Part 1 of All is well, just dream on was published here yesterday
The police ‘family’, the common purpose devotees and alumni of the police staff college known at one time as the centre for European police studies, which proudly flew the EU flag at its then ‘staff college’ at Bramshill before it was sold off, needs a root and branch strategic review. The last Royal Commission that took a look at the police was in 1964. Another one is long overdue.
Local accountability needs to be reinstated and those other political non-jobs, Police and Crime Commissioners (another innovation installed by ‘Call me Dave’ when presumably he was not having a difficult time with Sam), who are supposedly accountable to us, have been notable by their complete lack of comment, while the often disgraceful behaviour, comments and actions of senior police officers has, in the view of many, brought the police service into disrepute and been disgracefully allowed to continue also without comment by the latest incumbent in the Home Office Priti Patel. She, it is now reported, is having more than a little difficulty with septic servants, their unions and left wing activists.
Well, shocked I am, stunned and shocked. It’s many, many years since the Home Office was declared not fit for purpose, a phrase, according to then Labour Home Secretary John, now Lord, Reid, coined not by him but some unnamed septic servant. It’s obvious that little has changed, except that senior management has now given up any pretence of impartiality and competence, as have the police and, evidently, the Border Force.
Talking of ‘force’, I wonder if our Secretary of State for Defence Ben Wallace would care to explain why British troops from the Parachute Regiment are presently serving under EUFOR command, wearing EUFOR insignia on battle fatigues without any British insignia complete with face covering bearing the same EUFOR insignia.
The fact that the descendants of the men who jumped into Normandy and Arnhem, who served, along with other regiments and units in Northern Ireland and were responsible for retaking the Falkland Islands, are in battle dress under the command of an Austrian EU commander is bad enough, but on parade wearing face muzzles is beyond parody. What is also beyond parody is the continued silence and denials of our cabinet members and successive prime ministers who have continued with what can only be a deception that Brexit is being delivered.
The mainstream media, more interested in the lives of celebrities and what is happening at the BBC and how ‘Call me Dave’ has a difficult time with Sam, has not covered the story as far as I can see. It was brought into focus by Anne Widdecombe who, rightly in my view, opposes such arrangements, and by the redoubtable Frederick Forsyth writing in the Daily Express, and yet again it has been left to the alternative media in the shape of UK Column to give this matter a serious airing. Coming at a time when apparently the British Army is ‘mothballing’ its remaining tanks, why, you may ask, are we engaged in exercises in an organisation that we have apparently left? I write ‘apparently’ as earlier this year visitors to the Gov.UK web site, for example to pay car tax would have noticed a new heading that proclaimed words to the effect of ‘The UK has left the EU’. Odd then that this week, to check the wording for this article, the heading has disappeared. It must be just a coincidence – well actually I think not, but that is just me.
However, it’s not all bad news this week. We are told that school attendance is around 90% and certainly on the way into town on Friday morning, passing a large academy, large numbers of well-behaved youngsters in uniform, without a face muzzle in sight, were walking to school, actually four or five abreast, which says it all, or not, about the relentless brainwashing and fear-mongering of the press aided by various school head teachers and union officials. The only people we saw donning muzzles were two young women, not looking much older than the pupils (or should that be students) dressed as if they were going to a disco, with sunglasses on top of their hair, lanyards and ID badges swinging in the breeze as they tottered on high heels into the school entrance donning their fashion masks at the same time. Very fetching they looked too. How school staff – you can’t say ‘school teachers’ now as many of them are not – have changed since my time with Miss Nononsense in the lower sixth all those years ago.
It would seem that at this school, and another according to my friend who lives near one in the ‘black country’, the ‘brain washing’ and scare stories in the press have been usurped by peer pressure and chat on social media sites. We can, of course, all look forward to some glum-looking parent and smug offspring appearing in the tabloid press complaining that ‘Leya’ has been discriminated against by ‘school’ because she refuses to wear the regulation mask as it clashes with the colour of her trainers, and in any case if the school want her to wear a face mask all day then they should jolly well supply and pay for them. This will also be followed by a regional broadcast, probably on the BBC, which often covers these sorts of stories, pointing out that last year some schools banned face coverings but now want to introduce them for all students. You can’t, it seems, please everyone anytime.
Where all this will leave the hapless Education Secretary Gavin what’s-his-name remains to be seen but rest assured, whatever is decided by the establishment will be sensationalised and presented as a victory for good common sense. Anything to hide, as all the other stories in the main stream media do consistently, the one thing that the establishment and government has known for years, that this country and many of the people in it are just unmanageable.
The immigration scandal and the amount that it’s costing rumbles on with demonstrations in Dover and elsewhere, although the Home Secretary Priti Patel made the usual noises and continues too, nothing as yet seems to be happening to stem the flow of people arriving illegally from France since Nigel Farage identified a hotel in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, as being one of the places were these illegal immigrants were being housed.
It’s interesting that when it was further disclosed that other illegals were being housed in a hotel in the constituency where the Home Secretary is local MP, the same Home Office in which we are told Ms Patel is in constant difficulties with, reportedly said was an error, rectified the problem very quickly and moved them on elsewhere. It’s particularly interesting that Bromsgrove is the constituency represented by the previous Home Secretary Sajid Javid, later Chancellor of the Exchequer before resigning and now residing on the back benches.
One wonders if Sajid thought that moving illegals described today in one main stream tabloid as ‘desperate’ to his constituency was also an ‘error’ although as being a constituency back bencher and now taking up a new part time position with J.P Morgan on their advisory council for Europe, the Middle East and Africa he may be more than little busy in the near future.
