Stop acting tough ...just keep us safe

THE EXTRAORDINARY tale of the storm in the (peppermint) teacup over two young women who were fined by police for going for a walk around a reservoir in Derbyshire complete with hot drinks has been viewed, reviewed and even re-reviewed – but there’s one key aspect that should set alarm bells jangling for anyone who fears we could be sleepwalking into almost being a police state. As if it wasn’t absurd enough that two cups of tea were deemed to be a picnic by Derbyshire Police – who reportedly had many more officers there than there were walkers – it was the justification that the two women were not acting “in the spirit” of the law.

Precisely what does that mean? And what hellish fate awaits us all if police are now able not just to enforce the law, but also decide whether or not we’ve displayed the right “spirit”?

The law in this instance as it applies to England (but not necessarily the whole of the UK) is actually quite straightforward. You are permitted to leave your home to go for exercise – as the Prime Minister proved when he cycled around the Olympic Park, seven miles from Downing Street. Mercifully, most people saw sense over that and the much hoped-for hue and cry for Boris Johnson to humbly apologise never took off. Seeing as the man has had the ghastly virus, nearly succumbed to it and has pressures the like of which most of us can only imagine, good luck to him I say.

Therefore, the only way Derbyshire plod could proceed was to go for this so-called spirit. But the truth there is brutally simple: if the law permits it, it doesn’t fall to the cops to forbid it.

As Health Secretary Matt Hancock was on radio and TV seeking to justify this blunder that was as sinister as it was stupid, Derbyshire Police announced it had backed down, accepting the decision was wrong and the £200 fines would be hastily refunded. Clearly Mr Hancock was unaware of the restrictions that have been introduced and for which he has supposedly so earnestly and ceaselessly lobbied. To repeat: no crime had been committed.

But, if you expected a sanguine note of caution from the Government after this clear and present danger of an assault on our civil liberties, you were sadly wrong. Save for marching up to the podium at the Downing Street briefing last week wielding a pickaxe handle, Home Secretary Priti Patel couldn’t have been more strident in setting out her position.

“My message to anyone refusing to do the right thing is simple. If you do not play your part, our selfless police officers will enforce the regulations and I will back them to do so,”she barked.

So now we can add “the right thing”

to “the spirit” of the law can we? Has the penny dropped about these coppers’ new rights? They don’t just uphold the law, they are called upon to enforce the Government’s wishes as if they were the law.

If – totally understandably – you don’t want to listen to me, then perhaps the words of historian Jonathan Sumption might help. As Lord Sumption is a former Supreme Court judge it seems fair to assume he knows a thing or two about the law.

He said last week: “The lockdown regulations confer powers of enforcement that

no policeman should have in a society with even the most basic standards of governance.

“They authorise the police to give orders to members of the public if they ‘consider’ that they are out of their homes without a ‘reasonable’ excuse.”

Being tough just for the sake of it is not the way forward for the police now. It only serves to underline that some of the restrictions are palpably wrong and arbitrary, and that the crucial relationship between us, who ask to be policed, and those who are courageous enough to step up and do the job, is irreconcilably severed.

IF acclaimed screenwriter Russell T Davies, the man who breathed fresh life into Doctor Who, had his way only gay actors would be permitted to play gay characters. What woke tosh! Mr Davies likens it to the ghastly and now derided act of “blacking up” an actor to play a person of colour, which is a ludicrous comparison.

However, if you follow his logic, you’d have to ban gay people from playing straight roles and presumably only actors who were dads or mums could portray parents.

Can someone kindly tell him... it’s called ACTING for a reason!

THERE can be little surprise that Britain’s Got Talent was last year’s most complained about TV show, but the margin is extraordinary. There were more than 31,000 complaints, with 25,000 specifically concerning Diversity’s Black Lives Matter routine last September.

The gap to the second highest offender, Good Morning Britain, was huge as that show chalked up just 13,215 complaints.

Producers of BGT need to realise people want to be entertained on a Saturday night, not preached to or exposed to blatant political messaging.