Police

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.

Those of us trapped in Mayor Sadiq Khan’s low traffic neighbourhood scheme are now obedient, resigned. We expect a car journey of under a mile to take 40 minutes. We don’t hope for anything more. On Sunday, around five o’clock, my son and I stuck fast in Dalston Lane, but as we settled down to wait in a mist of carbon monoxide, there was a commotion up ahead. Down the wrong side of the road, horn blaring, lights flashing, came a Mercedes G-wagon, matt black with that handy snorkel up the side, the favourite ride of north London’s gangsters. It was interesting how calm everyone was about it, how unsurprised. A souped-up tank of a car coming at us head-on, and no one shouted or beeped.

The shale illusion Sir: Your leading article rightly makes the case for extracting as much of our North Sea resources as we can (‘All at sea’, 6 September). However the enthusiasm for developing shale gas is misplaced. As energy minister, I commissioned work to establish how much of the onshore gas in-place could be recovered. The truth is just a small proportion – maybe 10 per cent. An energy policy based on shale would put our energy security at risk. Economically, at a time when global gas prices are expected to fall, UK shale would simply not be competitive and projects would fail. It is no accident that none of the large energy companies thought it was worth seriously exploring shale.

Chris Hargreaves used to be a wellness coach with a promising future in reality television. In 2023, he starred in E4’s Big Celebrity Detox and tried to cleanse Kerry Katona’s soul with piñón blanco seeds. Today, he leads The Shield: a private volunteer police force of hundreds of officers. They plan to begin patrolling Britain’s streets imminently. Hargreaves and his team regard Britain as a place of increasing lawlessness. Many would agree. Shoplifting is at record highs, prosecutions are near record lows and people are asking where the authorities have gone. According to a poll by Merlin Strategy for The Spectator, only around half of British people have spoken to a police officer in the past 12 months.