So yes, information warfare is real, and yes, foreign powers use propaganda against their adversaries. This is hardly new: in Ancient Greece, the Athenian leader Themistocles engraved stones at a watering hole, encouraging his enemy’s Ionian levies to defect. If, however, the Government is right to combat outside threats, its domestic opponents are equally right to be suspicious about the National Center for Information Defense (NCID). Announced by Andy Burnham on Tuesday, it will disrupt “hostile information attacks” and “deepfakes”, and quash a “distorted and untrue narrative about Britain”. That’s fine as far as it goes — if only the NCID wasn’t conjured in a Whitehall that has proved itself a foe of legitimate criticism. 

Unsurprisingly, Burnham’s announcement first attracted the ire of free-speech campaigners, who quickly noted that the Government already has a bubbling cauldron of acronymic monitoring units at its disposal. The variety here is truly bewildering, from the Media Monitoring Unit to the Defending Democracy Taskforce to the National Cyber Force. At first blush, indeed, NCID seems to be a classically British amalgamation of existing units. By putting them under one roof, the reasoning goes, duplication and waste is avoided. 

The problem is that if Burnham’s innovation promises to save cash and pool ideas, it also concentrates power in the hands of civil servants. That only increases the danger that the NCID “grows arms and legs”, evolving like a fish wriggling out from a swamp, desperate to feed and grow. It hardly helps that interdepartmental rivalries will be triggered among the spooks, cops, civil servants and even soldiers involved in officialdom’s many online media monitoring operations, with the NCID doubtless eager to make its mark too. 

That matters, for the Government can increasingly not be trusted to separate opinion from genuine disinformation. During Covid, to give one example, dissenting voices found themselves on official watchlists, while only last year, Whitehall labeled people concerned with mass migration as “cultural nationalists” potentially worthy of Prevent referrals. To an old Special Branch hand like me, then, the NCID rings a distant Cold War bell. Subversion, it seems, is back in fashion — except this time, the primary “threat actors” are less sweaty Stalinists and more anyone challenging the post-1997 consensus. 

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Having worked in the field, both in monitoring online extremists and actual terrorists, the NCID operation strikes me as pure “parapolitics”. The liminal space between conventional politics, intelligence, security and propaganda, parapolitics is usually the domain of niche sociology journals. Parapolitical activity is sometimes practiced covertly. This time, though, the powers-that-be have decided to hide in plain sight. Yes, the Government seems to be saying, we’re watching. 

Of course, Whitehall has long maintained such capabilities, mashing up civilian media operations with politics long before the internet ever existed. During the Second World War, for instance, it established the Ministry of Information and the Political Warfare Executive, designed to counter Nazi propaganda, undermine enemy morale and — crucially — keep an eye on the home front by monitoring public sentiment. After 1945, the Attlee government created the Information Research Department to combat Soviet disinformation. As ever, the Russian bear looms large in the history of British domestic security, with hybrid capabilities developed to keep him behind the Iron Curtain. 

During the Cold War, monitoring and combating “subversion” became primarily an MI5 and Special Branch problem. The official definition, first introduced in 1972 by MI5, encompassed “activities which threaten the safety or well-being of the state, and are intended to undermine or overthrow parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”. The civil service effectively withdrew from the field, allowing anti-communist surveillance to become a classic quasi-political, quasi-policing issue. Were operations keeping tabs on communists designed for police action or pure intelligence purposes? In the parapolitical hall of mirrors that was postwar intelligence, no one really seemed to know.

This thinking wouldn’t survive the fall of the Berlin Wall, let alone the towers of 9/11. Nor is this surprising: despite the dangers of jihadi bombs, they hardly subverted the state. There was no overwhelming ideological threat from overseas, no evil empire. Islamist terrorism was too fragmented to seem threatening; to suggest Islamism generally might pose problems was long deemed politically unpalatable. Instead, the police and security services switched to a far more granular role, one encompassing proactive counter-terrorism intelligence and law-enforcement operations. Think less John Le Carré and more Jack Bauer. Not unrelatedly, the post-9/11 “CONTEST” strategy also saw “domestic extremism” downgraded in the face of al-Qaeda threats, with combating the puny far-Right increasingly contracted out to the social services, educational institutions and charities.

All the same, that didn’t stop the powers-that-be from gradually developing a digital panopticon, one capable of using content aggregation tools to harvest the internet for dissenting material. Online monitoring units would keep tabs on groups and individuals, flagging “actionable” content for removal, for intelligence purposes, and, occasionally, for criminal prosecutions. 

The Coalition government seemed perfectly happy with this Blair-era arrangement, and little changed until the late 2010s. Since then, the surveillance state’s appetite has only grown — especially with the development of new tools like AI, and especially now that, unlike in the 2000s, powerful anti-establishment forces really are on the march. Sure enough, every protest, riot and politically charged furore sees ministers, civil servants and chief constables demanding instant information, as if their intelligence minions possessed scrying balls and oracles. In their own way, populist protest movements have the potential to disrupt key infrastructure, as seen in Dover. They can also potentially incubate lone-wolf extremists. Before he became an infamous nail bomber, David Copeland had dabbled in the BNP.

And so the post-Southport disturbances, anti-immigration protests and “Patriot Platform” blockades have triggered, once more, Whitehall’s hunger for counter-subversion. The issue that concerns me here is proportionality. Where, in the end, is the line between lawful and unlawful protest? This, remember, is the era of non-crime hate incidents and knocks on doors, of journalists being warned of harassment for pursuing legitimate stories like Jason Arday’s. Then there’s interpretation. Does genuinely agreeing with a Kremlin-funded troll make one a dupe or a shill? Or, indeed, a traitor? Managing such questions is work for skilled investigators, not algorithms or quangos. 

The Government doesn’t seem completely oblivious to the dangers here. As Defence Secretary Wes Streeting put it yesterday, the new unit wouldn’t infringe upon “the freedom to disagree, the freedom for people to challenge their Government, to challenge Government policy, to criticise robustly what we are doing, and then to have the opportunity to choose a different Government”.

Yet the party Streeting serves has previous for its own information-warfare shenanigans. One example is Labour Together. It shared an address with the Center for Countering Digital Hate, whose stated objective was to “Kill Musk’s Twitter?” Parapolitical indeed. And how many meetings or cutaways are there between Hope Not Hate and its former director of communications Matthew McGregor: now the head of political strategy at No. 10? It isn’t hard to see how such relationships could be exploited by Westminster’s mini Machiavellis. 

No genuinely free democracy has successfully managed to entirely censor the internet. British attempts so far have been more farcical than sinister, not least Ofcom’s quixotic attempt to silence 4chan, that venerable US shitposting site. Yet downstream from such debacles come the “ think of the children” excesses of the Online Safety Act, with the mandatory age-gating of content the preferred, if unspoken, option of politicians. I am prepared to bet the new disinformation unit will soon be forming working groups to wargame these “tactical options” for countering disinformation. Yet without transparent frameworks, for instance around who to target and when, we will never know how these ideas are formed. National security is a convenient firewall for policymaking on the sly, with technical possibilities around internet censorship occasionally “run up the flagpole” with investigators. 

There’s a broader point here too. Assuming the new agency is successful in identifying online content made in good faith from foreign propaganda — even if they happen to tally — how will they police one against the other? Kremlin trolls do tell outrageous lies, but some of the best information warfare is material that subtly toys with reality. The challenge is to know the difference and act on it accordingly. Most reasonable people want to see foreign propaganda called out for what it is. But I’m not convinced the threat is concomitant with the solutions proposed. Blurring the lines of legitimate debate is unlikely to soften the genuine anger that exists over issues like small boats. 

Again, these are matters of judgment. I remember monitoring Twitter one night when Tommy Robinson posted a copy of a hastily scrawled “Osman Notice” — informing him of a threat to his physical safety — pushed by police through his front door. Robinson contrasted it with the apparently favorable treatment of a Muslim cleric who’d been similarly threatened. “Can you get that taken off the Internet?” a senior police officer asked me of Robinson’s posts. Why? “Because it’s embarrassing and the chief constable doesn’t like it,” came the reply. I refused, having neither the power nor desire to involve myself in something so trivial. Yet these, more or less, will be the people in charge of the NCID. And I have no reason to believe they’re much better now. 

This, the Government claims, offers bespoke protection for individuals while mitigating the risks presented by prison early-release schemes. Theoretically, offenders breaching the zones might face being returned to prison, giving peace of mind to victims of stalking, domestic violence and sexual offenses. It was reported on Sunday that restriction zones will start to appear in October.

Victims groups have welcomed the initiative. A spokeswoman for the Joanna Simpson Foundation, a domestic violence charity, declared the rollout of the zones “a much-needed change that has long been called for and is a powerful step forward”. Victims have for years complained that knowing abusers are free to roam their communities offers a constant source of pain and distress. I wonder, though, whether they will find themselves disappointed with the policy in practice; theoretical models of offender-control crack like eggs when dropped onto the pavement of reality. Incentives to not reoffend tend not to take into account many offenders’ irrational behavior, occasionally caused by substance abuse or mental health issues.

The Zones raise further questions too, about penal reform, justice and civil liberties — are our criminal justice elites trying to be too clever by half? Hunkered down in their brutalist eyrie, did Ministry of Justice mandarins imagine they’d square the circle of cost-cutting and placating the powerful penal reform lobby, which is generally skeptical about the concept of imprisonment? Now, rather than being locked up, violent offenders can instead be rehabilitated in communities, inside virtual-reality prisons. For now, the Zones are aimed at violent offenders, but what — or who — comes next? Would this model of control be considered for other types of offending, such as burglary or robbery too? Will the restriction zone model offer comfort to victims, or are they a window into a future of soft totalitarianism? And, crucially, will they ever really protect the public from violent criminals?

Towards the end of my police career, I worked for the UK Protected Persons Service (UKPPS). My duties involved what’s known as “witness protection”: that is, monitoring offenders who posed potential risks to vulnerable witnesses. As such, I often worked with the police teams responsible for delivering Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements [MAPPA] — the public protection world is laden with acronyms. These were locally-based officers responsible for the management of high-risk offenders. Their remit included yet another public protection acronym, MOSOVO, or “management of sexual or violent offenders”. None of these acronyms, however, are adequate in describing modern offender management in practice. In my experience, put-upon police and probation officers operate a system held together with optimism and duct-tape. Monitoring offenders is one thing — intercepting and managing them face-to-face is another.

In my experience, MAPPA fails to mitigate the underlying problem with offender management: the progressive-coded rehabilitative bias that affects criminal justice in general, and probation specifically. As the former police officer-turned-policy analyst Rory Geoghegan wrote: “The ideology centers the offender as a vulnerable individual with ‘criminogenic needs’ which the state must understand and address.”

This means that while a violent but newly-released rapist might be an ongoing threat to women and girls, he’s still an individual with “agency” and rights. How dare the authorities harass him? Which is what offender management is, really. Gently intrusive harassment, with a smile and a cup of tea. As ever, the carrots and sticks used by the police to protect the public are both in short supply. Sticks are surrendered to an administrative state in thrall to progressive dogma, carrots to accountants. Most police officers would agree that a sex offender held in a secure environment, with opportunities for rehabilitation, is more likely to protect victims than a GPS tag and harsh words. We used to refer to such places as prisons — hardly an appropriate word for the three-kilometer radius of an offender’s home address. Except the prisons have suffered the same death-by-parsimony as the rest of the criminal justice system. As, indeed, is the ever-struggling probation service.

The restriction zone project will rely on probation officers working with victims of crime to create bespoke safety plans, identifying where an offender might not be allowed to travel without breaching his or her virtual incarceration. The problem with this, of course, is the probation service’s questionable performance, not to mention the problematic relationship the private sector has enjoyed with monitoring prisoners at all. Scandals have concerned equipment and administrative failures, causing dangerous safety gaps for police and probation officers.

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Again we can discern the spirit of optimism and duct-tape lingers. One can imagine an operations room in a busy urban area, multiple lights bleeping on a map as dozens of “supervised” offenders probe the perimeters of their virtual cages. Who will assess risk? Send patrols to intercept rogue offenders? Will the police, still trying to extricate themselves from the burden of acting as mental health auxiliaries, find new work as ersatz prison warders too? Other areas of policing offer clues to the resource demands around monitoring or protecting individuals. A police close protection team might demand between six-to-eight officers to protect their “principal” for a 24-hour period. Three 10-strong mobile surveillance teams are necessary to covertly report on a human suspect’s movements over a similar period. Perhaps, one day, AI-controlled robots will patrol the Government’s invisible Temu gulags, but until then?

