PETER HITCHENS: Get rid of the guns, cars and Tasers and we might just end up with real policemen

This is Peter Hitchen's Mail on Sunday Column

What use are the police these days?
We know they have a pretty ambiguous attitude towards us, the public,
avoiding us where possible by staying indoors or racing about in cars,
and seldom going out alone in case one of  us actually approaches them.

They’re
busy doing something else, as one of them recently explained to me in
an irritable voice, when I asked him to act against a driver who’d
driven through a red light at a pedestrian crossing 20ft from his nose.

That
‘something else’ often involves hanging about scowling, with
sub-machine guns, supposedly saving us from an exaggerated terrorist
menace.

But now it turns
out that all those haughty squads of armed militia who supposedly
protect the great and the powerful don’t even know who it is they are
meant to be guarding. Prince Andrew was quite right to be angry when two
armed officers treated him like a suspect as  he strolled in broad
daylight in his mother’s garden.

How typical. First, they
failed to detect or halt an intruder into Buckingham Palace, surrounded
by high walls and fences and an obvious terror target (and nutcase
target) if ever there was one.[related]

Next,
they failed to recognise one of the best-known people in Britain, who
was also one of the very few people who had an absolute right to be
there, and whose features should be imprinted on their minds since they
are being paid to protect him.

It
is ridiculous to accuse the Duke of York of having a self-important
‘Don’t you know who I am?’ moment or of being insufferable or pompous.
The officers were paid to know who he was.

It
wasn’t as if his presence was unlikely or unexpected or out of context.
It’s his childhood home. He was right to be livid, and we should be
livid on his behalf. And there’s more.

How did news of this event reach the
media? It is now almost a year since the then Chief Whip, Andrew
Mitchell, was falsely said to have called police officers ‘plebs’.

This happened after an overzealous and inflexible officer refused to open a gate to let him ride his bike out of Downing Street.

Mr
Standfast, our warlike, missile-rattling Prime Minister, quickly dumped
Mr Mitchell from his job when he realised  it might endanger his poll
ratings. And Mr Mitchell remains sacked, despite the unravelling of the
claims made against him.

Meanwhile,
there’s still no sign of any action against those who leaked the
original falsehood, despite an investigation almost as big as the one
into the late Jimmy Savile.

Call
them all back in. Take away their guns and their Tasers and their stab
vests, sell their helicopters and their fast cars with the go-faster
stripes.

Give them proper British police uniforms, which mark them out as the people’s servants, not their masters.

And
send them out on solitary foot patrol, yes, even in the rain, where
they might once more meet those they are supposed to serve.

If London’s really so dangerous it needs armed guards, then deploy the Army.

They’re
better at it, they don’t look down on us, they’re nicer and more polite
than the police, and would be most unlikely to threaten a member of the
Royal Family or fabricate lies against a Minister.

 
Downton’s Lady Mary will NEVER be a ‘single mum’

A newspaper puff for the TV
snob opera Downton Abbey says that the character Lady Mary, whose
‘husband’ was killed off in the Christmas episode, will be ‘coming to
terms with her role as a 'single mother’ in the new series.

See how language is twisted to hide the truth?

The correct expression is ‘widow’, which you may have noticed we don’t hear so much any more.

Lady Mary, played by Michelle Dockery, did not have a child outside wedlock.

She was married. This matters.

One of the great triumphs of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was to deny the importance of marriage.

The expression ‘unmarried mother’ was abolished, and replaced by ‘single mother’.

But
a widowed or deserted wife’s position is and always will be utterly
different from that of a woman who deliberately has a child outside
marriage.

The difference is a moral one, and that’s what the revolutionaries want to abolish  – morality.

So we are to get horrible slithery plastic banknotes. I’ve used them in Australia and I can tell you, you won’t like them.

This
is to stop them wearing out so fast. I don’t mind the tatty notes. I
mind the way they lose their value so quickly. If they could find a way
to stop that, I’d be keen.

 
Generation ‘gap’ is now a mighty gulf

Britain
really is two nations now – the pre-1960s patriotic, Christian moral
conservative one, and the post-1960s omnisexual, multicultural liberal
one. The annual Social Attitudes survey does not show people changing
their minds. Very few do, as it’s rather difficult.

It
shows that younger people have completely different views from their
elders on almost every major issue of life. So at some point – and this
must be the first time this has happened in history – the older
generation stopped being able to pass on their values to their own
children. 

How was
this done? Who was responsible? Was it an accident? My own view is that
it was deliberate and sustained. Could it now be reversed? I rather
doubt it.

Oh no, we’ve done what the voters want!

Our political class
actively want to be out of step with public opinion, and are sorry they
accurately represented it the other day.

A
survey of Tory MPs revealed that many actually want to vote again on
attacking Syria, so that they can authorise this lunacy, even if it is
only an incredibly small pinprick with no discernible purpose.

And it’s not just the Tories. Ed Balls, the Shadow Chancellor, also wants Another Chance To Bomb.

He
confided to an elite TV show: ‘Our jaws dropped when the Prime Minister
suddenly took the  idea of military action right off the table.

I wasn’t expecting that, nor was Ed Miliband. If David Cameron is going to put that back on the table, we’ll look at that.’

Well, if they so fervently want not to represent us, I’ll say it again.

We
don’t have to elect these people. I’ve reluctantly come round the view
that we should bring in compulsory voting in this country – provided
every ballot paper contains a slot at the top marked ‘None of the
below’.

And if
the numbers voting ‘None of the below’ exceed 30 per cent in any
constituency, nobody is elected for that seat. Parliament would get a
lot smaller. MPs would become a lot more interested in us and in what we
think.