On Monday, Theresa May hit a bump in the road. In a speech delivered in Whitehall, at the Royal United Services Institute, the Prime Minister covered the economy, Brexit and Jeremy Corbyn’s many shortcomings, before—eventually—coming to the issue of security.
“Safeguarding the security of our country takes leadership,” said May to a crowd of applauding party officials. “That is why since 2010, in the face of a growing threat, we have protected the budget for counter-terrorism policing—and increased the resources available to the security and intelligence agencies.”
Faced with the third terrorist attack in Britain in as many months, the PM said she was determined to “make sure the police and security services have all the powers they need.”
And when the speech was finished and the applause had died down, May said she would take questions. One issue came up repeatedly—police cuts. Journalists took in in turns to put the same question to May: “since 2010, police numbers have been cut by 20,000. Was that a mistake?
At first, May batted the question away, saying that only she, and not Jeremy Corbyn, had the guts to deal with extremism. But the question kept coming back. As it did so, the PM began to look irritated and somewhat taken aback. A glazed expression fell across her face, her head tilted to one side.
The suggestion that police cuts have gone too far is uncomfortable for May, who was Home Secretary for six years—meaning that the cuts occurred on her watch. The PM’s defence was that her government is committed to “protecting police budgets,” a nice turn of phrase that sounds reassuring, but which, at a second glance, becomes all but meaningless. In the deadening lexicon of Whitehall speak, “protecting” a budget is not the same as “ring-fencing” it.
Put plainly, police budgets have been reduced since 2010. National Audit Office figures show that, since 2010, direct funding to police forces has decreased by 25 per cent in real terms. It is worth noting that the NAO checks all its facts with relevant government departments before publication—so the Home Office would have signed off on that figure.
This means that Theresa May presided over the police service for a period during which police funding was reduced by a quarter, a fact at odds with her image as a tough, “law and order” Conservative. It is also a fact which is deeply damaging to her security credentials.
May insisted in her speech on Monday that “we have increased the number of armed police officers, improved cooperation between the police and specialist military units, and provided funding for an additional 1,900 officers at MI5, MI6 and GCHQ.”
These increases are welcome. But the kind of threat faced today must be met with a strong police presence on the street. Only in this way can the police and security services hope to generate the low-level intelligence and local links that are so important in combating the modern forms of extremist threat.
May showed no grasp of this in a 2010 speech to the National Policing Conference, when she warned the audience that a spending review was under way. “The cuts will be big,” she said, “they will be tough to achieve, and cuts will fall on the police as they will on other important public services.”
“Let me be crystal clear from the beginning,” May said, “police officers and staff need to be ready, along with the rest of the public sector, to make sacrifices and accept pay restraint.” It is worth recalling those words when considering May’s claim to have protected police budgets.
The Prime Minister’s speech on Monday was intended to pass over this awkward history in silence. Instead, it struck a sharp note of dissonance. May wanted to present herself as an old hand on the security and policing beat, and elide that experience with her tough stance on Brexit.
But the effect was quite different. Instead, she drew attention to her dubious record on policing, just as Britain faces its most serious security challenge since the 7/7 bombings. And so the question arises: if she miscalculated so badly on the police, and cut funding just as a new insidious terrorist threat was developing—if, in other words, she messed up badly —who’s to say she won’t do it again over Brexit? That’s the bump she hit yesterday. It was of her own making. It was a big one.
