DON’T TAKE A TRUNCHEON TO THE TRUTH, THERESA

THERESA MAY is admirable in the way she is prepared to take on the police when she believes they are not acting in the public interest. But in her criticism of the Met’s stop-andsearch policies, the Home Secretary has not behaved with her customary integrity.

This is made devastatingly clear in a forthcoming report — The Return of Political Patronage — for the Civitas think-tank by her former civil service speech writer, alasdair Palmer.

He reveals how he was told by one of Mrs May’s special political advisers that ‘it would help the Home Secretary’s standing with afro-Caribbeans if she made a statement that was critical of the police’s use of stop and search. The grounds would essentially be that the tool was used by the police in a racist way: the statistics showed that you were six or seven times more likely to be stopped and searched if you were a member of an ethnic minority.’

Palmer then went away and discovered that, some years earlier, Home Office researchers had studied this and found that ‘when you looked at who was available to be stopped and searched when the police were stopping and searching on the streets, the ethnic bias disappeared: in fact the police stopped slightly more white people than they should have done if you looked solely at their proportion of the street population.

‘The police, the Home Office research showed, did not target particular areas for stop and search because they wanted to stop and search people of a particular ethnic group.

‘ They chose those areas because that is where the highest amount of street crime was reported — and stop and search’s primary purpose is to diminish street crimes such as mugging and robbery.’

So that is what Palmer put in his draft of the Home Secretary’s parliamentary statement.

He then records: ‘There was an explosion of rage from the special adviser’, who rewrote the statement, omitting this highly relevant internal research.

Palmer goes on to say that ‘misleading statistics on stop and search have reappeared in the Home Secretary’s subsequent statements to Parliament’.

Remember this when you read about the recent disturbing increase in murders and stabbings in the capital.