I’m campaigning against Tory cuts that put our quality of life at risk

By Ken Livingstone

One of the great political myths is that the Tories are the party that fights crime.

The facts don’t back this up. Under John Major’s government police numbers in London fell from 28,000 to 26,677. No sooner is a Tory back in charge of policing in London then they start cutting police numbers and threatening the fight against crime.

One of our key tasks when we first established the London mayoralty was to turn around the disastrous decline in police numbers imposed by the previous Tory government. Police numbers rose from 26,000 to 32,000 thanks to increased investment between 2001 to 2009 and safer neighbourhood teams, dedicated to each London ward, have cut crime and reassured Londoners.

Boris Johnson is unpicking that progress: firstly, by reducing the number of police by 455 officers over the course of the next three years; and secondly, as exposed by London Labour Assembly members under questioning about his cuts, by refusing to guarantee the current minimum deployment of our safer neighbourhood beat police teams.

Desperate Tory spin in the last forty eight hours has sought to persuade people that cutting police numbers was a Labour policy. The numbers speak for themselves – up under a Labour mayor, down across Boris Johnson’s four budget years.

Boris Johnson will find it very hard to blame anyone – either Labour or his own government – for a cut he first proposed eighteen months into his administration.

In fact there is a genuine difference of approach on this matter. We adopted the principle – and in my view this should be the policy – that police officer posts freed up should be used for frontline policing.

Labour in London pursued a policy of shifting police from posts that could be covered by civilian staff and putting those police officers into frontline policing. The Tories have radically altered this – cutting police officer posts altogether. So in Boris Johnson’s 2010-2011 budget, agreed earlier this year, 455 police are to be cut from the police service over the next three years. These are not transfers to the frontline – they are cuts altogether.

Boris Johnson’s decision on these cuts prefigured the election of the Cameron-Clegg coalition. They were a foretaste, not a consequence, of this government’s approach. Cameron, Clegg and Osborne may make things a lot worse, but they are following the path trail-blazed by the Tory mayor of London.

And at the 2010/11 budget-setting meeting on policing, Boris Johnson refused to use a council tax windfall of £5.7m to help protect police numbers.

Conservative City Hall’s position on the future of safer neighbourhood police teams has been gestating for some time. The now-deputy mayor Richard Barnes said in 2008 that “Some wards you would term as ‘safe’, yet they have full safer neighbourhood teams twiddling their thumbs.” It was quite clear from that time where this thinking would lead. Under questioning during the setting of his budget Boris Johnson said: “I have no intention of imposing a one-size-fits-all model across the whole of London,” adding: “I think that would be a pointless piece of top-downery.”

These police teams have revolutionised policing in London for the better. We need them. Londoners expect their mayor to protect services in the capital and to put a safer London at the heart of their agenda. And it will be harder to protect safer neighbourhood teams if police officer posts are being deleted from the cohort of officer posts available. Once you cut a police post it is much harder to reinstate that post.

That’s why London Labour campaigned flat-out in London against these cuts in the general and local elections. The London Labour Party – from Assembly members to MPs in marginal constituencies – have put the case against this threat to policing.

We need to continue that work through to 2012, campaigning now against the changes for the worse that the Conservatives are driving through, whether Boris Johnson’s police cuts and fare hikes, or government efforts to pass the burden onto people on middle and lower incomes.

It’s why I’m presenting a petition opposing London’s police cuts to the Metropolitan Police Authority today: to say that this course is the wrong one for London, and to show there is a political alternative to the miserable agenda of the Conservative Party that threatens our services and puts our quality of life at risk.