The crisis in policing shows the danger of a single-issue government bewitched by Brexit

During the last election campaign, when politicians had to pay attention to what the voters care about, Theresa May paid the price for police cuts

The latest story that would be front-page news if not for Brexit is the crisis in policing. A Police Federation survey today finds that 90 per cent of officers think the service is understaffed and that 44 per cent find the job very or extremely stressful, up from 39 per cent three years ago.

The reduction in police numbers means that officers increasingly have to work alone, which is one of the big causes of stress. This matters to people. During the last election campaign, when politicians had to pay attention to what the voters care about, Jeremy Corbyn made Theresa May pay a price for police cuts in lost votes.

The election now seems as if it took place in another country. Although it was called on the issue of Brexit, it was fought on quite different subjects. The campaign was dominated by social care for old people, the housing crisis for young people, schools and the NHS.

It is not that people don’t care about Brexit, but that they thought they had decided that question and expected the politicians to get on with it. In the meantime, there are other important matters that they expect their leaders to attend to.

The whole point of the cabinet system is to allow the government to do more than one thing at a time. Yet since the election, instead of allowing successive Brexit secretaries to deal with leaving the EU, the prime minister has handled it herself and it has absorbed a vast proportion of her time. The whole government machine is distorted by it. Even now, civil servants are being transferred from civilian departments to work on Brexit.

Theresa May didn’t want her premiership to be defined by Brexit, although she realised it was her most important historical task. She says she wanted to be prime minister to tackle the “burning injustices” of which she spoke when she first entered No 10.

And she has done some other significant things. The five-year funding plan for the NHS, outbidding the £350m a week extra on the side of the Brexit bus, cannot be dismissed. And David Gauke, the justice secretary, and Rory Stewart, his junior minister, are trying to reform prisons. That isn’t even something that most voters care much about, but it does matter. This week Stewart was asked if he was one of those ministers planning to resign to try to prevent a no-deal Brexit and he said: “I’m currently focusing on trying to resign over prisons.” (He has said he would resign if prison violence wasn’t reduced in a year.)

So there are patches of sunshine, but the other side of a working criminal justice system is the police. Che Donald of the Police Federation claims in an interview with The Independent today: “We’re becoming a completely reactive service, we can barely keep up with demand from 999.” That means public confidence in basic security – let alone safety from terrorism – is compromised.

We know that the Police Federation is a trade union, agitating for better pay, conditions and resources for its members. But on this it has public opinion on its side. The long fall in crime since 1995 seems to have come to an end, with the most recent trend either flat or rising slightly, and knife crime, especially in London, rising sharply.

One of the huge costs of Brexit that isn’t mentioned often enough is the opportunity cost. The resources of government, especially its most valuable resource, the prime minister’s time, that are devoted to groundhog work on Brexit, could be devoted to other important problems. It is dangerous for the country to have a single-issue government.