Police

No one looking back on the last fortnight could say that Middlesbrough didn’t make the most of its time in the spotlight. I’ve been in the north-east these past few weeks and opening the local papers has been like a diabolical advent calendar: a new horror for every day. On Saturday 22 August we discovered that five Middlesbrough boys, aged 17 to 23, with 22 convictions between them, had raced the wrong way down the A66 and smashed into a police car, killing themselves and the two poor officers too. On the Sunday we learnt that the speeding boys had been chasing another car, a Volvo, which, in the early hours of Saturday had reversed repeatedly into the front of one of the boys’ houses.

Last night, an Irish government jet landed just outside Dublin. On board was Daniel Kinahan, alleged leader of one of Europe’s largest cocaine trafficking cartels. He was taken straight to court, charged with directing a criminal organisation and sent to prison. For years, he and his family have openly lived in Dubai. They were believed to be beyond the law, beyond punishment for their alleged crimes. Clearly, they were not. Coverage last night and today has focused on many of the institutions involved. The Irish specialised police units, the agencies that seize criminal assets, and British police. It has also mentioned American sanctions and the huge American reward for his capture. Talks with the UAE have also received attention.

Andy Burnham is right. The cost of living is foremost in people’s minds just now. Naturally his electricity bill VAT holiday and freeze of bus fares find agreement in television news vox pops and focus groups. But he offers no explanation for the causes and concentrates only on the symptoms. Obviously, the removal of the 5 percent VAT will be nice for consumers. But underlying inflation today relates to government debauchery of money and disruptions of supply caused by Donald Trump’s tariffs and his short war, by Vladimir Putin’s long war and Ed Miliband’s net-zero trap, which makes us pay expensive green levies and bans new domestic fossil-fuel production. The remedy does not lie in the 1970s-style pretense that things can be made cheaper by fiat.

I went to San Francisco to document the homelessness crisis. What I did not expect was to witness the most blatant shoplifting I have ever seen. I was staying at the Holiday Inn, and just a short walk away was a Whole Foods. One morning around 8 a.m., I walked over to grab a breakfast sandwich. Before I even made it through the store, I noticed four different homeless individuals in different aisles stuffing bags with anything they could grab. It was not subtle. It was not someone slipping a sandwich into a coat pocket because they were starving. It was clear, obvious, brazen theft. Two security guards were stationed at the front of the store. Both were on their phones. They were close enough to see what was happening, but far enough away to make it clear they were not going to stop it.

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.

In the build-up to the tenth anniversary of the EU referendum, we’ve heard lots of claims about Bregret. There are some Remain nostalgists who are convinced that, after a decade of listening to their wise counsel about how much better we’d be if we’d stayed in the glorious EU, those misled numpties who voted the wrong way must surely have changed their minds and be ready to slink back to Brussels. Recently, the Observer commissioned polling to prove the point. It’s true that rejoining attracted the largest single share, at 33 per cent. But the options for staying out of the EU, taken together, commanded a clear majority: 55 per cent. Mysteriously, the paper decided not to publish. Darn it, why does the public keep giving the wrong answer?

What has been remarkable about Henry Nowak’s case was not the story itself, tragic though it is, but the potency of it to spark public anxiety. The anxiety is born of an in-built and nascent popular resistance to the idea that certain groups, the victims of unconscious bias, need special consideration in order to counteract that potential disadvantage. The expression ‘two-tier’ has in the Nowak case been applied to policing, but the principle is more general, and lies behind (for instance) campaigns to nudge public attitudes (and sometimes public policy) towards the disabled, older jobseekers, plus a ‘group’ which in fact comprises half of us: women. You can call it positive discrimination.

Same old Sir: In Michael Simmons’s otherwise excellent yet alarming essay on ‘Benefits treats’ (11 April), one sentence spoiled the rest of my day: to say that pensioners are ‘protected from and by every government decision’ is maddening nonsense. Pensioners are affected in exactly the same way as everyone else whenever the government of the day changes anything. Every time we switch on the heating, shop, fill up the car, pay any bill, we are suffering under the same government-fuelled inflation as everybody else. The chaotic finances of local government mean our council tax goes up along with everybody else’s. Every time tax thresholds are frozen, many of us pay more tax.

Sir Stephen Watson, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police (GMP), is Warrington-born, Rhodesia-raised. His father was an engineer in the Royal Navy and his work took the family to South Africa, South West Africa and then, when Sir Stephen was still a schoolboy, the breadbasket. The Watson family stayed in Rhodesia until Robert Mugabe became prime minister in 1980 and threw them out. ‘I saw the collapse of policing,’ Sir Stephen says. ‘I saw the collapse of the rule of law. I saw the collapse of health systems, of education systems, of legal systems.’ He also saw what Britain could lose. ‘I think there is a complacency in the UK. We take things for granted. I like to quote Kipling on this: “What should they know of England who only England know?

‘There’s no way of finding out what’s really happening in there,’ says Aaron Rainey, an XL bully expert who advises police forces and dog owners across the UK. ‘Nobody knows where the kennels are – the police keep the information under wraps in case people turn up and try to break out their XL bullies.’ Rainey was preparing to make a trip to assess an XL bully in Leicester, three hours from the dog’s previous home. He is concerned about the number of volunteers working in kennels housing XL bullies: many of them are college students trying to bolster their CV ahead of applying for veterinary studies at university. They are serving as prison guards to the UK’s most dangerous dogs. Welcome to XL bully death row.

I have never been the greatest fan of libertarianism as a political ideology. Libertarians seem to me to be the bisexuals of politics – they want a bit of everything. But even I felt a slight twinge of libertarian sentiment this week when I read some remarks by our Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood. The Labour minister had told MPs that artificial intelligence is an ‘incredibly powerful tool that can and should be used by our police forces’, though she added that it must be regulated in a way that is ‘always accurate’. I have never before read the words ‘police’ and ‘always accurate’ in the same sentence, so the novelty grabbed my attention.

Are Jews safe in Britain? To even have to ask the question is extraordinary. But a recent survey has found that half of British Jews feel they do not have a long-term future in the UK and 61 per cent have considered leaving. Those figures are shocking, but not surprising. Since 7 October 2023, anti-Semitism in Britain has reached record levels. Violence against British Jews is more common than at any time since their readmission in the 1650s. The survey was conducted between the Heaton Park synagogue terrorist attack in October and the sentencing of Walid Saadaoui and Amar Hussein in December for plotting to open fire on a march against anti-Semitism.

Party poopers ‘Your party’ holds its inaugural conference this weekend in a state of internal wrangling. Could it become the shortest-lived political party in British history? It was registered on 30 September, meaning it will have to survive until 6 June next year to outlive Change UK – the anti-Brexit party launched in February 2019. It was formally registered on 15 April that year and dissolved on 19 December after flopping in the general election. Other failed political start-ups lasted a surprising length of time: — Veritas, a Eurosceptic party founded by former Labour MP Robert Kilroy-Silk in 2005, was eventually merged with the English Democrats in 2015.

Moscow mule Sir: While visiting Russia, James Delingpole learned from the patriarchate’s press officer that under communism the Russian Church wasn’t allowed to exist (‘Letter from Moscow’, 27 September). However, that doesn’t accord with my own experience of being in the USSR during the Brezhnev era. As a student, I visited the 14th-century Zagorsk monastery complex just outside Moscow one Sunday and was spellbound by the heavenly chant of the Orthodox liturgy which lifted my soul. The church was full of babushkas as well as younger believers crossing themselves and kissing the icons. For all his faults and human-rights violations, Brezhnev, unlike Vladimir Putin, had not been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes.