Commons clash on Blair’s 10 year record
The Prime Minister and Michael Howard clashed in the Commons this lunchtime on Tony Blair’s record as Labour leader and PM.
At Prime Minister’s Question Time today Mr Blair received three lots of congratulations on his tenth anniversary as Labour leader, albeit at differing levels of sincerity.
Michael Howard- the final person to bring up the anniversary- jibed that these have been “ten years of deep frustration for the ambitions of my party and for the ambitions of the Chancellor of the Exchequer.”
Mr Howard referred Mr Blair back to his acceptance speech, where he pledged to be “tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime”, is violent crime up? he demanded.
The Conservative leader slated Mr Blair’s record on crime, saying there has been an increase in violent crime by 64 per cent since 1998, covering murder, rape and crimes against children, adding “too many of the guilty are going free”.
He stated that 500,000 violent crimes have not been cleared up and those released on the early release scheme leave custody to reoffend.
Rebuffing the accusations of failure, Mr Blair emphasised that overall crime is down since 1997, the number of police officers is up by 12,000, and stressed that the New Criminal Justice Act would “make a big difference”, whilst also praising the new measures dealing with anti-social behaviour.
None of this would be helped by Conservative plans to cut the police budget, Mr Blair added.
He also poured scorn on Mr Howard’s proposed spending cuts and claimed that the Shadow Chancellor’s belief that he could make bureaucratic savings in the Home Office to the tune of £1.8 billion would remove the asylum and immigration budget in its entirety.
“Anyone who thinks I wouldn’t ensure the Home Office would get the finance it needs is living in fantasy land”, countered Mr Howard.
“When I was Home Secretary crime fell by 18 per cent”, Mr Howard claimed.
Happy to compare records, the Prime Minister launched into a wealth of statistics showing how the UK has improved since Labour has been in power, citing the national minimum wage and low unemployment, concluding “we should never forget, he was the one who introduced the poll tax”.
