Bringing the police into disrepute

It is difficult to imagine a more shameful dereliction of duty than the West Midlands Police attack on Channel 4 over a documentary exposing Muslim extremism.

The politically-correct police force didn't bother to investigate the statements made by hard-line clerics and exposed in the Dispatches programme "Undercover Mosque".

Instead, they tried to shoot the messenger while ignoring the message.

The police reported Dispatches to Ofcom, the media watchdog, and justified this craven perversity by claiming the programme had quoted statements out of context and might incite racial hatred.

This has now cost us - you and me as taxpayers who fund the whole charade - £100,000 in damages to Channel 4.

The broadcasters deserve the money, if only as compensation for the inconvenience they have been put to in fending off vilification by the alleged forces of law and order.

This is a resigning issue. The Chief Constable of the West Midlands, Sir Paul Scott-Lee, should take personal responsibility for this gross dereliction of duty and quit immediately.

How can we have confidence in him or his ability to protect us when wrongdoing is clearly exposed on TV and his force's only response is to go into denial?

And why did he rush to blame Channel 4 rather than root out evil in our midst?

Because if he had not gone into denial he would have been forced to do something about the actual incitement to racial hatred exposed in the programme.

Muslim clerics at Mosques in Birmingham were filmed making a range of provocative and unacceptable statements which would, on the face of it, appear to cross the line between free speech and criminality.

"Take that homosexual and throw him off the mountain," for instance, sounds distinctly like homophobia.

"Whoever changes his religion from al-Islam to anything else - kill him in the Islamic state," might appear to be an incitement to racial hatred and murder.

Even the idea that "Allah created the woman deficient" and if girls of 10 don't wear hijabs they should be hit are not exactly mainstream views on parenting skills.

You would think that, when confronted by this sort of stuff, the police would at the very least take it seriously and have a look at it.

It is difficult to imagine a context in which these comments look normal, reasonable, rational or moderate. Yet the West Midlands Police could envisage such a context, apparently.

Let's not be too harsh on the police. They do have a difficult job. They must protect us from the worst extremists - suicide bombers and other terrorists who live among us. That must take up a great deal of their time and absorb most of their resources.

But that doesn't mean they should ignore incitement to hatred, especially as it is precisely this kind of mad preaching which can turn ordinary young men into walking bombs.

In this case, it does not appear to be about money or time. Sir Paul's police were too cowardly to act against the real enemy within.

They were clearly afraid of provoking a backlash from the Muslim community and making a volatile situation worse.

It's understandable. The police do find themselves in a delicate position which requires them sometimes to be uncharacteristically circumspect and careful.

That still doesn't excuse or forgive what they actually did.

Instead of taking the programme's revelations seriously, they went for the easy target of the journalists instead.

In doing so they clearly hoped the whole thing would just go away and they could be left in peace.

Thankfully, for all of us, Channel 4 chose to defend its journalists and take on the forces of law and order. Better still, they won.

No doubt Sir Paul was hoping for another Scott Inquiry where the journslists are comprehensively rubbished and the establishment emerges smelling of roses, not blood.

How a broadcaster puts together a programme is really none of the police's business. The day they get to exercise editorial control over what the media may or may not report is the day we finally give up our freedoms and bend the knee to the Police State.

That would appear to be Sir Paul's ambition. The idea that the police are in the business of enforcing standards on the media is, in any case, bizarre.

But the intimidation and threats implicit in police action against a programme-maker is truly disturbing in its attempt to stifle and silence proper debate on issues of genuine national interest.

To do this because the alternative is just too difficult - creating one law for one group of people and another for the rest - is simply unacceptable in a democratic society.

Sir Paul should go because his force has been brought into disrepute and Channel 4 should be referring it to the Director of Public Prosecutions for attempting to pervert the course of justice.

There's always someone looking at you

It doesn’t make sense: CCTV cameras are “an utter fiasco” – yet everybody wants one.

We have more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in the world – but it seems nobody bothers to study their pictures.

So why does demand for cameras on every street corner and shopping precinct exceed supply? Who do local councillors trumpet their triumph every time a new camera is installed? Who do the locals lobby and campaign for them?

