Police

Wednesday

David Blackburn

Reclaiming the Big Society

Yvette Cooper says no to elected police commissioners. The Shadow Home Secretary gave her speech to the Labour conference this morning and, in addition to launching an independent review into policing (which has been welcomed by senior police officers), she defined her opposition to the government’s flagship police reform.  Britain can ill afford the £100 million pounds cost of elected commissioners and the reform threatens to politicise the police by concentrating power in a single person without sufficient checks and balances. From the applause in the hall, you’d have thought that the whole party was behind her. But not every delegate agrees. At a fringe meeting on Monday night, Hazel Blears and Labour List

Friday

James Forsyth

Telegraph reports that Wallis was paid for stories by the News of the World while working for Scotland Yard

The Daily Telegraph is tonight alleging that Neil Wallis was paid by the News of the World to provide crime exclusives while working as a consultant for the Metropolitan police. The paper claims that the News of the World paid Wallis £25,000 for information including the details of Scotland Yard operations during this period. According to the Telegraph, £10,000 of the £25,000 was for a single story. This revelation will increase the pressure on the police to reveal fully the extent of contacts between it and News International. But with Paul Stephenson already having resigned over the hiring of Wallis as a consultant, further resignations are unlikely. The other hack-gate

Monday

David Blackburn

Bernard Hogan-Howe named as new Met commissioner

Theresa May has named Bernard Hogan-Howe as the new Metropolitan Police Commissioner. Hogan-Howe was the early front-runner and a finalist for the role last time round. He is apparently highly respected within the police force and has been a successful chief constable in Merseyside. His appointment has come earlier than was expected: the talk at the end of July was of completing the process later in the autumn. This suggests that the government is keen to repair the damage to its relationship with the Met and the reputation of the police caused by the phone hacking scandal and the riots. This will be essential if the coalition is to deliver its ambitious police

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The randomness of al-Qaeda’s evil

After all the nerves and security in New York, Washington and London, the only attempted terror plot on the anniversary of 9/11 appears to have been foiled outside an arts centre in Gothenburg. The Swedish press says that the four people arrested on Saturday night are believed to belong to a cell linked to al-Qaeda. There are no more details yet, but it’s a reminder that the al-Qaeda threat has not gone away. Its Arabian Peninsular division is still active, responsible for the underpants bomber and the bomb bound for Detroit, intercepted in London. This is also a reminder of how chillingly random its attacks are. This matters because there

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

In New York, the whole world remembers

New York There’s an eerie mood in New York right now, as the city prepares to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Al-Qaeda, or what’s left of it, likes anniversaries. The police have been on overdrive ever since a “credible” tip-off about an attempted truck bomb. Officers are everywhere. Armed guards patrol landmarks and cars from bridges and tunnels are being pulled over and checked. All this reinforces the sense of something alien to New Yorkers (and almost all Americans) until ten years ago: the threat of attack. A common threat has solicited a rather wonderful common response. Shop windows have displays of commemoration; companies take adverts

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Cameron Dorries exchange the most memorable moment of a quiet PMQs

The first PMQs of the new parliamentary term was a bit of a damp squib. Ed Miliband avoided the issue of the economy, presumably because he feared being hit by a slew of quotes from the Darling book. So instead we had a series of fairly unenlightening exchanges on police commissioners and the NHS. Labour has clearly chosen to try and attack the coalition from the right on law and order and security. There were a slew of questions from Labour backbenchers on whether the coalition’s anti-terrorism legislation was too soft. But I suspect that this PMQs will be remembered for the Cameron Nadine Dorries exchange. Dorries, irritated by how

Monday

Edward Boyd

Do we have the best police service in the world?