The reality of the restriction zone project, one unmentioned in any Ministry of Justice press release, is this: managing violent offenders in the community is, at best, a game of whack-a-mole. I once spoke with a detective on an east London borough where a team of four managed around 600 high-risk registered sex offenders. And London has 32 boroughs. Furthermore, officers working in offender management have a limited toolbox at their disposal. The hammers and nails involve sanctions when an offender breaches their license, meaning they might be returned to that same prison system that is so keen to release prisoners.

The rest of the time? The police compile reports on how offenders engage with the MAPPA regime. Their demeanor. Their life circumstances. Are they complying with probation? Have they tried to contact any victims? This is where struggling police forces interface with equally struggling probation services. Any system which creates more tagged offenders limited to strictly-defined geographical zones will add an extra burden to a system — the BBC reported that 32% of probation appointments with high-risk sex offenders, between 2023 and 2025, were missed due to workload issues. The success of the restriction zone project will come down to whether it can reduce in reoffending rates and prison returns. Sadly, the authorities have a poor record of anticipating, deterring and managing known risks. The cases of human time-bombs like Axel Rudakubana and Valdo Calocane show how knowing someone is dangerous is a completely different proposition from protecting the public from them. The themes, for Britain’s criminal-justice elites, are deeply uncomfortable: mental health, resources, human rights and race. Then there are questions of competence: why are police forces increasingly incapable of public protection?

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Inside Britain's DEI police force

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As a former policeman, I’m used to the consequences of second-order effects. No doubt this project will create new challenges for the officers charged with protecting us from predators such as the serial sex offender Simon Levy or the murderer Jordan McSweeney, both men who were known to be highly likely to reoffend. Sadly, the Ministry of Justice “proof of concept” turns on the lives of the innocent. Statistics suggest that in 2024, one murder a week was committed by offenders on probation. Then, when the optimism dies and the duct-tape breaks, those blamed for systems failure will be ordinary police and probation officers, their seniors lawyering-up for the inevitable public inquiries.

Instead, we have a cash-strapped civil service, one obliged to pay lip service to those theories of “criminogenic needs.” The Ministry of Justice have worked with the paltry resources at their disposal to offer geographic detention, monitored by outsourced technology and enforced by a shoestring police service. Meanwhile, policymakers and mandarins continue with the disestablishment of traditional criminal sanctions. To their minds, rapists and murderers can be managed via the penal equivalent of “20-minute neighborhoods” or planned parking zones. Turning offender management into a technical adjunct to town and country planning might sound novel, but I doubt it will work in practice.

What about the Home Office’s latest wheeze, offering asylum-seekers from developing countries pamphlets politely asking them not to commit sexual offenses? Perhaps that’s another window into our near-future of anarcho-tyranny, one where murderers overstepping invisible restriction zones receive a drone-delivered missive reminding them — gently ± not to rape or murder. Alternatively, of course, we could simply build better prisons, until the innate goodness of the human spirit so beloved of penal reformers finally manifests itself. Until that rapture, though, will they spare a thought for the rest of us?

In the end, the trainee resigned, but Andrew’s problems are hardly over. For if modern British policing resembles a moth-eaten tapestry made up of many tawdry threads, one thread is surely the cohort of officers that joined after 2010. Old police hands have a tendency to unfairly decry new recruits. Yet recent blunders, from muddled reporting over Ann Widdecombe’s death to the anti-racism row over the Henry Nowak case, expose just how broken British law enforcement now is — not least when it comes to recruitment and training.

Interviewing insiders from forces across Britain, I unearthed a story of bad policy, craven leadership and chronic underinvestment. Yes, DEI can harm policing, but not necessarily in the way critics imagine. Because while the strictures of the Equality Act cause doubtless harm on the streets, it also means forces often spend as much time wet-nursing vulnerable recruits as they do catching criminals. Combined with a raft of other problems, from a shrinking talent pool to the continued scourge of discrimination, and the future of British law enforcement looks grim.

***

To understand how Andrew’s trainee could avoid over 95% of her duties, you must first understand the Equality Act. Passed in early 2010, as New Labour stumbled towards defeat that May, it bundled existing anti-discrimination law into a single piece of overarching, rocket-assisted legislation. By creating nine “protected characteristics” — from age to sex to disability — lawmakers dumped employers into a legal and procedural minefield. Forcing managers to constantly balance rights and responsibilities, the Act is riven by ambiguities, making it easy to exploit or misinterpret. Crucially, the police have no blanket exemption to any of this: every officer’s duties must be considered on a case-by-case basis. 

This creates maddening issues for police forces, especially given a seemingly insatiable appetite for what the Equality Act calls “reasonable adjustments”. Paul*, a recruiter for one Northern force, heard of a young officer who suffered from “hypersexuality” requesting an extra 30 minutes in the work day to “sort herself out”. She was refused. Most adjustments are more mundane, typically involving working from home or avoiding certain duties. 

Much of this dysfunction comes from the top. As one former staff officer puts it: “Senior officers? All they seem to talk about and care about, really, is DEI.” This is borne out if you tour the upper echelons of forces nationwide. During one specialist policing course, a visiting chief superintendent spoke of nothing but opening up opportunities for minorities. On the actual subject matter? Not a word. Initially, this enthusiasm was probably a function of ambition, with promotion linked to pushing DEI. Then came a cultural and generational shift as a more activist cohort of officers entered the top tier. 

It doesn’t help that police line managers complain of having decisions challenged by staff networks — representing ethnicity, religion and neurodiversity, among others — established to protect minority rights under the Equality Act. One instructor complains how “the prestige of being able to say we’ve recruited officers from this or that underrepresented group” trumps operational efficacy. This is exacerbated by endless excoriating reviews, contributing to a culture of tale-telling. Stations increasingly resemble schoolyards, bubbling with rights-based resentments. Officers allege discrimination to distract from poor performance. And managers find themselves engulfed in office feuds, when really their focus should be on fighting crime.

Beyond the vagaries of the Equality Act, Gen Z recruits do also seem more vulnerable. Andrew recalls one officer who had to leave a tape-recorded interview after a suspect began swearing at her. “I found her hiding in a cupboard with a blanket over her head.” By 2024, officers reportedly took 774,000 man-days off for mental health reasons. No wonder many sergeants and inspectors complain of becoming little more than HR officers with truncheons, occupational health advisors and therapists to Gen Z rookies. 

Before any of this, though, new coppers need training. Until the Equality Act, many would have been precluded from joining. Now, though, forces must now find a way of adapting to recruits with a range of physical and mental health issues — even as courses themselves are less rigorous than ever. 

***

Hendon Police College, stranded in an unglamorous corner of northwest London, was always ugly. When I trained there in the early Nineties, before going on to serve at the Met for a quarter of a century, it felt like a Soviet housing project. Now, with its rows of modern, yellow-topped classrooms, it resembles an Amazon fulfillment center. The old Hendon site was demolished in 2015, after doubling as the Eastern European country of “Sokovia” in an Avengers superhero movie. 

Back then, officers joked the real supervillain was Theresa May. As home secretary, May oversaw reforms responsible for today’s desiccated police service, not least in terms of cuts. Officers no longer attend costly residential training courses, instead commuting to training centers or universities. What was once a quasi-paramilitary model, complete with square-bashing and long hours, became a more congenial, “civilized” experience. 

Veteran officers believe the old model was better: it developed a sense of camaraderie and focus. More than that, it gave instructors far more insight into their charges. My own time at Hendon involved daily role-playing exercises involving negotiation, confrontation and exercising practical legal knowledge. On the “training roads” around the campus, knots of novice coppers acted out arrests, stopping cars, searching people, adjudicating disputes and taking statements. Our performance was dissected by the instructors, our failings explained firmly but fairly. It mattered, too, that until the residential training centers were closed in the early 2000s, trainers were all sergeants.

Now, though, this robust in-person training is increasingly replaced by distance learning. In practice, this means fewer practical demonstrations and more learning how to stop and search from an online questionnaire. This, Paul argues, creates “officers with little life experience, a superficial knowledge of the law, precious little knowledge of how to put a prosecution case file together, and [who] have to fill in their lack of knowledge with enthusiasm”. For their part, sergeants have been replaced by more junior PCs, cheaper to employ but who seem to be more “professional trainers” than practical officers. Paul adds that he’s heard training increasingly involves short days and “directed self-study”: a euphemism for unsupervised homework.

Instructors are themselves under pressure to keep costs down. Now retired, Alex* taught “student constables” in the South West of England. “Recruiting’s driven by accountancy mindsets,” he says. “This leads to corner cutting, kit shortages and no investment in training amenities.” This typically means swapping out resource-intensive roleplays for abstract lectures.

Given all this, officers are reluctant to attack the newbies too harshly. “The current set-up’s broken,” admits Liam*, who before his retirement trained direct-entry detectives for a Northern force. “I’m not blaming the recruits, it’s just the initial recruitment process is flawed. During Covid, the whole thing was done over Teams! How can anyone be accurately assessed over Teams?” 

Nor are recruits responsible for the way senior staff indulge the worst Whitehall predilections. Alex describes how health-and-safety legislation has led to “a regime terrified of any risk, leading to sterile and false training scenarios”. Officers are now unlikely to receive proper training to deal with aggressive suspects, let alone undergo scenarios where their partners deliberately lie. One only needs to glance at the Henry Nowak video to see the potential problems of this approach. 

***

My Hendon class, in 1992, consisted of 14 trainee constables. Two were from ethnic minorities and two were women. Aged between 22 and 46, our number included three graduates, a former bus driver, an insurance salesman and a retired army warrant officer. One colleague had memorably been a male model. If we weren’t wholly representative of Londoners, we were at least reasonably educated, in good health and level-headed. 

If initial training was doubtless better then, my interviewees also agree that the talent pool has shrunk. In part, that’s down to broad societal changes. Alex, the former instructor, cites the smaller armed forces, so fewer take that “well-trodden path” to the police. Alternative careers, from digital nomadism to IT apprenticeships, are also more available than in the early Nineties, offering better pay for less anti-social hours. 

This coincides with sea-changes in recruitment. Hoping to “professionalize” policing, policymakers encouraged would-be officers to pursue degree training alongside a nursing-style license to practice. Significant pay cuts arrived too, meaning new recruits are generally younger and less experienced. Like Andrew’s ex-colleague, people can also now join as “direct-entry” detectives, missing out on the two years of beat experience older officers insist is key to becoming an investigator. This route is particularly popular among middle-class recruits, whole are less suited to dealing with the ugly realities of Britain’s criminal class. 

But perhaps most significant is the 2020 change which allows 17-and-a-half-year-olds to sign up. Some of these younger officers, I’m told, come from challenging backgrounds. Their life experience and education is significantly different from officers of my generation: and generally for the worse. Their relative youth, Alex explains, also means “they’re learning so much, so quickly, and are so unprepared, that they struggle”. 

Yet it’s hard, here, not to return to the Equality Act. Paul tells me about one new officer with cerebral palsy, who secured reasonable adjustments despite being unable to pass the personal-safety training where recruits learn to use handcuffs and CS spray. Another newbie, a direct-entry DC, failed the same course because of dyspraxia so severe he kept dropping his baton. Apart from tolerating candidates physically unable to perform basic duties, forces are also required to cater to pre-existing psychological issues. Despite holding generally “progressive views” — and suggesting the emphasis on the racial aspect of DEI training was over-egged — Paul nonetheless despairs at the consequences. “What victim cares that the new PC is anxious or has debilitating dyslexia?” 

As in policing at large, attempts to challenge the status quo are given short shrift, with managers keen not to rock the DEI boat. Alex, the former recruit instructor, says “the tone set is one that says ‘we’ll support your decision, just as long as it’s not contentious or difficult.’ The fear culture arises out of a combination of factors, ranging from the diversity industry; a promotion system that’s all about group think; and selfish ambition.” 

Alex’s experiences chime with my own service. By the time I retired, in 2018, the Met felt like North Korea — run by David Brent. I remember enduring computer-based DEI training claiming that telling sexist jokes was only a few steps from genocide. No wonder supervisors struggle to manage new recruits. “There’s a fear of doing anything informally at any level,” Alex says. “Now it’s just ‘pass the buck’ straight to [professional standards] for any level of allegation regardless of how minor or frankly daft it may be.” 

The new police training regime is supposedly built of good intentions. The irony, though, is that if it allows nice if unsuited candidates too much leeway, this system also does little to stem the flow of genuinely malicious recruits. There are plenty of examples here, from David Carrick to Cliff Mitchell, with the usual blend of cuts and remote work partly to blame. Wayne Couzens, too, dodged recruitment vetting before going on to murder Sarah Everard, while cuts to training meant he was enthusiastically received into the Met on account of the firearms skills he’d acquired in the Civil Nuclear Constabulary. 