The answer is simple: Because some attempt to maintain law and order is better than none.

CCTV is a poor substitute for bobbies on the beat. We’d all prefer real uniformed police officers strolling the streets but we don’t get them much any more.

Yes, of course, they turn out occasionally and it is also true we have been blessed with a small regiment of community support officers.

But as these boobies (correct) on the beat have little or no power and tend to get laughed at by the local yobs, they’re not much cop at inspiring respect for law and order.

So with the police behind their desks filling in forms or attending politically-correct focus groups on improving their customer outreach services, the rest of us have to make the best of a bad job.

In the absence of real eyes and ears on the streets of our villages, towns and cities, CCTV is the nearest mechanical equivalent. They see and record what’s happening –deterrent and detective.

Unfortunately it turns out they’re pretty much a waste of time and money. London’s man in charge of the whole expensive charade, Detective Inspector Mick Neville, says the system is “an utter fiasco”.

A pathetic three per cent of London’s crimes are solved by CCTV. DI Neville says we have squandered billions of pounds on expensive equipment without bothering to think how we’d use it.

Criminals know nobody is going to waste hours – days even – trawling through CCTV footage to identify wrong-doers (even if the pictures aren’t so grainy it’s impossible anyway).

DI Neville says police officers don’t bother “because it’s hard work”. No wonder criminals don’t regard the cameras as a deterrent.

If they don’t deter and they don’t detect, why bother with them at all?

Inevitably, the official answer to this dilemma is not to abandon the policy and put real bobbies back on the beat.

No, it’s to develop new software to track “distinctive brand logos” on suspects’ clothes and start publishing wanted pictures on the internet.

They’re also planning to establish specialist CCTV squads all over the country because, as DI Neville says profoundly: "If criminals see that CCTV works they are less likely to commit crimes.”

So, let’s get this straight. The CCTVs we have at the moment – all 4.2 million of them – may spy on all of us. But they do next to nothing to protect us.

Suppose each of them costs £10,000 to install (actually it’s often much more than that) and £2,000 a year to monitor. That’s £42 billion plus £8.2 billion-a-year running costs.

Instead of saying this is a wicked waste, the police want to redouble their efforts to justify the vast sums of money wasted so far.

True, CCTV has helped in putting together the details in high-profile cases like the murder of Jamie Bulger, the 7/7 bombings and the Hatfield rail disaster. But they didn’t actually detect criminals or deter crime.

And none of this mentions the small question of civil liberties and personal freedom.

Do you really want a spy on every street corner watching your every move? Do you really believe the information is safe? Can you be secure in the knowledge that no official data about your movements will ever be misused?

We know the Government can’t be trusted to protect our medical histories, our tax information or our defence records. How on earth can we trust them with more and more information about where we go, who we see and what we do?

You may say that if you’ve nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. But that isn’t true. After all, how do criminals get hold of your PIN number, for instance?

Can you be sure that the CCTV camera watching over you as you take cash from a hole-in-the-wall machine isn’t giving someone a chance to nick your security code?

In George Orwell’s book “1984”, the idea of Big Brother watching your every move was considered to be one of the worst aspects of a totalitarian regime.

We have been duped into believing that somehow these cameras are there to help and protect us. Pretty soon they will be compiling data on everyone ever seen on CCTV screen and it won’t be used to detect or prevent crime.

It will be sold to marketing companies so they can exploit information about where we shop and what we buy. The State will know when we park illegally, skive a day off work, visit the “wrong” church or join the “wrong” groups.

And they claim the price of more bobbies on the beat is too high.

It's the economy, stupid

It’s the economy, stupid. That’s what Bill Clinton told party workers in 1992 and it’s still true today. The first judgment of the voters on Gordon Brown’s performance as Prime Minister has been damning.

And above all the state of the economy is to blame. The credit crunch, rising prices and the fiasco over scrapping the 10p income tax rate are a toxic combination for the Prime Minister.

It’s true that some parts of the country had no elections. It’s equally true that local issues do genuinely have a significant effect at local elections – ask the Worcester Tories, who failed to gain overall control because people don’t like fortnightly bin collections.

