Thread by @TanyaJaynePark

Yesterday, Eastleigh's (soon to be departing to (a possibly) safer seat) MP @pauljholmes spoke in Parliament, saying "...I genuinely believe that crime and sentencing is one of this Government’s key successes in the past 13 years."

For anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention to the state of the country right now, this is palpably untrue...

For instance, let's look at the state of the court system..

Or how about the fact that the prison system has never been so close to being at capacity...

independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-n…

Or what about the abysmal conviction rate for rapists -
"In the year to December 2021, there were 67,125 rape offences recorded – an all-time high. Yet the number of completed rape prosecutions plummeted from 5,190 in 2016-17 to just 2,409 in 2020-21."
victimscommissioner.org.uk/news/the-distr…

But let's look at a couple of his specific claims-
"We have more police on our streets now..."
In 2010 (at the beginning of this apparently wonderful 13yr period of success), there were 172k police officers, today, there are 164k...so actually fewer officers, not more!

(Source: )statista.com/statistics/303…

Paul also states that "Crime is down by 50%, from 9.5 million recorded cases in 2010 to 4.3 million today."
Sadly the veracity of this statistic is pretty doubtful as this Full fact webpage shows - fullfact.org/news/crime-fig…

Finally, Paul goes on to claim, "....Donna Jones has listened to me and secured a new police station in Eastleigh town centre", he omits to mention that it was under this Tory government that Eastleigh's old police station was sold off for a massive profit.

On that note I'll finish this thread with a very apt quote from the Full Fact article:
"Selective or misleading use of official information without appropriate context and caveats can damage public trust in both official information and politicians."