Crime and Policing

I disagree totally, because we are tackling the deficit earlier and will not have the problems that we would have had if Labour had kept delaying the cuts and spending as though there were no tomorrow. I can assure the hon. Gentleman that 6 May was the tomorrow, and his party lost it. In Hexham, the police have already taken a small budgetary cut. I walked the beat with them barely three weeks ago. They are doing an amazing job of looking after their area and are perfectly able to cope with the difficulties that they have had thus far. Who knows where the future will ultimately lie? However, they understand and appreciate the problems and they know that there are ways forward. As the assistant to Barack Obama put it, ““We should not waste a crisis.”” It is often in the difficult times that we can re-evaluate who we are, assess what we are doing and review what we are going to spend our money on in future. I endorse the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Mr Burley) and by the hon. Member for Edinburgh West (Mike Crockart) in his excellent speech. The latter spoke with great eloquence, having been a police officer himself until nine years ago. He indicated, for example, that higher police numbers do not necessarily equal less crime. The example of Belgium is well known. There are very significant numbers of police—the highest numbers in Europe—yet the crime level is massively increased. I hope that the Government will consider the fact that in a constituency such as mine, which is 1,150 square miles, the vital issue of rural crime has been treated very differently from other crime over the past 13 years, and I hope that things will improve. That point encompasses why I oppose the closure of the magistrates court in my constituency. The proposal is that we will have no magistrates court in our 1,150 square miles. I do not believe that that is the right way forward, hence my strong opposition to such a measure. My final point is this. I ask myself why the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson), the shadow Home Secretary, gave the speech that he gave today—it has been mentioned this afternoon on several occasions. Some described it as an application to the post-election shadow Cabinet, but I am not sure that it was. I take the view that he expressed amazing reverence for Lord Michael Howard. He seemed to disregard all Home Secretaries between Lord Howard and himself, when we reached, as others described it, the delightful sunlit upland of ““the year of Johnson””, as he called it. That was very eloquent. According to him, the world went from the ““prison works”” policy of Michael Howard to him, but he disregarded the ASBO age of John Reid as Home Secretary and the CRASBO—criminal antisocial behaviour order—age of Charles Clarke, and indicated that we simply arrived in the year of Johnson when everything was sunlit and perfect. I thought that the Howard-Johnson alignment had a future, but then I remembered that that was the name of a rather dodgy hotel chain in America that provides a kind of cut-price service. Lord knows where we could go with that. I support the Government, and I urge people to reconsider their approach. I accept that there are contrary arguments—police budgets are always emotive—but the Johnson alignment is not the right way.