There is no suggestion here that the cuts to policing budget introduced by the coalition Government from 2010 onwards were a good idea, after all James was not an MP at the time so he cannot be held personally accountable for voting for such terrible decisions. That said he was a member of the London Assembly and so had would have been crucially aware of the terrible impact of Theresa Mays claims that cuts to Police budgets would cause us no problems. However it appears to have taken James nearly four years to wake up and realise that as an MP he could support the idea of increases to police budgets. The really disturbing matter is that James seems to think that the problems can be solved by the Police and Crime Commissioner and Chief Constable when the rest of society know full well that we need the Government to redirect public funds to fund the police in Essex and across the nation. To be fair at the end of 2018 the Government finally began to carry out a U turn on funding matters but they have nearly a decade of failings to resolve and so we need much more effort than James has implied in this tweet.