***

After marching off Hendon’s parade square, I was posted to a West London police station. There, along with three others, I went through the final stage of my training — being “puppy-walked” for 12 weeks by a sweaty old sergeant and three tutor constables. It was made clear that, should I be found wanting, I’d be dismissed from the Met. The tutors were patient, but happily issued bollockings where appropriate. There were fines — 50p here, a pound there — for stupid mistakes, the proceeds going towards an end-of-course drink. Meanwhile, my first arrest was closely supervised and mentored until the arrestee was bailed. I felt confident and supported throughout. 

These days, though, quality control is infinitely harder — and the Equality Act is again partly to blame. “You can’t get rid of people unless they use hurty words,” says Andrew, the Met DS. “There was one uniformed officer playing the diversity game like a pro; she’s got every protected characteristic and a portfolio of reasonable adjustments. She’s bagged an office job and hasn’t been on the street for years. I mean, she can’t even meet the public or leave the building unless she’s working from home. As far as I can see, she does very little.” Not just her: thousands of Met officers aren’t “fully deployable” because of their health or performance. All the while, officers are stoutly defended by the ever-present support networks; for the feckless and shameless, it’s a license to take liberties. “Nobody ever challenged this officer,” Andrew adds of her colleague. “Then she boasted about the PIP payments she was claiming. Talking about it makes my blood boil.”

These problems are compounded by questionable mentoring practices, especially when rookies are now led by colleagues who faced similar training. More than a few crack under pressure. Over the past five years, forces reported up to a 19% attrition rate from new-officer resignations, unsurprising when policing was recently described as “one of the most complex frontline positions in the public sector”. It’s hard to disagree, particularly when any error is soon plastered on social media. Forces, keen to atone for previous scandals, adopted zero-tolerance professional standards policies. Yet in another irony, this means that officers most prepared to get involved in operational policing are also those most likely to be disciplined. Many fear being “chucked under buses” for making mistakes, even in good faith. At a time when we desperately need more mature, experienced officers, we appear to be traveling in the opposite direction.

Nor is any of this theoretical. The recruitment, training and mentoring regime I’ve laid out here was responsible for producing the officers involved in the Nowak case. Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary, the force in question, ceased residential training in 2006. After watching footage of the incident, I fully agreed with Jonathan Hinder, a former police inspector and now a Labour MP, who said the decision to handcuff the dying Nowak was “unfathomable”. But frankly, was it really, given how officers are now recruited and trained? 

***

Amid these horrors, and polls showing less than half the public trust the police to deal fairly with complaints, can forces really change? There are some tentative signs that they can — at least beyond London. As Paul puts it of his Northern force, “the current regime does produce officers who are smartly turned-out and have a healthy respect for rank.” More than that, Paul says his colleagues would balk at the more absurd consequences of the Equality Act. “We wouldn’t dispute such a diagnosis,” he says when I ask him about that “hypersexual” young officer, “but wouldn’t support 30 minutes wanking time either.” This pragmatism is borne out elsewhere, with Sir Stephen Watson, the head of Greater Manchester Police, coming out strongly against rainbow lanyards and dancing with protesters. 

The reasons for these regional differences remain relatively unexplored. Yet Sir Stephen’s trenchant attitude — and my conversations with officers — suggest that the mood music from police headquarters percolates downwards. This only works, though, if chief constables feel supported by their bosses. It seems unlikely that Sadiq Khan will champion a campaign of common sense in the Met anytime soon.

All the same, it’s striking that even London’s famously progressive force is shifting. The service recently introduced a scorched-earth policy for “adjusted duties” officers. It’s a sign, perhaps, that managers are waking up to the disasters they’ve wrought. Yet even here, Andrew believes that the belated fightback is partly because the Met still doesn’t have the courage to back its managers. “The Met’s terrified of being sued for discrimination,” she explains, “so it decided to treat everyone equally badly.” The upshot? Well-performing staff with genuine health problems face six-monthly moves to other departments, a process one officer describes as “a stealthy form of constructive dismissal”. 

I asked the Met to comment on this and other issues raised in my story. It declined. All the while, British policing seems happy pursuing policies that are meat and drink to its critics. For example, the Telegraph recently reported that trainees are instructed to write essays “reflecting on antiracism”. Hopefully the investigation into Henry Nowak’s death will delve into the reasoning behind this ideological focus, as important as managing fractious crime scenes doubtless is too. 

Fail and the public will only keep suffering, as fantasies of inclusion collide with the brick wall of reality. Andrew, now nearing retirement, shakes his head. “It’s the Met all over. They lowered standards for diversity reasons and to hell with the consequences — until it bit them on the arse.” Of course, that doesn’t stop chief officers from insisting they’ve built inclusive forces, staffed by properly selected, well-trained constables. Politicians offer specious announcements around funding and officer numbers, claiming to support forces in keeping the streets safe. As Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said in January, “I’m putting police back where they belong — on the beat and fighting criminals.” To which the public is presumably entitled to reply, like the officer who handcuffed Henry Nowak, “I don’t think you have, mate”.

***

*Names have been changed.

The statement was laced with officialese: and Ogilvie is reportedly from Rathcoole, a predominantly Loyalist housing estate north of Belfast. Was the suspiciously polished family statement, many wondered, issued by the Government on the family’s behalf? And if so, why? Social media, unsurprisingly, decided “the State” dictated the Ogilvies’ response. Victims of controversial killings involving ethnic minorities, it was alleged, are manipulated by government spinners. And so the scene was set, digital barricades erected, culture warriors firing barbs across no-man’s-land. It’s hardly the favored territory of  officialdom, with police comms teams too often flailing in the septic tank of 24/7 social media. 

What, though, is the truth? Are families pressurized to give statements sympathetic to official narratives? How seriously does the Government take threats concerning racial tension? And, as Britain enters another potential summer of unrest, are police forces prepared?

First, the specifics of the family statement. Given the severity of Ogilvie’s injuries, a police family liaison officer — or FLO — would be assigned to support them throughout the investigation. Police FLOs are widely considered to be a success story, offering support to victims during distressing circumstances. Nonetheless, they are also detectives with a hotline to the Senior Investigating Officer. Furthermore, victims’ families do receive advice on issuing statements. Statements might be discussed over cups of tea, FLOs explaining how they might impact future criminal proceedings. All parties are likely to have been briefed by force comms officers, keen to dampen down contentious issues. Note how, for example, Henry Nowak’s father gave a full statement — one criticizing police actions around his son’s death — only after Vickrum Digwa’s trial. 

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It seems likely, then, that the Ogilvies’ statement would have been “managed” via the FLO and the wider PSNI. This is standard practice. Suggestions the security services might involve themselves in such matters, in my experience, are wide of the mark. Given the uniquely fraught circumstances Northern Irish officers operate under, not to mention the forthcoming marching season, any public statement would attract the interest of a three-ring circus of community and political groups. Added to this is the Sinn Féin majority administration’s pro-immigration policies, making the party vulnerable to allegations of being “soft” on issues of race. This is why John Boutcher, the (English) PSNI chief constable, tiptoes daily across a minefield of political sensitivities. This isn’t to say there wasn’t some authenticity to the Ogilvies’ statement, nor that the family’s contribution wasn’t heartfelt, but their words seem almost certain to have been polished.

Is the Ogilvie case, then, an example of comms management particular to post-Troubles Belfast? Or does the British government routinely control public sentiment in cases involving potential disorder? My experience working in counterterrorism suggests it does, albeit subtly, even if things have invariably evolved. Techniques pioneered to prevent post-terror attack riots are deployed against vaccine-skeptics and those on the “radical Right.” The Government clearly is spooked: only this week, Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Science, declared the Government would urgently seek to update the Online Safety Act so that it requires services “to take quicker action to remove illegal content circulating during times of crisis.”

Even during my police service, I witnessed how genuinely petrified senior police officers and civil servants are of wide-scale public disorder. The 2001 Oldham riots, involving three nights of racially motivated violence, focused their minds. The context, by 9/11 that September, was that of Muslim communities targeted by the far-Right after any terrorist incident. During the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings in 2005, working in counterterrorism intelligence, I saw police commanders repeatedly ask the same question: how do we stop Muslim communities from going up in flames? How do we stop another Oldham? Liberal-minded officers, such as Brian Paddick, were accused of cravenness. Others sounded like colonial governors, fretting over restless natives. That was then. Now, we have pro-Gaza independent MPs exercising de facto control over police operations.

Central government is painfully aware of these problems. The United Kingdom, were it a car, would be a Cold War-era Trabant, its engine spluttering as an era draws inexorably to a close. This isn’t to say the powers-that-be haven’t mounted a spirited defense, updating the creaking two-stroke engine with a digital-management system. Post 7/7, the Government established the Research, Information and Communications unit, known as RICU. A relatively small unit, independent of the security services, RICU works with local authorities and media contractors to create and disseminate content. To counter Islamist narratives, RICU’s communications aim to “effect behavioral and attitudinal change.” These techniques are also employed elsewhere, as was evident during the Covid pandemic and in the aftermath of last summer’s anti-immigration protests. Now, though, public information and sentiment strategies intended to combat Islamist terrorism have been targeted at those threatening official narratives around “diversity” and “community cohesion”. During the same protests, the “National Security and Online Information Team”, a body within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, asked online platforms to moderate content critical of government narratives. 

Then, after the post-Southport riots, came the Home Office’s awful “rapid analytical sprint” report. Only 18 months old, the “sprint” has aged like milk. It posited a new offense of communications that inflict “psychological harm”, demonstrating Labour’s ongoing obsession with controlling language. It urged the police to increase their use of since-abandoned Non-Crime Hate Incidents. Perhaps most telling of all, though, is RICU’s use of “controlled spontaneity” after terrorist incidents — the kind of tactics the Home Office are likely to use in order to counter anti-immigration sentiment. In that vein, a veteran contingency planner told Middle East Eye that “this job has changed significantly from planning for organic, people responses to tragedy, to being told: ‘We would like the people to do that, how do you get them there? A lot of the public’s responses are spontaneous, of course. But a lot are shaped. The [British] government doesn’t want spontaneity: it wants controlled spontaneity.” Controlled spontaneity involves bussing in peace-preaching imams. Putting up posters in railway stations. Facilitating vigils. The panoply of “Don’t look back in anger” theatre, inspired by the public’s (genuine) response to the 2017 Manchester bombing.

Admittedly, controlled spontaneity sounds a tall order in a city like Belfast, yet the mindset remains similar. Seize the initiative. Frame narratives. Control. But official narratives have become suspect, especially in racially sensitive cases. For the Government, the potential for widespread disorder explains the urgency of its internet-control agenda. Why? The alternative is unthinkable. Due to austerity, UK police forces are short of personnel, training, and equipment, with the consequence that their ability to keep order has been seriously diminished. For example, after the Stephen Ogilvie stabbing, the PSNI was forced to fly in 200 extra officers from the mainland to support its operations. At the recent pro-Palestine and Right-wing “Unite the Kingdom” demonstrations in London, the Metropolitan Police fielded 4,000 officers, but only with reinforcements from as far afield as Wales. Luckily for the Met, the demonstrations were largely peaceful. 

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This, ultimately, is why the Government devotes so much of its political bandwidth to messaging, communications and sentiment management: its capability to police public disorder has atrophied. An officer with a Home Counties force recently told me how senior officers are currently “wargaming” their response to any repeat of Southport-style unrest this summer. “We aren’t the Met, we don’t have dedicated public order officers,” he said. “We’ll be relying on PCs taken from other duties, guys with only basic shield training.” And the mood music in police HQ command floors? “Grim. They’ve run out of money. They simply don’t have enough people available.” His message was clear: if England “kicks off”, it’s every force for itself. As they head off on holiday this summer, this will prey on the minds of chief officers and Home Office mandarins. All this after the performance of Hampshire police during bushfire demonstrations in Southampton was mixed. 

The UK’s police “mutual aid” arrangements, as seen at the London demonstrations earlier this year, assume supporting one or two major incidents. Multiple outbreaks of serious public disorder would almost certainly collapse the system. “Basically,” said the officer, less prosaically, “we’d be fucked.” And what, I asked, of the last resort? Calling in the army? He laughed. “They haven’t got enough people either, have they?”

This, in the end, clarifies the relative importance of subtler measures. British governments pride themselves on their ability to negotiate. To parley their way out of problems, while assuming the UK remains a high-trust society. A society with a functioning social contract, the glue keeping the Trabant of state legitimacy on the road. This is why, when cuts are required, legislators axe the state’s more coercive arms — the military and policing. 

Yet now that public trust has eroded, along with the social contract, legitimacy is surely next. The Government, though, will continue with its displacement activity, fretting over internet misinformation and polishing statements made by grieving families. A frontline consisting of internet monitors and family liaison officers, armies of “performative spontaneity” coordinators urging us not to “look back in anger”.

