DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Labour is determined to stay in the gutter
Unabashed by the widespread denunciation of their grubby smear campaign against Rishi Sunak, Labour made clear yesterday they have no intention of leaving the gutter.
After the crass ‘attack ads’ claiming the PM doesn’t want to send paedophiles to prison or prosecute rapists, Keir Starmer’s spin doctors will next try to blame Mr Sunak personally for the economic downturn and rising violent crime.
Like the claim about paedophiles, which only served to expose the fact that Sir Keir sat on the Sentencing Council when it actually softened punishments for sex abusers, these new ads may well backfire.
For example, two of the very worst performing police forces on preventing and detecting violent crime, the Metropolitan and Greater Manchester Police, are presided over by Labour mayors – Sadiq Khan and Andy Burnham respectively.
What have they been doing to combat this crime wave, beyond blaming everyone else for their own glaring inadequacies?
After the crass ‘attack ads’ claiming the PM doesn’t want to send paedophiles to prison or prosecute rapists, Keir Starmer’s spin doctors will next try to blame Mr Sunak personally for the economic downturn and rising violent crime
And what of Labour’s own economic record? In 2008/9 under Gordon Brown, the UK saw borrowing double and six consecutive quarters of negative growth.
Sir Keir would no doubt argue that this was because of the global financial crash and that Mr Brown was not to blame.
So why should Mr Sunak be any more responsible for the fallout from a world pandemic and war in Ukraine? Indeed he was lauded for his Covid support schemes.
Sir Keir is showing himself to be both a cynic and a hypocrite. But mud-slinging is a dangerous business. The clods can often stick to the thrower, rather than the intended target.
Channel terror threat
In the past year alone, security services have identified no fewer than 19 suspected foreign terrorists who entered Britain illegally on small boats from France.
Some belong to murderous organisations such as Islamic State, yet instead of being deported they are believed to have been put up in hotels at public expense.
We can’t send them back to where they came from because of the fear of persecution and we can’t try them here because the evidence against them is largely intelligence material, some gathered abroad.
Taking such evidence to court would expose how and by whom it was collected, potentially compromising individual agents and revealing secret technological data.
A group of people thought to be migrants are brought in to Dungeness, Kent, onboard the RNLI Life Boat following a small boat incident in the Channel, April 4
If the Rwanda scheme were up and running, these men could be sent there for processing. But the Illegal Migration Bill, which would enable that to happen, is still inching its way through Parliament against stiff resistance from opposition parties and even some Tories.
So the Mail asks those who want to defeat the Bill: What is your plan for stopping the boats and keeping this country safe?
This callous strike
When the NHS was first conceived, doctors belonging to the British Medical Association were hostile. They objected vehemently to being employees of the State and threatened a boycott, effectively holding the new service to ransom.
Asked how he persuaded them to change their minds, the then health minister Aneurin Bevan said: ‘I stuffed their mouths with gold.’ Now 75 years on, the BMA is again demanding lavish sums of public money – this time for junior doctors.
By walking out for four days, starting today, over an outlandish 35 per cent pay claim, they show callous disregard for those whose lives they are endangering.
Their leaders piously say they don’t want to go on strike but have been left with ‘no choice’. Of course there’s a choice. They could – and should – turn up for work and tend to their patients.
Striking NHS junior doctors on the picket line outside Queen Elizabeth hospital in Birmingham
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