Peter Hitchens's Blog, page 259

Getting Terror into Proportion

Mr or Ms ‘Baz’ writes  (first quoting me) :   ‘“It wouldn’t, in fact, have prevented the main terror outrage perpetrated against such a gathering, the planting of a timed bomb in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, long before the Tory conference took place.” Quite right. The searches carried out by police officers using dogs prior to the event address that threat.’ 

 

‘However, do you think it would make any sense whatsoever to search an area, then let anyone walk in without searching them or their luggage? Given that the people inconvenienced are those who choose to attend a political conference, I'm not losing sleep. "...Like the absurd gates in Downing Street..." Yes, it's not like terrorists have ever attacked Downing Street? Oh wait, the IRA did just that, but because of security features like the very gates you whine about, they had to attack from a distance using home-made mortars. This meant that the attack was much harder to accomplish, and it failed. Perfect security does not exist. The best that can be done is make it harder or less rewarding for potential attackers. There is an argument to be made about government abuse of "anti-terrorism" powers, but you're doing a very poor job of it.’

 

 

Am I? Surely the question is one of proportion. Is the danger that someone will walk into a party conference with a bomb really so great that thousands of law-abiding citizens must be treated like serfs or convicts?  I’d be perfectly happy to have my luggage searched if I were staying in the same hotel as the Cabinet, though in general I’d rather a nice friendly B&B down the road to any such place.

 

 But it goes much further than that. You cannot even enter the area in which the hotel stands without being searched, and providing a detailed biography to the police.

 

Wouldn’t a few vigilant police officers, patrolling the relevant buildings constantly, be just as , if not more, effective against this remote danger? And if party conferences must be protected in this way then why not department stores, shopping malls,  cinemas, theatres, concert venues, festivals, railway and bus stations, the underground in London, supermarkets, universities, anywhere that people gather in numbers?  What’s so important about politicians? Are they any more irreplaceable than non-political fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands, sons and daughters?

 

Life would of course be impracticable if we did so.  A similar argument could be advanced for wearing body armour while going up and down stairs, or riding on the London Underground’ perilous escalators.  You’d be safer in such armour. But it would be silly.  

 

 

Having undergone what seems like dozens of these checks, I have come to the conclusion that these selective exercises are little more than propaganda, an attempt to suggest that the state can make us safer by interfering in our lives more, when it actually cannot. If we saw through these attempts, we would be less willing to accept the formula of ‘you must submit to this because it will make you safer’.

 

For me, I also think that the hanging by the neck until dead of the convicted Brighton bombers would have been a fine safeguard for the future, as well as sparing us the continuing grisly exhibition of one of them, who still walks about free as if he was entitled to breathe God’s open air and should not hide his face away in shame from human society.

 

De Valera’s execution of the IRA leadership in late 1930s Dublin kept IRA terrorism out of the Free State for decades. Despite talk of ‘creating martyrs’, nobody knows their names.  I do, however, know for a fact (don’t ask me how) that the first thing every IRA terrorist planned in a bombing was his or her own escape.

 

As for ‘the people inconvenienced’, it is indeed the people who are inconvenienced. Normal human beings now have no chance, as they once did, of simply walking into an auditorium and seeing and hearing (and having the chance to heckle) their political leaders. Leaving that important fact aside, what does ‘Baz’ know or think about the ‘people who attend party conferences’ which makes him think that they somehow deserve to be selected for this sort of treatment, as Mr or Ms Baz? seems to think they do?  All kinds of people go to them, many of them, even I must admit, with good motives. And it’s not their convenience I’m concerned about. It’s society's acquiescence to surveillance and supervision far beyond what ought to be acceptable in a free society, on a flimsy pretext.

 

As for the IRA’s mortar attack on Downing Street in February 1991, there is no evidence that this method of attack was forced on the IRA by the silly gates about which I ‘whine’. Apparently the IRA originally thought of a large static car bomb nearby, to be detonated as the Prime Minister’s car went past, but the resulting carnage among passers-by would have been unacceptable to those persons, not because they had anything against carnage itself- far from it -  but because TV footage of large numbers of corpses scattered across the tourist part of London (possibly including some Americans)  might have damaged the notion current in much of the USA to this day  that the IRA were an army of heroic freedom fighters.

 

I think that, even without the gates, it would have been hard for anyone to drive a car laden with explosives into Downing Street, park it there and leave. Indeed, some simple precautions make it difficult even for a suicide-bomber to drive a car into the street at high speed, because it opens at right angles off the main road which is Whitehall. There are in fact plenty of ways of keeping vehicles out of a street, without closing it to pedestrians.

 

 

He or she doesn’t really address my central point, which is proportionality. Are the precautions proportional to the threat? I am often for instance asked if I would be ready to fly in an aeroplane whose passengers had not been subjected to the ‘security’ procedures which I so often complain about. My answer is an unhesitating ‘Yes’ , especially if we are once again allowed to carry corkscrews and use metal cutlery (though I would make an exception for a flight to or from Tel Aviv, on El Al, which has serious security procedures which are onerous but effective, and in my view proportionate to the threat, because flights to and from that destination are highly likely to be specifically targeted by groups known to be proficient in terrorist murder, and with long records of using aeroplane hijacks and the planting of explosives to do so, see the Hindawi case) .

 

Since the introduction of armoured flight-deck doors, and the strictest possible rules against opening those doors under any provocation, the danger of a repeat of the horror of 11th September 2011 on most flights is hugely reduced. And if everyone on board a plane has a corkscrew, a penknife, or some other similar object of the sort I have had confiscated and no longer carry, I wouldn’t fancy the chances of three or four hijackers, with similar weapons, against 200 passengers who preferred to continue on their normal route.  The same, in my view,  goes for people who suddenly try to set fire to their shoes or underpants.

 

 

Of course, the only really effective measure against terrorism is never to give into it. We only have terrorism because the terrorists know it works. The PLO’s hijacks and murders made Yasser Arafat into a ‘respected world statesman’ and created the ‘two-State Solution’.

The IRA’s murder campaign put Sinn Fein into government, made its leaders honoured guests in the White House and spelt the end of the United Kingdom.

 

As for September 11th, read my book ‘The Cameron Delusion’ for an analysis of the USA’s response to that. I’m not sure the words ‘standing firm’ fit the bill.

 

The best security would be to kill the terrorists when we catch them in mid-crime, try, convict and execute the rest, and make no concessions to them ever at all under any circumstances. But that, of course, is ‘politically impossible’, whereas the current regime of searching and surveillance and sequestering of politicians far beyond the reach of their employers, in gated streets and fenced-off ‘conferences’ and armoured convoys, is ‘acceptable’. To whom? I find it repellent and disproportionate.  Are we being offered any choice?

Thoughts on Repatriation, and how the Government Really Views the Deaths of Soldiers

So what do the government really think about the public demonstrations of grief and respect, when the coffins of returning soldiers are driven out of RAF bases?

 

The BBC website is currently reporting (as a follow-up to a ‘Guardian’ exclusive on Friday morning) :

 

‘The Ministry of Defence has said it has "no plans" to downplay repatriation ceremonies for fallen personnel, after a claim that it was considering ways to make war more palatable to the public.

 

The idea to "reduce the profile" of such military services was proposed by an MoD think tank as a possible way to handle "casualty averse" opinion.

 

The paper was obtained by the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act.( http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/sep/26/mod-study-sell-wars-public )

 

But the MoD said it was not meant to outline government policy.

 

In the four years up to 2011, the town of Wootton Bassett in Wiltshire gained fame for repatriations, as the bodies of 345 military personnel killed in conflicts were brought back to the RAF base at Lyneham and driven through its streets - which were lined by thousands of mourners.

 

 

“It is entirely right that we publicly honour those who have made the ultimate sacrifice and there are no plans to change the way in which repatriation ceremonies are conducted”

 

 

 The last cortege passed through the town in August, after which RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire became the landing site for planes returning from conflict zones.’

 

 

In July 2011 I began to criticise the government’s plans for bringing the war dead home through RAF Brize Norton. It was not the change to Brize Norton from RAF Lyneham that worried me -that was the consequence of an unconnected  change in RAF organisation. It was the way in which the repatriation processions were to be routed. I wrote:

 

‘HERE'S the truth about the Government's decision to route the hearses of soldiers killed in its various stupid wars away from any of the nation's High Streets.

 

This comes into effect very soon, when the bodies of the dead start to arrive at RAF Brize Norton, next to the Oxfordshire town of Carterton.

 

Junior Defence Minister Andrew Robathan stumbled a bit trying to deal with this in Parliament on Monday.

 

First, he disclosed that the back gate of the RAF base, through which the hearses will pass, is to be renamed the Britannia Gate. Who thinks of these things? The Downing Street cat? Were I to rename the back door of my house the Britannia Door, it would still be the back door.

 

Then he said that the route through Carterton was unsuitable for corteges because it has speed bumps. So does the bypass route that the processions will actually take, as Mr Robathan ought to know.

 

He added that Carterton's streets were 'very narrow'. I doubt that they are narrower than those of Wootton Bassett, and plan to check them myself, unless anyone has measurements to hand.

 

But he was rescued from his confusion by a fellow Unconservative, the North Wiltshire MP James Gray.

 

Mr Gray asked: 'Does the Minister agree that it might not be possible, nor indeed quite right, to seek to replicate the Wootton Bassett effect elsewhere, as that was a chapter in our history? I am not sure we necessarily want to see it repeated elsewhere.' Mr Robathan eagerly responded, saying Mr Gray had made 'a very good point'. Really? What was so good about it? I wonder who Mr Gray means when he says that 'we' do not want to see Wootton Bassett's spontaneous, unofficial, genuine expression of respect for courage, discipline and loyalty to be repeated. He certainly doesn't speak for me.’

 

A few days later I bicycled up to Carterton with my trusty measuring tape (Yards, feet and inches only) and recorded :‘I HAVE now measured the road that Defence Minister Andrew Robathan says is 'very narrow', too narrow, apparently, for the hearses containing dead soldiers from Afghanistan.

 

I went to Carterton, the small town on the doorstep of RAF Brize Norton where the honoured dead will arrive after September. And I measured the Burford Road, just outside the Church of St John the Evangelist, along which the cortege could pass on its way to Oxford, if the authorities had not chosen another route, which carefully avoids the only major High Street nearby.

 

The road at this point is 22ft wide, which doesn't strike me as specially narrow. Two-way traffic was getting through pretty briskly.

 

What is more, Carterton, a strikingly modern town with exactly the same population as Wootton Bassett, has plenty of broad pavements on which people might - if they wished - assemble to pay their respects to those who did their duty to the utmost.

 

Of course, the Prime Minister and his shadowy, rich backers (not all Murdoch employees) dwell just round the corner in the cosy hills above Witney and Chipping Norton. I do wonder what contacts they may have had with the Tory-controlled Oxfordshire County Council that has selected the route. The whole thing is increasingly suspicious.’