Even so, these elections are an indicator of the state of the parties. They’re a good reflection of public opinion and demonstrate that David Cameron, bizarrely the longest-serving of the party leaders, is riding high.

The Liberal Democrats, though they had some success, have proved that replacing their leader Menzies Campbell with Nick Clegg hasn’t done them much good. Since the whisky-scented demise of Charles Kennedy, the Lib Dems have struggled to counteract the Cameron effect.

Despite disappointments in places like Worcester and Cheltenham, the Conservatives did well in the West Midlands – still the crucial electoral battleground where the outcome of the next General Election will be decided.

Cameron’s party held on to power with increased majorities in Dudley and Birmingham as well as gaining Nuneaton and Bedworth and doing surprisingly well in Sandwell. These results augur well for the Tories in the region’s crucial marginal constituencies.

On this month’s showing, must-win seats for the Conservatives like Birmingham Edgbaston, Stourbridge, Wolverhampton South West and Redditch are all set to fall. Their Labour MPs, even Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, will have to start thinking about life after Westminster. At least 20 Labour MPs in the West Midlands face the real prospect of losing their seats.

However, though most of the results will be a true and fair reflection of the votes cast, we cannot be sure of it.

These elections took place under the shadow of yet another report, this time from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, warning that fraud is now so rife our voting system can’t be trusted.

We’ve seen 42 convictions for electoral fraud in the last seven years. In 2004, the goings-on in Birmingham were condemned as suitable for a banana republic.

Yet as the “Express & Star” showed this week, there are still plenty of opportunities to cheat. It’s the sort of scandal that gives comfort to people like Zimbabwe’s dictator Robert Mugabe.

The big loser was Gordon Brown. Battling his rebel backbenchers, his own lack of charisma and a potential recession, he has lurched from crisis to crisis since taking over from Tony Blair.

There will be calls for him to go now and give someone else a chance of shoring up Labour’s position before the next General Election. As Charles Kennedy points out, “Gordon Brown is being roasted on the spit.”

But that doesn’t mean he will be burnt to a cinder. Calls for Mr Brown to go won’t come to much because a Labour leadership contest over the summer would do even more damage to the party than a continuation of Mr Brown’s Premiership.

These results suggest a Cameron landslide in 2010. But that’s still some time away and local election success is no guarantee of General Election victory.

That result still depends on one factor which has slipped from Gordon Brown’s grasp – the economy, stupid.

Floreat Etonia

Boris will quit Henley when he becomes Mayor. At least, that's what David Cameron thinks.

So confident was the Conservative leader about Boris's success that two weeks ago he called a meeting to discuss who should be selected for the by-election to return the next MP for Henley-on-Thames.

Mind you, even before the official results, the Conservatives are not looking forward to London life under Boris.

My spy at party HQ tells me: "Boris winning easily isn’t the problem. The fact is that he will keep on putting his foot in it because he can't stop himself saying stupid things.

"His office will be filled with 'minders' from the Conservative Party but that won't stop him. He just can't help himself. The question is whether people admire it as independence of mind or whether it makes the whole party look stupid.

"The trouble with Boris is that he's not actually as nice as everyone thinks he is. He's an Old Etonian with all the arrogance that having a rich and privileged background at the country's most famous public school implies."

My spy failed to explain how he reconciles this view of Old Etonians with the fact that David Cameron himself also went to that ancient seat of privilege in Slough.

Gordon the bewildered bull

You can tell Labour MPs think their days in Parliament are numbered. Suddenly they’re full of self-righteous rebellion at the thought of robbing the lowest paid of their 10p tax rate.

Yet a year ago these same Labour MPs trooped meekly through the lobbies to vote in favour of the move.

So why was axing the 10p tax band OK then when this week it’s the subject of a rebellion which forced the Prime Minister into a humiliating climb-down?

Gordon Brown is grovelling to his backbenchers promising a way round his own tax increase.

He will have to find up to £7 billion from somewhere and then work out a way of handing it back to people who have just had it taken away from them.

So why did Labour MPs panic? Because they don’t trust Gordon to get them re-elected.

