I’m not in the slightest bit surprised that our deplorable government seems incapable of achieving anything of note. As much as I despise Tony Blair with every breath I take, he was able to get things done and win three General Elections, because, by and large, he had smart brains working under him. I’m fully aware that we continue to pay a very heavy price for many of his disastrous policies.
Gordon Brown remains a very clever, if unrelatable, kind of bloke. Other bright people who served in Blair’s first cabinet were David Blunkett, Jack Straw, Mo Mowlam, and the very principled Robin Cook.
When I embark on the painful exercise of looking at Sir Keir Starmer’s team of ministers and secretaries, all I see is a barren, intellectually challenged wasteland.
The one minister who rises above the arid desert of mental functioning among the Prime Minister’s team is the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood.
I do not single her out because I believe her to be a towering intellect; she clearly isn’t, but she does talk a good game in terms of what she is setting out to achieve, and this week she allowed her ambition to run rampant.
Never one to understate her aims, on Monday, Mahmood claimed that she was to embark upon “the most significant changes to policing in this country in nearly 200 years”. If you can hear a loud whirring noise as you read this, it’ll be Sir Robert Peel spinning in his grave.
There is no doubt whatsoever that British policing is in crisis, and that wholesale change is required, but not for the first time, the Home Secretary is looking in all the wrong places.
The establishment of the ‘National Police Service’, or the British FBI as Mahmood desc described it, took me back to when I was a serving detective in the 1990s.
I was part of the Regional Crime Squad, and we tackled serious and organised crime, much of it wholesale and at a nationwide level, including illegal drug dealing.
Under a government-announced reform package, we were merged into the South-East Regional Crime Squad, and not long afterwards, under yet another highly publicised wind of change proclamation, we became, overnight, the National Crime Squad.
From our position at the coal front, where going undercover, carrying out surveillance, bugging phones, handling informants and smashing down doors was our daily bread, all that seemed to change under these reform packages were the bosses’ offices and the headed notepaper, all at considerable cost, I suspect. Meanwhile, we just carried on, same job, different squad names.
Labour's plan for policing is a dud that will slide us deeper into the swamp of lawlessness - Peter Bleksley | Getty Images
Talking of cost, when it comes to locking up the most dangerous villains out there, talk’s cheap, but policing isn’t. The Home Secretary may soon discover that her programme of reform may hit the buffers when the quote for it lands on the desk of Rachel Reeves. Talking of whom, she’s gone a bit quiet recently, hasn’t she?
Mahmood is also determined to reduce the number of police forces from 43 to possibly 10, or maybe 12; the exact detail has not yet been made clear.
On the upside of this proposal, huge police forces could make considerable savings because of their purchasing power when it comes to uniforms, vehicles, radio systems, IT, and much more, but my fear is that bigger forces will lead to more centralisation.
Senior police officers love huge and glitzy centralised headquarters buildings, located far from the rough and tumble of the frontline, with plenty of parking, catering, and corridors full of other senior officers, with whom they can sit around and espouse their woke, lefty, liberal, minority flag waving, face painting, social media post arresting, genocide-chant allowing, Union Jack hating, virtue signalling claptrap.
As long as the pathetic College of Policing and the self-loving National Police Chiefs Council are allowed to exist and brainwash senior police officers, then any change Mahmood imposes won’t benefit the wider public.
If those who rise to the top of policing remain university indoctrinated, self-proclaimed ‘progressives’, then don’t expect your burglary to be solved, your mobile phone to be recovered, or the drive-off from the petrol station to even be recorded as a crime.
Don’t expect machete-wielding vermin who seek to settle their drug-dealing scores on our streets to now live in fear of the British Feds, because they don’t and they won’t.
You’d also be kidding yourself if you think that these police reforms will make those minority communities who hold grievances old and new, that emanate from religious and ethnic hatred from lands far, far away, and who also take their detestation of each other onto our streets, to suddenly embrace one another and shout from the rooftops that, "Diversity is our strength", all because the police have made changes. They will continue to want one another dead.
Last month, the idiotic head of our local police teams spouted, "We cannot arrest our way out of the shoplifting problem".
For as long as clowns like that are permitted to have warrant cards, then Shabana Mahmood can make all the grand and ambitious announcements she wants, none of which will stop this once great nation from continuing to slide deeper into the swamp of unremitting lawlessness, into which it already has one foot firmly planted.
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