 

And in September I wrote again:

 

‘THE Government did not like the scenes at Wootton Bassett as the dead came home, and wants to make sure that nothing of the kind ever grows up again in any other place. It wants to be free to conduct more stupid, unwanted wars, without being reminded of the true cost of them.

 

From now on, the bodies of those soldiers killed in the Afghan conflict will be flown home to RAF Brize Norton, and will no longer pass through Wootton Bassett.

 

There are acceptable reasons for that. But there is no acceptable reason for what happens next. They will no longer go through the centre of any town, being routed through suburbs and along fast main roads and bypasses where no crowds are likely to gather. They could go a different way. Brize Norton is on the edge of the town of Carterton, with a similar population to that of Wootton Bassett. There is also a perfectly good and rather beautiful route that would take the cortege to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford through the large and lovely village of Bampton.

 

I have heard the various official explanations for this curious routing, including the shameful, pitiful claim that the roads of Carterton, 22ft wide, are 'too narrow'. I think the time has come to say that these explanations are so much tripe, the sort of thing dictators and despots say.

 

In a free country, the Government should suffer for its lies.’

 

I am glad to say that the people of Carterton turned out in splendid numbers, and went to the inconvenient spot which was the only place from which they could salute the returning dead. But it was of course entirely different from the response in Wootton Bassett, where the procession used to pass the church and the shops and the people going about their business. All those parts of Carterton were avoided. The cortege was then driven as I had warned, along fast roads to Oxford, roads along which it was very difficult for people to gather in any numbers.

 

Now, the document obtained by the Guardian dates from November 2012 and is a recommendation for the future, so it cannot be linked to events before then. And, thank heaven, the number of casualties in Afghanistan has greatly diminished, and involvement in Syria now seems unlikely (though the government can take no credit for the latter) . But we are still entitled to wonder, rather sceptically, about the use of the ‘Britannia Gate’, and what it really means.  

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Hell and Death

As this is Party Conference season, I though it a good moment to reflect a little on Hell (a place which we have been discussing elsewhere on this site) . I have stopped attending the party conferences, because I no longer see any point in doing so. I’ll get on to the Infernal regions in a minute or two, but first a word about those conferences.

 

Partly,  I’m put off by the intrusive ‘security’ now required. Months before the event, the would-be attender must submit a vast form, not unlike a visa application to a particularly suspicious foreign country, including personal references, and great masses of intimate information which I would myself prefer not to give to anyone at all. What happens to it all? It’s perfectly obvious that people like me aren’t terrorist threats, and have attended many of these events before quite harmlessly, yet there’s the same rigmarole, over and over again, and then when you get there you have to shuffle through sheds, tediously emptying your pockets into trays and being screened for weapons and explosives. It’s excessive. It wouldn’t, in fact, have prevented the main terror outrage perpetrated against such a gathering, the planting of a timed bomb in the Grand Hotel, Brighton, long before the Tory conference took place.

 

But these things are a ratchet. Like the absurd gates in Downing Street, once they’re there, no bureaucrat will ever support their removal. Anything which then happened would be his fault.

 

I tend to think that the people are in much more danger from terror than the politicians are, and that the risk is exaggerated for all of us. It’s horrible when it happens, but the chances of it happening to any individual are tiny, and the chances are also that, as terror is based on surprise, our precautions will not have anticipated the next outrage. By making our lives in general less convenient, more stifled and surveilled, we have gained very little and lost a lot.

 

It’s a pretext for giving more power to the police and the state, and more contracts to private security firms, and it’s dispiriting and  frustrating to have to submit to it (not even daring to laugh) as the price of flying anywhere, or going to these gatherings.

 

But at least flying does actually get you somewhere you want to go. The conferences are a nowhere destination, scrubbed of normal human beings, cut off from normal life, usually in buildings with even less charm than airport terminals. 

 

If you dare to leave, to go and visit the (often attractive) towns and cities in which these events take place then you must queue up to be searched to get back in again. So most people stay put.

 

There are periodic mob events, in which the media, in their sheep-like way, get excited by a leak or a speech, as the spin-doctors intend them to do.  But for the rest it might as well be a trade fair for the manufacturers of grommets. I know plenty of people who attend these entire events without once entering the hall in which supposed ‘debates’ are taking place. I always made a point of trying when I used to go, but the deathly, abandoned air of these futile discussions is almost enough to make me lose the will to live. I also find the business of meeting politicians increasingly lowering. Almost all seem to have been taken over by some sort of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, which has deprived them of the ability to think. There are one or two exceptions, but they don’t offset the general effect.

 

So not Hell, but perhaps Limbo, or maybe Purgatory.

 

As to Hell, what is it? I joked, in my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’, that Roy Jenkins had probably abolished it one unseasonably hot afternoon in the mid-1960s, slipping the Infernal Regions (Closure) Bill past a somnolent House of Commons. But it wasn’t entirely a joke.

 

Hell exists, first of all, in the human mind.  There’s a John Wyndham short story in which a number of people arrive in what appears to be Hell  (by London Underground train, I think) and simply mock it out of existence by refusing to believe in it.

 

You can see what he was driving at there. But I find the images of hell in art rather worrying, even so.The effect on me of Rogier van der Weyden’s ‘Last Judgement’ in the Hotel Dieu in Beaune , which I describe in my book ‘The Rage Against God’ is an example of this. As a child, I was particularly troubled by a small painting by Wlliam Blake called 'the Simoniac Pope', not because I planning to be Pope, or even knew what Simony was (I looked it up) but because it was so ferocious.

 

In the small Buckinghamshire village of Penn, once the home of the (atheist) novelist Elizabeth Taylor (whose rather good books and stories are now coming back into fashion), the church contains a famous painting of the Last Judgement, known as ‘The Penn Doom’. Visitors may study it by turning on a light . On a plaque by the switch are the words ‘For Doom, press switch’, which caused me to hestitate before doing so. There’s another fairly ferocious Doom in the church of St James the Great in South Leigh, near Witney, and some of the windows in Fairford Church ( one of the most astonishing collections of stained glass in the world) are downright frightening to contemplate, A lot of people actively dislike them. I’m not so sure.

 

What are they telling us? Do such creatures await us on the other side of the dark tunnel that is death? It’s funny how the conception persists. M.R.James, in his matchless ghost stories, produces a variety of hellish creatures which somehow escape, or are rashly summoned by people who don’t know what forces they are playing with,  into the Edwardian world of cathedrals and Oxbridge colleges of which he writes.

 

It’s there in the Sistine Chapel roof. It’s in Hieronymus Bosch. Dante provided a sort of Baedeker's Guide, with maps and pictures. There’s a Tintin book in which the villains, in the course of drowning, find themselves suddenly surrounded by small red demons, shoving their forks into them. In the extremely popular film ‘Ghost’, terrifying cowled shapes appear from the depths, accompanied by a hideous noise,  to drag away the damned to a destination that is plainly not going to be fun.   One of the most disturbing demons in art is (I think) in the Groeninge Museum in Bruges (or Brugge, as we ought to call it, if we’re going to call Peking ‘Beijing’). It shows Judas, fleeing from the Last Supper to complete his betrayal. He is looking back at Our Lord and so does not see that he is rushing into the clawed embrace of a hideous, staring,  beaked creature.  No explanation or background is offered by the gallery.  Then there are various forms of the Faust legend, or other diabolical temptation, enjoyably retold in modern times by Alan Judd, that interesting writer, in his book  ‘The Devil’s own Work’.

 

'Room 101', in 'Nineteen Eighty Four'is also a form of hell, because it is always the thing the victim fears the most. The Thought Police have got into his head, like demons, and found this out,  in each case. That is why we all know what is in there.

 

C.S. Lewis created Screwtape, a devil who plots the subtle corruption of nice English middle-class people, and went a good deal further than that in his so-called ‘Science Fiction Trilogy’. Mick Jagger suggested sympathy for the old gentleman. Stephen Vincent Benet introduced him to New England in that alarming story ‘the Devil and Daniel Webster’, in which a jauntily-bearded , witty and jesting Satan (known locally as ‘Scratch’) collects souls and keeps them, like fluttering moths, in his pocket-book. You can here their tiny voices crying to be let out.  A rather good film was made of this, if you like that sort of thing. I t ends, as many good films do, with a jury trial. But what a jury.  

 

And then of course there’s Ira Levin’s clever book ‘Rosemary’s Baby’, brilliantly filmed by, well, I never, Roman Polanski, in which the horned devil actually appears in modern New York City.

 

Well, I’ve met no such person, but I’ve seen, or learned in detail about, plenty of diabolical actions by humans, which are in their way quite as terrifying as the clawed, implacable monster of darkness which artists have produced out of their minds. These are the things we do when we (and this of course includes many religious people who wrongly imagined they had a warrant to be cruel) ignore the moral absolutes which we have been given. It’s amazing how quickly we can descend into cruelty,  when we think we’re authorised to inflict it, as the Stanford Prison Experiment showed, I think , quite conclusively.

 

 

And it’s been my view for many years that hell can be (and often is) glimpsed in a human face (sometimes our own) in the midst of an act of cruelty or selfishness, in some kinds of laughter and in some sorts of silence as well.

 

As to the form that Divine Justice might take, if there is (as I both hope and fear) such a thing, I fancy that human imagination cannot really encompass it. That is why our forebears daubed crude devils on church walls, and also why geniuses such as Bosch and van der Weyden painted their worrying masterpieces. It was partly because they wanted justice, and partly because they feared it. It was also because they all suffered ( as we still do)  from this great and puzzling gap in the human mind – the fact that we are born with a desire for justice, and yet so seldom see justice done in this life. That is the origin of Hell, and the worse the injustice, the deeper and more horrible is the Hell we imagine. Is it there? Don't bank on it not being, or in necessarily being the modern Anglican version, which I gather is a sort of absence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just for Once, Please Argue with What I Actually Said

How extraordinary. Lots of people who enjoy playing nasty computer games didn’t like my attack on ‘Grand Theft Auto V’ .Well, it makes a change from being attacked by police officers, who claim I know nothing about the police and then, when it turns out that I do, flatly  refuse to accept indisputable historical facts from my research

 

 (Mr Vernau is wrong, by the way. Producing the figures, which show beyond doubt that an alleged  ‘manpower shortage’ is not the reason for declining foot patrols – because manpower has gone *up*, both absolutely and per capita,  and police responsibilities and legal duties have been *diminished*, and because the police now have about 40,000 back-up staff which they never had in the days of foot patrol – does not in any way influence most of the police officers who loathe my ideas. That is because it is my ideas they loathe. They simply do not really want to go back on foot patrol, though of course they claim that they favour it.  But rather than admit that, they abuse me instead).

 

Now, back to GTA.

