A Sensible Home Secretary Doesn't Undermine the Police.

Yvette Cooper will live to rue her idiotic allegation. She should have been sacked.

The Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper, made the most extraordinary assertion in the Sunday Telegraph, alleging the public has lost confidence in the Police. She offers no evidence, anecdotal or data based, to support her opinion.

Confidence in the police is vital. In the UK the police operate almost entirely under the nine  principles developed by Sir Robert Peel, sometimes referred to as “policing by consent.” This is why the overwhelming majority of British Bobbies are unarmed. If the public do not trust the police that consent starts to evaporate. This happened at the beginning of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, when catholic trust in the Royal Ulster Constabulary was destroyed. The net result was disaster; mob rule led to the deployment of the Army (initially to protect the Catholics) and thence to 40 years of terrorism.

As it happens I have spent a fair amount of time working with the police in a variety of roles over the years. In my experience they work with professionalism, sympathy and determination in often trying circumstances. As a Constable once explained, the public seldom interact with police officers when things are going well in their lives.

In June and July while campaigning in Swansea I saw policing at its best; a reassuring presence on Wind Street, home of all the clubs  and bars (open from lunchtime or earlier) and therefore scene of alcohol and drug fuelled problems most days. Uniformed  and sporting old school police helmets as well as the inevitable hi-viz, police officers were simultaneously reassuring the public, deterring thugs and dealing with the odd flare up quickly and effectively. I had a chat with them, and they confirmed it was a duty they enjoyed; reassuring and protecting the public. Their presence also kept the businesses working.

Confidence in the police, or indeed their performance, was not a political issue at the election. As far as I recall no party mentioned policing problems other than the lack of money (like every public service) during their campaign. I found that crime  was mentioned often by residents of the depressed areas of Swansea, places like Townhill and Mayhill, where drug dealing is rife and where there was a riot about drugs in 2022. Drug problems remain in Mayhill. However across the City more people mentioned uncontrolled migration as their main concern.

The Home Secretary is the Cabinet minister responsible for both policing and border security. Wise Home Secretaries do not undermine public confidence in the police. They work with them to support them winning the front line battle with crime, as those officers in Swansea were. Ms Cooper is one of the most experienced in the Cabinet, having served as Chief  Secretary to the Treasury in Gordon Brown’s government 2008-9. Nor is she a fool – she has a first class degree in PPE (natch!) from Baliol, won a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard and has a MSc in economics from LSE. Why then did she utter such a dangerous and counter productive untruth?

I gained an insight from rising Labour uber-apparatchik Torsten Bell on election night, just six weeks ago. In his victory speech he said that the Labour government would confront “right wing populism.” He didn’t say what he meant by that. It’s now clear that he and Labour believe a right wing populist is anyone who questions the role and competence of Labour’s state machine. That’s anyone suggesting that uncontrolled mass migration has been less than wonderful is labelled “racist”. They may be called “fascists” too.

One of Tony Blair’s less vacuous soundbites was “tough on crime, tough on the cause of crime.” As Shadow Home Secretary Ms Cooper invoked it in a speech last year. (Clearly she doesn’t do originality.) What she didn’t explain, then or now, was how undermining the police achieves that.  

We have seen hefty sentences which some might construe as “tough” but no action - tough or otherwise - addressing the underlying causes of the riots (the economic failure linked to mass immigration). Instead the government has launched a slick propaganda operation to paint the  riots triggered by an appalling crime as a “far right” assault on the country. The party of the state is seeking to suppress opposition to the state machine, that is anyone on “the right.” This programme is already  going terrifyingly well; even the Telegraph, broadsheet newspaper of the Conservatives (but not Reform), continues to refer to the riots as “far right.” If even the Tory press is parroting Labour lies we’re well on the way to a becoming a country in which dissent is impossible.

And that is where Ms Cooper’s lie comes in. A fictitious loss of confidence in policing gives an excuse for more authoritarian legislation “to help restore confidence.” Blair introduced the Orwellian sounding  “hate crimes.” As some of the thugs may have been coordinated via social media the “far-right” riots can be used to extend the already draconian On Line Safety Bill Libertarians (like Reform UK) are concerned that the Prime Minister intends to go further. Free speech will be supressed.

This is not policy opportunities, but part of a plan. Starmer’s right hand man, Morgan McSweeney made his name “defeating” the racist British National Party in Dagenham. In Labour circles this makes him an expert on the “far right.” McSweeney  is apparently a fan of American behavioural economist Cass Sunstein who wrote  “Terrible events produce outrage, and when people are outraged, they are all the more likely to accept rumours that justify their emotional states.”

Outraged people are also “all the more likely to accept” legislation that purports to prevent a recurrence of the event regardless of costs, or indeed questioning whether it will work. The post Dunblane legislation restricting firearms ownership hasn’t stopped people being shot to death any more than the tide of legislation on knives has prevented people being stabbed. We have yet to see whether the On-line  Safety Bill will prevent angry, disaffected people rioting. I’m not hopeful; murder has been illegal since before Moses came down the mountain several thousand years ago but it still happens.

As Peel knew, Police Constables on the streets prevent crime and reassure the public. It’s also the case that the Police have a recruitment problem, a quality problem, and a retention problem. Those are symptoms of disastrously bad leadership and that starts at the top. Ms Cooper’s comments can’t have helped. Perhaps when Parliament returns someone can ask her to explain her indefensible comments.

The reality is that the public have not lost confidence in the police. They might lose confidence in the increasingly authoritarian government. The Police may already have lost confidence in the Home Secretary. That bodes ill for the King’s Peace and our future.

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