Pritti Awful Politics

The Home Office has deleted thousands of computer records containing fingerprint and DNA data.  Its obviously a pretty serious error that will cause problems for the police in cross referencing information, with the effect that some criminals might escape justice.  But, its Labour's response where the awful politics comes in.  Labour's Shadow Home Secretary, Nick Thomas-Symonds, has said that the Home Secretary, Pritti Patel, is responsible for this error, and for all these criminals then walking free.  This is clearly nonsense, and just playground politics.

Now, I think that Pritti Patel is awful.  Her politics are thoroughly nasty and reactionary, and from all of the accounts seen in the media a bully.  But, to say that she is responsible for someone in the Home Office computer department deleting these records, as a result of human error is absolute bullshit.  Did Patel tell someone to delete the records?  Did she make some other decision that directly led to someone deleting the records?  Did she want the records to be deleted?  The answer to all these questions is clearly no.  So, she was not at all responsible for those records being deleted.  It was a simple case of human error, by someone in the Home Office.  The most that can be said is why didn't the Home Office have back ups of all this data.

The fact that Symonds has gone for this ad hominem attack on Patel, is typical of Labour's current politics.  On all important issues, be it Brexit, lock downs, immigration, jingoism, English nationalism, Starmer's New Labour has again become just clones of the Tories.  That leaves them no political space to attack the Tories, and so Labour's only line of attack, to differentiate themselves becomes personal rather than political.  It leaves Labour on the ground of the politics of the cheap political jibe, of attacking Tory politicians rather than Tory politics.  It is a political dead-end well travelled by Labour, but it seems, a rut that Labour is again well and truly stuck in.