The Trabant that is the UK state trundles along, held together with little more than duct-tape and good intentions. Such apathy typifies the mindsets of senior police and civil servants, until the predictable happens. With luck, next time, disorder will again be contained. Reviews will be commissioned and public inquiries launched. Lessons will, allegedly, be learned. And, somewhere, another violent man will cross a border unchallenged. Then another statement will be burnished, until the Trabant’s engine finally sputters and dies for good. 

Now, though, detectives now face the political and procedural struggles of a high-profile criminal investigation. Hints of this came early, as Defence Secretary John Healey patrolled the Sunday morning news shows, offering lawyerly answers to questions around crime and extremism. Behind the scenes, however, the Government will be wary. The public mood is febrile, and all this before a strategy on “the way forward” is even announced. Leading the inquiry are the 5,000-strong BTP, responsible for investigating all offenses committed on Britain’s mainland railway network.

They are sometimes criticized for slow response times — other forces joke that “BTP” stands for “Be There Presently” — and this is the likeliest reason that the arresting officers came from Cambridgeshire Police. Yet BTP is genuinely stretched, a truly national force responsible for the railways from John o’Groat’s to Land’s End. Furthermore, many of its specialist resources are focused on major termini, leaving smaller stations relatively unpoliced. Even so, BTP has strengths. Its officers, for instance, are specially trained in evidence-gathering on the railways. Railway infrastructure is a surprisingly complex and occasionally dangerous environment for investigators. Evidence, for example, might end up on live railway tracks. It goes without saying, here, that closing a line to facilitate police work is far from simple, especially a major East Coast route like this one.

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BTP has concluded there is currently no evidence of terrorism. How and why? The answer lies in both the circumstances of the offense and a fast-time intelligence response, in this case aided by police Counter Terrorism Units. Presumably the suspect didn’t featured on any Security Service or criminal-intelligence databases. The suspect’s home, once identified, will have been searched, and his electronic devices checked. Officers will also have investigated his associates, vehicles, financial records and any criminal history. They will further have sought an urgent interview with the suspect himself, possibly even before the arrival of his legal representatives. We can only speculate what information police gleaned beyond “no comment”.

Does this, then, establish irrefutable evidence there was no terrorist angle to the stabbings? Not completely. All the same, I would suggest the BTP’s assessment was made in good faith. After all, someone very senior put their name to such a conclusion. And given trust in the police and government is already frayed, a bad judgment on such a serious matter would be disastrous. Given the number of scandals around governmental candor, and the Prime Minister’s dire personal polling, this investigation will only get bigger — or “grow arms and legs” as officers say.

This still leaves the thorny question of motive. Social media provides, as ever, a vortex of misinformation, speculation: and outright fantasy. Investigators, on the other hand, will focus on the facts. Once terrorism and extremism are discounted, few alternatives remain. Was this a mental health incident? Now that we know there’s only one suspect — a second man was arrested before being released without charge — that’s the most likely explanation: especially as the alleged assailant apparently ranted about the devil, and asked to be killed as the police approached. Whatever the truth, and as with all such crimes, the details offer hearty meat and drink to conspiracy theorists. To counter them, police will need to tread a fine line between offering fact-based public assurances while protecting the integrity of court proceedings.

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In all this, senior officers are crucial. Lucy D’Orsi, the BTP’s chief constable, was extremely ambitious while working at the Met. She may still covet the Commissioner’s job and will certainly understand the pressure to be seen to “do something”. This highlights another important cog in Britain’s steam-driven policing. The BTP is a “Ministry Force”: meaning it falls under the remit of the Department of Transport rather than the Home Office. What Whitehall battles will be fought as civil servants mark their turf and cover their behinds? For the general public, disasters are to be endured. For senior police officers and civil servants, disasters might be awful too, but they also provide opportunities for politicking.

Beyond the specifics of the Huntingdon case, officers and civil servants will also be conscious of the broader implications for public order. The autumn months are among the most challenging of the policing calendar, partly a function of darker evenings, but also because of public events like Bonfire Night and Remembrance Sunday. Then comes the run-up to the festive season, with its Christmas markets, concerts and parties.

All weigh heavily on the rail network, with BTP almost certainly bidding for significant support for “public reassurance” operations. Expect to see temporary knife-arches at high-profile transport hubs and known crime hotspots. Expect facial recognition teams too, as well as the now-ubiquitous armed police patrols. BTP have already trialed joint patrols with the Royal Military Police, with “Redcaps” occasionally seen patrolling Waterloo Station. We may not see troops patrolling the streets this Christmas, but in his interviews yesterday Healey was strikingly reluctant to rule out extra checks.

Whatever the efficacy of these measures, and whatever the attack’s ultimate cause, they won’t address the broader issues. Anyone can buy a ticket and hop on a train, and as Robert Jenrick famously pointed out, it’s also easy to avoid paying. Nor will tougher security fix the broader public mood. The public discourse around such incidents grows ever more bitter. Exhortations not to “look back in anger”, or publicity posters urging unity, are increasingly dismissed as something approaching Soviet propaganda. Cynicism is now commonplace; the Government’s armory of vigils and nudge units is fast running out of ammunition. Online, certainly, the message is increasingly one of: “Yes, let’s look back in anger.” Such frustration feeds resentment and disorder, creating a societal doom-loop.

In a sense, the police themselves are trapped here. Because of Huntingdon and similar outrages, officers are compelled to engage in expensive, kneejerk responses — rather than preventing crime to start with. Meanwhile, the disgruntled and disillusioned will project their grievances onto this whole awful affair, the facts secondary to fevered narratives. All this means the police will continue doing more with less, with varying degrees of success. Yes, emergency responses can be impressive, but in many ways policing is becoming like the NHS. It’s perfectly capable of getting a patient to A&E in extremis — but after triage? Like treating a chronic health condition with an endless waiting list, the morass of legislative and financial constraints on forces risks being ignored, though whether this changes during this month’s Budget will be interesting to observe.

We properly expect the police to respond promptly to violence. Yet “reassurance patrols” also divert resources from core duties and, crucially, from deterring crime in the first place. Officers become jaded and exhausted by the continued distractions from duty, and the canceled rest days. The public, for its part, has realized what’s happening too — short-termism and “sticking plaster” policing rather than meaningful strategies to tackle the root causes of violence. All the while, politicians will stick their fingers in their ears and hum, or back initiatives to sell blunt-ended kitchen knives. And so, like a stone dropped into a pool, the ramifications of the Huntingdon stabbings will make waves long after the headlines fade and the trains begin running once more.

The abandoned criminal case, involving Westminster researchers accused of passing material to Beijing, reveals the ghost in the machine: the British establishment’s rank hypocrisy over what constitutes national security. To put it simply, espionage isn’t espionage when politically it’s inconvenient. For the police and security services, this poses an obvious dilemma. Why bother chasing spies in the first place? Such hypocrisy was ever thus, from the kid-glove treatment of the Cambridge Five, to MI6’s decision to hide Michael Foot’s suspected status as a Soviet “agent of influence” before the 1983 election.

For decades, then, our political culture has been seeped in opacity and hypocrisy, something I’ve encountered myself. As a special branch detective, I remember a routine financial vetting review. This was invasive — yet entirely necessary. Any counterintelligence officer knows employees with money troubles constitute a potential point of compromise. I, a lowly detective, spent hours accounting for every penny I’d spent over the past year.

I saw other incongruities, especially where the Official Secrets Acts was concerned. When MI5 officer David Shayler removed a hoard of secret files from the records section at Thames House, we found them in a newspaper editor’s safe. This constituted several offenses, including under the 1911 Official Secrets Act, which features prominently in the Chinese scandal. Created to combat German naval espionage, it is a stuffy Edwardian sofa of a law, its definition of what constituted “damage” to the state better suited to the age of the telegram.

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Faced with these challenges in the Shayler case, our financial investigator suggested an elegant solution: simply charge the newspaper editor with the bog-standard offense of Handling Stolen Goods. This, we at Scotland Yard agreed, was a good idea; the CPS, and no doubt the Attorney General, disagreed. This was during the early days of New Labour, when news management trumped all. I later heard rumors that a senior Labour figure confessed there was no appetite for “going to war with The Mail on Sunday.”

This culture of “rules for thee but not for me” runs rampant across all political parties and Whitehall elites. That’s especially frustrating when public bodies spend precious time and resources fostering a “security culture” — one where operational security (OPSEC) is paramount. Intrusive vetting is one common tactic here, with probing questions about a candidate’s political views and private life (sex life included). So-called “clear desk” policies are obsessively policed too: leaving a document on a desk while you pop to the loo can lead to a reprimand. All the while, restrictions are habitually placed on private conduct, from being a member of a controversial political party to having contact with foreign nationals.

Then there are the so-called “STRAP” rules, a codeword to designate a ban on the use of digital devices in areas where sensitive intelligence is handled. Yet as so often, senior police officers, or civil servants, seem strangely exempt here. I remember attending a mandatory GCHQ OPSEC briefing, where a technical officer from GCHQ demonstrated how easily everyday devices can be hacked. When he asked what might shield a phone from hostile compromise, a wag put up his hand. “The rank of chief superintendent and above,” he suggested, “protects mobiles from all foreign intelligence services.”

Like much else in Britain, then, attitudes to secrecy appear two-tier. Over my own career, I often got the impression that senior officials conflate their own importance — and political hobbyhorses — with those of the wider United Kingdom. And as Jonathan Powell may yet learn, backroom deals are all very well until you piss on the wrong people. Either way, realpolitik becomes more difficult in an era of instant rebuttal, quicksilver-fast social media and febrile, impermanent governments.

You grow pretty cynical after a career in the police — but even I’m shocked by the unsightly infighting between the Government and CPS, not least because of the Prime Minister’s previous (and much-referenced) incarnation as director of public prosecutions. The current DPP, Stephen Parkinson, is a Westminster lifer, not known for rocking boats. Significantly, Parkinson is also the first DPP who served as a solicitor rather than a barrister. Could he, finally, be giving the KC old boy’s network the finger, standing his ground against the elite consensus? Such details are the cogs upon which mighty wheels turn. Then there are the Cabinet Office veterans Simon Case and Mark Sedwill, both veritable Jacques Cousteaus of the Deep State, and both immersed in national security matters.

How, then, does this Whitehall’s dead, invisible hand impact actual investigations? The China case is perhaps instructive. Unlike TV spooks, real intelligence officers don’t mysteriously appear at crime scenes and tell the cops what to do. The dark deeds are performed in the Cabinet Office, or in Whitehall pubs. Then there are the courts, where sensitive evidence is subjected to endless voire dire, or meta-trials, as lawyers join silky verbal battle to establish the admissibility of evidence. These arguments happen in camera or in a judge’s chambers, or else involve issuing “Public Interest Immunity” certificates, which render testimony secret. The whole process is typically English: nominally open, but in fact very, very closed. To be fair, opacity is sometimes needed. The state is entitled to keep secrets, but that’s exactly why the privilege shouldn’t be casually abused. Certainly, I suspect the police case was solid — the CPS don’t charge this stuff lightly.

Then there’s the issue of the Government’s attitude to counterintelligence, which occasionally acts as a brake on diplomacy. It’s difficult to drink champagne at the ambassador’s reception if the bloke who planted microphones in the Ferrero Rochers is on trial at the Old Bailey. Capacity is another factor. When I worked on the Alexander Livinenko investigation, almost 20 years ago, MI5’s Russia desk had atrophied. After 9/11, tracking foreign spies was of limited interest to a government focused on counterterrorism and, this being New Labour, “community cohesion”. Besides, City bankers were happily stuffing their Church’s brogues with pilfered Russian cash, earning Britain the nickname “The Laundry”. Given Litvinenko’s murder was a naked act of radiological terrorism, I’m amazed it never escalated further. Which brings us back to money: pre-2008, New Labour bet the bank on financial services, and lost. It’s a gamble we’ve been paying for ever since, as the Chinese know.

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This brings us to the nub of the problem, one which Keir Starmer seems to have missed: the Government’s blatant gaslighting over China. In the end, whether or not the People’s Republic constitutes an “enemy” feels insultingly nebulous; as far as I know, such considerations have never been much of an issue before. Besides, even Jonathan Hall, the government’s own advisor on national security law, agrees China is an obvious threat. And Hall, the most fair-minded and experienced barrister in his field, isn’t known for partisanship. This speaks to the depths of high-level disagreement over this issue, with China presenting a unique problem for British policymakers. The communist state views close governmental involvement in private enterprise — including intelligence — as a given. Virtually all Chinese technology, business and diplomacy serves the Communist Party’s insatiable appetite for sensitive information.

