I’m not sure why I started following the photographer Alastair Hilton on X. He’s right-ish politically, so perhaps the algorithm just blew him my way. But through the rising tide of online bilge, I still seek out and enjoy Hilton’s posts, mostly because he talks about pubs and posts pictures of cold pints on hot days.
Hilton has a narrowboat on the Thames in Chiswick and seems to half live in the bars along the river, so he was extremely cross about a recent proposal to remove the tables and chairs from the riverside, especially from his local pub, the Bell and Crown. Last week he posted a video in which he said that the word on the Chiswick street is that getting rid of the outdoor seating was the sneaky pet project of a local Green party councillor, Rick Rowe, who lives Thames-side with his boyfriend and dislikes the noise – though you’d have thought a local councillor would support a struggling pub.
The police need serious deprogramming, not a simple ‘reset’
Well, most of us are a long way from W4, and I wouldn’t dream of leading you down a rabbit hole into local Chiswick politics, were it not for the fact that soon after Hilton’s pub-seating tweet, two policemen visited him. They walked up to his table as he sat, as usual, outside with a drink, and very clearly warned him off tweeting about councillor Rick. Hilton filmed the whole weird encounter, and if you find him on X you can watch it online.
No crime had been committed, the lead cop agreed – they just wanted a little ‘conversation’ with Hilton about the fact that he had filmed the riverbank near Rowe’s house.
‘I’m a photographer, I deliberately didn’t show his house… I’ve done nothing wrong,’ says Hilton. Then, more urgently: ‘Mate, you’re being used as a hard man, to scare.’
‘I’m not threatening you, I’m giving advice,’ says the officer, looking down at Hilton. The lead copper had very much embraced the Met aesthetic: short beard, fresh fade haircut and a stab vest studded with gadgets. Interestingly though, the keys tohis car, usually on an officer’s belt, were attached by a carabiner at collar-height, which meant his name tag was hidden.
‘But what is this about?’ asks Hilton repeatedly. There was no crime, so ‘why have two coppers come to speak to me?’
‘As opposed to how many coppers?’ asks the officer, clearly playing for time.
‘As opposed to no coppers,’ says Hilton.
A long-awaited report about what’s gone wrong with British policing was published on Monday, and I’ve been thinking about it in light of Hilton’s video. An inquiry chaired by Lords Blunkett and Herbert found – surprise – that policemen are badly trained and badly led, and are too fixated on rooting out racists and bigots. They need an ‘ethical reset’, it concluded, and to ‘focus entirely on the prevention, detection and prosecution of crime’. ‘Drop the woke ideology’ is the message of the report. If only it were that simple.
Successive governments have presided over programmes that explicitly encouraged young policemen and women to think of their jobs as policing culture, not enforcing the law. Until a few years ago, the Met was signed up to Stonewall’s Diversity Champions scheme, which awards points to companies that promote the LGBT crowd. This prompted the introduction of a number of mandatory police courses such as anti-racism training days and courses teaching intersectionality and promoting the belief system which says white, right and straight people must always be the aggressors.
It was plain weird, the way the main copper looked at Hilton. The whites of his eyes were showing, like a horse that’s seen something flapping in a hedge, as if he thought Hilton might leap at him over the table, though he knew all Hilton had done was tweet. But then how could the lead cop wrap his mind around the notion that the middle-aged, white, pub-going Hilton, who had a history of tweeting disapprovingly about immigration, might be in the right?
Talk of ‘an ethical reset’ makes it seem as if someone just has to push a button and a decade of brainwashing will be undone. But the police need serious deprogramming, not a simple ‘reset’. Any twenty-something officer has been taught from school age that words can equate to ‘literal violence’. How can they then be expected suddenly to understand the vital importance of free speech?
I promised not to drag you into Chiswick politics, but it might be interesting for you, if not for the police, to know that although Rowe insists he was absolutely not behind any attempt to get the pub’s outdoor seating removed, and that the sound of happy Conservative voters knocking back Chablis by the Thames only fills his heart with joy, that doesn’t seem to be an entirely undisputed account of events. I enjoy a ferret around in other people’s business and I’ve found indirect quotes from another councillor who is of the view that Rowe ‘got the ball rolling’ on looking into the validity of the pub’s outdoor licences. And Rowe himself (if you believe Hilton) seems to have almost outed himself as the prime mover behind the menacing appearance of the lead cop and his silent sidekick.
I only saw it a few days later, but that same evening, an obviously shaken Hilton posted another tweet. Rowe, he said, had come into the pub with his boyfriend and had ‘let it slip’ to Hilton that ‘he has been given my personal information by the police’. The Met said in a statement that it had received a report from an ‘elected official’ about ‘malicious communications, harassment and public order concerns’. ‘If I do not post on here in the morning,’ wrote Hilton, ‘it means that the police have again acted on the orders of a Green party candidate and have arrested me… seriously, please kick up a fuss.’
The police have wisely retreated from the riverside scene. But if they get involved again, it’ll be a reliable sign that they’ve taken not a blind bit of notice of any Police Leadership Commission report.
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