As the wave of rioting and looting swept through London earlier this month it was disturbing to see how the actions of a minority could engender fear and disorder on such a grand scale. As the dust settles and the reality of this episode fades away, there is a simple fact that is at risk of being buried under the heap of condemnation of criminals and praise for the police – namely, that such a relatively small number (just over 2,000 were arrested in London out of a population of 8 million) of people deployed themselves so effectively as to bring London to its knees.  Yet thankfully effective deployment is

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Our Crazy Drug Laws, Part XVI

As legal entertainments go Man facing jail after reporting his cannabis plants stolen is a pretty good one. The Edinburgh Evening News reports: Police were called to David Williamson’s home to investigate reports that he had been assaulted and robbed. But after Williamson volunteered that it was two of his prized cannabis plants which had been stolen, suspicious officers got a warrant to search the 34-year-old’s Edinburgh home and discovered a further 20 plants. Williamson was immediately arrested. The case caused barely disguised mirth among lawyers and officials at Edinburgh Sheriff Court today, when Williamson admitted producing a controlled drug at his Sighthill home in May this year. So far,

Tuesday

David Blackburn

Miliband re-opens campaign with same old weapons

Party politics is back from the summer and the summer’s events are defining the strategic dividing lines. Ed Miliband reopened hostilities by threatening to force a vote on police cuts. The Standard reports: ‘The Labour leader said ministers were being “reckless” in refusing to rethink planned 20 per cent savings following the worst rioting in living memory. Launching a new campaign during a visit to Lewisham, Mr Miliband claimed the cuts, reducing officer numbers by 16,000, would “weaken the forces of law and order on our streets”.’ Policing Minister Nick Herbert, one of the coalition’s stars outside the cabinet, described Miliband’s claims as ‘hypocrisy’, pointing out that Labour did not

Saturday

David Blackburn

The war on Britain’s streets

Police in Birmingham have released this extraordinary footage of people firing shots at lines of police officers during the riots. As Iain Duncan Smith says in this week’s magazine, the riots were a wake-up call. This video shows what looks like gangs, about three dozen of them in masks, not just trashing buildings but discharging firearms at unarmed police. The West Midlands chief constable, Chris Sims, released the footage this morning and said he believes there is a “concerted and organised attempt” to kill or injure police.

Wednesday

James Forsyth

Recalcitrant police forces

Applications to be the next commissioner of the Metropolitan Police closed at noon today. But thanks to the Home Office and the police, the best candidate for the job — Bill Bratton — hasn’t been allowed to even apply. The energy which was put into barring him shows just how determined the police and the Home Office are to prevent any outside talent from being brought into the police. Number 10, though, maintains that it still wants to appoint outsiders to positions of authority in the police, even though it is now trying to claim that the commissioner of the Met was the wrong place to start this process. It

David Blackburn

Riot sentencing row brews

David Cameron promised that looters would feel the full force of the law. Courts have been sitting round the clock holding defendants on remand and issuing stern sentences. This is causing disquiet in some circles. Lib Dem MPs complain that the government has overacted, incapable of resisting the temptation to take draconian decisions without adequate scrutiny. Tessa Munt told the Guardian that the government’s approach “smacks of headline grabbing by Conservatives, not calm, rational policy-making.” Lady Hamwee also told the paper that it would be a “great pity if what [the justice secretary] Ken Clarke has been doing – finding a better way of sentencing – was to be undone.” Much

Monday

Alex Massie

Bill Bratton’s Approach Provides Ammunition for Tories and Labour Alike

It’s always worse elsewhere. That, at any rate, is one conclusion to be drawn from this question: This is consistent with polls that find twice as many people think crime is “Top Three” problem for the country as a whole than consider it a major problem for their own family. Doubtless there are many reasons for this discrepancy, among them the way in which crime is reported by a breathless, always-indigant media. Nevertheless, perceptions matter in life as in politics and cannot be wished or even, sometimes, persuaded away.  One aggravating aspect of all this post-riot contemplation is the way in which the violence has been taken as proof that

Sunday

David Blackburn

“Zero tolerance”