 

 

Here come the usual criticisms. ‘You haven’t played it’. No, I haven’t. I never said I had.  I relied on the accounts of it written by those who had  

 

 

Here’s one by James Delingpole in the Daily Mail

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2424124/Grand-Theft-Auto-V-James-Delingpole-gives-verdict-latest-game.html

 

 

Here’s one by Keith Stuart in The Guardian

 

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/16/gta-5-review-grand-theft-auto-v

 

and his response to Mr Delingpole

 

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/sep/18/gta-5-grand-theft-auto-daily-mail

 

Even Mr Stuart, in a largely complimentary account, couldn’t resist saying ‘Women are, once again, relegated to supporting roles as unfaithful wives, hookers and weirdos. The one successful female character in the story is suspected of just wanting to screw her boss.’

 

And ‘Blasting your way out of impossible face-offs with private armies, streaking through the city streets in a new car – some will hate the sheer amorality, the relentless seething darkness of the narrative. [Spoiler] Many too will be horrified by an interactive torture scene that pushes the player to perform acts of cruelty on a defenceless victim [spoiler ends]. But GTA is all about complicity and culpability – what is the player prepared to do in this world? How much are they responsible for?’

 

But then this is lost in a great cloud of guff about ‘seductive force’ , satire, wit, ‘extraordinary detail’ . ‘beautiful modernist architecture’.

 

I’m prepared to take these two gentlemen’s word for the fact that the player is invited to become a torturer, and also to treat women as dirt, as well as committing a large number of crimes of varying severity.  Forgive me if I decline to try it for myself. I really don’t think the ‘you haven’t played it’ complaint has any validity. I wasn’t reviewing it. I was writing about its moral character, which is beyond dispute.

 

Then there’s

'No study has ever shown a connection between computer games and violence'

...or its variant 

'Studies have shown no connection between computer games and violence’.

 

But actually, I made no such crude claim (though one contributor suggests, from his own direct experience,  that the mentally disturbed are indeed made violent by playing such games) . Those who attack me for not playing the game might at least have read my article. Or maybe English is not their first language, or reasoned thought not their strong suit.

 

Here’s what I wrote : ‘Oh, quite – lots of people do this and don’t go out and murder their school-fellows or workmates.’

In this passage I quite specifically state that I don’t make a direct connection between games and violence.

 

Next :’I strongly suspect that the wretched Alexis (who was plainly unhinged in other ways, with voices in his head) was yet another victim of supposedly harmless and ‘soft’ cannabis, now virtually legal in much of the USA. And plenty of British 14-year-olds are playing that game, too – often with the connivance of their parents.’

 

In this passage I make it equally plain that even the Navy Yard killer, stated by many media to be a player of violent computer games, was *also* plainly mentally disturbed. I suggested that it was very likely that his disturbance was the result of cannabis, a drug which has now been effectively legalised in much of the USA as well as in Britain,  which is misleadingly described by its supporters as ‘soft’, and which is heavily correlated, especially in young users, with irreversible mental illness. I further point out that many parents who allow their children to play violent computer games also allow them to smoke cannabis at home.

 

I then say (which is a logical conclusion from the foregoing)  :’…what you put into someone’s mind makes a difference to the way he behaves.’

 

And then I say :

‘For every one who goes on a rampage shooting, there are thousands whose school work goes off the rails, thousands who treat girls like toys, thousands who consider callousness, dishonesty and bad manners as normal.’

 

In this passage, I *specifically* say that playing such games does not necessarily lead to violent behaviour . I say that many who never do violence are, even so,  morally corrupted by playing such games. And that is what I think. If anyone's got the cash for a big research grant to look into *that* proposition, I'll design the questions and the methodology. 

 

 And I go on to explain why I personally feel so strongly about this, as a result of powerfully memorable personal experiences at key moments in my life.

 

 

I do not think more than one in 20 of my critics has responded to what I actually said. Yet again, they have responded to what they would have liked me to have said, because if I had said it, they could easily dismiss it.

 

I understand why they do this. It is never pleasant to be told that one of your chief pleasures is corrupting your morals. But can’t they do better than this?

 

It wasn’t by the way, seeing the Somali children starving to death which desensitised me. It was seeing so many TV pictures of African children dying in famines, that meant that when I eventually saw this face to face, I was far less grieved than I ought to have been. Familiarity had weakened my power to grieve or be angry, and so made me morally deficient. I don’t think there’s any answer to that. I’ve had the experience. I know. If you haven’t, you can’t really tell me I’m wrong.

 

It would be polite to acknowledge it. I can’t see much point in my having had the experience, honestly, if , when I describe it, people who have never sat in the same stinking tent as a dying child in the midst of a man-made famine tell me that they know more of life than I do, and that what I’ve actually seen and felt counts for nothing.

 

I believe that my gift, of some small skill at words, was given to me so that I could communicate such things. The child was doomed before I ever saw him, by terrible events which torture Somalia and its people to this very day (and which have much to do with ignorant and cynical outside intervention in that country). I could not save him, or offer any comfort to his family.  

 

And yet I found to my utter dismay and surprise that I had no tears for the child, and thought I should at least wonder why. And during the remainder of the time I spent in that awful place,  I found the answer, which  seems to me to be a great reproach to our habit of watching tragedy, violence, destruction and other evils,  in sparkling high-definition colour in the comfort, safety and plenty of our homes. Doubtless one of the spiteful twisters who comment here will accuse me of turning the tragedy of a dying child into my own personal sorrow. It will be a lie. I don’t seek or want anyone’s sympathy for the experience. The sufferers were the child and his family.

 

I just want to use my experience, which few British people will have (and which I hope few will ever have) to teach my readers something they would not otherwise know, and which might make their lives better than they are, by telling them a truth they hadn’t previously known, which might help them in their own conduct, and perhaps in deciding what sort of society they wish to live in, or how their own children might be brought up.   

 

Yet all I get is shouts of abuse. And meanwhile, in all those bedrooms, all those poor lost souls grow crueller and harder, without even knowing it. The refusal to consider that there is any danger is the dangerous thing. Societies which do not believe in hell pretty quickly find hell springing up all around them.

I know I said it was over, but....

...For the dogged, here’s my response to another reasoned and civil Police critique of my recent article on the subject. On this occasion, I have inserted my replies in the text of the original article posted by ‘CanisLupus’, My responses are marked ***

 

 

CanisLupus begins:

 

I am sure many people have now read Sunday’s Mail Online article by infamous journalist Peter Hitchens. The article uses an extract from within as its title “GET RID OF THEIR GUNS, CARS AND TASERS AND WE MIGHT JUST END UP WITH REAL POLICEMEN”.

 

***Infamous? Well, how kind.

 

CL:

This inflammatory comment sets the tone for the entire article in which he lambasts the Police and pretty much labels them useless.

 

***Inflammatory? Provocative, perhaps, but, as I’ve said elsewhere, I have been trying to get the attention of the Home Office, the Justice Ministry and the police for more than a decade. Is it my fault if my measured and careful book and my article for a Police Federation booklet were utterly ignored by them , or my fault if more ‘provocative’ language actually gets a reaction? I don’t think so. They should examine their own consciences. If more hard-edged language starts them thinking, when restrained language didn’t, the moral case is made for tough popular journalism.

 

CL:

 Upon first reading the article I, like many others completely disagreed with him, rejected it as what has sadly become typical Daily Mail anti-Police rhetoric and then allowed it to anger me.

 

***I don’t know what this ‘typical’ or ‘anti-police rhetoric’ is . I don’t, as it happens, write, for the Daily Mail, but so far as I am aware its columnists, reporters experts and commentators have long offered perfectly rational, well-sourced and reasonable criticisms of the police sometimes ( as in the case of Richard Littlejohn) tinged with mocking humour . I should have thought that the mere fact that Britain’s leading conservative, middle-class newspaper had become so critical might cause a thoughtful police officer to wonder if something was up. So might a story such as this http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2383863/Librarian-57-stood-family-yobs-arrested-forced-wear-degrading-hood-police.html

 

Or this, in another newspaper

 

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/tasered-blind-man-colin-farmer-1393173

 

 

 

It is, alas, typical of the modern force that criticism is regarded as a sin in itself, and dismissed by several methods. One is to claim without evidence that the critic has some personal or venal motive. The other is to assume he or she is stupid or ignorant.  A third is to invent a category of person called ‘anti-police’, which happily includes all persons who criticise the police, including perhaps 57-year-old librarians, or 62-year-old blind men,  and who can therefore be dismissed  *on the sole grounds that they have been critical*. The alternative, of examining these criticisms and taking them seriously, is almost never adopted.

 

CL:

I then headed to Peter’s twitter timeline and saw that many others had expressed their disagreement with the article in a wide variety of ways and so I decided to send a few tweets to him myself. They were not offensive, or were at least not intended to be,

 

***Oh, come now. Some of them certainly were, and you know it.

 

CL

 

but I just made a few comments about the article and then informed him that I was offended by his suggestions because I had sadly lost a friend and colleague to armed criminals. Peter would later dismiss my comment as “irrelevant” because he had lost a friend to the IRA. Not sure where the logic is in that

 

*** Then I will explain it. The logic is that all decent and civilised people honour courage , and honour and mourn those, police officers included,  who died bravely in the course of their duties. But it is not merely irrelevant but in my view plain wrong to use those deaths as an emotional riposte to criticism of police methods and attitudes. Even journalists die bravely in the course of their duties.  It does not place the trade of journalism beyond criticism, and in fact it would be very wrong of me to respond to such criticism by referring to those deaths. I would be using emotion to censor the discussion, and insinuate that critics of (say) phone-hacking were thereby dishonouring the memory of foreign correspondents shot on assignment.  

 

CL

 

 I found his dismissal rather distasteful.

 

*** did he, though? I would be interested to see him explain exactly why.

CL

I am deeply sorry Peter has lost a friend in this manner and I can sympathise with him in ways he won’t know so I certainly would not dismiss such a thing as irrelevant.. I don’t ask for for MR LC’s sympathy. The

 

***No, the person involved was not a friend. I didn’t have that honour. He was a colleague. And the Harrods Bomb was a long time ago. I don’t ask for  Mr LC’s sympathy, and if he thinks I am asking for it, he completely misunderstands the point I am making.

  

 CL:

My comments on Peter’s timeline soon attracted some strange people and one particularly vile male who seemed frighteningly obsessed with the man. However I did end up talking to some rather sensible, intelligent, mature and reasonable Hitchens supporters who engaged in polite debate and did not become rude, aggressive or offensive when we disagreed. Mr Hitchens himself responded to some of my tweets with his usual sharp rudeness which having read a few of his blogs now I quite like and find amusing, but this is fine and acceptable because I was not particularly polite either. I have to respect a person who speaks their mind and says what they think and feel without worrying about the consequences or who they may upset. Whilst it may be sometimes rude and offensive it is at least honest.

 

***Good

 

 

CL:

Having spoken to these people and having now read his article several times I would like to firstly admit that I was perhaps wrong to dismiss it immediately and secondly to apologise for my rudeness.

 

 

***Accepted with pleasure.

 

 I fully respect other people’s opinions and if this article is Peter’s then I respect that. My reason for writing this blog however is to do what he and others have suggested and to point out, in a reasonable manner, where his article lacks fact.