The average MP, on £62,000 with £200,000 expenses, is desperately trying to cling to the political gravy train. This week’s rebellion proves they are terrified Gordon the Red Engine is careering straight for the buffers.

It’s difficult for ex-MPs to find another job, especially one that pays half as well. It’s worst when the market is over-supplied with redundant MPs after a crushing defeat.

Admittedly Labour MPs face a slow-motion crash with two years before the full impact is felt at the ballot box.

But next week’s local government elections – though Labour is already talking up the devastation so it won’t seem as bad when it happens – could be a taste of things to come.

The abolition of the 10p tax rate in order to cut the basic rate of tax, announced in March last year by Gordon Brown when he was still Chancellor, was always crass politicking.

Mr Brown, “the antidote to spin”, was spinning for all he was worth.

He triumphantly announced a cut in the basic tax rate from 22 per cent to 20 per cent. Hidden in the small print was abolition of the 10p starting rate.

It was Mr Brown himself who introduced the 10p band in 1999. He said it was a way of helping the lowest paid.

He chose to scrap it to buy a cheap headline just weeks before he made his successful bid for the Labour leadership. It was a piece of electioneering to be paid for by 5.3 million low-paid and part-time workers and pensioners aged 60 to 65.

While Mr Brown didn’t exactly draw attention to this tax increase, neither was it a secret. Every year Parliament debates and votes on a Finance Bill which MPs must approve if tax changes are going to come into effect.

The right of Parliament alone to raise taxes is the basis of our entire democracy. It’s why Oliver Cromwell executed Charles I.

Yet last year all those Labour rebels walked happily through the voting lobbies in support of their future leader’s little con-trick.

Then, Mr Brown seemed like their meal ticket to another five years in power.

Today, he looks like the bewildered beast at a bull-fight. Baited and provoked on all sides, he can’t understand what has happened to him.

He is raging against the toreadors and matadors but the only blood spilt is his own. It’s getting gory. I’m starting to feel sorry for him.

Our Prime Minister’s greatest asset was not being a slippery eel like Tony Blair. But somehow he is neither as insincere as his predecessor nor as genuine as we thought he might be.

So now it’s open season on Mr Brown. His MPs are turning on him because they fear he is incapable of delivering election victory.

And what better stick to beat him with than an un-Socialist tax increase which hits the poorest hardest? Especially at a time when prices really are shooting up far faster than the official 2.5 per cent inflation rate.

Profiteering petrol firms are hiking the price of a gallon over £5 while the tax take rises at the same time.

Banks get massive handouts from the State yet they increase the cost of borrowing though the official interest rate keeps falling.

Food bills are going up faster than at any time since the Second World War. They increased 15 per cent in the past year and will carry on rising.

Then there’s fuel bills, water rates and council taxes all up by double the rate of inflation or more and you wonder what planet the “official” cost of living index is compiled on.

The key to winning elections is, as Bill Clinton told his supporters in 1992, “the economy, stupid”.

Labour MPs know re-election depends on how damaging Chancellor Brown’s economic policies prove to be for Prime Minister Brown.

With prices soaring, taxes rising, the housing market in decline and High Street banks requiring our money to rescue them from their own folly, expect unemployment to start rising.

This is no time to increase taxes for the lowest-paid. No wonder Labour MPs are twitchy. If we avoid recession, they might keep their jobs; if we don’t, they’re goners. Or will they get rid of Gordon first?

Lies, damned lies and evidence to the Commons local government select committee

I was surprised the other day to discover immigration minister Liam Byrne claiming that MP Peter Luff was in favour of increased immigration. I sent Mr Luff this extract from a newspaper report:

MPs also told him employers in Worcestershire wanted more immigrants, Mr Byrne said. "If you take for example Peter Luff (Con Mid Worcestershire) in Worcestershire, he is someone who has been lobbying me to relax immigration control in Eastern Europe, because he is talking to local farmers and agriculture employers, and they are saying, actually, we want to make it easier to bring in low-skilled migration from outside the EU."

In reply to my e-mail, Mr Luff has sent me a copy of a letter of protest he has sent to Mr Byrne:

This letter is to emphasise that maintaining the purpose of the highly effective Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme (SAWS) would not represent any relaxation whatsoever of immigration controls.

