October 24, 2023 - 1:25pm
And lo, the blame game has started. Sir Mark Rowley, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, yesterday claimed that his officers don’t have the legal powers they need to crack down on the sort of blatant antisemitism we have seen at recent Gaza demonstrations; Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, says they do.
In fairness to Rowley, he did co-author a report back in 2021 arguing that existing extremism legislation was too narrowly focused on counter-terrorism. Meanwhile, successive governments have chosen not to ban the Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir.
But in a country where multiple officers were once dispatched to confiscate some golliwog dolls from a pub, and where people can get paid a visit for abrasive tweeting, the idea that the police are powerless to uphold “taste and decency” is not plausible.
So how else to explain the Met’s inaction? The root of the problem likely lies in an excessively narrow, and indeed woefully counterproductive, interpretation of their mandate to keep the peace.
The police want to maximise individual safety and minimise any confrontations between officers and demonstrators. On the face of it, these are perfectly laudable goals.
In practice, however, this seems very often to amount to allowing the ugliest and most potentially violent elements of any protest to set the tone — and even to the police tacitly enforcing the mob’s definitions of taste and decency on everyone else.
More than once over the past couple of weeks, protesters sympathetic to Israel have had their activities curtailed on the grounds of a perceived danger that they might upset the peace and even get hurt.
This sounds reasonable until one realises that what that means is that they would have angered the nastier elements of the pro-Gaza demonstrators, who might have kicked off and threatened them. And that instead of stepping up to protect everyone’s right to protest, the police shut the victims down for the sake of a quiet life.
Even in less egregious cases, it sometimes appears that the police are more concerned with the wellbeing of rioters than in preventing public disorder.
This is not a new problem. The public was angry at the lackadaisical early response to the 2011 London riots, and it has been a persistent issue ever since. It is also a very hard one for politicians, as more powers won’t fix it. It needs a cultural shift in attitudes to public order policing among those charged with carrying it out.
In an article in today’s Daily Telegraph, Rowley writes that “the chasm between our country’s legislation and public expectation is becoming more evident.” This may be so, but the chasm between public expectations and police conduct is at least as deep. The British people, when asked, strongly support “harsh” policing in the face of civil disorder, with polling from last year suggesting they are broadly in favour of proposed new protest powers.
We don’t want to know if the hoodlum on the roof of the bus “is now down safely”. We want to know he was arrested. The King’s Speech is imminent and reportedly rather thin, so perhaps Braverman will find space to give Rowley the new laws he apparently needs. But that’s no guarantee the police will use them — and if they don’t it’s the Tories, not the Met, who will be on the ballot next year.
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SubscribeA recent BTL comment in the Spectator summed it up nicely: “The police will ruthlessly suppress anything or anyone representing a cause they don’t approve of. Approved of causes are met with kid gloves, cups of tea and dancing.”
Yes, I encountered this in Amsterdam during the lockdowns. While anti-lockdown protestors were beaten by police and mangled by police dogs, BLM protests and Gay Pride parades were met with DJs, flags, and dancing. When I commented about this double-standard to a Dutch acquaintance of mine he, completely non-ironically, told me “oh, yes, but those protests had government approval.”
This never happened.
UnHerd’s resident fantasist strikes again!
Why are you so eager to intimidate others into silence? What are you scared of?
No worries, it’s a local troll in its natural habitat
If, as you say. it never happened in Amsterdam, it certainly happened in London. Anti lockdown protresters were met with brutality from the Met and just stop oil with creature comforts.Disgraceful !
Well said. Culture war stuff from the right wing.
I had the pleasure of being in Piccadilly last Saturday during these protests – a full on hate-fest, regardless of how the BBC apologists would like to massage that away.
I’ve no faith in the Met delivering anything remotely like law and order.
Persecution of the wrong people is standard procedure – I wonder what I pay my taxes for?
If it was pensioners asking for help with winter bills they’d of got out the water cannon.
We might have walked past each other. I was in London last weekend for the first time since 2015…just in time for geopolitics to go completely mental. Again – I was living there on 9/11 and went through the nuttiness of that too.
We saw the helicopters over Trafalgar Square but scurried off quickly to Charing X. No desire to get anywhere near the action.