 

The article is predominantly based on opinion. Peter’s opinion of Police, Policing and a couple of high profile incidents where officers have fallen short of the levels of professionalism expected.

 

 

***It’s a short article, not a book. (But there is a book, who runs may read) . It gives two telling and demonstrative examples from my own direct experience. I have heard or read dozens of similar accounts from readers who, in the dozen or so years since I took up this matter have written to me or run me up to express their despair or disappointment at the police force’s lack of interest in their problems, or worse.  The newspapers are also crammed with such instances, the worst one being that of Fiona Pilkington because of its terrible end. Many others are in similar states of despair, but just keep on living their persecuted, unhappy lives, the victims of low-level, ‘petty’ disorder of a kind our modern police cannot prevent and have no idea how to stop, because they are a reactive, target-driven, motorised  force, and also because they no longer agree with the public about what constitutes wrongdoing.   They are, as my book notes, increasingly neutral between ‘offender’ and ‘victim’ , acting as referees between two opposing teams rather than as the ally of the victim.

 

CL:

 

I think the thing that has upset many and gotten so many backs up is the sweeping generalisations contained throughout the blog. Peter has expressed his opinion of presumably his local constabulary and expressed this as fact in relation to “the Police” in general to a national audience. Reading between the lines I think the article is aimed at the Policing of London however the language use and numerous generalisations imply to the average reader that the same negativities apply to Police throughout the UK.

 

 

***In the course of my work I travel widely in this country. I don’t live in London (though I work there) but in Oxford, a city I have known well for nearly 50 years. I am always vigilant , wherever I go, because of my interest in this matter. What I notice  everywhere is that regular police patrol in ordinary uniform has almost totally vanished . I very occasionally see officers in Kensington High Street, miraculously avoiding death and injury while wearing nothing but tunic and helmet and even going out alone. But they are hugely outnumbered by the grim-jawed ,car or van borne  gun-carrying, flat-hatted types who regard (for instance) driving at speed through a pedestrian red light while people are crossing , as beneath their notice. Or their brethren who stand about, again often armed as if the Syrian civil war, in mainline railway stations. These are usually at the very least in pairs, chatting to each other, and often in platoons sitting in vans. When I once cheekily wrote down the number of one of these vans, illegally parked outside Starbucks, a sergeant leapt form the vehicle, chased after me and quite seriously threatened to arrest me under the Terrorism Act.  He would have done, too, if a passer-by hadn’t told him who I worked for. Then there was the evening when, trying to walk peacefully along the pavement , I was more or less swept aside by a squadron of armoured, helmeted militia who, when I sought their leave to go about my normal business bawled at me in unison , and repeatedly ‘It’s Not Debatable!’, like so many Daleks. The excuse for this was the presence(100 yards away) of an entirely peaceful demonstration across the road from the Isareli Embassy.

 

By contrast, in a provincial town I observed two ‘patrol’ officers, standing in a street in which cycling is clearly banned, standing yakking to each other while a number of cyclists whizzed straight past them. That is much rarer than the more general experience, in which I can walk ( I love to walk) for miles through any English town and city, never seeing a police officer on foot at all.  I was amused, in should add, by an officer who rang me up to complain about my article who a) falsely accused me of calling the police ’cowardly’. b) said I was ‘ignorant’,  c) had *never heard* of James Q.Wilson’s ‘Broken Windows’ theory , nor of Rodger Patrick’s work on crime figures, was plainly rather annoyed when I answered yes to the question ’have you ever confronted a man with a knife?’ and rudely hung up when I tried to give him the details of my book.  

 

I don’t ‘generalise’ about this absence of preventive patrols. Many years ago I wondered where all the police had gone and set out to find out. I know from the research I did for my book that the Home Office Police Advisory Board abolished foot patrol on 7th December 1966. I found it how it had been done, and why. Thereafter, I knew that there were no police foot patrols because *there were not supposed to be* . The whole concept and principle of policing had been changed, a process accelerated by the near-nationalisation of the English and Welsh Police in 1967, when most of the small local forces were forcibly merged into the strange hybrids we have now, neither local nor national. It’s all in the book. But you wouldn’t read it, would you?

 

 

CL:

 

 who Peter told many on his timeline that he was more than qualified to make his comments because he had written a book about crime and policing etc which involved research. That book however was written quite some time ago. If the website is correct they date from 1999 to 2003. Policing was different then. Very different.

 

 

***So he says. I’ve no doubt there are some important changes, but the fundamental point, that the police react to crime rather than seeking to prevent it, remains exactly the same. It has, no doubt got worse, because reactive policing doesn’t work and never will, and while it’s not working crime, disorder and violence increase and intensify. . The police have got better at public relations, and there are all kinds of ‘community initiatives’ and so forth, but I describe such things in my book as temporary concessions, not regarded by chief officers as their main purpose, and so they remain.

 

CL:

I only joined in 2004 and even now the Police service and its methods are unrecognisable to when I joined.

 

***Well, they are even more unrecognisable to anyone who grew up before Roy Jenkins wrecked the police in the 1960s, too. In fact they come from another planet, or even universe. The question is, which of these changes is significant, and qualitative, and which merely a quantitative progress down a wrong path set nearly 50 years ago. When I published my book, foot patrol had been abolished and reactive policing was supreme, police stations were closing all over the place. It was a continuation of what I had explained and described. It still is. Most modern police officers simply *cannot understand* the idea of preventive policing at all, except as an occasional concession to soothe the dim public, and simply go on and on about ‘response times’. The same was true of a famous report of the Audit Commission at the time I wrote my book, which jeered that patrolling police officers hardly ever *caught* any burglars. No, that wasn’t their purpose. Their purpose was to deter and prevent burglary. An arrest is a failure, not a success. Likewise a prosecution, even where successful. A police officer, as such,  is very little use, after a crime has been committed. He may be useful as a quasi paramedic or a quasi social worker, or as a helpful, kind and compassionate human being,  but these tasks can be and are performed by others. As a police officer, charged above all with preventing crime, he is attending the scene of his force’s failure, and can do nothing but record it, help clear up the mess, issue a crime number and provide sympathy and the (usually faint) hope of detection, arrest and conviction of the culprit  followed by a feeble sentence.  This stark and unwelcome fact is at the centre of my argument, and most modern officers simply do not get it.

 

 

 

 

 

CL:  The other thing which has changed tremendously is society, crime trends and crime types. I dare say that Peter’s research on this topic may be a little dated. Allow me to explain and clarify a few things.

 

***Have they really? Louts are still louts, drunks are still drunks, drug abusers are still drug abusers, thieves are still thieves, burglars are still burglars, fences are still fences,  aggressive beggars are still aggressive beggars and vandals are still vandals. They have never altered much in many centuries. But, while the pre-1966 police kept them under control, the post-1966 police have allowed them to flourish and take over the streets.

 

 

LC:

 

Firstly, the opening question I am going to take as rhetorical. Whilst many do not support the Police and some actually despise them, it is pretty obvious how useful Police Officers are. They do a job nobody else could or would and without the Police the world would be a much more frightening place to live.

 

***Is that really so? For a lot of people it is pretty frightening despite the existence of the police. I’m not at all looking forward to being old and weak in modern Britain, and it’s getting harder and harder to afford to live in places where we are safe from ‘low-level’ disorder and ‘petty’ crime. Does he not know how hard it is to get the police to come to deal with these things? And how little use their occasional visits are to the beleaguered people of the big estates? As for whether nobody else could do it, who’s to say. There are a lot of ex-soldiers on the market just now. I suspect many of them would like to have a go.

 

LC

 

Until there is an alternative to criticise then the Police remain a very useful tool in preventing and detecting crime and protecting the public. They are only hampered in this role by political interference.

 

***I doubt the police prevent much crime. They detect a little. They hide a lot by statistical massage (see Rodger Patrick et al) . There is undoubtedly political interference. But when did the Police last campaign against that? They vigorously campaign for more pay and to protect their pensions as it is their right to do. But when did the Federation, or ACPO for that matter, ever campaign against the absurd codes of practice of PACE 1984, or the politically correct inquisition which followed Scarman and Macpherson, or the Equality and Diversity rubbish, or the lowering of physical standards for entry? Or for the proper enforcement of the laws against drug possession, whose abandonment spawns more crime every minute?  Or for the restoration of initiative in general, let alone for the restoration of the death penalty, a better guardian than  a million stab vests. . Do let me know. I’ve never heard a peep. Yet the police are actively involved in campaigns AGAINST the enforcement of drug laws, so you can’t say it’s because they have to stay out of politics.

 

LC:

 

Secondly, despite Peter’s opinion Police Officers do NOT have an ambiguous attitude towards the public. Police Officers have a lot of respect for honest law abiding members of the public. If they did not hold a positive attitude towards them then why would they serve them?

 

**Do they serve the public? I often see police officers guarding politicians and other figures of power, as one would expect in a third-world country.  And thousands of them appear on the streets for big demonstrations and sporting events, demonstrating that they do exist (and the myth of manpower shortage is just that , a myth, as my book clearly shows) . But these officers just somehow aren’t available to man local police stations or to go out on preventive foot patrol. As for ‘respect’, I think there’s a line in Burns about wishing the Lord would give us the gift of seeing ourselves as others see us. He really ought to slip into ‘civilian ‘clothes one day and listen to what people are actually saying about the booted,  base-ball-capped, equipment-hung, swaggering, gum-chewing shaven-headed characters who have replaced the old constables.

 

LC

 

They put their lives on the line, their health and safety at risk and face daily criticism because they’re damned if they do, damned if they don’t and they do all of this for the public.

 

*** No doubt many are motivated by ideas of service. Even some journalists like to think they are helping to keep society free, and to right wrongs. But I think it is always worth remembering that people also work for wages, pensions, perks, status and other things. That they often hope for promotion, and that in the modern police promotion comes to those who are the most politically correct, most sociological, most bureaucratic and political. And that a desk or a car is always more welcome than a dark street, alone in the rain, a high-prestige special squad more alluring than plodding drudgery, and an early teatime better than a late shift. That’s just common humanity, which we can all understand. It’s true of any job where there are those who go out in the dark, and those who sit at desks. And modern policing methods give common humanity plenty of opportunities, which the old beat didn’t.

 

 

 

CL:

The Police do NOT avoid heading out into the streets

 

**No, perhaps not, but then again, they aren’t there much. It’s more that they don’t think there’s any point in being there. Which of course makes an unwelcome duty even more unwelcome.

 

CL

 

 or fear being approached

 

**I don’t think I mentioned ‘fear’. They just don’t act as if they welcome approaches, that’s all.  The set of the face, the ‘deep-in-conversation with colleague’ mode, the militaristic uniform and the menacing ,mistrustful assembly of clubs, handcuffs, pepper sprays and tasers may just, and I say this with all diffidence, suggest to the subconscious mind that this person might not welcome an approach. I mean, what would CL think if he saw a ‘civilian’ going about dressed like that?

CL

 and they do NOT always work with another colleague.