I am very surprised indeed that I have to make this blindingly obvious point, but I have had my attention drawn to Wednesday’s Birmingham Post , the front page of which discussed your revelation to the Commons Communities and Local Government Select Committee on Tuesday that I wished to relax immigration controls for Eastern Europeans. This is a view I have never held, and certainly one I have never expressed to you.

I can not believe that you deliberately misled the Committee about my views but rather, as I have long suspected that you and your department are simply unable or unwilling to understand the role and importance of the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme.

I am not calling for the relaxation of immigration controls on Eastern Europeans. Rather, I have been trying to impress on you the need to maintain an existing system, SAWS, which has worked well over many years and which, as far as I am aware, has never been subject to abuse of any kind.

Under the scheme young, fit (largely agricultural) students from Eastern European countries outside the EU (previously from the recent accession states such as Poland, but also until recently from countries like the Ukraine and Russia) come over on a temporary basis, for a carefully defined period of a few months, typically from April to September, to work on farms in the UK.

You have now restricted the scheme both numerically and geographically to the two remaining “A2” accession states – Bulgaria and Romania, and the results are already proving problematic for British growers.

The students are accommodated by the farmers; they pose absolutely no strain on public services; and, once their brief period of employment is over, they happily and willingly return to their own countries.

Both parties benefit from the scheme: the farmer gets hard-working employees to take on the jobs British workers have not done for decades, and the students earn a good wage while also developing their English skills and agricultural knowledge. On top of that, the UK gains as it wins friends in the countries to which the young people return – and we make a contribution to developing the agriculture of these other places.

Sadly your comments show that you fail to understand the real pressure farmers and growers are facing by the massive reduction in the scope of SAWS, with its final withdrawal now a matter of government policy when restrictions on immigration from the A2 are abolished.

SAWS was a logical response to an historic reality. Migrant and temporary workers have played a crucial role in British agriculture for a very long time. British factory workers would take holidays to pick hops, Scottish families took in the potato harvest. Other jobs were filled by gypsies or short-term Irish migrants. As economic and social change robbed agriculture of these vital sources of labour, farmers and growers turned to Europe.

When such European workers could only work in agriculture as students under SAWS and under our tough immigration rules, there was no problem. But now that the Poles, the Lithuanians, and all the others from the A8 can work in our pubs, hotels, restaurants, factories and so on – they will not fill these vital agricultural jobs.

I urge you once again to re-open SAWS to the Ukraine and Russia – but in the sure and certain knowledge that this is not liberalisation of immigration rules but rather a return to an old status quo that worked so well, and which you have carelessly and thoughtlessly destroyed.

Last Friday I spent the morning with growers in my constituency who face some very serious problems. In the past year their costs have shot up – for example fertiliser costs have rocketed by 126% - and their prices are under huge pressure from the supermarkets. Your choking off of a vital labour source is playing fast and loose with their very future.

Your comments to the Communities and Local Government Select Committee were, I hope you realise, completely misrepresentative of my views, and am therefore copying this letter to the committee and making its contents public.
Well done Peter, that sets the record straight and puts the man in his place.

See? CCTV is a no-no

I have just written the article below for the Henley in Arden e-mail newsletter. If you are interested in reading more on the surveillance state, why not order “Tomorrow’s England”? Much of it is about that very subject.

Big Brother isn’t watching you, he’s towering over you, intimidating you and ruining your historic High Street.

Big Brother has installed his ugly great CCTV gantries at the very heart of Henley-in-Arden without so much as a by-your-leave let alone any semblance of public consultation or discussion.

Henley is apparently so crime-ridden it needs the protection of two CCTV cameras, one right next to the historic church, the other – with unintended irony – outside the abandoned police station.

There is little justification for these cameras under any circumstances. CCTV does not prevent crime.

If a crime takes place on the mean streets of Henley-in-Arden, the pictures will be relayed to some dozy security attendant in a locked room in Stratford-upon-Avon.

He will be monitoring a bank of 80 or so separate screens showing the boring sights of every camera in the district. By the time he clocks that something’s afoot in Henley, it will have been and gone.