And so politicians wilfully ignore the obvious: what we see as spying, the Chinese consider due diligence, simply part of Beijing’s game of hegemonic chess with the United States. In this reckoning, the UK is basically irrelevant, whatever hawks like Tom Tugendhat might imply. We’re surely in no position to retaliate with an intelligence campaign of our own, particularly given the parlous state of our economy. And so, despite our allegedly Rolls Royce civil service, diplomatic corps and spooks, Powell seems to have decided that acquiescence is the only game in town. Counterespionage, old boy? Over-egged. Needs to be seen in context. And, perhaps, those Chinese businessmen will rescue our steel industry in return? Just, whatever you do, don’t tell the plebs.

The entire affair suggests a system in meltdown. Dysfunctional, arrogant and — crucially — impoverished, Britain is caught in a trap of its own design, where we chase Chinese pennies like paupers teased by ancien régime aristocrats. All the while, the national security charade continues. The official secrets, the MI5 briefings and intelligence-gathering. All poured into the colander that is the Cabinet Office, leaked, lost or hacked to whoever wants to steal it. Should the scandal end Starmer’s unhappy tenure as Prime Minister, it would be apt. A lawyer to his bones, he seems convinced he can prove that black is white and night is day, that a secret isn’t a secret and an enemy isn’t an enemy.

The mawkish affection the Krays inspired, along with fear, has become something of a cliché. Yet their business model — clubs, protection rackets, loan-sharking and the occasional robbery — really did have rules of engagement: avoiding “civilian casualties” chief among them. Like other criminal outfits, meanwhile, the Krays also indulged in performative acts of community engagement, donating to charities and the poor. In 1966, they quietly gave £100 to the Aberfan disaster relief fund, the largest single donation the organization received.

Such philanthropy might explain why, when Reggie Kray died of cancer in October 2000, his send-off was a schmaltzy Cockney pageant, featuring a cast of C-list celebrities and aging villains. Reggie was laid to rest near Ronnie, ending an era of antiquated villainy. It feels apt that one of London’s last old-school heists, the ill-fated Millennium Dome robbery, took place just a month after Reggie passed.

As a London policeman, I witnessed the death throes of old-school London gangsterism. This was the era when the Adams family was finally taken out by MI5. One of the infamous Hunt brothers ended up in court too — after The Sunday Times accused his organization of murder and drug trafficking. Hunt lost his libel fight, and certainly by this point, English organized crime was increasingly centered on narcotics and money-laundering. Yet it soon found itself playing second fiddle to bloodthirsty foreign competition. I’m thinking, here, of the Eastern European gangs unleashed by the Soviet Union’s collapse, to say nothing of the dirty capital, cheap labor and drugs waved in by globalization.

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In this, the decline of English gangsterism has parallels with the wider white working-class, and indeed with the British economy more broadly. It’s tempting, too, to cast analogue villains like the Adams as dinosaurs, vaporized by a meteor storm of foreign narcotics. There’s something to this analysis — but detail is where the devil lurks, and chasing devils is what detectives used to do.

Consider, for starters, the role played by the authorities. By the time Reggie Kray died in 2000, the Metropolitan Police was disrupting English organized crime on several fronts. The first involved aggressively attacking corruption via the fabled “Ghost Squad”. The second encompassed an overhaul of informant-handling, restricting covert relationships between criminals and cops to specialist, heavily supervised units. These were shadowed by a third and accidental shift. By encouraging graduates to join the force, CID offices were less often staffed by detectives who’d attended the same schools as the criminals they investigated.

And if all this helped stymie native organized crime, so too did foreign competition. An uncomfortable truth is that working-class English gangsterism was replaced by foreign competitors. Crime is Hobbesian, and it turned out that foreign criminals were simply more vicious. Notice how London’s gangsters, for instance, have yet to develop the minerals to set up shop in Tirana or Mogadishu. Meanwhile, the Albanian mafia makes softly-softly England its playground. At the same time, English laws and police forces remain configured for the relatively genteel crime lords of yore, not the ruthless bandits of war-torn Africa or the Balkans.

At this point, sociologists and criminologists might point to the structural similarities, say, between the Krays and their Albanian successors. Both involve, do they not, notions of class, family, honor? And, as my Adler family legend implies, English mobsters clearly had a capacity for violence; Reggie himself notoriously stabbed a man to death at a Clapton house party. Yet as a former detective, all this is a bit like saying all food consists of protein, fat and carbohydrate. It’s fundamentally true, but hardly insightful. It’s difficult to imagine the Krays selling heroin to schoolkids, or sanctioning hits in crowded family restaurants.

As for the drugs themselves? They’re clearly important: Albanian gangs have carved out an estimated £6 billion niche in Britain’s cocaine market. In the end, though, it’s again more subtle than that, with the type of drugs also explaining the decline of white English gangsterism. Crack, especially, has become an accelerant of “acquisitive” crime, its addictiveness prompting waves of hit-and-run burglaries. For their part, protection rackets and bank robberies have become niche pastimes. A friend serving on the Met’s Flying Squad bemoans the demise of the old-school blagger. “When I joined we looked at proper people, second generation Eastenders, tooled-up with shotguns.” These days? He’s more likely to be chasing moped-riding kids. Another old colleague, serving on the Met’s Project Team, rolls his eyes when I ask about his work. “Same old shit,” he shrugs. “Drugs and guns, mate. Nothing but drugs and guns.”

In other words, then, the dynamics of the modern drug trade leave less space for the kind of organized heists the Krays became famous for. And there’s something else here too. As the English know full well, it’s easy to be cruel when you’re not on home turf. Our working-classes have cheerfully exported violence abroad, from the Black and Tans to Heysel. But back in England, Gen Z’s white, working-class organized criminals have given up on becoming crime lords. Nor is that especially surprising. The hard Victorian slums their grandparents knew are a distant memory, particularly from the vantage point of a three-bedroom semi in Swanley.

If they’re criminals at all, they’re more likely to operate underworld service industries, oiling the wheels of international narcotics cartels. From county lines drug dealing to City money laundering, English criminals are, increasingly, vassals. Either that, or second-tier dealers, big fish in small ponds — what I call the “Etsyfication” of boutique crime. For the sort who binge “Essex Boys” murder stories and stream TV gangster slop, the height of their ambition is shifting parcels of overcut, third-rate gak.

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As for the old ways? Extortion and blackmail? It’s moved online, replacing shaven-headed men demanding money with menace. Now, teenage nerds bring multinationals to their knees from their bedrooms. Occasionally, they don’t even demand money, merely indulging in cheery digital nihilism. For their part, British police forces struggle with online fraud and hacking. It’s a transnational and highly specialized field, far beyond the ken of the average copper. Hacking is also being co-opted by parastatal organizations, deployed as a hybrid warfare tactic by China and Russia.

To Ronnie and Reggie and their ilk, all this would have felt like mind-blowing science fiction. But though white, working-class Londoners have largely given up on gangsterism, their social superiors haven’t got the message. Film and television show no hint of mercy for the dead horse of Kray-inspired crime — and, as usual, the floggings are delivered by posh boys. I recently enjoyed Mobland, directed by gangster film supremo Guy Ritchie and starring Tom Hardy, who turned in a barnstorming performance as both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in the 2015 flick Legend.

Hardy and Ritchie both attended private schools. Hardy grew up not in Tower Hamlets, but the gilded Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames. Again, that’s unsurprising: the middle classes have always lionized working-class crime. I suspect it’s partly “noble savage” syndrome, partly an enduring English fondness for Robin Hood defiance. Either way, and whatever their entertainment value, shows like Mobland retool an extinct age of English villainy for the 21st century, even as the Krays’ legacy remains a lodestone, an origin myth, for the kind of person who’s never even seen a hatchet, much less wielded it in anger.

There’s one more irony here too. The fact is, it’s never been easier to make drug money, launder it, then scurry off to the Gulf. Just ask Scotland, where indigenous thuggery has endured in a way it hasn’t down south, and where Dubai has become a sunnier alternative to Glasgow. So if you can almost hear the old Eastenders in their Essex bungalows, lamenting Reggie’s passing and shaking their heads at his brutal successors, such nostalgia misses the point. Were the Krays alive today, they’d happily be filling their boots with coke and dirty money too, then sharing the spoils on TikTok.

Nothing was ever done about that officer. Kelly, generously in my view, thinks his behavior was emblematic of wider societal attitudes to women, in a force staffed by men who grew up in the late Fifties and early Sixties. By the time I joined the police, in the early Nineties, things had changed. My female colleagues reported how, yes, some of their fellow officers might “try it on” — but few suffered anything like Kelly’s ordeal. Yet, during my service, I saw a recurring problem with harassment. More than once, this involved officers who thought their rank protected them from scrutiny.

For the Metropolitan Police — Britain’s largest force — internal discipline means playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. In a sense, that comes with the territory. From false overtime claims to selling information to criminals, policing offers temptations for men and women hungry for fruit from the poisoned tree. Many officers taking this path drift down it due to financial or personal troubles. Many have issues with performance and attendance. This often overlaps: Wayne Couzens, for instance, was horribly in debt. This is usually a red flag for anti-corruption investigators.

Against all this are those officers patrolling the orchards where poisoned trees grow — the Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS), the “AC12” of fictional Line of Duty fame. DPS, to the average copper, is an unwelcome mixture between HR and Darth Vader. After joining DPS, where I ultimately served for five years, my invitations to office lunches and retirement drinks dropped off a cliff. At a police social club, I was once introduced to a retired detective. My posting to DPS came up in conversation. “The Funny Firm?” he growled. “I didn’t talk to those cunts when I was in the job, and I’m not talking to them now.” Then he walked off.

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Policing, as I often say, isn’t a popularity competition. What happens, though, when those policing the police pluck an apple from the poisoned tree? One recent case provides a shocking example of what happens when sexual misconduct and internal affairs collide. Earlier this week, five Met officers were arrested for allegedly suppressing allegations of sexual assault against a senior officer by a junior colleague. One is a detective inspector — from the DPS.

This raises difficult questions. Has the Met, after the Wayne Couzens and David Carrick scandals, adequately dealt with issues concerning sexual misconduct? I’m being rhetorical here: it clearly hasn’t. The report by the Government’s roving inquisitor of choice, Baroness Casey, was excoriating about New Scotland Yard’s culture of sexism. Then there’s the DPS itself. Whatever the alleged cover up says about policing’s ability to self-regulate, it likely isn’t good. Nor are these problems limited to London. To a lesser or greater extent, every force has similar problems. The complicity of officers, especially in Northern English forces, in the grooming scandal is only beginning to come to light — but I suspect the worst is yet to come.

During my own stint at DPS, I worked on proactive operations against corrupt officers. I saw firsthand how clunky and dysfunctional police misconduct procedures are. One example among many is how policing complicates what should be straightforward HR matters — taking a work car home without authorization or throwing a sickie — by treating trifles like potential crimes. Some of these problems are cultural and structural, “making the job work” by cutting cumbersome procedural corners. Others are legal, such as the thicket of human rights, equality and employment laws governing poor performance.

Yet when it comes to allegations of sexual assault, policing is particularly vulnerable. Like other traditionally male-dominated professions, the police has a tradition of macho, laddish culture. Then there’s the dynamic of rank and hierarchies, alongside a long and stressful working environment. It’s no surprise many police marriages are volatile, with many ending in divorce. Workplace affairs aren’t uncommon. As a DPS officer, I would log onto the intelligence system on a Monday morning, which would invariably reveal officers arrested for domestic disturbances, occasionally by over-enthusiastic county cops with no great affection for the Met. The November-to-January complaints generated by police Christmas parties constituted a DPS crime hotspot. Indeed, the alleged misconduct in that Met case supposedly happened at a festive drinks.

Despite these cultural pressures, of course, we rightly hold police officers to a higher standard. Managing coppers therefore requires strong line management — what we used to call leadership. Those line managers require unwavering support from their seniors too. This is where, too often, the system fails. At this point, the Irish playwright Brendan Behan’s dictum springs to mind: “I’ve never seen a situation so dismal that a policeman couldn’t make it worse.” The new cohort of police leaders, many of whom are women, talk a good job on change. Yet they struggle to deliver, preferring to attend conferences and giving speeches, rather than work the hard yards by developing a culture of leadership, one based on operational experience rather than virtue-signaling.