The law and order debate has come full circle: the coalition is going to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime. David Cameron’s promise that crime and anti-social behaviour will receive “zero-tolerance” recalls the rhetoric and politics of the Major and Blair years, an indication that, despite the annual celebration at lower crime rates and higher prison numbers, progress has been merely statistical. As James has noted, the success of the Cameron premiership now rests on delivering “zero tolerance”. Cameron is fortunate that the policies required are already in place, for the most part. Planned police reform will be essential, as will the radical plans for

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Cameron mustn’t let the police top brass bully him into silence

The police have been busy defending themselves this weekend against any criticism of their performance. They aim to stop elected politicians from making any comment on their performance. But David Cameron should not—and must not—back down from both his criticism of police tactics and his conviction that the force urgently needs reforming. The truth is that the initial police response to the riots was hopelessly inadequate. If senior police officers really do think that the Met’s performance on Saturday, Sunday and Monday was adequate, then that in and of itself makes the case for reform. Losing control of the streets in sections of the capital is a failure. As one

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

From the archives: the Bill Bratton edition

As James Forsyth says today, No10 wants Bill Bratton to not just take charge of the Met but start a revolution in policing. A ‘Stop Bratton’ campaign has duly begun with Sir Hugh Orde, himself a candidate for the job, saying that he’s not sure he wants to “learn about gangs from an area of America that has 400 of them.” But it’s worth noting, though, that Bratton has advised the British government before: in June 2006, at the beginning of John Reid’s tenure at the Home Office. Allister Heath (now editor of CityAM) went to meet him and reported back in The Spectator. His piece is below. ‘You can control

Saturday

David Blackburn

Boris’ long-game strategy

Has the sheen come off BoJo? The question is echoing around some virtual corridors in Westminster this weekend. The Mayor of London was caught off guard by the recent riots and his initial decision to remain en vacances made him look aloof and remote, a sense that grew during his disastrous walkabout in Clapham. Then he joined Labour in calls for cuts in the police budget to be reversed, a decision that reeked on opportunism, superficially at least. The FT’s Jim Pickard has an excellent post on these matters and he reveals that Boris Johnson has been voicing these concerns in private for months and that he has a brace

David Blackburn

Cameron lands Supercop as police acrimony mounts

Internationally renowned policeman Bill Bratton has agreed to advise the government on how to defeat gang culture. Bratton’s role is not official, but he will arrive for duty in the autumn nonetheless. The former LA police chief has already offered a diagnosis of Britain’s problems. In an interview with the Telegraph, he says that hoodlums have been “emboldened” by timid policing and lenient sentencing. Quite what this means for Ken Clarke’s justice policy, supported by the Liberal Democrats, remains to be seen. But the indications are that the government will bolster its law and order policies. Doubtless a wry smile will have broken across the face of Andy Coulson, who

Friday

David Blackburn

From the archives – the nihilism of the young

Theodore Dalrymple has an article in this week’s issue of magazine (non-subscribers can buy the Spectator from just £1 an issue), on the nihilism of the young. Roy Kerridge came to very similar conclusions during the Brixton riots of 1981. Here’s what he made of them: A day in Brixton, Roy Kerridge, The Spectator, 18 April 1981 Some years ago I noticed that all was not well with some of the teenage children of my West Indian friends. After reluctantly being pushed out of their schools – where they really did spend the happiest days of their lives, going on treats almost every week – they simply went home and

James Forsyth James Forsyth

Time for action

The facts of life are Conservative, as the old phrase has it. The events of the past few days have shown the urgent need for Tory social policies. The case for reforms to the police, welfare and education has been amply demonstrated.  Some in the government appear to get this. But there is also an odd hesitancy about getting on the front foot. As Tim Montgomerie said yesterday, why wasn’t a minister put up for Question Time last night? They could have used the programme to push Cameron’s reform agenda. Equally, why isn’t Cameron setting up an inquiry that will expose how the police have effectively abandoned parts of our