Braverman: woke police damaging public trust

Home Secretary launches investigation into officers ‘pandering to politically correct causes’

PUBLIC confidence in the police is being “eroded and needlessly damaged” because officers are “politicised” and “partisan”, the Home Secretary warns today.

In an interview with The Daily Telegraph, Suella Braverman discloses that she has instructed Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, to investigate the “unacceptable rise” in police taking a side on controversial issues.

She says she fears that “pandering to politically correct causes” is distracting police from fighting crime. She has also written to chief constables in England and Wales expressing her concerns.

It comes in the wake of rows over “woke” policing, including a “hate incident” recorded by officers after an autistic boy accidentally damaged a copy of the Koran, and police investigating tweets by feminists voicing gendercritical views. Mrs Braverman warns: “In recent years, we’ve seen an unacceptable rise in police partisanship and the police straying into politically contested areas.”

Highlighting issues such as police referring to trans rapists as “she” or “her”, and officers taking the knee at Black Lives Matter demonstrations or dancing with protesters and flying flags at parades, she says: “Some of these examples are having an insidious effect on public confidence.

“Police deserve respect, they deserve public confidence but in too many instances that confidence has been eroded and needlessly damaged.”

Mrs Braverman also reveals she is “very concerned” about the level of violence at Notting Hill Carnival this year and wants police to assess what more can be done to make the event safer; says victims of thefts are being let down; tells middle-class cocaine users that they are killing people; and says she supported the idea of every community having a named police officer.

Mrs Braverman says she has been called the “P-word” in the street in the past but does not believe that Britain is a racist country, and warns police forces against declaring themselves “institutionally racist”.

“When I see police chiefs at some forces declaring that they are institutionally racist, I think they should be more concerned about tackling knife crime, catching burglars and stopping anti-social behaviour.

“It’s not a helpful term and doesn’t do anything for the public whom the police are there to serve,” she says.

Her comments come at the end of a week in which the Government has sought to highlight its efforts to fight crime. It announced an agreement by police forces to investigate all crimes where there is a reasonable line of inquiry, new laws to make it easier for police chiefs to sack officers who are found guilty of gross misconduct and legislation to force criminals to appear at their sentencing hearings.

Mrs Braverman says she was “at pains” to stress her “gratitude, admiration and thanks” to the majority of officers for their bravery and hard work but it was her duty to ensure taxpayers’ money was not being wasted on “initiatives that are not meeting the priorities that the public expect of the police”.

“I’ve instructed the chief inspector to look more closely at this issue and to see what effect it’s having on public confidence ... with the police and effective- ness,” she says.

She adds that police should not appease politically contested views and insists that “in no instance” is it biologically or legally right for a rapist to be described as a “she”, as police forces have done in some cases.

For Suella Braverman, the two officers she met in Manchester this week symbolise the approach to policing she wants to roll out nationwide. Local intelligence from the officers’ contacts in the neighbourhood had identified a suspected drug dealer operating out of Cheetham Hill near the centre of the city. “Through some concerted work over a series of months, they focused on that person, they monitored him and they were able to arrest and charge him with quite serious offences,” she says, leaning forward in an armchair in her neat Whitehall office. “That’s the kind of neighbourhood policing we need: being smart, being serious and being focused on who the criminals are and how we get them.”

It is what she describes as neighbourhood policing “with teeth” overseen by the city’s no-nonsense chief constable Stephen Watson, who in the space of 18 months, has rescued its failing police force with a pledge to investigate all crimes – no matter how minor – if there are reasonable lines of inquiry.

“He’s turned around what was a failing force because he’s adopted a back-to-basics approach whereby they respond swiftly to 999 and 101 calls, where they’re visible in the community, and following every reasonable line of inquiry.”

The adoption of Watson’s “zerotolerance” principle by all 43 police forces in England and Wales was the first policy initiative of Rishi Sunak’s “crime week” this week. Today’s declaration of war on “woke” policing by Braverman also has its roots in Manchester. When Stephen Watson began his formidable task of overturning the culture in Manchester police in June 2021, the force was one of the most progressive and liberal in the country but was also failing to record the true level of crime, let alone solve it. He told The Telegraph at the time that the public were “fed up” with police officers focusing on virtuesignalling rather than locking up burglars, and that police officers’ traditional impartiality was being put at risk by making “common cause” with campaign groups by, for example, taking the knee or wearing rainbow shoelaces. When asked if he would take the knee in uniform, he replied: “No, I absolutely would not. I would probably kneel before the Queen, God, and Mrs Watson, that’s it.”