I recall a conversation with another female colleague, a retired detective inspector. A tough woman, a proud daughter of Essex. We were discussing “handsy” male officers. The former detective inspector had moved to a management role in the private sector. “It’s so bloody simple compared to the police,” she told me. “A bloke says or does something out of order to a female colleague. We either reprimand or sack him, depending on the circumstances. In the police, we can’t see the wood for the trees, everything becomes a major investigation.” Even today, despite numerous overhauls, policing’s bastardized misconduct apparatus retains paramilitary elements, with officers scurrying off for the job’s version of a court martial. I’ll never forget watching a constable vomit over his tunic on Vauxhall Bridge, shortly before his Central Discipline Board. Neither are police officers HR managers, which is possibly why minor, and not so minor, transgressions are sometimes ignored.

As for actual police HR, in my experience most staff were perfectly competent, albeit more focused on performance than actual misconduct (though there were outliers: including one woman known as “Claymore Mine” because she was anti-personnel). Then HR was cut like everything else, outsourced to contractors trying to manage complex cases via a telephone help desk. And so officers distrust HR decision-making, especially when some do experience tactical and malicious complaints, including from colleagues. This is why many argue complaints deserve forensic scrutiny for matters which — say in a supermarket — would be dealt with by HR. It is in this gap where potential sex offenders fester and, like Carrick, prosper.

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Another issue is one that dogs other areas of policing. Dealing with workplace misconduct is DPS’s version of neighborhood policing. And, like neighborhood policing, it’s something of a Cinderella, devolved to local support teams. The real focus, during my time on DPS, was on organized crime, corruption and the most serious cases of misconduct. Our tactics and methods were seen as disproportionate. In the few cases where we proposed covert operations against officers accused of sexual misbehavior, managers often considered them too risky. I also worked with coppers who, in confidence, reported wrongdoing. Most refused to provide written evidence for criminal proceedings. That culture will only change when leaders lead by example.

So what can the Met realistically do? After the Wayne Couzens scandal, it sought to investigate what it considered a toxic culture by setting up a new squad. “Forming a new squad” is a perennial way for police managers to pour old wine into new bottles. A new confidential reporting system and “WhatsApp squad” is all very well, but if the mechanism for following up on intelligence doesn’t work then what’s the point? The Met’s new squads will find some scalps. There’s certainly no shortage of low-hanging fruit. I doubt, however, that they will catch, identify or deter the worst offenders without a more intrusive strategy, of the sort the Met launched in the Nineties to identify racism.

The Met is in a genuine bind. Ten years of scorched-earth austerity, followed by a rapid uplift of staff, has created a young, inexperienced workforce led by young, inexperienced sergeants and inspectors. To save on training costs, meanwhile, the Met backfilled specialist posts like firearms from other forces. I suspect this is how Wayne Couzens, who came from the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (responsible for guarding power stations) ended up serving on the Diplomatic and Parliamentary Protection Group. And yet, still, nothing changes.

Sexism, like racism, exists in wider society. And some of that will, inevitably, percolate into the police. There, the problem becomes horribly magnified. The answers, then, are both tough and unglamorous. They involve cash-strapped forces investing in better recruitment, vetting and training. That would help make policing a more attractive career, widening the pool of quality candidates: urgent enough when some officers now need English lessons before they can even take a statement. And, yes, constant vigilance is needed too. As my superintendent on DPS used to say, “sometimes, you have to nail the crow to the barn door, to serve as a warning to the others.” Perhaps it’s time for police officers, especially those at the top, to issue their sergeants with hammers and nails.

After passing legislation, you then have to apply it. This duty typically falls to beleaguered police services, who are blamed for laws conjured by their thoughtless political masters. Yet, if the issue at hand is Palestine Action’s proscription, after activists vandalised a pair of aircraft at RAF Brize Norton, the Terrorism Act 2000 is about so much more than the politics of Gaza. It speaks, rather, to 25 years of government failure, and how over-powered laws and under-powered cops collide to push Britain towards all-out chaos.

From a personal perspective, I’m sympathetic to banning Palestine Action. Whichever way you split it, breaking into an RAF base and deliberately disabling military aircraft isn’t just criminal damage, it’s a shameless assault on the armed forces. And besides, June’s attack came before the group’s campaign of industrial sabotage on companies it linked to Israeli interests. Reports suggest the total costs here could hit £55 million.

In practice, however, arresting hundreds of would-be “terrorists” is easier said than done. After all, the sentence for the offence detailed in the Terrorism Act is anything from six months to 14 years. It hardly helps that the police are refusing to back down, simply saying offenders will be dealt with. But even the Met, Britain’s biggest police service, will struggle with 500-plus public-order arrests. There simply isn’t the custody space, without creating emergency holding and charging centres anyway. On the other hand, though, not arresting offenders will invite more allegations of two-tier policing, especially when London’s mayor seems dubious about proscribing the group to start with.

The upshot, then, is that the Met will be made to look impotent, and the law an ass. Such a scenario is every radical activist’s dream, and every public order commander’s nightmare. And that’s before you consider the broader problem. State legitimacy bleeds away when it proves unable to uphold the rule of law. That was clear enough when Extinction Rebellion activists blocked roads with impunity — but terrorism? With the Westminster system already creaking, it’s easy to see how the Palestine Action debacle could spiral.

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To understand how policymakers could have ended up in this mess, we must first appreciate how the Terrorism Act appeared. Passed by New Labour in its pomp, it offered the UK’s first statutory definition of terrorism, described as “the use or threat of action designed to influence the government or to intimidate the public… for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”. If that sounds flexible, it’s because the Act was intended to be a permanent solution to older ad hoc legislation.

Drafted after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and the end of the Cold War, legislators identified the old Prevention of Terrorism Act as ripe for replacement. Introduced in 1974, in the aftermath of the IRA’s Birmingham pub bombings, the PTA was annually renewed by Parliament. From its introduction, indeed, it was always known as “temporary provisions”, such was their severity. Fair enough: it permitted the state to detain suspects for up to a week longer than usual before charging them, while also allowing for the proscription of Irish Republican and Loyalist terror groups.

Crucially, the term “terrorism” was never defined in the 1974 Act. At the time, it seemed quite obvious what terrorism was: blowing things up, especially people. That, of course, still left other radical groups, not of the bomb-making variety but still skating the edges of legality. Prior to 2000, the Government again preferred a fairly impromptu approach. Echoing the tactics of communist groups during the Cold War, it tolerated, engaged and influenced fellow travellers while disrupting hardcore activists. This lead investigators, eventually, to genuine terrorist suspects.

The period after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 was pivotal here — existing laws were piecemeal and besides framed around the sensitivities of Irish terrorism. Especially with the rise of international jihadism in the late Nineties, the Government decided to enact permanent, overarching legislation.

The 2000 Act was passed just seven months before 9/11. Since then, it has been continuously amended, introducing new laws responding to the ever-evolving chimera of terrorism. That encompassed everything from banning the glorification of terrorism to creating Prevent, effectively replacing the traditional police monitoring of extremists. And, up to a point, this proliferation makes sense: who, in the naive digital world of 2000, could have predicted the vicious intersectional politics of today?

All the while, the thrust of the Blairite legal revolution was distinctly European, favoring statute over common law. Slowly but surely, with its focus on procedural fairness and (ironically) human rights, the law shaped the police response to terrorism and extremism. Many of the practices resulting from this approach, from Control Orders to Prevent, have subsequently been found wanting. Extremism as a shared social problem, rather than one of law enforcement, saw the police withdraw from swathes of counter-extremism: the sort that often presages actual terrorism.

No wonder, then, that the Terrorism Act 2000 is today the legislative equivalent of Frankenstein’s monster, applied to a dizzying range of social and technological problems. Deployed on the margins of extremism, it targets those shadowy slices of the Venn Diagram where radical politics, criminality and disorder all intersect. Indeed, had the often-violent Animal Liberation Front (ALF) not lost momentum by the late 2000s, it would almost certainly have been proscribed.

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Why, then, wasn’t Palestine Action banned sooner, especially when the list of proscribed organizations reveals any number of neo-Nazi grouplets which exist mainly on the internet? Whitehall’s slowness here arguably hints at another issue: Labour’s confusion over Palestine. The party’s Left flank, especially in seats with significant Muslim communities, is under siege by “Gaza Independents”. Its grassroots are instinctively sympathetic to Palestine too. The party’s Right flank, however, is painfully aware of its funny bone around extremism: hard on what it considers the “populist” Right, but fuzzy around progressive protests over environmental issues, trans rights and Palestine. As and when a radical anti-immigration group appears, I predict it will receive harsher treatment.

This will simply accelerate our seemingly unstoppable cycle of discontent, one in which the Government finds itself increasingly trapped. It isn’t often I feel sorry for Keir Starmer or Yvette Cooper — but on this issue they’ve tied themselves into something of a Gordian knot. Arguably, they would have best been served by tackling Palestine Action as the Blair-era authorities dealt with the Animal Liberation Front. But that would have involved intrusive intelligence-gathering and Cold War infiltration. Instead, and especially given policing’s retreat from the wider field of extremism, anti-terrorism legislation is all that’s left. As the saying goes, when you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail.

Today, the police face 500 potential nails, from retired clergymen and elderly librarians to bright-eyed students, marching on the side of the angels. I’m not sure this was the intention of the Terrorism Act’s centrist architects, during those long-lost Blairite days. But policymakers’ errors are bread and butter for riot cops. And, if the proscription of Palestine Action tells us anything, it’s that our strange new world, one of endless, inchoate rage, defies containment by conventional politics. Only totalitarian regimes try to arrest their way out of social atomisation and dissent, and even if our Government wanted to try this, it’s unlikely to succeed. Yes, Whitehall needs hammers — but also other, subtler tools.

In its report on the 2024 summer riots, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary quizzed senior officers on their intelligence strategy. As shops were looted and cops dodged bricks, they confessed to “writing the manual as it happened”. This is new. Historically speaking, British police were masters at investigating domestic extremism, something they achieved by asking three fairly straightforward questions. What is the issue motivating a protest group? How likely is there to be wider support for that issue? Who are the agitators seeking to weaponize the issue?

It’s an approach that worked well in the past. Public order and counter-extremism intelligence helped police environmental and animal rights extremism in the Nineties and early 2000s. It pinpointed potential IRA sympathizers inside radical Leftist organizations. Later, investigators established links between criminal groups and extremism, encompassing everything from football hooligans and the far-Right to urban street gangs and Islamists.

I witnessed these successes myself. Monitoring Belfast flights from Heathrow in the mid-Nineties, I remember stopping a nervous-looking man from Andersonstown in west Belfast. I telephoned the RUC. “Ah, that fella? He did six years in the Maze for firearms,” said the Special Branch officer down the line, who knew which pubs he drank in, the school he attended and the registration number of his car. “He’s also got size 11 feet,” he added.

To give a sense of how much things have changed, consider the example of “Stand Up to Racism” (SUTR), the most prolific pro-migrant organization in Epping and elsewhere. However harmless its middle-class activists may seem, the group is closely linked to the Socialist Workers Party, itself a sect of avowed revolutionary Trotskyists. That, in theory, should mean the activist’s motives should be suspect — Trotskyists, after all, are committed to undermining oppressive state organs, using any cause du jour as their weapon.

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These days, unfortunately, representatives of activist groups are virtual police consultants. For example, His Majesty’s Inspectorate included analysis by the controversial group Hope Not Hate in its post-Southport report. More cynical officers see such relationships as anti-officer Trojan Horses, welcomed through the gates by spineless senior officers. The firebrand activist Lee Jasper, for instance, was once famously made a policing adviser by Ken Livingstone. I remember officers joking how inviting him inside Scotland Yard was akin to putting Dracula in charge of a blood bank.

That institutional closeness, in turn, eventually created a ghost in the machine, one which has calcified into allegations of two-tier policing. Certainly, Reform activists are unlikely to be invited into any independent advisory groups. In my experience, ambitious senior officers are more likely to listen to the advice of media-savvy and politically connected advisers than their own officers.

Ideology, then, is clearly an important factor here — yet it’s far from the only issue. After all, the initial retreat from domestic intelligence-gathering was driven by circumstance. From 9/11, officers focused almost exclusively on jihadism. Then, when budgets were squeezed post-2008, police began culling their public order intelligence units, preferring to monitor social media instead.

Yet as the kids-glove approach to groups like the SUTR implies, it’s hard here not to return to the question of ideology. “Islam and terrorists are two words that do not go together,” proclaimed Deputy Assistant Commissioner Brian Paddick, when I was a Special Branch officer at the time of the 7/7 bombings. Yes, we raised our eyebrows too. Nonetheless, Paddick’s words were consistent with the establishment narrative around the sanctity of British multiculturalism. A decade or so later, London’s mayor famously suggested terrorism was “part and parcel” of living in a global city. This gaslighting spawned a counter-narrative: one of two-tier policing.

