The Conservative Party has released an attack ad on Labour’s record on crime in London and the wider country.
The video features grainy black and white footage, accompanied by an ominous US-accented narrator. It is intended to resemble a 70s US crime drama or superhero trailer.
The ad claims that “London under Labour has become a crime capital of the world”, however, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, people are less likely to be victims of crime in London than across the country as a whole.
Aside from those who have (rightly) criticised the video for being blatantly misleading, the advert has also been ridiculed by Londoners who find it lacks credibility to the point of being laughable.
The ad states that the city is a “metropolis teetering on the brink of chaos” and implies that people are too scared to go out at night, which anyone who lives in the city knows to be false.
But not winning over Londoners isn’t a problem for this ad, as I believe that the ad is aimed at those living far away from the capital.
The main message of the video is that London is a blueprint for how Labour intends to run the rest of the country. The film makes the (unsubstantiated) claim that “where Labour are in charge, crime goes up and justice goes down”.
There is no mention of the Conservative London Mayoral candidate Susan Hall, who is standing for election on 2nd May.
Furthermore, neither Susan Hall nor the City Hall Conservatives account have, at the time of writing, shared the video on their social media accounts.
All of which leads to the conclusion that the Conservatives are using Sadiq Khan as a bogeyman for the entire country.
At first this might seem counterintuitive. Sadiq Khan is 24 points ahead of his nearest rival with just six weeks to go until polling day and so he is likely to romp home for a third consecutive term in office.
But despite Khan’s success in London, he has the highest unfavourable rating of any Labour politician in the UK at 56%.
The Conservatives are hoping to weaponise high levels of dislike of Khan and negative perceptions of criminality in London to their advantage in elections taking place elsewhere in the country.
While the execution has many flaws, the strategy is an interesting one.
You can listen to me discuss all the above and more with Matt Chorley on Times Radio in the video below.
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An earlier version of the Conservative Party ad, using scenes of a panicked crowd in 2017 rushing through New York’s Penn Station, has been deleted as it was reported to be misleading.
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