With a classically unfunny headline, Break In Bad, the Sun “newspaper” reveals a “shock drop in crime detection”, with only one in ten burglaries being solved. The piss poor pun ridden article – I’ll bet the victims of crime roared with laughter when they read it – concludes, by way of an afterthought, that 17,000 police officer jobs have been axed in recent years. They make no connection between the cut in police numbers and lower rates of detection: that’s for the slow-witted Sun reader to work out for himself (it has to be him and not herself because no self-respecting woman would buy that filthy organ) and even if that’s too much for him, the rest of us can work out the obvious: public spending cuts have an impact.
If you spend less on schools, you will have less teachers, less teaching assistants, less essential equipment, larger class sizes and that is exactly what is happening now. Apart from the huge pressures on the teaching profession, those who will suffer will be the children. If you don’t spend enough on the NHS and social care – well, work it out for yourself. The paradox is that this particular newspaper has campaigned long and hard for exactly what is now happening.
Whilst it is a matter of debate as to whether your average Sun reader is the sharpest tool in the box, those who own and run it are very sharp. They are experts at shaping opinions, whether by convincing working class people that an anti-working class government is what they really, really want, or by voting to make their readers poorer by leaving the EU will allow them to not really take back control of anything.
In my previous life, I worked with coppers and I have nothing but respect for the work they do. I have worked deep inside police stations, down to the cells and out on arrests. Their professionalism and courage never failed to amaze and impress me. Knock on every strange door and you never know who or what is behind it. I was also massively shocked, three years ago and further back, at how thin the blue line actually was. I will not say what I know because you never know who might read this, but if you knew the level of police levels at some places and at many times I suspect you would be staggered. And if you knew what went on, or rather didn’t go on, at large transport hubs, especially at night, you might not feel as safe as you do when you step off your particular mode of transport.
And the fact that we don’t have enough police officers – and we patently don’t – has consequences. We hear that crime is falling and that’s true. Car crime, other than at the top end, is not rare but far less than it used to be because it’s far harder to steal cars these days. But then, much crime is not reported at all because people know that the one in ten figure means there is pretty well no point in spending ages on the phone just to get a crime reference number.
It was Theresa May herself, our embarrassing and out of her depth prime minister, who initiated police cuts in the first place and things are getting far, far worse on her watch. The Sun, of course, omits this simple fact because they are too busy building her up as a kind of Margaret Thatcher tribute act and its readers, as you can see from the comments section below the story, blame everyone but the government for the problems, especially the “socialists who run public services”. You can’t argue with pork, can you?
The simple truth is that if we want good public services, we will need to pay for them. The government continues to throw ever increasing billions at MOD bureaucracy but fails to find the sums to prove basic protection of the “ordinary working families” May drones on about so much. The journalistic dregs employed by Rupert Murdoch don’t give a toss about you or me and nothing in their ugly right wing philosophy suggests they have the slightest sympathy for or empathy with their readers, either.
