Major of London Sadiq Khan today rolled his eyes when he faced questions from a Sky News reporter about funding for the fight against knife crime.
Mr Khan claimed he had done ‘as much as I am allowed to do under the law’ by setting up a £45million youth fund and raising council taxes.
But he insisted cuts in funding from central government had left him hamstrung.
Mr Khan today claimed he had done ‘as much as I am allowed to do under the law’ to tackle knife crime by setting up a £45million youth fund and raising council taxes
The Mayor’s actions during the interview sparked anger on Twitter, with one person accusing him of being ‘out of his depth’
‘I’ve raised council tax three years in a row, but also used the money from business rates to invest in policing and youth services,’ he told Sky News.
‘The investment we are putting in doesn’t fill the massive hole left by the Government.’
At this point Sky’s Sarah-Jane Mee interrupted, saying: ‘You keep shifting it onto central government.’
Mr Khan then rolled his eyes in frustration, before the presenter asked why he wasn’t ‘taking personal responsibility’ for the issue.
His actions during the interview sparked anger among some people on Twitter, with one user accusing him of being ‘out of his depth’.
The Greater London Authority Conservatives tweeted a link to the clip with the comment: ‘The Mayor needs to take personal responsibility’.
Chancellor Philip Hammond has resisted calls for more funding to tackle knife crime by saying police should divert the resources they already had to the issue.
Philip Hammond (pictured yesterday outside Downing Street) said a smooth exit from the European Union would help free more money for public services
Mr Hammond said police forces need to move officers off ‘lower priority’ crime and onto knife violence.
His comments came after another knife murder in London on Wednesday and the death in hospital of a man who was stabbed in Oxford last week.
Mr Hammond also suggested there would be more money for public services if MPs voted for the Prime Minister’s Brexit deal.
‘What we need to see now is a surging of resources from other areas of policing activity into dealing with this spike in knife crime,’ he told the Today programme.
‘And that’s what you do in any organisation when you get a specific problem occurring in one area of the operation – you move resources to deal with that.
‘And what the public will want to know is that this Friday night and this Saturday night there are going to be more police officers focused on dealing with knife crime, and that means necessarily fewer police officers that will be dealing with other lower priority areas of activity.’
He added: ‘If we get the right Brexit deal done, and a smooth exit from the European Union so that we can release the money that we’ve set aside to deal with the possible disruption of a no-deal exit, then that will give us more money still that we can put into public services over the next three years.’
Murder map: The shocking scale of knife deaths in Britain so far in 2019
Mrs May also faced mounting pressure from Home Secretary Sajid Javid (pictured yesterday) and senior officers, who went public with demands for increased funding
Mr Hammond’s comments on police resources were labelled ‘monstrous’ by Labour, and an ‘insult to grieving families’.
Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott asked Home Office minister Victoria Atkins: ‘Does she accept that many people will find the fact that the Chancellor of the Exchequer is suggesting that all the police have to do is move resources from other areas to fight knife crime is monstrous, and an insult to grieving families?’
Ms Atkins did not directly address the question in her response, but pointed to the Government decision to ‘increase police resources by nearly a billion pounds’ last month.
On Wednesday, Home Secretary Sajid Javid said after an emergency meeting with chief constables that ‘police resources are very important to deal with this’.
He said the Government must ‘listen’ to police ‘when they talk about resources’.
The Chancellor insisted police budgets were rising, and said knife crime is ‘an immediate problem, you cannot solve it by recruiting and training more officers – that takes time’.
The number of police officers across the 43 forces in England and Wales has fallen by more than 20,000 since 2009 but Prime Minister Theresa May has said there was no correlation between the decline and ‘certain crimes’.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn accused her of trying to protect the public ‘on the cheap’.
An officer mans a cordon today on North Birkbeck Road in Leyton, east London, where a man was stabbed to death last night
Flowers at the scene in Leyton (left) and a blood smear near to where the body was found
There was more knife-related bloodshed overnight on Wednesday as a man was stabbed to death in Leyton, east London, while a 22-year-old man attacked in Oxford on February 27 died in hospital.
West Midlands Police are also investigating whether knives were used in an incident at Matthew Boulton College in Birmingham on Wednesday afternoon, which left two teenagers in hospital.
Sadiq Khan and seven police and crime commissioners sent a letter to the Prime Minister on Thursday warning that a ‘broken’ school exclusion system is exacerbating the surge.
‘It cannot be right that so many of those who have committed offences have been excluded from school or were outside of mainstream education,’ it said.
The letter also urged an end to ‘off-rolling’ – removing pupils from school registers – to increase average exam results.
At the weekend two 17-year-olds, Jodie Chesney and Yousef Makki, were killed in separate stabbings in London and Greater Manchester