 

***Can’t argue with that. Not always. But mostly.  I’ve seen, very rarely, actual lone constables. Perhaps four or five times a year.  But it’s far more common to see them in pairs, if at all.

 

CL

 

 With cuts to frontline policing, which are being cleverly hidden from the public eye, many officers are PREVENTED from heading into the streets. Not by choice for most, but because of workload demands and the wishes of those at the top of the chain of command and in Government. So called “back office” roles usually done by civilians are being plugged by officers. Cuts to the frontline mean less officers to deal with suspects and so they are dragged in off the streets to deal with the interview and charging process which depending on the offence can take hours. Officers want to be out patrolling but most of the time the mountain of paperwork and bureaucracy prevents as many of them from venturing outside some days. It is not “the Police” on the ground that makes this decision, it is those at the very top sitting in the Home Office or those a little further down the chain.

 

***This is a consequence of the structure mandated by reactive policing. The police should be employed for one purpose, preventive patrolling. All other tasks should be secondary to that. If it were so, current manpower would be quite adequate.

 

CL

When officers do go out on patrol then yes I think it is fair to say these days most do so in a vehicle.

 

***Well, quite, and this is not a ‘patrol’ in the sense that a regular foot patrol is. It is in my view largely symbolic. It is not deterrent, not least because it  is by its nature unobservant of the small things that a proper police force would prevent and deter.

 

 

CL

 Again this is due to the dangerously low numbers of Officers available to cover such vast areas

 

***I believe it is still true, despite some recent reductions that the  numbers of officers in this country, both as an absolute and per head of population, is far greater than it was when this country was patrolled on foot and bicycle, police stations existed and were staffed, and most rural areas had residential constables. (Eg, in 1961 (England and Wales figures) there were 75,161 police officers for a population of 46.1 million. In March 2013 (House of Commons Library) , there were 129,584 Full Time Equivalent officers in England and Wales, for a population of 56 million. I might add that in 1961, police had the responsibility of checking commercial premises, and of parking control, prisoner escort , courthouse security, prosecution and many other functions now taken away from them and given to private security firms or the CPS. And also that the police officers are backed up by more than 40,000 so-called ’civilian’ staff, who did not exist in 1961.

 CL

 and because many criminals these days do not skulk around on foot in the shadows, they travel in vehicles and it is pretty tricky to keep up with a car on foot and as today’s press shows, it can be very dangerous trying to stop a criminal in a car whilst on foot.

 

***Who’s asking you to do so?  Yet it is hard to commit a burglary or any other crime (apart from a motoring offence) while driving a car. The criminal has to get out of the car to be a lout, a thief, a vandal , a burglar, a murderer,  or whatever else the police are supposed to prevent. And if the country were still covered by a network of foot patrols, he would have to fear them as soon as he left his car. It is this belief that the job is about *chasing criminals afterwards* rather than about *preventing crime in the first place* that is so hard to dislodge.  I’ve long favoured an entirely separate body from the police to deal with traffic matters . And of course a few cars and motorcycles should be available where needed. But they should not be the main means of locomotion for police officers. Boots and bikes should be.

 

 

 

 LC:

The main reason however is that the Police have strict response times. They must attend an emergency call from the public promptly and can take no longer than 14mins 59seconds (may vary depending on location) or the call is “missed” and this reflects badly on the force when the statistic geeks come calling which then results in rapped knuckles which roll downwards with increased severity to the initial attending officers. It would be impossible with the number of officers today and the huge areas they cover to meet this strict response times on foot. Let me give you a factual example.

 

**Indeed, and all this is based on the same basic error, the belief in reacting to crime rather than in preventing it.

 

 

 

My beat area is two hundred square miles. It is at any one time covered by only 2 Police Constables and 3-4 PCSO colleagues. My force has a STRICT single crewing policy and we are routinely monitored via GPS to ensure we are single crewed. If we are found to be double crewed then we are contacted immediately by a rank of at least Inspector and asked to account for why. Unless we are off to make an arrest of a violent person, transporting a prisoner, dealing with a person known to make allegations or suffering with Mental Health issues or transporting the officer(s) to their foot beat then we will be in a little bother. Working with a colleague these days is a luxury and if we can not justify it then we will be disciplined. The only exception to this rule is Friday and Saturday evenings in busy towns or cities. We have just lost a lot of vehicles from our fleet and so my beat only has one marked Police car and one marked Police van. Unless we have a prisoner to process or have specifically requested clerical time in advance then we must all be out on the streets within 30mins of starting our shift, just enough time to brief, check the vehicles and kit and away we go. Often we park up and walk around on foot engaging with the community and have to run back to the vehicle when an emergency call is made. One of us transports our PCSO colleagues to their designated beat areas and then has to round them back up again unless public transport is working. And so as you can see, this is completely different to Peter’s opinion and this is fact. This is not just a one off example for my current beat, this is the case for all beats I have worked and for friends in other forces I have spoken to before writing this.

 

**See above, prevention versus reaction.

 

 

 

Sadly, because there are so few Police officers these days (***see above)  they have to prioritise their work and do not have the resources to deal with everything that comes in. I remember only 8 years ago when I would turn up to briefing at the start of my shift and there would be at least 20 cops on shift. Eight would take cars, two of which were double crewed, and the rest headed out on foot. I loved it. These days there is often only 6-10 officers on shift and the Neighbourhood teams such as mine have even less as stated above. For this reason we do often have to pick and choose jobs. Sir Peter Fahy caused controversy when he admitted recently that 60% of crimes are not investigated. This is the true nature of Government cuts to Policing.

 

 

***No it’s not. It’s a consequence of the reactive model. Crime and disorder grow faster than the ability to deal with it. That’s one of the main reasons it fails.

 

 

CL

 

So the Officer who Peter alleges stated he was busy doing something else “in an irritable voice” when he asked him to deal with somebody who ran a red light was most probably simply being honest and was irritable because, whilst I do not wish to make assumptions, I dare say Peter would have been his usual abrupt and rude self when speaking with the Officer in this alleged incident.

 

 

***You dare say, though so far as I know we haven’t met. Interesting.  But even so,  I have more sense than to approach a modern police officer in the manner you describe. I fear them greatly.

 

CL

 

I wasn’t there and so cannot say for certain what that officer was doing at the time,

 

***He was sitting in a big red stationary car, with two colleagues, and seemed to me (as one of his colleagues also was) to be looking at the screen of his phone or I-pad,  perhaps tweeting about these horrid journalists.

 

CL

Peter can explain further, but I have been in similar situations where I am pulled over noting down details of a call I am being despatched to or I am perhaps doing some important clerical at the roadside or even waiting for a suspect vehicle which I know is heading my way, when I have been shouted at by a member of the public for “ignoring” a car which they believe was speeding or the driver was on the phone. Whilst these are offences and should and will be dealt with when possible, I am afraid that we cannot deal with everything.

 

***No, but as I walk or bicycle about my home town and London, I see (and could, were I a sworn officer act on) as many as a dozen such offences a day . In most cases, thanks to the speed of the traffic, it is quite easy for me to catch up with the offender and tap on his window ( as I do, whenever I feel like renewing and updating my knowledge of the basic English expletives and their usage, which wouldn’t happen to CL)  And if you all did that, then the use of phones while driving, and the running of red lights, both in my view acts of homicidal criminal stupidity, would markedly diminish. As it is, they increase constantly (sorry, no statistics, just observation), and I am increasingly concerned that one or both will probably be the cause of my death.

 

We all long for more resources and the ability to do more so please do not blame the boots on the ground for this as we are as equally frustrated as the public.

 

***Good if so, but where can we see the evidence of this, in motions at the Federation, or any other collective action to put it right?

 

I cannot argue at all with his comments regarding the Prince Andrew incident or the Mitchell incident other than to question the part where he implies the Police leaked the story about the Prince to the press. Is this actually true or was it just a convenient link into his bit about “Plebgate”? If it is true then yes I agree it is wrong, if not then he is wrong to imply to a national audience that this was the case.

 

***I simply asked who leaked it. There is a limited number of possibilities, it seems to me. But the assumption is his, not mine.

 

CL

 

I don’t think there is a Police Officer in the UK today that does not wish they could Police without the need for guns, Taser and vests. All these things have become vital tools in the fight against crime. I do not believe Officers should be routinely armed with guns but to remove them completely would completely prevent anybody at all dealing with armed criminals and to have them available only at the station to be allocated to trained officers when an incident come in would only delay response time and put more lives at risk. The same applies for Taser. These tools are much safer and cause less problems and discomfort for the suspect then CS spray yet this has become acceptable now. Yes there have been a few Taser horror stories in the press but when compared to the plethora of unreported positive Taser deployments these few cases would not even be 1%. Having been subjected to the Taser (by choice) and seen it used a handful of times I have no issue saying it is a vital tool and should replace CS and Pepper spray. And as for vests… Well to suggest the Police should be deployed in this day an age without one is madness. I wish we could be but we can’t. So long as the Police and Justice System receive no respect or fear from violent criminals and offers no deterrent these days then Police will continue to need protection from harm when putting themselves in front of armed and violent criminals. My vest has saved my skin, if not my life, on more than one occasion and has stopped bullets killing a few of my colleagues too. Helicopters although expensive really do assist the Police. They were introduced as a progression in policing and are used for a wide variety of roles such as searching for criminals and missing persons, safely following vehicles to prevent dangerous pursuits, monitoring public disorder incidents to direct officers and gather evidence. The list of jobs they do which could not be done by any other means even if we trebled the number of cops on the ground is vast. I really do wish these things were not needed to Police society but before the surrendering of these items can even be considered, society needs to change, crime needs to drop (for real, not just on paper) and the Police need more resources so they can safely patrol. Does Peter really think 2013 Britain can be policed using archaic methods, tactics and equiptment?

 

I agree with Peter to some extent that the uniform needs to change. We are beginning to look slightly more militant and even more so when armed to the teeth in and around the streets of London. The Police uniform has gone from being smart, presentable and also carrying an air of authority to a national mismatch of styles and colours and although it may be more practical for modern day policing it is quite uncomfortable, looks quite militant, often looks scruffy and does little to help our desired approachable image. I hate the thin, tight fitting moisture wicking polo shirts most now wear and think we should look at moving back to the white shirt and ties and having some pride in our appearance once again. The horrid hi-vis jackets and tac vests are grime magnets and get dirty very quickly and rarely come out clean when washed. Many cops walk around in dirty day-glow looking more like an AA mechanic these days because that is the uniform we are given. I love looking back at pictures of uniformed Police through the ages and when uniform from only 8 years ago is put next to today’s it really is quite sad to see.