This, it goes without saying, augurs badly for British police forces, which now answer to a political class openly sympathetic to the sentiments underpinning radical activism. It hardly helps, of course, that shorn of its long heritage of investigating domestic extremism, officers are increasingly taking a more broad-brushed approach, with forces seduced by the technological panopticon of social media aggregation and sentiment monitoring. Rather than expensively and intrusively snooping on the hardcore minority seeking to ferment unrest, they’ve decided it’s somehow fairer to monitor everyone.

And so the securocracy creates new definitions of extremism, such as “cultural nationalism“, or incels, or the other phantoms haunting Whitehall’s imagination. This, of course, ignores the more compelling issues, the ones politicians find intractable. Ethnic tension. Direct action. Sabotage. An era of harassment and violence, segueing into terrorism, all occurring during a time of technological plenty, one where would-be urban guerillas have cheap access to drones, encrypted communications and AI.

What’s clear, then, is that police chiefs must urgently reconfigure their national intelligence-gathering capabilities, as the Met’s Sir Mark Rowley himself lately acknowledged. Nor do we even need to grasp back into the depths of time here. Before the Metropolitan Police disbanded its Special Branch, in 2006, there were detectives who specialized in monitoring extremists within London’s diaspora communities. They excelled at the painstaking work of cultivating and maintaining discreet relationships with religious and political leaders. Situations were diffused. Disorder was averted. Ringleaders were identified. And cards, to put it bluntly, were marked.

Now, Britain’s non-existent borders means new arrivals import a smorgasbord of causes, disputes and feuds. That’s even as police intelligence-gathering activity — especially surveillance and recruiting informants — often invites allegations of bullying and racism. I remember when Left-wing groups, sometimes endorsed by radical MPs, supported militants like the IRA and the Kurdish PKK, and were bitterly opposed to police monitoring their activities. A more recent example would be the furore created when UK BLM supporters were approached to offer confidential information on protest activity after George Floyd’s murder.

Senior officers, understanding the nature of the beast, carried on regardless. The uncomfortable truth is that beating domestic extremism means monitoring radical activism — but not necessarily criminal activity. Such grey zones are the terrain in which extremists hide. In the late Nineties, far-Right nail bomber David Copeland passed through the radical, but not illegal, British National Party. The comparison is far from perfect, of course, but a more contemporary example might be activists vicariously linked to the newly proscribed Palestine Action. This would identify thousands of people sympathetic to “the cause” involved in entirely lawful organizations, and it would be wrong (not to mention impossible) to track them all.

Understanding the law is important here too. In the dry language of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, police must be mindful of intelligence-gathering for reasons of “collateral intrusion”. This is partly why senior officers became overreliant on open-source social media monitoring: surveilling the public online is less politically risky and resource-intensive than focusing on the hardcore. That surely explains why police are wrong-footed when activists on e-scooters cause havoc inside critical military facilities. As social unrest increases, anyway, lawmakers should accept unlawful political action has always rubbed shoulders, albeit uneasily, with lawful activism, from the Suffragettes to Irish Republicanism.

And though such intensive surveillance is obviously expensive, it’s arguably still cheaper than the alternative. After all, public order policing is eye-wateringly expensive. Between October 2023 and February 2025, policing pro-Palestinian demonstrations in London has cost the Met over £53 million. How much would a rolling campaign of public disorder cost? Imagine disturbances occurring — everywhere, constantly. Apart from being tragic on its own terms, this normalization of political violence would quickly bankrupt the state.

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For the police, one answer to this dilemma is reassuringly simple: local policing, the alleged core principle of British law enforcement. Beat cops are an essential part of the police’s early warning system, especially now forces find themselves with a newly radicalized, racially aware faction to consider: disaffected and underprivileged white communities. That’s especially true when they lack the religious links and clan networks found elsewhere in Britain; in places like Epping, protests are generally spontaneous and “leaderless”. Yet as they say in Belfast, nobody hears “the dogs on the street” bark as quickly as a switched-on copper.

What’s clear now is that a new approach is urgently required, one where gauging potential disorder is routine. Again, Northern Ireland hoves into view. During the Troubles, the Royal Ulster Constabulary embedded local special branch teams into police stations, purely to identify subjects of interest. Was the tactic controversial and bitterly contested? Yes. Was it effective? Absolutely.

Not that this is just a question of institutional change. If they were cannier, senior police officers might recognize how the system is rigged against them. They might also be less inclined to tip-toe around the elite’s luxury beliefs. After all, they remain constables, swearing an oath to keep the peace without “fear or favor”. And, if the current crop of chief officers, Linkedin technocrats with warrant cards, aren’t up to the challenge? Sack them. Keep indulging failure, though, and the uniforms on our streets might eventually be less hi-viz yellow and more camouflage and khaki.

Speaking about the refugees the Government spirited into the UK, Defence Secretary John Healey said that anyone who has come into this country “is checked carefully” in advance, telling Times Radio that known criminals would naturally be precluded from coming. I’m sure Healey speaks in good faith, having been assured by Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Home Office officials that the correct protocols were followed. 

But there are reasons to worry. Robert Clark, a former soldier who worked on the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy (Arap) suggests that many of this latest cohort weren’t properly vetted. They are here purely because their data was leaked. The suggestion, then, is that there haven’t been adequate checks to establish whether individuals had been radicalized or had extremist connections. Even the individual who threatened to leak the dataset to the Taliban has apparently been allowed into the UK, along with his family. I would suggest he has already provided ample evidence of his character. 

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Not that vetting is an exact science. As a counterterrorism officer, I held “DV”, or developed vetting status, for over 20 years. This clearance allows someone to routinely handle top secret material unsupervised in order to assess intelligence. I worked in anticorruption, the department responsible for investigating suspect officers and recruits. I know, in short, how the process works, and it’s a far from watertight process — and that’s before you factor in the data abyss that is Afghanistan. 

Vetting foreign nationals allows authorities to assess risk. But without access to basic records from a newcomer’s place of origin, Britain is unable to perform even the most basic due diligence. Especially given this country’s rising community tensions, you don’t have to be especially cynical to suggest this might explain Whitehall’s frantic attempts to keep this operation secret. 

At the outset, it’s worth emphasising that the British authorities aren’t completely blind when it comes to the Afghan arrivals. Operation Herrick, the UK military deployment to the country, operated for 12 years. British intelligence officers, from the military and Secret Intelligence Service, ran a range of local agents and informants in-country. At the same time, the Army has a proven, professional intelligence capability — UK police forces closely followed their intelligence corps model when developing their own information management models. And, to be fair, Afghans arriving on other refugee schemes do seem to have been checked out. 

But the question I would ask here is how much their intelligence-gathering envisaged a situation like “Operation Rubific”. Presumably, while in Afghanistan, army sources would have been pointed towards operations against insurgents, not harvesting routine data of the sort often invaluable to vetting officers — the sort which would include employment and family histories, as well as financial records. Yes, there might be tangential or collateral intelligence, whether criminal records or local gossip. But there will also be gaps.

Then there’s the problem of local recordkeeping. Even if we were able to access pre-Taliban police records, I doubt that would yield a great deal of useful information. Add to this cultural differences, whereby matters considered noteworthy here would never be recorded in Afghanistan. This is a country with an unenlightened attitude to women and safeguarding. 

If, meanwhile, relocated Afghans have ever been to the EU, or have family there who they might seek to bring here, we’ll also need to access foreign records. That poses yet another information headache for hard-pressed British officers, especially when European standards aren’t always great. I remember dealing with the Polish police force and receiving an impressive amount of data, including criminal records and case files, allowing me to make an informed assessment of risk to an individual. On the other hand, asking the same questions of a police force in the Low Countries or Romania only got me the basics. 

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There’s a broader problem here too. Basic police checks run the names of individuals through a range of systems. As someone’s vetting level increases — in other words, the risk their role or presence poses — inquiries will include character references and financial disclosures. “Developed Vetting”, the highest level, involves officers holding intrusive one-to-one interviews with candidates. The point here is that all these procedures rely on the quality of data available. And, again, that poses real challenges for arrivals from somewhere like Afghanistan, especially when Operation Herrick was wound down over a decade ago, leaving a significant information gap.

The data gap, then, is full of risks — and that’s before we consider the broader political dimension. As former Defense Secretary Ben Wallace assures us, his motives for hushing up Operation Rubific were primarily for those of operational security. But concerns around the public reaction — including serious disorder — would surely have featured. As one Cabinet Office official noted, “15 out of the 20 primary disorder hotspots” during last summer’s riots were in the 20% of local authorities hosting the highest numbers of resettled Afghans.

Might this explain why the superinjunction lasted so long? Our politicians know our multicultural model has the potential to turn into a powder keg. They would surely have been keen to prevent Operation Rubific from lighting another fuse.

London’s reputation for street crime is now on a par with Naples or Rio, and things have become so bad that it’s starting to threaten its lucrative hospitality industry. The prestigious PPHE hotel group has upped its security budget, citing a lackluster police response to crime. Elsewhere, TV stars grapple with thieves in Kensington cafés, while the city’s elite are increasingly warned not to wear expensive jewelry out in public — lest they become the next Blue Stevens.

Yet amid the rising disorder, one crime stands out: phone theft. Around 80,000 were reported stolen in London last year, a significant rise from 2023. These industrial-scale numbers are reflected elsewhere: stolen handsets are sold to dealers, often owners of independent electronics shops, before being unlocked or stripped for parts. They’re shipped to Asia, Africa and the Middle East, where differences in regional blocking technologies means they’re easily recycled. “We had a victim whose iPhone was snatched,” says a detective I’ll call Chris. “Five days later, it paired with her Apple watch. The stolen phone was in Dubai.” Phone theft also drives fraud: unlocked, they allow thieves to access bank accounts and payment apps. It’s a very modern mixture of cyber-burglary, embezzlement and identity theft.

The Metropolitan Police, when not bickering with the tech industry over theft-proofing, pleads a dangerous lack of resources. They also point to successful proactive operations combating thieves, involving undeniably gutsy motorcycle cops “nudging” fleeing offenders off their bikes — and risking the wrath of the Independent Office of Police Conduct if anything goes wrong. Yet on the thieves go, their loot now representing some two thirds of thefts right across London.

London’s iPhone theft hotspot is the junction of Oxford Street and New Bond Street. When I visit, the area feels spick and span, still basking in the afterglow of a recent facelift. New Bond Street, as ever, is a gilded temple of conspicuous consumption. It’s also pedestrian-friendly, with low curbs and wide pavements: an ideal escape route for thieves using e-bikes or scooters. The streets are peppered with alleyways, rat-runs and cut-throughs, perfect for what police still quaintly term “decamping” from the scene of the crime.

Sadly, I see no sign of the Metropolitan Police on this sunny weekday afternoon. Instead, Oxford Street is patrolled by the occasional private security guard. On New Bond Street, sharp-suited heavies, wearing bodyguard-style earpieces, loiter in shop doorways. As for the shopping public, they’re busy staring into their phones and bumping into each other. In short? The area’s an El Dorado for thieves. Luckily, I spy no suspects loitering with intent. It’s just after 12 — and, if experience is anything to go by, they’ll just be lighting their first spliff of the day.

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“They’re usually under 18, not in work or education, and their parents don’t give a shit,” says Chris, who works at a busy London police station, of the typical phone snatcher. “Where I work, most are from an ethnic minority. Some are on the periphery of gang activity.” Chris’s observations are borne by the statistics. In 2022, for instance, around 60% of London’s robbery suspects were black or Asian. The age of offenders is significant too: dealing with young offenders is challenging for police. Because they’re still juveniles, it doesn’t matter if they’ve just robbed someone at knifepoint. Safeguarding and risk management procedures still apply, while custody sergeants want them discharged sharpish. Never mind that phone thieves often graduate working the County Lines, shipping drugs for big-shot dealers. “Once they’ve gone down that path,” Chris says, “there’s usually no going back.”

My patrol takes me to Jermyn Street, immaculately tailored men peacocking outside Turnbull and Asser. On Ormond Yard, a homeless woman injects herself under a fingernail with a hypodermic needle. Wasn’t London ever thus? You could be forgiven for thinking street robbery is as old as the city itself, from highwaymen to Dickensian gangs of pickpockets: a legacy brutally demonstrated by Britain’s lively history of deportations and public hangings. For the latter, Tyburn was the execution spot of choice; these days, the gallows have been replaced by Marble Arch, just at the bottom of Oxford Street.

In truth, though, that’s only half the story. From the interwar period until the Seventies, the capital’s streets were comparatively well ordered. Londoners lived in a culture of high trust, conditioned by wartime obedience. The streets were patrolled by physically imposing coppers. Any “clips around the ear” were administered without fear of phone cameras or CCTV. Mugging — or street robbery — was relatively unusual.

