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Blundering Susan Hall Mk. II

In the hope that consideration of Hall won't again get drowned in the endless, interminable, circular arguments about Gaza, I want to draw attention to her misleading statements about crime in London."Crime has spiralled out of control after he shut police stations and failed to recruit police," Hall claimed at her campaign launch (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-68639277.amp).Wrong: when he took over in 2016/17 the crime rate (the Met + City of London Police) was 89.3 per 1,000 population; in 2022/23 (the latest available figures) it was 100.9 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/380963/london-crime-rate/). so the increase was 13.2% over 7 years; hardly spiralling out of control.And the Conservative campaign has been forced to delete an ugly attack video that made another false claim about crime in London: “London under Labour has become a crime capital of the world.” Further, it showed scenes of panic at a railway station, overlaid with an ominous US-accented (why a US-accented narrator??) narrator saying: “A 54% increase in knife crime since the Labour mayor seized power [seized power? He was ELECTED, you dummies!] has the metropolis teetering on the brink of chaos. And in the chaos, people seek a desperate reprieve.”Not only was the station shown not in London or even in the UK, but it was Penn Station in New York! And the claim that there has been “a 54% increase  in knife crime was also completely false: in 2016/17 the total number of police recorded knife or sharp instrument offences in London was 12,077 and by 2022/23 it was 12,786, an increase of, er, 5.9%.It seems the hopeless Hall is so desperate she can only run using distasteful and dishonest tactics.

Richard Carter ● 2d7 Comments ● 1h