 

The fact is Policing has changed because society has changed. Society has changed because of poor leadership in Government. The days of the local bobby being only a shout or whilst blow away are long gone and I would love nothing more for them to return. I would happily put up a Police sign on my house and be my town’s local bobby. I would and often do quite happily patrol on foot in all kinds of inclement weather. I have done so in city centres, rough estates, rural areas and small towns and villages and I have done so alone. Yes it was nice in the days when you could perhaps walk with a friend and colleague and you knew you had immediate assistance if needed but nobody enters the world of Policing expecting to have somebody holding their hand every day. Whilst we might moan about it, the Police are more than used to change and learn to adapt all the time and despite what Peter’s article may say they are doing just that today. His own experience of Policing in London or in one particular area may be negative, his research from 10+ years ago may be negative (I don’t know as I have not read his books), his recent article may well be overly negative towards the Police but it was wrong of him to imply on a national level that what he sees and hears in relation to Policing in London is a reflection of “the Police” in general. It is not so much what he says that irritated me in particular but rather HOW he said it. In this day and age when the media hold the Police in general accountable for the actions of a select few resulting in a dispirited public, articles as vague and as sweeping as this only seek to fuel the erosion of the reputation of the Police Service of England and Wales, a Police Service respected and admired the world over.

 

All the things moaned about by Peter are also nothing to do with the men and women the public see on the streets which again is something I think Peter should have made clear. The lowly PC has no say in his/her deployment, posting, what he/she wears or carries for protection, what incident they can or can’t deal with, whether or not they can work with another bobby… The PC is at the very bottom of the Police ladder and does as it is told. These decisions are all made much higher up the ladder and quite often at a Government level and so for anybody to take out their anger, annoyance or even their hatred for Police and Policing out on the men and women on the ground is disgraceful and to hold the entire Police Service of England and Wales or even a whole force accountable for any single negative encounter or the mistake or criminal actions of a small select few corrupt officers is ridiculous. You would not and could not get away with discriminating against other groups in society based on the actions of a small minority. I would never for one second tar all journalists with the same brush because one or two like to write anti-police stories. It is wrong and deep down I think these people know that.

 

I doubt Peter will read this and if he does I doubt he will either admit it or agree. I hope I am proved wrong but I doubt it. I wanted to write it because I wanted to firstly apologise to Peter for my initial reaction and if he does read I hope he accepts that apology. Secondly I wanted to try and explain in greater detail than Twitter allows just exactly WHY I disagree with parts of his article. Many of his supporters have asked me questions that I can simply not respond to in 140 characters and so this is my response and my opinion based on my up to date knowledge and facts.

 

 

***Well, there you are then. It’s getting late in a long day, and I’ve explained why it was that I wrote as I did, and I too wish you could get anywhere in modern Britain without turning up the volume.  But I never heard from Mr CanisLupus about my book, did I?

 The long paragraphs above are best dealt with by reading that book. I think it absurd to imagine that the deterioration in the police force could have happened without at least the passive acquiescence of many officers, and the active support of some. The incidents I mentioned were worth mentioning because they seemed to me to be exemplars of an attitude. I have  said a dozen times that of course much of this is political, but if the police officers themselves won’t fight against it, using the tools available to them, yet stream on to the Internet to defend themselves against critics such as me, then we are entitled to assume they don’t object. Nobody writes ‘anti-police’ stories, a ridiculous expression which armours its user against giving serious consideration to important criticism.  . Alas, there are many stories which reflect badly on the police, and it is our job to write them because they matter, and need to be told. None of us is a saint. But I think it would help if we each accepted that the other’s *motives* were basically good. I don’t doubt the *motives* of the modern police are good. But it’s no good having good motives, or working hard, or being brave, or anything else, if the thing you are doing is fundamentally mistaken.

 

If the staff of an electrical goods factory were diligent timekeepers, highly productive, cheerful in their labours and everything else, but they wired all their plugs the wrong way round, which would matter more? Reactive policing has never worked, and never will. Preventive policing did work, and will again, when we reintroduce it. Can’t come soon enough for me. I’d welcome CL’s support. 

 

If the Devil had to invent a game, it would be this one

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail On Sunday column

If the
Devil had his own bible, it would probably take the form of a computer
game. It would be sly and witty, enjoyable and slick. It would start with
small, almost funny misdeeds.

It would
offer the player the joys of money, successful violence and easy,
responsibility-free sex. There would be drugs which didn’t  fry your brain
or burn holes in your nose.

You would
be made to feel brave, while not actually needing to be. None of your pleasures
would be paid for in coin, pain or grief.

Everyone
else in the game would be disposable and forgettable. And it would contain one
big lie. You would come out at the end happy and unharmed, and wanting more.

As I
understand it, this is roughly what happens in the new, much-praised Grand
Theft Auto V, now being played by thousands of 14-year-old boys in bedrooms
near you.

Officially
it’s for those aged 18 and over, but nobody takes that seriously in modern,
child-hating Britain. If you haven’t got it, you’re not cool.

The shops
were ready for the rush with great stacks of it. Parents who refuse to buy it
for their sons can expect ballistic rage, stamping and sulking. Perhaps it will
turn out to be a human right.

Would
anyone care to say that this doesn’t matter?

It’s a
curious coincidence that Aaron Alexis, the man who massacred 12 people in
Washington DC last week, liked to play such games for hours on end (Call Of
Duty was apparently his favourite).

As usual,
the liberal media are more interested in the fact that he had guns than in what
was in his head. Oh, quite – lots of people do this and don’t go out and murder
their school-fellows or workmates.

I
strongly suspect that the wretched Alexis (who was plainly unhinged in other
ways, with voices in his head) was yet another victim of supposedly harmless
and ‘soft’ cannabis, now virtually legal in much of the USA. And plenty of
British 14-year-olds are playing that game, too – often with the connivance of
their parents.

But these
increasingly frequent incidents seem to me to suggest that what you put into
someone’s mind makes a difference to the way he behaves.

For every
one who goes on a rampage shooting, there are thousands whose school work goes
off the rails, thousands who treat girls like toys, thousands who consider
callousness, dishonesty and bad manners as normal.

Many
years ago in a French seaport town, I saw what I still think was a vision of
evil. In a grubby cafe a boy of about 11 or 12 was ceaselessly feeding coins
into one of the crude gaming machines then available. His eyes were blank, the
skin of his face was dry and horribly pale. He looked as if he rarely ate. He
was (this was, after all, France) smoking a cigarette. I swore at that moment
that I would protect any child under my authority from this influence.

Around
the same time I found myself in a famine-stricken country – Somalia – and saw
for the first time the great round eyes and swollen stomachs of children dying
of hunger. In many ways the worst thing was that I was not shocked or moved
enough. I had seen this too many times on TV.

I have
known ever since that seeing things on screens desensitises us. There is no
doubt. If evil is familiar, it is easier to bear and easier to do. It is in our
imaginations that we use our consciences and work out how our actions will
affect ourselves and others. Conversation, storytelling and reading strengthen
our imaginations.

These
games kill our imaginations, which help us to be kind, and replace them with
the liquid manure of pure selfishness, which helps us to be cruel.

The police deserved their drubbing  

Are we
allowed to criticise the police? My article on the subject last week was
followed by squawks of outrage, to which I have replied at length on my blog.

Some
claimed that I know nothing of the subject, when I have researched and written
a substantial book about it. Some urged me to go out on patrol with officers (as
if I haven’t done so here and abroad).

Many
claimed – without a scrap of evidence – that my motives were low and greedy.
Some sought to use emotional blackmail by mentioning the many officers who have
died in the course of duty.

I grieve
for these brave, much-missed men and women as much as anyone, and revere their
memory. But their sacrifice doesn’t mean I cannot criticise the police or their
methods.

Some
journalists have died bravely too, but that does not put my trade above
criticism. Far from it. And heaven forbid that it ever should be.

A welcome
few of those who commented were thoughtful and reasonable. But to  the
others I say that they sound very like the BBC, another nationalised industry
trading on a reputation  gained many years ago and no longer entirely
deserved.

Both
these bodies need to remember that they serve the public, not the other way
round.

Britain will continue to vanish behind the veil

Not many
years ahead, the full Islamic face-veil, the niqab, will be as common here as
the headscarf (the hijab) is now.

And quite
a lot of non-Muslim women will probably have adopted the hijab too, as they
will find it wise to do so in the areas in which they live.

This is
going to happen. Nothing can stop it.

Islam is
at home in this country and grows stronger every week.

When we
replaced Christianity with ‘Equality and Diversity’ as our official belief, we
abandoned the only argument we might have had against it.

I
couldn't care less which of the three Left-wing parties is in government.

I doubt
if Labour would ever have dared smash up the Armed Forces as the Coalition has
done, but that’s the only difference I can see, and it’s happened now.

But my
sense of fairness compels me to defend Ed Miliband against the babyish attacks
now being made on him, mainly by media folk who bought shares in his Blairite
brother David, and are still furious that their man was beaten in a fair fight.

Actually
Ed’s shown real guts. He was the first party leader for years to refuse to
toady to Rupert Murdoch’s papers.

He wants
to get rid of the iniquitous political levy – something Margaret Thatcher tried
and gave up because she was too scared. And whether he meant to or not, he
stopped the Prime Minister taking us into a wholly idiotic war.

As far as
I can work out from the feminist sisterhood, it’s not sexist to kill girls in
the womb because they are girls. Beats me, but these people are a lot cleverer
than poor old medieval  me, stuck with my certainty that such killing is murder,
and wrong.

If you wish to comment, please scroll down

That Stephen Fry Moment Revisited

In the midst of a colossal response to an article in Another Newspaper (a little like invading a country on a  thousand mile front because a child in that country has blown a raspberry at you) , Stephen Fry has posted as follows at http://stephen-fry-me.tumblr.com/post/61754597917/some-weasel-of-a-telegraph-journo-wants-me-to-give-up#

 

Well, that’s his affair. But because his target has incidentally mentioned me, he also includes this passage, to which I must now wearily respond, or people might think I accepted his version.

 

‘Walker concludes his vicious little paragraph firstly by telling an outright lie: that I “buttonholed” my dear friend Christopher Hitchens’s brother at the luncheon after Christopher’s memorial service in New York. Not true. I could see Peter Hitchens in the doorway of the Waverly Inn, standing utterly alone  (as he does intellectually, morally and socially amongst his brother’s friends) and, taking pity, I just came up to chat. He responded so rudely, so vilely and with such lack of human decency, that I couldn’t but tweet at the extreme difference between two products of the same parents. Probably a misjudgement on my part. I make many. But then Peter Hitchens is proportionately as joyless and unlovable a person as his so deeply missed brother was joyful and loveable and I was upset at such charmless rudeness. And I was, I freely admit, a little drunk. Which is just what Christopher would have wanted me to be.’

 

Um. I would cheerfully have left this matter.  Mr Fry’s boorish behaviour at the time was roundly criticised even by some of his fans, and I thought that he had been chastened by this. Not chastened enough, it would seem. So, I’ve got out my chastening set, in the hope that Mr Fry will in future stick to making giggly BBC programmes about the F-word, which is obviously his metier, and leave me alone.