Parking my car in the Autumn of 2001 near the American embassy, I looked up to see a sniper trained on me. Oh well!
Our politicians have tried to socially-engineer the fix to a series of perceived social ills (e.g. racism) by introducing what are essentially blasphemy laws (e.g. non-crime hate incidents) which curtail freedom of speech.
Ostensibly these measures apply equally to all, but in reality they apply more to some than others. Largely because of institutional capture of the police and other judicial authorities who are encouraged to, for example, pursue old ladies who say sex is more important than gender, but conditioned to ignore or excuse mobs who publicly incite “punching TERFs” and on more than one occasion even follow through on that ambition.
So its not just that the police are a bit afraid of upsetting the side which is most virulently aggressive, as they would then have the problem of dealing with violent people and the inevitable fall out of being accused of heavy-handedness against “vulnerable groups”. It is also that like many other public authorities, they have bought into the null-hypothesis that some groups rights are more in need of protection than others and it is the law’s job to provide that. In other words, its not absolutely impossible to get the police to protect your rights if you are the so-called “TERF” getting punched, but it is much, much harder than it should be because their default assumption is that you are the one spreading “hate” in the first place.
In their rush to be seen as “on the right side of history”, the police, courts etc appear to have forgotten that, imperfect as it is, the point of having written-down law is that it is impartial and without favour. Otherwise why bother with the expense of it all. Just save all the trouble and go back to the local Baron deciding who to believe.
It shouldn’t need pointing out how dangerous this is. Yet apparently it does because we are hurtling rapidly into a situation where how the law applies to you depends on who you are and what your cause is:
Toppled a public statue into a canal as part of a mob? Not a problem, after all, the statue was of a nasty person and your cause is so virtuous. Smashed the windows of a bank’s HQ because they invest in fossil fuels? Completely fine because without brave people like you how will we save the planet? March around screaming about death to an entire country you don’t like? Nothing to see here, move along everyone.
I don’t want to stop anyone speaking or protesting (non-violently) about anything. I have said it many times but it bears repeating: freedom of speech, within the law, has to apply to people whose opinions you don’t like also or it is meaningless.
What I do want is two main things:
For the law to clearly and impartially recognise the difference between, on the one hand, expressing an opinion somebody may find hurtful which should not be the police’s business and, on the other, actually hurting someone or directly inciting others to actually hurt them, which very much should be the police’s business.
And, secondly, for the police and judiciary to apply the laws impartially. Its not ok to say one group’s cause is in favour so it excuses criminal damage while another group’s cause isn’t and therefore doesn’t.
Hopefully the broader British public is having its eyes opened as to what the woke Left is really doing to the social fabric of the UK. And the public’s frustration about poor policing priorities vis-a-vis pro-terrorism rallies, might just spill over into other aspects of policing that have been harmed by the Left’s propaganda and mis-truths.
I think it’s much too late for that. The bookies’ odds on the next election imply that it’s 90% sure that Labour will win.
We have party elections, not presidential elections. You can think you’re voting for Thatcher and get Major. Or vote Blair, get Brown. Or vote Boris, get Truss.
Starmer will be PM, but will he be dumped by his party after he has put them in power? Social fabric of the UK, indeed.
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I am not in favour of giving the police new powers. When they had them during lockdown, they abused them. They have more than enough powers and they regularly use them tenatiously if they feel like it.
The problem is highly partial policing. During lockdown, those opposed to lock down even those socially distanced were instantly tackled. Perfectly legal church services all covid compliant and authorized were raided because police officers apparently felt like it. But BLM marches were facilitated. The police knelt before the non-socially distanced crowds. But women protesting the rape and murder by a serving police officer had the heavy squad set on them. Literally the police sent the heaviest doughnut eaters they could find to sit on 7 stone women and pull their hair. We have not heard that the unlawful arrest of an autistic teenager by a van load of police lacking any sense has resulted in any disciplinary action. So, when they feel like getting stuck in then there doesn’t seem to be any discipline or principle or proportionality involved. So, no more police powers should be given to be used partially and recklessly when they feel like it. As the article mentions this is a motivation and mindset problem, not a legal one.
