Mayor demands action on knives

The Mayor has spent weeks insisting that gun crime has dropped by 20 per cent in recent years and even claimed that the media had wrongly focused on teenage murders with a motto of "if it bleeds, it leads" the news.

But in what appeared to be a major shift, Mr Livingstone today unveiled a new manifesto calling for longer sentences for anyone found carrying a weapon. He also said that there should be a presumption against granting bail where the police opposed it and called for shopkeepers who sold knives illegally to be subject to prison sentences.

Mr Livingstone said that he would work with the families of victims of knife and gun crime to organise a London-wide consultation with youngsters to deter them from joining gangs.

Unveiling his plans in Peckham, he seized on the fact that Tory rival Boris Johnson had voted in Parliament against Labour's mandatory five-year sentences for gun possession. "Action, not waffle is the way to cut crime," the Mayor said.

Mr Livingstone repeated that the total number of gun crimes in London had fallen from 4,400 in 2002 to 3,400 in 2007 and stressed that it was a direct result of his decision to put 10,000 extra uniformed police on the streets.

Yet in a change in tone to his previous pronouncements, Mr Livingstone said he had to do much more. "There is no room for complacency. Londoners are rightly concerned about serious violent crime involving young people and the problem of gangs," he said. He pledged to give the police whatever money they needed to target gang members.

The Government has increased the maximum sentence for carrying knives from two to four years and the minimum age for purchasing knives from 16 to 18.

But the Mayor said he backed a petition calling for tougher sentences that was submitted to the Prime Minister by the family of 16-year-old Kodjo Yenga, who was stabbed to death in Hammersmith last year. "One of Kodjo's killers had been released on bail against police advice hours before the murder," he said.