 

I can’t recall exactly who I was talking to immediately before Mr Fry bulged up to me, as I talked to so many people on that occasion.  As it happens, I am on good terms with many (though not all) of my brother’s friends, and his family are of course my family too.  I was, for certain, stone cold sober as I knew I had work to do that evening on the train.  So my memory may be clearer than his.   I certainly wasn’t in any doorway. Had I been, as he claims, standing utterly alone, I should have seen Mr Fry coming afar off, and fled, much preferring solitude to any kind of encounter with him ( and wisely so, as it transpired).

 

I had managed to avoid any contact with Mr Fry at the actual memorial gathering at the Cooper Union, when at one point I saw him approaching purposefully,  out of the corner of my eye , and so swiftly absented myself.  I don’t like anything about Mr Fry, have been rude about him in print and thought it would be hypocritical and wrong to pretend friendliness to him in person. Any encounter would either be dishonest or abrasive, and as this was a solemn occasion, I thought it simpler and better-mannered to avoid any risk of that. Had it been some light-hearted occasion, I’d have welcomed the chance to tease a person I regard as greatly over-rated by himself and others. My position, as a declared believer and conservative at an overwhelmingly atheist and radical gathering, was sensitive enough without my having rows with Stephen Fry. As it was, when Mr Fry forced himself on me, it was in much more relaxed circumstances, in a bar, and even then I was restrained and quiet. Had it been left to me, nobody outside my immediate family would ever have known about our encounter, which I mainly recall for the dullness of his discourse.

 

He mentions my brother , calling him his ‘dear friend’ . This was the case, as I can myself confirm.  I had, some months before, had a conversation about Mr Fry with my late brother. We had discussed Mr Fry’s  portrayal of Jeeves on television. I  thought it greatly inferior to Dennis Price’s matchless mastery of the role in our own childhood, and we both felt it generally wrong and unWodehousian.  We also talked about the evening when he and Mr Fry had come up against a rather inadequate Roman Catholic team at a debate in London, in which I thought (and still think) that the pair of them – encouraged by an audience pretty heavily tilted towards their side -   went some way beyond the limits of civilised debate. I have reason to think that Christopher and Mr Fry may, in the end, have wondered about that too.

 

Christopher said that, despite the awful ‘Jeeves’,  he had decided that Mr Fry was All Right Really. I urged him to reconsider, saying that Mr Fry wasn’t remotely on his intellectual level,  but he was adamant. We left it at that.

 

The idea that Mr Fry wanted to show ‘pity’ for me is absurd, especially given his obvious sensitivity to criticism,  demonstrated by the whole piece in which this passage occurs.

 

Why on earth did he seek me out? The bar in which we found ourselves had three or four separate rooms. There was plenty of space in which to avoid each other. And he cannot have missed my enthusiastic spreading of the summary of him in ‘The Dictionary of National Celebrity’, which described him as ‘A stupid person’s idea of what an intelligent person is like’. While this is, when you think about it, far ruder to his fans than it is to him, you wouldn’t like it being said about you.

 

I think he wanted some sort of redress. Everything that has happened since confirms me in this view.

 

And so he appeared without warning, forced his company on me when he could easily have guessed it wasn’t wanted,  interrupted my conversation,  introduced himself as if I mightn’t know who he was (such modesty) , and said, as I recall, that he thought we probably disagreed. I confirmed this, and said quite evenly and without rancour that I knew who he was, and  that I didn’t like the way he behaved (citing the debate I mentioned above) .   He wanted to know why not. I told him.  

 

As I recall, my main complaint was about the dangerous intolerance of the modern atheists, who claimed to know the unknowable and so dismissed their opponents as stupid and ignorant, and would in the end seek to silence them altogether. This is, after all, the theme of my book on the subject.

 

He didn’t appear to understand the point I was making, and reiterated some dull boilerplate, containing assumptions about my beliefs which weren’t correct,  which didn’t in any way respond to what I had said. I expect I looked as bored as I was by this poor, thin undergraduate stuff. I seized an opportunity to slip away, and knew nothing further until I read of his tweet, which was later withdrawn.

 

I have no idea what ‘human decency’ has to do with it. It wasn’t *his* closest living relative whose death we were marking. I had certainly not sought him out. He couldn’t possibly have expected me to welcome his company. I most definitely hadn’t looked for it, and in my view even a moderately perceptive rhinoceros would  have been aware that I was actively avoiding it.

 

I might add that my late brother was seldom reluctant to speak frankly to those he disliked, at any occasion at all. In that way, I should have thought I was demonstrating one of the several strong similarities between me and my brother, one of which is not to be too inhibited about letting people know what we really think of them, when they ask for it, and sometimes even when they don't.

 

Actually, my brother could be far ruder than I have ever been, and few of Christopher’s friends can have escaped a demonstration of his ferocious, white hot rudeness, even if only as spectators .  For those in doubt of this, I believe there is a good account of such an explosion in a ‘New Yorker’ profile of him  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/10/16/061016fa_fact_parker

 

If Mr Fry truly admired or really knew my late brother, he can hardly be censorious about a bit of rudeness, nor can he suggest that, by being rude to him, I in some way showed myself dissimilar to Christopher.  In comparable circumstances, approached at a close relative's memorial event by someone he despised,  I have no doubt that Christopher would have been much, much ruder, and I expect most people in the room would have known about it. Since Mr Fry speculates that Christopher would have approved of his being a little drunk (which is likely true) , I will hazard a guess that Christopher would also have enjoyed my clash with Mr Fry. He’d have thought it enlivened the occasion. Mind you, I only knew him for 59 or so years.

 

As for being ‘joyless and unloveable’, I’ll leave that to those who know me best to decide. I can only say that I was not overjoyed to have Mr Fry’s company forced on me, and that I was not in any way seeking his love, let alone hoping to charm him. That does not necessarily mean that I am joyless and unloveable, nor even that I am charmless. I may be all of these things, but Stephen Fry wouldn’t ever know.     

A More Tempered and Reasoned Police Response

I was glad to see this more thoughtful response to my criticisms of the police.

 

 

http://www.policeoracle.com/news/Local+and+Neighbourhood+Policing/2013/Sep/19/The-Peter-Hitchens-police-bandwagon_70953.html&commentadded=1 (you may need to register)

 

I should point out here that, when I wrote my book on the subject,  I took care to send it to several influential senior police officers, as well as to opinion-formers. I had very little response ( except from the always laudable Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian). In some cases I simply encountered ad hominem abuse (one reviewer has since apologised to me personally for his behaviour).

 

So I think it is quite reasonable or me to state the matter in stark terms, whenever I get the chance, in the hope of getting this very important subject properly and knowledgeably debated. Much of my case ( as in 'The War we Never Fought') is that conventional wisdom and other assumptions commonly made by journalists and others in this discussion are severely mistaken, and do not stand up any examination of the facts.

 

As an example of the less pensive and calm police approach to what I wrote(assuming the author is,  as he says,  a sworn police officer) there is this :

http://ademandeloya.wordpress.com/2013/09/16/my-response-to-peter-hitchens-and-his-asinine-little-article/

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Response to Assistant Chief Constable Morgan

I think this had better be my last full posting on the police matter, though Mr Morgan, as the subject of this posting, is of course free to respond here at length should he so choose. The problem is that this is a very important subject, and it would be a pity to miss any opportunity of discussing it properly (even if I would rather discuss my pleasant and rewarding visit yesterday to a girls' secondary school in St Alban's - thanks to all involved)

 

Gareth Morgan, an Assistant Chief Constable, suggests that my article was *intended* to ‘provoke a furore’. How wrong he is. I have had to set aside much time that I would rather have spent on other issues, just fending off spiteful and ill-informed personal attacks on me from people claiming  to be police officers ( and in many case people who actually are police officers, the quality of their attacks – alas - not giving a good impression).

 

I was actually surprised that this particular (rather mild) attack on one of Britain’s last great unreformed nationalised industries (alongside the political parties and the BBC) led to such an extraordinary response. I have been persistently and consistently criticising this particular institution for more than a decade. Personally, I think that a) failing to prevent an intruder gaining access to Buckingham Palace and b) soon afterwards failing to recognise one of the Queen’s own sons in the garden of that palace are very serious and indicative failings, quite deserving of very vigorous criticism indeed, and drawing attention to a deeper and wider problem.

I only brought up the subject -yet again – because of the astonishing behaviour of police officers in Buckingham Palace, and the lingering effect of the Mitchell GateGate incicent.. I am surprised tht this needs explaining, but newspaper columnists generally use specific and telling incidents, which are currently in the news columns, as a starting point for articles in which they make wider points. I do this all the time, and it seems obvious to me. But I have many, many times written articles critical of the police (some years ago I wrote one which began ‘If all the police in this country were abducted by aliens, who would notice?)

 

 

Yet the response of the police, for many years, has been to damn all critics as enemies, and to circle the wagons rather than listen, let alone change. As we know, and  as Arthur Scargill proved beyond all doubt by ‘defending’ the coal industry to death, this sort of thing can be kept up for years and years, and will scare away reformers for a long time - but in the end it will fail. And when it fails, because there is so much pent-up desire for change, the changes that come may well not be the right ones.

 

I remember many years ago, on a late night Radio Five Live phone-in, pointing out that the standard excuse for the absence of the police from the streets – manpower shortage – was simply untrue. (the table of page 47 of ‘A Brief History of Crime shows that the numbers of police officers, as an absolute total and per head of the population, rose sharply during the period in which they were withdrawn from the streets). Within a couple of minutes, two men saying they were serving constables were on the line, furiously denouncing me as ‘anti-police’, although my facts are unchallengeable. And ever since then, I have endured this unresponsive special interest pleading as the price of raising this very important issue. I am not anti-police because I criticise modern police methods, any more than I am anti-American because I opposed the recent planned attack on Syria.

 

And I will make once more these simple points. The police are often on display, at Federation conferences and on mass demonstrations, protesting about their pay, pensions and other material matters. If they are ( as many say they are) as appalled as I am by  the changes in the police , wrought by PACE , the CPS, force mergers, the influence of Bramshill,  and Macpherson, etc, why do we never hear them protest about *them*?

 

If these are their views, and they are genuinely afraid to express them, then surely they should be glad of an independent outside voice who expresses them for them? I am sure that many in the BBC, for instance, were very glad when Margaret Hodge had a public go at the Corporation’s top echelons the other day. I doubt very much whether Mrs Hodge received any rude letters or e-mails denouncing her as anti-BBC from rank and file staff.

 

I fear that the truth is that in the police, perhaps more than in any of the other state industries,  from teaching and social services to local government and the NHS, the leadership and the rank and file are united in defending what is called ‘the producer interest’, that is, arrangements which suit management and staff very well. The ‘consumer interest’, that of the public who receive the services of the police force for which they pay very heavily in taxation, is largely excluded from the discussion.

 

I write of the police as a ‘consumer’, someone who has experienced the vanishing of the police from the streets in his lifetime, and who has ( as a pedestrian and user of public transport) also experienced the severe deterioration in order which has followed that departure. I have also experienced the transformation of the police from a generally conservative body of men into a politically correct army, one of whose main aims is to protect its own monopoly of force - in case the rest of use force force for traditional consrvative ends. All law-abiding persons now know that they are at grave risk from the police if they defend themselves or their property – they are, in fact, at graver risk from the law than are the criminals against whom they seek to defend themselves. This is because the polcie always find it eaaier to prosecute co-operative, law-abding people, who respect and fear them, than they do to prosecute criminal hard men, who do neither.

