Labour’s plans on crime are a ray of hope at a strange and depressing conference

It’s been a strange and depressing Labour conference. The country is grinding to a halt under a fuel crisis provoked by government incompetence, and yet the opposition seems completely cut off in Brighton, oblivious to what’s going on away from the seaside and obsessed with the latest twists and turns of its civil war.

But this afternoon, something happened which offered a ray of hope. It came in a speech by shadow home secretary Nick Thomas-Symonds.

He’s not one of the figures you hear very much about. People prefer to talk about Angela Rayner or Andy Burnham, who have positioned themselves as potential challengers to leader Keir Starmer. But he offered something neither of them had: a return to the politics of compromise and moderation. The kind of politics which gives you a shot at winning power.

This was always key to the Starmer project. He’s ultimately a pragmatist with the air of a professional politician. He wants to win. And that means there will be painful compromises – concessions made to bridge the values-gap between progressive campaigners and the Red Wall heartlands the party needs to regain. But in exchange, Starmer promised a chance of a Labour government which could pass legislation to help people.

This involved a return to transactional politics. That’s a grubby-sounding phrase, but in fact it signifies something fundamental: the use of reason and universalism in democratic society. Under Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn, the two main parties degraded into hero-worshipping cults, happier demonising the other side than they were thinking how to reach out to them. Transactional politics does not offer total victory over the other side. Instead it promises mutual advantage – incremental change regulated by moderation.

Thomas-Symonds’ contribution to this style of politics began with an old slogan – “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” – briefed to the press ahead of his speech. It’s an old Blairite phrase, which’ll upset some left-wingers and disappoint those who want fresh thinking.

But if you’re going to revive a political slogan, you might as well make it the best one of the past half century. In the end he didn’t actually say it out loud, preferring to instead accuse the Conservatives of being “soft on crime and soft on the causes of crime”, but the principles of the slogan were embedded in the DNA of the speech.

“Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” encapsulates what makes compromise politics work. It makes two simultaneous promises – one to those who want firm law-and-order, and one to those who understand that criminality often stems from systematic failures in society: poverty, disadvantage, discrimination and abuse. It offers a powerful electoral proposition, but also a potent philosophical one – that we don’t need to be divided into warring tribes on right/left or liberal/authoritarian lines. Parties can spread their support and reassure some voters while delivering for others. In an age of purity politics, it’s a radical idea.

The speech contained some bitter pills for liberals and left-wingers to swallow. Thomas-Symonds seemed to return to New Labour’s law-and-order gimmickry with a promise to install “police hubs” in every community alongside WhatsApp-based “next generation neighbourhood watch” teams. He spoke of “eyes, ears and boots on the ground” – the kind of surveillance which alarms those who do not have a good experience of the police, including radicals, campaigners and ethnic minorities. It won only muted support in the hall.

But there were some carrots to go with the stick. The shadow home secretary focused on the way that austerity had contributed to crime by slashing the funding of community services. “The shutters rolled down on hundreds of youth clubs,” he said, “totally inadequate mental health services, thousands of police officers and police staff cut.” He promised support for the kinds of services which improve life chances and make criminality a less attractive prospect.

Labour also seems on the verge of adopting Scotland’s policy to allow police officers to issue warnings to people caught in possession of Class A drugs, rather than prosecute them. “Keir and I are not in favour of changing the drugs legal framework, but within that we have to be tackling the underlying causes of addiction,” Thomas-Symonds told a fringe event on Sunday. “Part of that has always been about non-court disposals for possession.”

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This would constitute the de-facto decriminalisation of drug possession. It’s not a perfect drug policy, but then this isn’t the politics of perfection. It’s the politics of incremental progress. It would be a confident step in a more liberal direction, in which people’s life chances – and particularly those of young ethnic minorities – are not ruined by youthful indiscretions. It would be much more radical than anything New Labour or Corbyn proposed and finally bring the subject of drug reform into the political mainstream.

In a way, the promises themselves matter less than the strategy in which they’ve been inserted. Thomas-Symonds is taking aim at a policy area which is traditionally associated with the Conservatives, but polling and focus groups suggest they’re vulnerable. He is doing so in a way that reassures the Conservative voters Labour need to convince, but offers liberals and left-wingers the promise of positive change. It’s the politics of trade-offs. The politics of securing power.

It’s about time we heard something like this. In a dispiriting Labour conference, it provided a rare glimpse of competence and purposefulness. We can only hope there’s more like this to come.