Two years later, Braverman has ordered an inquiry by the Chief Inspector of Constabulary Andy Cooke into the drift by some police leaders into “politically contested” areas such as gender politics, critical race theory and blasphemy. The Home Secretary traces her concerns back to 2020 when she saw officers taking the knee during the Black Lives Matter protests. “I was bewildered and angry that the police were siding with a political movement and subscribing to a contested idea of critical race theory and undermining their legitimacy in their public order function that was totally unacceptable,” she says.

“What’s crystallised it in my mind is meeting hundreds of rank-and-file cops who have said they’re fed up with the virtue signalling that some police leaders have been spending their time on, instead of focusing on back-tobasics crime. They are fed up with apologies by chiefs for being institutionally racist, because they’re not racist, and they don’t feel that they’ve been properly represented. They’re uncomfortable with the takeover by gender ideologues and trans ideology.”

She argues the police must “make sure at all times they adopt a position of strict neutrality, even if that may mean offending some parts of society.” It is a line taken by Met Police Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley, who this week said officers could wear Remembrance poppies, but should avoid aligning themselves with other political or environmental causes.

Rowley was the originator (when chief constable of Surrey) of the modern concept of neighbourhood policing. Braverman says that he and Watson are “two chiefs I would single out as having the right approach to commonsense policing.” Indeed, as part of “crime week”, she announced a change in the law that will give chief constables greater powers to sack rogue or corrupt officers – something Rowley has been calling for.

When Parliament returns from recess next week, the Government’s focus will be on its policy of transferring migrants from hotels to more basic “mass accommodation” sites. The “immigration week” of announcements ended disastrously last month after 39 asylum seekers were evacuated from the Bibby Stockholm barge in Portland, Dorset, and returned to hotels after the discovery of legionella bacteria in its water supply. Braverman admits she was “angry” and “frustrated” with the contractors and civil servants after being left in the dark for at least three days about the finding.

Even more significantly, next month will see the Supreme Court hearing to determine whether the Court of Appeal’s block on deportation flights to Rwanda should be overturned on the basis that the country is safe. Rwanda is key to the Government’s strategy of deterring Channel migrants by detaining and removing them swiftly to the central African state to claim asylum there. Without Rwanda, the Home Office will struggle with the policy of “deterrence” which has shown some success with the Albanians, who were the biggest contingent of Channel migrants last year. A fast-track deportation deal with Albania has contributed to an overall 20 per cent drop in crossings this year and 40 per cent fall in the crucial summer month of August.

“The Albanian government has been a very constructive partner in dealing with this joint challenge,” says Braverman. “The numbers are down. But ultimately the numbers are still too high and I’m not going to rest until we get that number far, far lower,”

With “stop the boats” being one of Sunak’s five pledges, Braverman knows that failure to address this issue could cost them the next election. “This is not about simply trying and failing and shrugging our shoulders. This is about succeeding. As I have said, as the Prime Minister himself has said, we will do whatever it takes.”

The Braverman household in Hampshire is run on spreadsheets.

With two children, George, four, and Gabriella, two, and a seven-day-a-week job which can mean 3am calls about national security, family life has to be meticulously organised. “My husband [Rael] is a fan of spreadsheets, so we always have spreadsheets on every day of the week: who’s doing the various nursery drops, the pickups, the school runs, the childcare, who’s doing bedtime, who’s doing dinners.”

She says she could not do her job without businessman Rael’s help, backed up by her parents and her in-laws. “We have a village of people, as they say, helping us raise our children,” she says. “We have quite a complex arrangement of various people slotting in and out. There’s a lot of planning.” That includes organising her son’s Batman-themed fourth birthday party, with a “real-life” Batman. “I’m very good at organising children’s parties,” she says.

Her mother, Uma, and father, Christie, are, she says, “pretty much full-time grandparents.” It is a family where politics was omnipresent. Her mother represented the Conservatives as a councillor and twice as a parliamentary candidate in 2001 and 2003. “Campaigning and elections and local community service was very much part and parcel of my childhood,” she says.

Two experiences inspired her to enter politics. “Living in the US and France gave me a great appreciation of our parliamentary system, our democratic and our legal system, our social and cultural life,” she says. “That did encourage me to think I do want to get involved in public life in the UK.”

Braverman read law at Cambridge, and spent 10 years working as a barrister “seeing that the English legal system was not absolutely supreme and we were always at the time subjugated by a foreign court, the European Court of Justice,” she says. “I always found that very ill fitting and difficult to reconcile with our concept of Parliamentary democracy.” Underlying her political ambition, however, was a “very profound desire to give back to this great country that’s given my family and myself so many plentiful opportunities and allowed and afforded us great security and support,” she adds. Her mother and father, both of Indian origin, emigrated in the 1960s from, respectively, Mauritius and Kenya.

