida Dick yesterday said she “doesn’t exclude” the possibility of troop back-up. And Hunted star and ex cop Peter Bleksley writes that Javid “should be meeting army generals today”. He recalls: “In the days after the 7/7 bombings, London was awash with plain clothes army officers. Like then, we are in unprecedented times. It’s as bad as I’ve known it.”
A new battlefront has opened today in Theresa May’s war of attrition to get enough MPs to hold their nose to back her Brexit deal. Business Secretary Greg Clark’s workers’ rights package - giving Parliament a say on incorporating EU rules, the creation of a new enforcement agency and protections for parents and carers - is crucially to be included in the EU Withdrawal Bill.
Now, May is hardly seen by trade unions as the workers’ friend, not least because it took her more than two years to invite them to No.10 and only then for a five minute chat in her hour of need. So it’s not surprising that union leaders have dismissed the new rights, especially as they fail to retain any automaticity of continued EU protections. But several Labour MPs may be more tempted by the protections than they were by the paltry cash-for-towns offer. And that’s the real game of course.
In a blog for HuffPost, Labour’s Jim Fitzpatrick says: “I will be looking again at the Brexit deal next week – bolstered by the concessions on workers’ rights (and money for towns) – and I’d strongly urge my fellow Labour MPs to do the same.” John Mann tells the Times that this is a ‘huge step forward’. That’s two down, 28 to go (No.10 estimates it needs around 30 Labour MPs to counterbalance the Tory Brexiteer ‘ultras’ who won’t be bought off by any concessions on the backstop).
Speaking of Parliamentary arithmetic, the Chief Whip Julian Smith warned Cabinet yesterday that if MPs reject May’s deal on Tuesday, a softer Brexit is more likely as he believes the Commons will vote the following day to take no-deal off the table and then back an extension to Article 50. Of course, no-deal will be very much off the table if there’s a free vote. The FT suggests a free vote is now likely, a move that will infuriate the European Research Group.
Would May really allow a free vote on such a key plank of government policy (she said only last week she wanted to keep no-deal on the table)? If so, she would surely have to also stage a free vote on delay too. Brexiteers can point to Mark Carney’s evidence to peers that no-deal would be half as bad as his previous forecasts. And all sides may be unhappy that we won’t get to see the zero-tariffs plans until after no-deal is confirmed. Clark said ‘work was continuing’ on getting exemptions for key industries such as ceramics and told Today the tariffs would be published only “once we knew we were leaving without a deal on 29 March”.
Labour’s anti-Semitism row just won’t go away, but Jeremy Corbyn last night came out fighting against his critics. In a letter to Margaret Hodge, he made a strong defence of the “very small group of staff in the Leader’s Office” who had been approached by former complaints staff to help clear a backlog of cases. “In an act of good faith, staff in my office complied with this request in order to assist the party. The decision making remained with staff members from GLU [Governance and Legal Unit], and there was never any attempt to overrule them.”
In the letter, extracts of which have been seen by HuffPost, Corbyn also revealed that it is ‘likely’ that Charlie Falconer will be appointed as the party’s surveillance commissioner overseeing anti-Semitism cases. But what was striking was the Labour leader’s clear irritation that Hodge had taped her meeting with him last week (as revealed by the BBC’s Norman Smith at 6.35am yesterday morning), accusing her of “a total breach of trust and privacy”.
The Jewish Labour Movement meets tonight for the first of its gatherings (I think there’s another one in Manchester next week) to gauge views on whether it should stay affiliated to the party. The Guardian revealed more than 100 MPs have signed a pledge urging JLM to stay. A little history may be worth citing here. I’m so old I remember when JLM was actually called Poale Zion (Great Britain), though its name changed in 2004. And the Jewish community hasn’t forgotten that back in 1984, Corbyn was one of several Labour MPs to sponsor a motion at the Labour Movement Conference on Palestine which called for “the disaffiliation of Poale Zion from the Labour Party”. When asked about by the Home Affairs Committee in 2016 if he stood by that, he replied: “No, I don’t believe that to be the case.”
Meanwhile, the Tories’ own problems with Islamophobia are growing. HuffPost reported last week on the party’s failure to expel a member over anti-Muslim remarks. That has since been followed by a PoliticsHome scoop on a council candidate forced to resign for saying ‘Islam is like alcoholism’ and the Indy yesterday had the exclusive (which it seems BuzzFeed was onto too) that 14 Tory members had been suspended after posting Islamophobic or racist remarks on social media. We have our own interview with Sayeeda Warsi due out this morning, and she certainly has a lot more to say.
Watch Tony Blair tell LBC’s James O’Brien just how uncomfortable he now feels about cosying up to the Daily Mail when he was Labour leader. The anguish on his face is quite something, but so too is his point that he was fighting a trench war after Neil Kinnock’s 1992 election day demolition by the Sun.
BuzzFeed has an excellent FoI story laying bare the scale of threat faced by MPs from extremists. The Parliamentary Liaison and Investigations team, established by the Metropolitan Police in August 2016 in the wake of the murder of Labour MP Jo Cox, has received four reports of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, four of common assault, 41 of harassment, and 379 complaints of malicious communications.
Ex-Labour MP for Peterborough Fiona Onasanya could lose her seat after the failure of her High Court attempt to challenge her conviction for lying about a speeding charge. Commons speaker John Bercow told MPs he would write to the relevant petition office to confirm she was subject to a recall. “She must now do the decent thing and go,” Labour says. The party is already campaigning for candidate Lisa Forbes, but the Tories really fancy their chances of retaking the seat in a heavy pro-Leave area.
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