There is footage of a police officer pepper-spraying teenagers currently doing the social media rounds. She looks very much like the officer who took such offence at an autistic teenager comparing her to her “lesbian nanna”, though in fairness I don’t know that this is confirmed.
Its not clear what the teenagers were doing to merit pepper-spraying. Perhaps reckless misgendering?
This is about iron grip that the international political Left has forged on all of our institutions, including all political parties, our civil service, our education and health systems, our police, and our state institutions.
The vast majority of our population is socially conservative (including the vast majority of immigrants). We want good public order, strong borders and policing, and a strong, but fair penal and prison systems, and migration reduced, and carried out on our terms. It’s not much to ask, but it is anathema to the left, who revel in discord, anarchy, and hate.
Make no mistake, the fight is not about “Conservatives, Liberal or Labour”. It’s us against them. All of them. All are dead set against everything that most of the population wants – their idea of successful governance is not what they can do for us, but what they can get away with, while we are distracted by whatever petty political bickering they’re pretending to be in deadly earnest about.
The vast majority of our MP’s don’t care a damn about the public’s wishes. They regard us as a bunch of red-necked rubes, and a pain in their backside. They are “the enemy”. They’re all in it to feather their own personal nests, to stay out of trouble with the apparatchiks of their respective parties, and not to rock their tidy, lucrative, globalist boat – the Westminster gravy train.
A vote for Reform, or no vote at all, with a spoiled ballot paper is my choice next time. I’m expecting that it’ll take one failed term by Labour for the remainder of the public to see the light, and for the real, hot, anger to start to build. And then I think we’re going to see “interesting times” in this country politically.
“The vast majority of our population is socially conservative.”
Would that it were true… but why would you think this? Public polling, the ballot box, the consumer choices people make… none of it suggests this is true.
I’m not saying they’re Conservative voters, I’m saying that their attitudes are socially conservative, the opposite of liberal, woke, or radical. And this is why I include most migrants, who are indeed socially conservative – their hostile views on gay marriage, trans, etc. are well known.
It’s a big picture problem. The UK, France, the USA are in a war, but won’t acknowledge it. Radical Islam is at war with the West. And the west is allowing known Radical Islamists entry and continued residence. Why? Because Western governments are understandably afraid to arrest, intern, and deport. They will need to call in the military to support the local police and courts. I hope Rishi, Macron, Biden et. al. have the courage to proceed.
Most of the recent stories about uneven policing seem to have been based on worries about how they’ll look on Twitter. These recent shortcomings seem to be motivated by fear – videos suggest to me a force with zero confidence of coming first in an altercation with the protestors.
Partly it’s typical public sector antipathy towards having to put any effort in. Partly it’s woke beliefs amongst the more senior officers, which in turn is the result of all those fast-tracked graduates.
My nephew has just joined a northern constabulary after completing a degree in Policing at his local polytechnic, sorry, university. His sister is following the same path one year astern. They are both sensible young people and, both, of rugby-playing physique, which is encouraging. But neither can explain why a degree will make them better PCs or why the constabulary requires it.
This is NOT the fault of the Met, but off the virtually ungovernable CROWN PROSECUTION SERVICE ( London North & South.)
Theoretically the Home Office is supposed to be their master but is either too feeble to act or in collusion with them.
In short this is a National disgrace, sadly one of many just now.
For the last 60 years or so appeasement has been the strategy adopted by Local Councils, all Governments, all Police jurisdictions, the Civil Service and most other institutions in dealing with those who insist we facilitate their way of life and the subset who would do us harm. To use an old adage – being nice to the crocodile will not prevent you being eaten, it merely moves you further down the menu.
They’re busy arresting Schmizzy, the Tik Tok prankster of Stamford Hill ?
He came into my backyard and started building a sukkah, the prat!
In my opinion, everyone is entitled to their opinion. If someone wishes to criticise some national or racial group, for whatever reason, they should be entitled to. They are just words.
The police seem currently to be overrepresented by a generation who have grown up on the Internet and fed anti-Semitism by the Left, and by a few nationalist groups who have been shown to be active in the armed forces.