The best he could do is call the police and ask them to take a look. They, in turn, will much rather look at CCTV footage in the comfort of their headquarters a few days later than rush to the scene.

What sort of crime might these cameras actually prevent? Well, it’s possible vandals will be deterred from tipping flowers out of their pots and baskets.

It’s even possible a few people will be put off parking on the double yellow lines in case CCTV footage is printed out and used in evidence against them.

The cameras could possibly intimidate an occasional gang of teenagers, though if they feel threatened they could sneakily move round the corner out of sight of the prying electronic eye.

The cameras may deter burglars though that supposes the raiders won’t cheat and go round the back instead.

Ram-raiders could get caught though elementary precautions like using a stolen car and wearing face masks would probably be enough to prevent detection by CCTV.

It is, indeed, difficult to imagine what practical use these intrusions into the conservation area might actually have. Even if they do make a modest difference, how can they possibly be worth the heavy price the town must pay for them?

That price comes in various forms. There’s the cost to the local taxpayers and the price of 24/7 monitoring of their no doubt riveting footage of people buying their newspapers and going to the pub.

I rang Stratford Council to ask about this. These cameras cost the taxpayer £35,000. Monitoring the district’s CCTVs costs £250,000 a year.

The aim is to cut crime by 15 per cent in three years. So far, according to the council’s own figures, crime has actually risen from 8,458 incidents a year to 9,855.

But they claim the cameras have “helped” in the arrest of 546 people. Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Meanwhile there’s the unfashionable question of civil liberties. The council has a policy on this. Its systems “are operated in a manner that will secure their consistent effectiveness and preserve the civil liberty of law abiding citizens at all times”.

Luckily, they promise that sensitive personal data won’t be used against us (the definitions say “Sensitive personal data is personal data which is deemed to be sensitive” – so that’s clear then).

Mind you, they’re getting an extra 40 grand from the police to use cameras with automatic number-plate recognition, so if you’re sensitive about getting a parking ticket you’d better avoid the double yellows in future.

That might be regarded as a benefit but let’s face it, when the taxman (HMRC to you, sunshine) can lose the bumf on half the households in Britain, what confidence can any of us have that Stratford District Council will guarantee our privacy?

Then, finally, we have the fact that these monsters are there at all. The whole of the High Street is a conservation area. The council’s own conservation policy sets out in some detail what you can’t do to destroy the “street scene” in this historic location.

It highlights this warning: “Please note that if either Listed Building Consent or Conservation Area Consent is required, it is a criminal offence to undertake works without it.”

On the face of it, the police should be asking the district council to help with their inquiries.

The council tells me these gantries do not need planning permission. I asked why they couldn’t be placed on the side of building.

They can’t go on buildings for two reasons: because the owners would not give their permission and – stunningly – “because the majority have got conservation orders on them”.

In other words, the buildings are too valuable to despoil but it’s OK to destroy the entire vista. Does this make sense to anyone?

Still, there’s no chance the police will investigate this clear breach of conservation area planning laws.

After all, the whole point of CCTV cameras is that they allow the police to abdicate all responsibility for policing. They are the cheap and cheerless substitute to bobbies on the beat.

Everyone laughs at the Henley “community support officer”. It would be nice if real police officers showed their faces more often. CCTV will put paid to that.

The worst part of this is that some idiot invited CCTV into the town in the first place. Someone, somewhere (let’s face it, the parish council) must have thought it was a good idea.

The district council spokesman told me the police, the CDRP (Crime and Disorder Reduction Partnership) and the crime figures themselves determine where the cameras go.

She goes on: “Henley Parish Council have been demanding cameras for four or five years. As the crime statistics prove a need and the district council has finally been able to accommodate their wishes.”

Even if it were a wizard wheeze, surely nobody expected this pair of monstrous carbuncles on the face of a much-loved friend. If the parish council knew what it was asking for then there’s no excuse. If they didn’t, then the sooner they demand their excision the better.

Even if the cameras reduce crime by 15 per cent in three years (fat chance), the price for tolerating this criminal damage to the environment is far too high.

I asked the council spokesman what the procedure was for getting rid of CCTV cameras. She said she didn’t have any advice about that.