The issues raised in this article are further examples of why the chief buffoon at 10 Downing Street just cannot be trusted to run this country in a proper manner. His ethos seems to be all talk and no action, which pretty well sums up the majority of our utterly incompetent politicians these days. The police have been allowed by successive governments to become politicised. Police training has been dumbed down in recent years and police recruits no longer attend residential police training centres as I did for 25 weeks where discipline was instilled with a heavy emphasis on physical fitness and where a thorough grounding in the application of the law was taught. Entry to the police was having at least 5 ‘O’ levels or passing the national police entry examination Instead, training is now conducted at a local level, where the recruit goes home every evening, virtually no physical training, no discipline is instilled in the recruit, and now no longer than 8 weeks in duration. The recruit nowadays is required to have a degree. I ask you, what utter tosh that particular ruling is. You do not need a degree to be a Police Constable, but do need a hefty amount of common sense which these days is severely lacking. At one time, all senior police officers had to serve at least 2 years on the street as a Constable before taking the Sergeant’s examination and then progressing through the ranks, if that was their desire Now one is able to join the police as a direct entrant to the level of Superintendent and Detective Constable without having any experience at street level at all, providing of course one has that all important degree in their possession Is it any wonder that detection rates have dramatically fallen right across the board, and that recruits are hitting the streets without fully knowing their powers, and that certain offences like Theft and Burglary are not worth bothering about All this has come about via successive rotten Conservative governments who also introduced the silliest idea of all namely the Police and Crime Commissioner. Them and our present so called Chief Constables is very much a case of the blind leading the blind. There needs to be a radical re-think in terms of policing and its administration. Getting back to basics would be a start. How about it Boris…………
Colin Hussey. I’m sure you are right in what you say about the deterioration of our police force.
Colin,
As a kid and young man the police were always looked up to, talked to, admired, always knowledgeable about local affairs, and BIG, and it really din’t matter if they hadn’t got a GCE…. And I remembered first seeing a small (5′ 11″) policeman. I reckon that started the rot of thinking that they were for catching criminals. We need big blokes to look up to. OK have midget clever detective,s and they have I suppose to do apprenticeships. But we need big, fit, that no body argues with, that the young admire.
I think anyway. Particularly with localism becoming paramount
We are,I fear, beset by conundrums,we judge our governments and their chosen ministers by standards that vanished many years ago when it was not unusual for an exceptionally capable man (as it invariably was then) to spend many years making his fortune and then turn to politics later in life.
The problem now is that most of those with the level of talent we would like to see in Parliament consider a life spent in the Westminster cockpit or listening to the multitude of worries of desperate constituents for a salary less than that of a train driver for two minutes and quickly seek more lucrative opportunities in the private sector.
We must,therefore be wary of mimicking the media’s constant criticism only attitude and ponder how well we would perform if we had to decide when it is correct to impose further lock downs or restrictions knowing that we would be subject to the dammed if you do and dammed if you don’t syndrome whatever we did.If we were Home secretary what would we do with thousands of illegal immigrants happily waved goodbye by the French and whom we dare not leave floundering in the shipping lanes for fear of a tragedy and knowing that France would’t allow them back and the human rights lawyers would thwart their removal anywhere else. Then, having rescued them and brought them ashore, do we put them in some sort of camp with all the almost invariable associated problems or find them accommodation in hotels and face the inevitable barrage of complaints for being too hospitable.
It is undoubtedly a fact that many of those who reach ministerial office these days leave rather a lot to be desired but at least we can be fairly positive about two things,in 3 months time they will have removed us from the catastrophe of remaining part of the EU and that the alternative sitting on the opposition benches would almost certainly be very much worse.
Send ’em to Sturgeon and put em on the Faroes, or Mull, or the Orkneys ( See poem )
Once upon a time… That’s how Fairy Tales begin.
Yes, well, it’s nearly that long ago, but I remember when Chief Constables were often retired Army Officers with some hands-on experience of man-management.
The junior ranks were nearly all ex-services (thanks to National Service) who had enough nous to know when to use common sense.
Today’s Senior Police Officers are more likely to be Common Purpose graduates who have been fast-tracked up the promotion ladder. Many, indeed, are LGBT/BAME as well, to fulfil some sort of “quota”.
Forget about the best candidate for the position. The needs of the “quota” are paramount.
No wonder that the force can no longer recruit the right calibre of personnel.
Well said, Richard. Your comment about quotas is spot-on, but the recruitment is sadly lacking because BAME folk are not interested in joining a body aiming to enforce law and order. Recruitment should be centred around those ABLE to do the job.
Nice article. But yesterday 2 (Two),( not 200) ( not 2000 ) ,(not even 20 ), but 2 people died of CV19. They believe. HORROR. CATASTROPHY How will the NHS cope. It’s not taking much notice of me. I’ve been waiting 6 months for an ordinary scan. They’re definitely havin a larf. The Guild must be furious.
Re j P Morgan job for Javid, one wonders who is ‘supporting’ the rest of the ‘next PM but one’ field. Truss, Hancock, Patel. Barclay etc. Perhaps we shouldn’t think of our MPs as members of parties but as the… well… The Bloomberg candidate, the Goldman Sachs candidate, the Vestey candidate etc. Cameron, of course, had a wealthy wife so he was the Sheffield candidate. Who is behind Gove and Johnson?
A loose association of millionaires and billionaires as Paul Simon says in The Boy In The Bubble. Not healthy.
JF
Doesn’t this crony capitalism tell us as much about the constituency Tory association members as it does about the MPs themselves?