The police were always one of the top targets of the slow-motion British Revolution that has swept through this country since the 1980s. You didn’t notice? You weren’t meant to. This was the world’s first revolution that left all the buildings standing, just changed the laws, the rules and the morals. No barricades, no guillotine, no concentration camps. Just an infuriating, smugly smiling face telling you what and how to think.
This is the real reason poor Henry Nowak was treated as a criminal while he lay dying, and the man who stabbed him was coddled and indulged. It’s so blatant that even the Government and the BBC have noticed. We now have a political police ‘service’, which seeks to please a liberal elite, not an impartial police force which fairly enforces the law of the land.
I’ve only been saying this for more than 20 years, so I suppose it would be silly of me to expect anyone to have noticed. But you can’t ignore it now. If you want to be properly policed, you’ll have to start again and build a proper police force, like the one we used to have. Then we can sack all these useless paramilitary social workers. Yes, I am wholly serious.
Actually, the police of this country, a once-conservative force, mainly made up of traditionally-minded large men, patrolling the streets on foot in the rain, was already in trouble from the 1960s onwards. One blow after another destroyed what had been, and replaced it with something worse.
The Police and Criminal Evidence Act of 1984, and its codes of practice on how officers behaved around suspects, treated police as if they could not be trusted to follow legal procedures.
Henry Nowak, who was stabbed to death in December last year, was ‘treated as a criminal while he lay dying’, writes Peter Hitchens
Protesters hold placards with Henry’s last words on them outside Southampton Central Police Station
Constables had been taken off the streets and put into cars and offices in a totally failed attempt to become more efficient and modern. Policing, for many officers, became a sedentary occupation. Like so many other staid and male organisations, they had come under pressure to recruit women because they were women, rather than because they were the best candidates for the job.
To that end, the old minimum height requirements were finally abolished in 1990. Nine years later, the ‘W’ in the old rank of WPC was abandoned. Liberal-minded graduates, often women such as Cressida Dick, were clearly being encouraged to rise in the ranks.
In 1994, they even changed the way they looked. The old tunic and helmet, with a concealed truncheon, was increasingly replaced with the pseudo-military outfits nowadays worn, especially the ‘duty belt’ with its openly displayed handcuffs and baton, plus flat caps and high-visibility jackets. Now we have baseball caps.
In 2002, the old police constable’s oath, to serve the Queen and uphold the law ‘without favour or affection, malice or ill-will, and that I will to the best of my power cause the peace to be kept and preserved and prevent all offences against people and property…’ was dramatically altered and became a promise to uphold ‘Human Rights’.
The key passage now also includes the words ‘with fairness, integrity, diligence and impartiality, upholding fundamental human rights and according equal respect to all people’.
That was the moment when the change came out into the open, but it didn’t mean ‘two-tier policing’, the ridiculous expression some people are now touting about. Everybody gets the same pitiful policing, unless scandal or major disorder forces them to emerge, blinking, from their remote office blocks, or heave themselves out of their cars, to enforce what is left of the law.
If you want to be properly policed, you’ll have to start again and build a proper police force, like the one we used to have, writes Peter Hitchens
The ghastly report on the 1999 Macpherson inquiry was a devastating blow to wise policing in this country
It’s just that the laws of England are no longer based on Christianity and monarchy, but are the laws of a politically correct People’s Republic. The case of Henry Nowak is especially horrible, with the officer’s disrespectful, off-hand dismissal of the dying young man’s plea for help. But in the end, stabbings are wretchedly common in this country because the police are not there to prevent them or to prevent the other crimes that lead to them, especially the widespread, unchecked use of brain-frying illegal drugs.
They cannot unstab you, unmug you or unburgle you. Turning up afterwards is really very little use indeed. A firefighter can put out a fire. A paramedic may save a life, but as for a policeman after a crime, what is he good for except writing notes and issuing crime numbers?
But this idiotic reactive policing is even worse than useless if you let Marxoid 1960s dogmas prevent you from seeing what has actually occurred and also make you see things that aren’t there. That is what happened in the Nowak case, but it happens in many others, too.
As for the Tory leader, Kemi Badenoch, wherever has she been for the last quarter of a century? In her article in the Daily Mail yesterday, she appeared to think that the Macpherson Report into the unspeakable murder of Stephen Lawrence had been some sort of step forward. She wrote that ‘Stephen’s murder forced the country to confront the intolerable and say: “This is not who we are.” Indeed, many battles have been won in making our society better and fairer since then.’
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Three hours in Southampton that exposed ‘two-tier’ Britain. The night Henry was murdered -DEEP DIVE
Have I got this right? That the Tory leader thinks the 1999 Macpherson Report helped in this process? If so, I have news for her. That ghastly document was a devastating blow to wise policing in this country. It demanded, in paragraph 45:24 that ‘“Colour-blind” policing must be outlawed. The police must deliver a service which recognises the different experiences, perceptions and needs of a diverse society’.
A little earlier, in the appalling paragraph 45:17, Macpherson actually recommended the universal use of the crazy rule that ‘a racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’. Isn’t this a call for a new form of racial or other discrimination, approved of by liberals? And isn’t that what we have been getting, ever since?
Surely colour-blind policing is exactly what we want? But Macpherson wanted something else, and we are now finding out what it was.
Its conclusion that the Metropolitan Police were guilty of ‘institutional racism’ was impossible to prove or to refute. The tricky catch-all term, significantly, was invented in 1967 by the American black power activist Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael was a nasty anti-Semite who told the TV interviewer David Frost in 1970 that he thought Hitler was a genius. Should the sweeping reinvention of Britain’s police have been based on a charge invented by such a person?
It was that sweeping reinvention that led inexorably to the lonely death and insulting handcuffing of Henry Nowak. Political conservatism has been amazingly feeble on this subject since Macpherson. Day by day, evidence has poured in that the police have stopped serving the public – ignoring burglaries, marijuana possession and vandalism but pursuing thought-crime with amazing vigour. And they angrily brush off criticism.
But what have the Tories, in office for many years since Macpherson, actually done about it? Nothing. In a way, the task is so huge that you can see why they have dodged it. But can this go on any longer? To paraphrase the officer who manhandled Mr Nowak: I don’t think so, mate.
