It’s a moderately catchy quote, and spot on. Shame the same can’t be said for the rest of David Davis’ speech today at the Tory Conference.

The decision to launch the meaningless “War on Crime” by showing a video of Nottingham shopkeeper Victor Bates, who witnessed his wife being killed in front of him by armed robbers, talking of his horrific experience could, at best, be seen as an opportunistically callous exploitation of an innocent victim’s pain for political gain. And, as The Guardian points out, “Since a man has been charged with that murder, the short film clip risked running foul of the law on contempt of court.”

Good work – launch a “War on Crime” by flaunting regulations aimied to protect the impartiality of the courts, thus potentially prejudicing a jury and allowing a criminal to get off scott free.

Actually, the sad and scary thing is that a lot of what Davis (who, for non-UK – and probably a fair few UK – readers is the Shadow Home Secretary), said may well be catchy. Especially the new hardline Tory rhetoric on immigration.

It’s all very well praising Britain’s laudable “tradition of toleration”, but to follow this up with alarmist bullshit about how “immigration alone could fill six new cities the size of Birmingham over the next three decades” flies in the face of everything the Conservative Party should stand for. What happened to the value of the individual which used to be the party’s underlying mantra? Why are they now lumping all immigrants together? Have they forgotten that even their current leader is a second-generation immigrant?

Apparently, the current level of immigration – for which earlier in his speech Davis admits no one has reliable figures – “is too much, far too much, and we must do something about it.”

Perhaps it is, but as Davis himself admits, no one knows; following this up with the classic “my best friend is black” get-out and a frankly disturbingly right-wing assertion demonstrates amply that even though the UKIP look like a spent force, the Tories are going to continue in their rabid lurch to the right which has served them so brilliantly at the polls over the last seven years of massive Labour majorities:

“Let me make it clear, we will never diminish the contribution that immigrants make… But Britain is already the most densely populated major country in Europe… immigration endangers the values that we in Britain rightly treasure.”

He then tops it off with a no-doubt unintended admission of what the Tories now are:

“Extremist political parties are hoping to batten on the fears and resentments that already exist.

“So the next Conservative Government will act.”