Robert Jenrick has a point but he has no business making it
Robert Jenrick wants you to think he’s an action man.
A no nonsense, law and order type so fed up with fare dodging and civic disintegration that he’s taken justice into his own hands on the London Underground.
In a demonstration of righteousness recorded by a friend with a camera, he stopped at least three young men at Stratford station, questioned them about not paying their fare, and asked one to clarify if they were carrying a knife.
It was theatre. Perilous and – in my opinion – deeply hypocritical theatre.
In his cheaply amateur video, he blamed London Mayor Sadiq Khan for ‘driving a proud city into the ground’ to try and score some even cheaper political points.
But I believe this whole saga was not a courageous defence of lawlessness, but a desperate diversion from the Conservative Party’s decade-long attack on the very infrastructure that could address it.
Jenrick’s knife-edge monologue, complete with snarky Turkish barber comments and corny ‘bang to rights’ catchphrases, might play well on X. But it is precisely the sort of play-acting politics that the public has tired of.
It wasn’t policing. It wasn’t leadership. It was an audition reel.
While Jenrick criticises the members of TfL and police for not jumping into action, he fails to mention that under successive Conservative administrations in which he has served, the powers of transport services and policing have been hollowed out.
Don’t just take my word for it. Shocking figures from the GMB Union revealed in 2019 that more than 23,500 police staff roles have been cut in the UK since 2010, and London has borne the brunt. The capital has lost almost half (47%) of its police staff, including a whopping 72% of PCSOs.
These are not ‘back office’ roles, as some Tories like to characterise them. These are the custody sergeants, 999 call handlers, scene-of-crime examiners, and neighbourhood eyes and ears who underpin community policing.
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If Jenrick wants to know why fare evaders walk through barriers unchallenged, he does not have to look any further than his own party’s history.
The Conservatives have spoken tough about crime for more than a decade while quietly taking apart the systems that keep neighbourhoods safe. Under Boris Johnson’s London Mayorship, yes, the same man who became Prime Minister in 2019 and then gave Jenrick his ministerial entry, London’s Met Police saw the most extreme of those cuts.
Neighbourhood policing has been all but destroyed. TfL revenue enforcement teams have been so stretched that they’re often told not to physically intervene unless absolutely safe, a policy born not of laziness but necessity.
The Transport Salaried Staff’s Association (TSSA), which represents the British Transport Police, brutally denounced Jenrick’s intervention as ‘vigilante justice’, and cautioned that fare evasion must be tackled by trained personnel, not MPs ‘playing hero on the commute’. Ouch.
But of course, Jenrick isn’t trying to get to the bottom of anything. He’s trying to pose as a leader in waiting, to take on a future Tory leadership bid while dodging fingers pointed at his disastrous record in government.
He didn’t even bother to ask Kemi Badenoch if he could do this video, which has now been viewed over 12 million times.
The irony is stomach-churning. Jenrick claims he hates the fare dodgers ‘chipping away at society’ while he helped implement policies that have dismantled community services and worn away trust in institutions.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Jenrick was in hot water over expenses he had no right to claim. The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority discovered he’d charged the taxpayer for both train and petrol costs for the same 136-mile round-trip journey from London to his Newark constituency.
The money only got reimbursed after a constituent raised the alarm. ‘An administrative error,’ his office called it.
So let’s be clear: Robert Jenrick helped to reduce police levels across the country, and now believes it is up to a public service to tell their lowly paid and under-trained workers to take risks fighting for as little as £2.70 from fare evaders.
He is no innocent bystander stepping in where the police have not. He is one of the men who has made that failure.
Fare dodging is a problem. But the solution isn’t self-interested MPs with cameras trying to be internet sensations.
It’s an adequately funded British Transport Police. It’s reinstating the 23,500 police officers the Conservatives cut. It’s investing in community safety, not cutting it and then blaming Sadiq Khan or some exhausted culture war boogeymen.
TfL itself is already making a start with little funding. Its new strategy uses data and CCTV to catch out repeat fare dodgers, and it’s expanding the numbers in its enforcement teams. But without the ability to staff barriers, even the best-laid plan comes to nothing.
Meanwhile, Jenrick’s ‘shame people into action’ video has been preceded by another series of headlines but no change to any meaningful degree. Another example of a disgraced former Tory minister turning social collapse into an excuse for a photo opportunity instead of a call to arms.
If Robert Jenrick really had a concern about crime, he wouldn’t be making videos. He’d be issuing apologies.
Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing James.Besanvalle@metro.co.uk.
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