Britain’s woke police forces have lost their way

Officers’ desperate desire to avoid being branded racist has undermined respect for the law

In the last few weeks, around 140 police officers have been injured in this country; 27 in just one night last week in Brixton. A day later, the force’s LGBT+ network could be found tweeting their support for asexual people. Perhaps the thugs who assaulted their colleagues in Brixton would have been mollified had they known how supportive the constabulary is of the asexuals in their midst? Or perhaps – and I simply put the possibility out there – such efforts by all branches of the British police do not, in fact, show how much the police have got with the beat, but just make things harder for the policemen and women on the actual beat?

When you cast your mind back across recent months, what are your most distinctive memories of the British constabulary? Dancing for public likes in Tiktok videos? Skateboarding down major London thoroughfares closed down by climate extremists? Officers “taking the knee” before Black Lives Matter activists, shortly before some of those same officers had to flee from the protesters who had turned violent?

All of these sights are indelibly linked in the minds of everybody who has seen them. But in the minds of a portion of the public they meld with another vision of the British police. A vision which numerous commentators and politicians have helped to exaggerate in recent weeks.

In the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minnesota, politicians and Left-wing pundits, in the UK as much as in the US, sought to make some grand strategic play off the back of that appalling incident. In the US, various commentators argued that the Minnesota incident was not isolated, but part of a broader problem of US policing and of American society as a whole. There is a debate to be had about aspects of US policing, certainly. But inevitably there were those in our own country who tried to make political gains by claiming the same situation exists here. These people – not least the organisers of BLM UK – wish to portray the British police and the American police as being the same, and the history of American racism synonymous with all British history.

It is a very dangerous game that such opportunists are playing. Some responsibility at least for the assaults on police officers that have occurred since the first BLM UK protests must be laid at their door. A week before the assault on police in Hackney, the Labour MP Dawn Butler stood in the

House of Commons and told the Conservative Government that it needed to “get its knee off the neck of the Black, African, Caribbean, Asian and minority ethnic community in this country.” It was a disgraceful intervention, which went off almost without censure.

Ms Butler and others seem very determined to bring American racial problems to the UK. They use the language of the Macpherson report into the killing of Stephen Lawrence as the sole template through which to interpret the British police. And they ignore all the progress and good that the British police have done since in a sectarian and partisan campaign to advance their remarkably ugly and racialised positions.

What is a young person to do facing this mixture of views? On the one hand MPS declare that the British state as a whole has its knee on the neck of all black people in this country. On the other they see a police service prostrating itself before the public, begging to be loved and doing everything it can not to be feared.

Possibly, just possibly, there will be people who see through all of this and recognise an unparalleled opportunity to act up and do whatever they like. The truth is that a police force that is presented as racist and violent is very obviously, manifestly, afraid of putting a foot wrong. Especially when it comes to BLM. Could anyone expect some not to take advantage of such a position?

Of course there are problems – as well as advantages – in the British idea of policing by consent. Not least is that the police have a tendency to flip back and forth between being overenthusiastic and underwhelming.

In 2009 an innocent unarmed man – Ian Tomlinson – was hit and killed by a British policeman during the unrest in London caused by anti-capitalists protesting against the G-20 summit. There was justifiable criticism of the police reaction to protesters, and considerable self-criticism within the police force. But two years later, when riots erupted in London, the police very visibly held back. Looting and other previously unimaginable rioting then broke out across the country. The public attitude overnight switched from demands for lighter policing to demands for heavier policing. Such is the moment we may be at now.

At the start of the BLM protests the police stood back. Now there are demands, from the Home Secretary down, for the police to step up. It is time they did, and that politicians and police leaders argued their case. It should not be difficult. The case is not racial. It is the divide between hooliganism and violence versus law and order.

If the police and politicians cannot hold that line then don’t expect them to hold any other.