The Scoop

Why Ken has won on transport but is losing on crime

Adam Bienkov | Monday 13 February, 2012 12:10

The latest Evening Standard Mayoral poll suggests that Boris Johnson has regained a small lead over Ken Livingstone.

With only two points in it, it’s margin of error stuff, but does suggest that Ken Livingstone has failed to consolidate his lead from last month.

Ken’s lead was built largely on fares and the cost of living.

Despite Boris’s best efforts, Ken has won on these and Boris’s ludicrous £3 giveaway is not going to reverse that.

But as I’ve written before, fares was always going to be Ken’s ace card and he needs to win on the other issues if he has any chance of beating Boris.

The biggest of these is crime and Ken’s campaign has not been anywhere near effective enough on this so far.

Today’s poll shows that Ken is well ahead on transport but still trailing on crime.

However Boris’s lead is assailable and his record on crime has actually been pretty poor, especially when you contrast it with how central it was to his campaign in 2008.

Under Boris, knife crime has risen, especially among the young. and despite all of the publicity his flagship youth mentoring scheme has been a total flop.

And despite pledging a crack down on crime, he failed to extend it to his own office, where one of his Deputy Mayors was convicted for fraud.

However, rather than pick any of this record apart, Ken’s campaign has focused almost entirely on the issue of police numbers.

By doing this they have allowed the debate to descend into a long and rather dull game of mathematics, which depending on how you calculate it, shows police numbers going up or down by around a thousand.

This is not going to excite many voters.

They’ve also used a number of dodgy statistics, of their own, something that isn’t necessary when many of the real statistics are bad enough.

But in order to win, Ken needs to focus far more on Londoners’ real experience of crime, most notably the terrifying riots of last year in which Boris Johnson was absent without leave.

For any other politician, Boris’s performance during the riots would have been disastrous.

However, a compliant press and a lacklustre response from Ken and Labour, meant that Boris was allowed to get off the hook.

If Ken is going to win, then he needs to place Boris right back on that hook again.

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