 

But I also write about the police as a privileged person – a journalist with long experience of reporting on crimes and trials, who understands the prosecution system, who has visited prisons, who has accompanied police (as I am constantly told I can’t have done, or I'd view them differently) on what they call ‘patrol’ these days. Why, I’ve even experienced these things in other countries, and so been given the special insight which comparison of different cultures provides. And finally I write as an author, someone fortunate enough to have been given the chance, by a reputable publisher, to set out between hard covers a coherent position on the issue of law, justice and policing, based upon extensive research.

 

One of the most miserable experiences I have is the one of reading people saying ‘Oh, you’re just trying to promote your book!’.  This is not because it is wounding ,but because it just so frustratingly stupid and ignorant, and yet gives the person involved an excuse (in his or her own mind) not to read the book.

 

No doubt I should be pleased to be propelled into the best-seller leagues, and become as fabulously rich as I suspect many people think I am.  But it is most unlikely.  As it happens, the only book I wrote (about religion, as it happens)  that made me any substantial sum of money did so because of a very generous advance, which I doubt it will ever earn back.  In almost all cases, in terms of money reward per hour spent, the writing of non-fiction is one of the least lucrative activities known to man. I write my books to try to influence public policy. Alas, if nobody reads them, I will fail, and many years of effort and work will be more or less wasted. Anyway, as I keep saying, my books can be obtained from libraries, for no more than a small reservation fee, which does not go to me.

 

Having dealt with that, let’s examine what Mr Morgan says next:.

 

‘I have since re-read the original piece and the subsequent commentary in Peter's blog where he develops his argument that the Police Service has essentially become remote from communities, lost sight of its founding goals and become a belligerent paramilitary force led by a liberal elite who have colluded since the mid 1960s to dismantle Peel's model of policing.

 

‘This hypothesis is supported by extensive historical research and analysis and has been outlined in a number of publications in recent years by Peter. This commentary on policing is central to a range of Peter's arguments about the 'state' of Britain and public services in particular. To argue that Peter is unfamiliar with policing and that he is presenting a case from a position of ignorance is therefore folly.

 

 

‘His personal interpretation of events and developments in policing is well articulated from a particular perspective; his ideological and philosophical stance about the role of the state vis-a-vis the citizen is equally well documented.’

 

 

I appreciate that. It demonstrates the necessary openness of mind, and basic generosity of debate without which no serious discussion can be held. I commend it to *all* the persons, here and on Twitter who have chosen instead to abuse me, and to claim (mistakenly) that I don’t know anything about the subject because I don’t share their views (One such, who rang me up at my office, called me ‘Ill-informed’ and yet had never heard of the ‘Broken Windows’ theory put forward by James Q.Wilson,  nor of Rodger Patrick’s work on crime statistics. I was also interested to note that he accused me of calling the police ‘cowardly’ which I had not done, and would not do, because I don’t think it’s the case. I found this particularly shocking in one trained in the rules of evidence. When I tried to give him the name of my book, he boorishly hung up).

 

Then Mr Morgan says : ‘His personal interpretation of events and developments in policing is well articulated from a particular perspective; his ideological and philosophical stance about the role of the state vis-a-vis the citizen is equally well documented.’

 

Thank you again. It might be helpful to mention here that this view of mine is the traditional British one, based on personal responsibility, conscience, freedom under the law, due punishment of responsible persons, and limited government. I believe that the difference between this view, and the continental one of a powerful state to which all owe direct allegiance, is probably the single most significant division in politics. When I was growing up in this country, the first view was pretty much universal in all classes, and it was a matter of national pride that our police were unarmed. Of course, the lack of weapons was a symbol of many other things about them. The almost complete disappearance of this view, and its replacement by what we have now, is one of the most extraordinary revolutions of our time. And in my view, the fact that it has happened does not mean it was a good thing.

 

Mr Morgan again : ‘I have always been and expect to remain wedded to Peel's Principles of Policing. I don't think there will ever be a better mission statement.’

 

I find ( and note in my book) that lip-service is generally paid to Peel, even while his methods are being abandoned. There is a particularly telling example of this on page 65 and 66 of ‘A Brief History of Crime’ .This passage discusses the decision of the Police Advisory Board, on 7th December 1966, to abolish traditional foot patrolling after almost 140 years of successful practice. Yet, even as they strangled Peel’s ideas, one of the working parties which reported to the PAB praised them. This is inevitable. They remain perfectly sound, and are not fundamentally affected by modern technology or any of the other glib excuses offered for abandoning them. That is because they are built upon an understanding of human nature, which changeth not.

 

Mr Morgan continues

 

‘I agree with Peter's description of policing moving away from preventative models and that linked to changes in technology policing has become more remote in the last 40 years. But we then part company. I believe that the 'rediscovery' of neighbourhood policing and the self evident truth that policing is better delivered locally, in partnership and with communities remains at the heart of British policing. It is at risk in these times of austerity but the service can and should make choices to invest in this the most visible foundation of policing by consent.’

 

Yes, but such policing is offered not as the central activity of the police, but as an occasional concession by officers taking time off from their various squads, courses and specilaisms, or from coping with the demands of PACE 1984. These  brief concessionary bursts of activity are  always vulnerable to the demands of the new purpose of the police, which is to react to crime after it has happened and provide the illusion that detection, arrest and prosecution (reinforced by massaged figures) can begin to cope with, contain or reduce the steadily rising flood of disorder and selfishness which makes the lives of so many so miserable.

 

What use is all this, as I so often ask, to the lonely pensioner on the rough estate who must endure, night and day, the whack of a football being repeatedly kicked against her walls and windows by bands of callous youths? What statistic can begin to measure this horrible thing, which to her is worse than the entire Great Train Robbery and far more present than the terrorist menace?  Petty crime, not even worth recording. Only when, as in the case of Fiona Pilkington and her daughter Francecca, it ends in hopeless tragedy, does anyone realise what a universe of unrestrained cruelty lurks in our streets. While those who should restrain it, regard the task of doing so as beneath them (much as many nurses, who were  also until recently above criticism, now seem to regard nursing as beneath *them*) . isn’t it funny the way that hardly anybody in Britain does what he or she used to do, and how hardly any building is now used for its original purpose.

 

Most of us have rceeived leaflets pushed through our doors telling us about the new 'community officer' who will be getting to know us and our area. Then nothing happens. And he is never heard from again, until a few years later a similar leaflet arrives, and so on. It's also quite common, after a particularly nasty incident, for polcie to flood an area on foot for a few days or weeks afterwards. Then they go away again.  Yesterday, I was in St Alban's in Hertfordshire, and walked for some miles through the city and along main roads. I saw no police officers at all. This is quite normal in English towns and cities.  

 

I never claimed that my various nights spent with police officers in London, Dallas and Johannesburg could ‘be used as the basis of a sustained critique on the complexities and challenges of policing modern Britain.’ I merely mentioned them because so many of my critics invited me to take such rides, or assumed I hadn’t done them. My ‘critique’ is also based on years of research, and on observation, as a consumer, of police effectiveness . It is also based on a ‘theory’ of law and justice which I think has been swept aside by post-Christian reformers, but not superseded. In fact, it is the blazing failure of modern criminal justice and policing, with its bursting prisons and swollen police forces and fiddled statistics, plus vast disorder and (very importantly) almost total collapse of enforcement of laws against drug possession, that  is the strongest argument for revisiting the policies which were abandoned, on spurious grounds, in 1966 and thereafter. They were not perfect, but they were fundamentally sound, and their imperfections were (in my view and that of many of my fellow inhabitants of these islands) much less important than the imperfections of what we have now.

 

 

Finally, Mr Morgan says :’ I wish that Peter Hitchens' perfectly legitimate right to promulgate opinions on policing could have been written in a way that invited discourse and discussion rather than polarising opinion. The opportunity to use evidence in support of an argument has been lost in anecdote and ideology.

 

It could have been different but as in many things it's about making the right choice and I fear there was an overwhelming desire to add to the already overburdened bandwagon.’

 

I'm glad my right is legitimate. Oh, but I have expressed these views so many times for so many years. And yet this is the first time in a decade or more that I have got Mr Morgan’s attention. The same ideas were written in my book, which I couldn’t get any police chief to read or listen to, or any politician. They were even written in my recent contribution to a booklet (‘Upholding the Queen’s Peace’) published by the Police Federation itself , who solicited my views,  knowing my long record of criticism. It can be read here

 

http://www.polfed.org/documents/Upholding_The_Queens_Peace_Essay_book.pdf

 

So, is it a criticism of *me* that nobody reacted before last Sunday’s article? Or is it a criticism of those who only reacted when they were presented with an article of this type?

I think good, robust popular journalism has an important role in society, and I also think that people have to learn to take criticism. We journalists know that nobody loves us. In most cases, we understand why that might be, and even sympathise with and share some of the criticism. Most of us have learned a lot from that criticism over the past 30 years or so, and do things better as a result. We don’t say, when attacked, that because some of our number have died bravely (as they have) or because state-registered cowards such as I am, have even so found themselves dodging bullets in war zones or nearly getting lynched in the Congo, that this excuses the failings of our trade. Nor does any serious person offer hard work or danger as an excuse for doing the wrong thing. If it’s wrong, however energetically you do it, and however brave you may be,  it will still produce the wrong result

  

Is it just me?

I just thought I’d  share with readers some other recent comment on the police, which shows I’m not alone in my misgivings.  Here’s an article from the London Evening Standard, written by Sir Simon Jenkins, former editor of ‘The Times’ and (despite his mistaken views on drugs) one of the most perceptive and well-informed commentators in the country today.

 

http://www.standard.co.uk/comment/comment/simon-jenkins-londoners-pay-a-price-for-too-much-vip-protection-8806820.html

 

And here’s the ever-interesting Chris Mullin, a former Chairman of the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, (though no political soulmate of mine) writing in The Guardian

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/16/plebgate-andrew-mitchell-police-federation

 

I cannot link to the article by Lord Macdonald, former Director of Public Prosecutions, about the role of the Metropolitan Police in the ‘Plebgate’ affair,  as it is in ‘the Times’ and behind a paywall. But I think I can say that it is highly critical of the police.

 

Are all these people also ignorant, ill-informed and motivated by personal failings or some odd dislike of the police as such (as I am accused of being) ? Or are they voicing a more general disquiet, among thinking people of all classes and political opinions,  about what has happened to a once-loved institution?  

 

I might add that earlier this year I was considered so ignorant and ill-informed by the Police Federation that they invited me to contribute to this booklet, ‘Upholding the Queen’s Peace’.   

 

http://www.polfed.org/documents/Upholding_The_Queens_Peace_Essay_book.pdf