Our police are a bigger threat to your freedom than Putin
REFORM the police now or regret it for ever. There will never be another opportunity like this to get back the police force we once had. Equally urgently, this may be our last chance to stop the police turning into a dangerous engine of oppression – powerful, secretive and unjust.
I know we are distracted by the endless EU issue. But we should not let it keep us from dealing with this scandal. I have been a national newspaper journalist for more than 40 years, and a pretty alert citizen for longer than that, and I can recall few incidents as shocking and urgent as last week’s astonishing public statement by the distinguished judge Sir Richard Henriques.
Judges try very hard not to attack the police directly in public. They know the public must have confidence in them. They are supposed to be allies. But Sir Richard is not just criticising them. He is calling for the prosecutions of some officers.
Sir Richard made a detailed and forensic investigation of the appalling ‘Operation Midland’ three years ago. He knows far more than he has ever been allowed to say about police failings and misdeeds in that idiotic pursuit of innocent men on the basis of mad, incredible charges from an obvious fantasist.
So if he thinks there should be prosecutions, there should be. There should be much more than that. It is time for a full inquiry into what the police do, what they are for and what powers they should have.
Parliament originally resisted the whole idea of a police force, 200 years ago, because continental gendarmes were terrible menaces to liberty, far too powerful. They only changed their minds when Robert Peel devised the English system – unarmed civilians in nonmilitary uniforms with few powers, serving the law rather than the state, expected to keep order by persuasion and example rather than by force. All this is now gone.
INSTEAD we have regiments of armoured paramilitary social workers, jingling with clubs, Tasers, pepper sprays and often guns, schooled in political dogmas and vigilant for political correctness. And we now learn they are also steeped in the mad conspiracy theories of the wild Left, notably the belief there is some sort of lingering conservative establishment which is implicated in a vast paedophile conspiracy. They believed this seething garbage because they wanted to.
But that’s not all. In all their lengthy training, nobody seems ever to have explained to them that in this country a person is innocent until proven guilty to the satisfaction of an impartial jury. And so, if you ever wonder where the police are, as you walk the unpatrolled streets of this country, now you know. They’re busy being Left-wing.
They don’t need, respect or like you. They serve the state, not you. They have also created a system of publicised arrests and humiliating, devastating home invasions, in which they can, by the flick of a pen, ruin the life of an innocent man.
And that innocent man, if he tries to fight them, finds himself on the receiving end of a closed, sullen bureaucracy not all that different from what you might encounter in Russia or China.
So, not just useless for all practical purposes, too busy to bother with us, but also – because they are here, now – a much bigger threat to your freedom and mine than Vladimir Putin could ever possibly be.
I have to add that most of them are perfectly nice people, kind to animals and all that. Alas, history shows that those who operate the apparatus of repression usually are nice in private. But it’s what they do in public that matters.