The former Minister for Crime Prevention, Norman Baker, has said he hopes the theft of a minister’s purse makes the government and police investigate more crimes.
Speaking on GB News Norman Baker said: “If [Dame Diana Johnson] has got the same title as I had, she's Minister for Crime Prevention, which she hasn't managed to do on this particular occasion. So it's clearly embarrassing for her. It's embarrassing for the police.
“She was addressing a conference with senior police officers and someone, some cheeky chappy somewhere, decided to nick her purse from the hotel in which the conference was taking place.
“But it does indicate how embarrassing it is. But also I don't know whether the police will pursue this matter, because low level crime has effectively been decriminalized in recent times. The idea of the police pursuing the theft of a purse strikes me as unlikely.
“I hope it drives home to both the government and indeed the police that a crime is a crime and they should be pursued. There should no longer be any crimes which are effectively free for the criminal.
“If they are crimes, they should be pursued. If they're not crimes, they should be removed from the statute book. It's quite as simple as that.
“And I hope that we do take things like theft more seriously. It's unfair, for example, on our shopkeepers, that shoplifting is effectively decriminalized, and people can go in and take what they want and are unlikely to get, in theory, repercussions. And if the shopkeeper, of course, attempts to stop them, they can get arrested for assault."
Discussing the scenes outside of prisons this week, he said: “It's another thing that's very embarrassing, probably more embarrassing for the government than the theft of Diana Johnson's purse. It's a very poor image.
“I don't actually blame the government in this situation, because we have a situation where prisons are at capacity. They inherited that from the last government.
“The last government was actually thinking about a similar scheme because of the pressure on the prisons.
“However, it does suggest that the criminals stick two fingers up, frankly, to law and order in this country and it's unedifying to see those sorts of scenes.
“I very much hope that we'll end up with a situation where, first of all, people who shouldn't be in prison because, for example, not paying a television license or something, are dealt with in different ways, but those who are in prison for serious offences should not be released and 40 percent of sentence. That’s not right.”
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