Well, well…. for the first time in a long time we have heard a government minister tell it as it is on the UK’s ever rampant crime wave… and yet, she got herself in trouble for it.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith is in hot water after confessing in a newspaper interview that she feared walking the streets of London at night (London’s not even safe during the day, either). Not surprisingly, this was seized on by the opposition parties, one MP said that what she said was, I quote: “an astonishing admission.”
What is so astonishing that a government minister fears for his or her life just walking around the streets of London? Smith had stated the bloody obvious about crime in the capital. It’s the same across the country… people are getting mugged, beaten, burgled or even having your own identity stolen. The government has tried every trick in the book to tackle the crisis, but nothing has changed…. the situation continues to get worse.
Maybe her admission… and the political fallout from this… will enable her to put forward sensible and practical long-term proposals to tackling crime in this country.