Although she says she has “been called the ‘P’ word in the streets in the past over the years” to which she “turned the other cheek,” she says she has “not really” experienced racism. “I think, actually, we have got a very good approach to race relations and integration in our country,” she adds.

If anything, she feels political correctness and cultural sensitivities can get in the way of protecting vulnerable people, such as the girls exploited by the grooming gangs in Rochdale and Rotherham.

“[The victims] felt that a blind eye had been turned for years by social workers, by teachers, by the police, by councillors, who didn’t want to take up very obvious concerns out of a fear of offending community groups, namely the Pakistani community in those towns,” she says. “There was a cover-up, there was institutional failure, there was negligence, there was reckless behaviour because of political correctness, because of fear of offence, because of maintaining community cohesion, as they euphemistically put it.”

Those scandals were, she says, an “incredibly powerful” motivation for her belief in being “searingly honest for the British people. If it offends some people, if it makes some people uncomfortable, so be it. It is my role to tell the truth in this job.”

Being so outspoken has sparked personalised attacks. How does she feel about labels such as “Cruella”? “I’m not here to complain. I’m here to make a difference and help people and fight crime and keep the British people safe,” she says. Polarised views come with the Home Office territory, she adds. “We live in an open democracy. We need to exchange views. I’m up for the debate and I’m not shy about prosecuting my viewpoint energetically.” She declares that she is a “law and order” politician who believes in the Peelian principles of policing by consent. She is in awe of their bravery, as evidenced by the “ultimate sacrifice” of Sgt Graham Saville, who died this week after trying to save a man on rail tracks in Nottinghamshire.

“I want the police to be the best that they can be. I want the police to be respected, not discredited,” she says. That has meant “giving police the tools” to focus on the basics of crime fighting with an extra 20,000 officers, by stripping down bureaucratic crime recording rules and a new deal with the NHS to reduce the time officers spend sitting in A&E on mental health call-outs. As a victim of two crimes herself (her phone was snatched out of her hand and, before that, her car was broken into by a thief to steal its radio) she has experienced at first hand being given a reference number by police with no further action taken.

“Since I’ve become Home Secretary, I’ve become very concerned about the number of accounts I’ve come across of victims of phone theft, car theft feeling let down by the police, feeling that they’ve reported a crime and they’ve merely been handed out a crime reference number,” she says.

She welcomes the “positive” response by all 43 police chiefs agreeing to investigate all crimes where there is a “reasonable” line of inquiry. Her support for a no-nonsense approach also extends to anti-social behaviour including drug use, from cannabis being smoked on the street to middle-class cocaine use.

“So called middle class users are killing people, and they are fuelling a violent and brutal trade, possibly not very far from where they may live. It is not only damaging to their own lives and their own wellbeing, but also to the lives of many others.”

She adheres to the “broken windows” theory of tackling crime. “Police should take action on behaviour that has too easily been dismissed as minor and insignificant but actually can make people terrified in their own homes. From vandalism of bus stops, to the local park, to graffiti to criminal damage to shop fronts. Nuisance boy racers. Aggressive off-road bikes. Nitrous oxide usage. Aggressive, noisy, intimidating behaviour.”

Crime is set to figure prominently in the King’s Speech this autumn, with tougher sentences to be unveiled for anti-social behaviour, automatic jail for repeat multiple offenders, a ban on the illegitimate use of nitrous oxide, a ban on machetes and “zombie” knives and powers for judges to compel offenders to attend sentencing hearings.

It is seen as part of an attempt by Sunak to woo the Right and exploit the dividing lines between the Tories’ tough approach on migration and Labour’s opposition to the Rwanda policy, even if it is knocked out by the Supreme Court. It is one reason why Braverman’s position is seen as safe. She famously took a tilt at the leadership as the Right of the party’s standard bearer after Boris Johnson resigned in 2022. “I felt that, from a Brexit point of view, it was important to have someone who was very passionate and credible on the issue of standing up for our sovereignty from the European Union,” she says.

In that leadership race, she said the only way the UK could solve its immigration “problem” and ensure Brexit was “delivered” was to leave the European Convention on Human Rights. This week she repeated that Strasbourg was an “interventionist” and “politicised” court. She refused to rule out the prospect of quitting the ECHR if the Rwanda flights continue to be blocked but said there were no discussions about doing so.

“We are working to deliver our plan,” she says. Asked if she would ever stand again, she laughs. “I am hoping that we don’t have to go through anything like that for a very long time. It is a very gruelling process not just for us, but for the rest of the country.

“I’m very, very happy to be enthusiastically supporting Rishi Sunak. He’s doing a very, very hard job very well. I am working with him very closely, since I’ve been Home Secretary, on the particular issue of small boats, and I have been incredibly impressed by his commitment to fixing this problem.”

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