By the Seventies, though, robbery was on the up. Criminologists declared concerns over mugging a moral panic, preferring to concentrate on race and inequality rather than property rights. Such beard-stroking was of little consolation to mugging victims, or the cops tasked with catching offenders. That echoed a broader shift. During the Seventies and Eighties, crime became increasingly politicised and, yes, a fair share of the blame lies with the police — the Brixton riots were sparked by the racist application of “sus” laws, subsequently replaced by stop and search procedures under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.

By the mid-Nineties, London was suffering another wave of muggings: nearly 24,000, a 50% rise in 1990 (in 2024, there were 35,000 cases of robbery reported, excluding non-violent theft). Launching “Operation Eagle Eye”, then-Commissioner Sir Paul Condon faced media opprobrium by warning “it is a fact that very many of the perpetrators of mugging are very young black people”. The politics of race has always dogged street crime investigation, and it drives cops nuts; as a robbery squad officer in Notting Hill, the majority of suspects were usually of Moroccan or Afro-Caribbean origin. Confronted with allegations of racism, or disproportionate stop and search, frustrated officers would ask: are people lying to us about the person who robbed them? Yet, somehow, the problem was always police prejudice. This in a city, remember, where nearly half of Londoners are now from ethnic backgrounds.

But if racism in the Brixton mould is a thing of the past, the Met’s structure remains problematic. The service was once divided into smallish divisions, based around local police stations. Then, later, it moved to borough-based policing. When I investigated robberies, there were no iPhones; thieves coveted laptop computers, Rolex watches and jewellery. On my first day on an “Eagle Eye” team, our detective sergeant took us to a café on Golborne Road. There, in the shadow of Trellick Tower, the man known as “Mick the Fish” (don’t ask) explained the café was popular with robbers. “You need to know your punters,” he explained.

We ate breakfast and bantered with suspects, our mutual loathing almost comedic. Officers cultivated informants, an activity now forbidden for street cops. At any rate, our team became part of the street’s weft and weave. This autonomy meant we’d arrest two or three suspects per shift, raid properties, restore stolen goods and take offenders off the street. We eventually received an intelligence report from an informant revealing how “the Golborne Road boys are sick and tired of the Notting Hill robbery squad”. We framed it. These days, of course, such behavior might constitute harassment, but effective street policing isn’t always pretty. Knowing the game was up, our regular customers decamped to nearby Harrow Road, becoming a neighboring division’s issue. You never fully eliminate crime, you merely move it around.

These days, of course, the Met has sold most of its police stations. Notting Hill nick is a satellite office, without public access. Plainclothes cops no longer eat fry ups with their suspects, like some west London ripoff of Heat. Nor are they embedded in the communities they police. To save money on admin costs, the Met created multi-borough “Basic Command Units”. Notting Hill division, for example, was swallowed into a vast “Central West BCU”, covering three boroughs: Westminster, Kensington & Chelsea, and Hammersmith & Fulham. Westminster (nicknamed “Westmonster” by Met officers, due to its unwieldiness) has London’s highest incidences of phone theft. To put the figures into context, the “CW BCU” has a population of over half a million, not including tourists. That’s about the same as Liverpool or Bradford. Yet the BCU is policed, 24/7, by only 1800 officers — and most of those aren’t uniformed response constables.

“Each BCU only has one proactive team,” laments Chris, one overworked officer. I ask how many officers work on each team. “On average,” he answers, “a dozen or so plainclothes cops.” They concentrate on the “big” stuff: gangs and knife crime. That leaves phone thefts, left to neighborhood policing teams without resources or experience. To be fair, senior officers aren’t clueless here. “When the Met was borough-based, we had relative autonomy when it came to problem-solving,” says David Spencer, a former detective chief inspector and now at Policy Exchange. “There were borough-based proactive teams to tackle street crime.” Not so now, with the introduction of monster BCUs.

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Yet as my experience on Operation Eagle Eye taught me, there’s no substitute for putting a name to a face. Much of the blame, predictably, can be placed on bone-headed bureaucracy. For instance, officers have to comply with legislation concerning everything from health and safety to diversity. Crime reports, run on a notoriously unreliable new IT system called Connect, require meticulous evidence of compliance. Overwhelmed by the volume of allegations, officers find themselves reacting to crimes rather than crime-fighting. CID officers largely now exist to complete drop-down boxes on forms, issuing crime reference numbers for insurance claims.

“The guidelines crime managers must follow are over-prescriptive and unwieldy,” Spencer summarizes. “They remove officer discretion.” For their part, senior detectives spend a disproportionate amount of their time reviewing cases, tracking performance metrics and “managing risk”. Spencer also cites the Met’s “victim-focused” approach — a well-meaning initiative that nonetheless means more bureaucracy tracking “public satisfaction”. As a result, officers spend more time feeding investigative processes than actually dealing with crime.

As so often in modern British policing, meanwhile, radical change is frowned upon; the Met has little tolerance for dissent. The last thing an ambitious officer should do is rock the boat, despite New Scotland Yard heading full steam towards an iceberg. Such a sluggish corporate culture inevitably brings second-order challenges too. “Too many student officers are very young, very inexperienced and poorly-paid,” says Chris. “They were sold a lie when they joined, that policing was going to be like a TV drama.” Many quit. Then there’s the “toughness” question, the sense that some young officers just aren’t robust enough. “One lad started crying when a suspect began swearing at him,” Chris says. “I’m not kidding. He had to take the rest of his shift off. When experienced officers quit, due to pay and conditions, they wanted graduates to ‘professionalize’ the job. Now they’ve got them.”

Back in central London, I finish my patrol. Outside The Golden Lion pub in St James’s, I see London’s finest for the first time. Two police vans, full of bored-looking coppers. They’re probably policing a noisy pro-Palestine protest nearby, another reason why the Met struggles to patrol London’s streets. The service is pulled in every direction, drowning in a septic tank of political and administrative sludge.

No wonder Oxford Street’s snatchers are so brazen. It’s a lawlessness that transcends stolen iPhones — but has rather come to symbolize Britain’s threadbare social contract. Not that Whitehall seems to care. In its latest spending review, the Government virtually ignored policing, forcing council taxpayers to foot the bill for additional resources. Londoners shouldn’t expect anything from City Hall either. Sadiq Khan has been criticized for offering platitudes on phone crime, even as he focuses on post-theft blocking technologies over actually arresting thieves. He’s also been criticized for misrepresenting knife crime statistics and equivocating over stop and search.

That’s deeply unfortunate, and not just because a stolen iPhone will set you back $800. Street crime, after all, can easily escalate. A phone today, a Rolex tomorrow — and then a stabbing. The preventative measures necessary will always be the same: robust policing; stop and search; getting to know the suspects. Like all simple solutions, however, the gap between theory and practice is vast. Whichever way you look at it, there’ll be other victims like Blue Stevens.

We watched people come and go. Black and white, but mainly black. The estate was largely Afro-Caribbean, which is a problem when you’re perpetually accused of only stopping black people. A few of the pub-goers were known cannabis dealers. They saw our marked car and either sucked their teeth or pointed their fingers at us like pretend guns. “There you go,” said Stuart, nodding at a tall black man wearing a tracksuit. The man was leaving the beer garden, wreathed in sickly white smoke. “That’s my man.”

The thief-taker got out of the car and began reciting the catechism known to all police officers: “I can smell weed on you, mate. I’m gonna search you. Now, have you got anything in your pockets you shouldn’t have, anything sharp?” Then he continued with a heavily-abbreviated version of the information required under Section 1 of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984. The search led to the discovery of several wraps of crack and a quantity of cash. The man in the tracksuit was a dealer who the thief-taker had been keeping a beady eye on. And, yes, the scent of weed was the key to the door.

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I later tried the same trick myself. Stopping a suspect who smelled of weed, I searched him and found a car key. The suspect, who didn’t have a driving license, had “borrowed it”. Inside the car? A dozen freshly stolen leather jackets from a local motorcycle shop. I was no thief-taker, but then again the guy with the stolen jackets wasn’t exactly Moriarty, either.

The tactic is hardly a secret. London’s police are sanguine about cannabis use unless you’re — to put it bluntly — taking the piss. During my stint as a uniformed officer I was fairly liberal in my application of the law, but found it was a useful tool for catching bad guys. And, for some reason, petty criminals love weed. Sadly, such earthy truths offend the sensibilities of those in power. Which is presumably why Sadiq Khan’s recent review of drugs use in the capital recommends decriminalizing small quantities of cannabis for personal use. The review, which pompously treats London as an independent state rather than the UK’s capital city, was (of course) headed by an impeccably liberal lawyer and close friend of Tony Blair, Charlie Falconer. Falconer said officers use such tactics “disproportionately against black men”, and that the enforcing of drugs laws is an “incredible friction point between the police and black communities”.

The politics behind this review are typical of London’s mayor: performative, headline-grabbing, problematic for policing and designed to garner support from Labour’s base, especially younger voters. Unlike his predecessors, Khan’s support for the Met has been equivocal, despite policing being one of his only significant Mayoral powers (the other is transport).

Khan is the third London mayor since the role was created. I have been an officer under all three London mayors, of whom Khan has been the most unhelpful to policing. Ken Livingstone, despite his reputation as a Left-winger, understood the importance of robustly policing a capital city. Boris Johnson had the good sense to subcontract policing to his more capable deputies and, eventually, to get rid of the lackluster police chief Sir Ian Blair. What of Sir Sadiq? His opportunism is shameless yet instructive. How so? Delve into the small print and you’ll see how, practically, his proposals are unworkable. The Mayor said: “The report makes a compelling, evidence-based case for the decriminalization of possession of small quantities of natural cannabis, which the Government should consider.”

This is where the proposal falls apart, or perhaps the mask slips. Small quantities of natural cannabis? Patrol officers would be required to become mobile pharmacologists. All arrests for drug possession are usually “on suspicion of”, because, at the moment they seize the drug, officers can’t evidentially prove precisely what it is. Another difficulty is that, compared to other drugs, cannabis covers a wide spectrum, from brain-rotting psychoactive skunk to the sort of mellow, artisan weed smoked by surfer dudes on Cornish beaches. How, in the rain, at 2am, is a police officer meant to know the difference? This betrays the report’s likelier purpose: the police officer isn’t meant to stop and search in the first place. Just leave the kids alone! Perhaps I’m a natural cynic. Or perhaps I’m simply a keen student of Sadiq Khan’s approach to Ulez “evidence-gathering”, whereby his strident claims about air pollution and congestion were found wanting. Either way, this looks more like an attack on stop and search as a tactic.

What we should pay attention to is the direction of travel. Stop and search is a totemic issue for progressives, and always has been. Is it always fairly applied? No. Is it necessary? Yes. Is Sadiq Khan prepared to tackle the reasons why stop and search is so contested, or simply pander to his political base? I would, were I able, lock Sir Sadiq in a room and make him watch the third season of David Simon’s TV epic The Wire. Written by progressive creatives for a largely progressive audience, The Wire is nonetheless the best drama ever produced on urban policing. The episode titled “Amsterdam” concerns the consequences of an experiment in decriminalizing drugs in order to ease community tension and treat addiction as a health issue. The experiment goes badly wrong when gangs realize parts of Baltimore have essentially turned into a free-fire zone, a place where they can ply their trade unhindered by local officers.

As ever, though, British politicians trail their American counterparts by five to 10 years. American cities have experimented with varying degrees of drugs liberalization in cities such as Portland and Los Angeles, with predictably dystopian results. The criminal ecosystem, the real one as opposed to the one described by academics, thrives on weakness of any kind. A city weakening its stop-and-search policies for small amounts of drugs, as the Americans discovered, has a cumulative (if not intended) effect as users and dealers drag with them their associated social problems. Portland was transformed from an artsy, bohemian city into an open-air drug market and refugee camp for the addicted homeless. Los Angeles and San Francisco, with their lax prosecutors and defanged police, became lawless paradises for shoplifters and robbers.

Even San Francisco, America’s most liberal city, has had enough. Its Democrats have rediscovered the benefits of robust policing, prosecution and sentencing. The lax policing was an inheritance from the academic revulsion at the “Zero Tolerance” policies of the early Nineties, whereby law enforcement targeted minor offenses. The approach was viewed by criminologists as oppressive and ineffective, a verdict that ignored the “lived experience”, usually so respected by academics, of people living in communities blighted by criminality and antisocial behavior.

This light-touch style of policing is finally going back out of fashion. Naturally, the academics concerned have yet to admit they were wrong — just that their pet policies “haven’t been implemented properly”. Predictably, the milquetoast British College of Policing also reviles Zero Tolerance law enforcement.

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Alternatively, closer to home, Sadiq could simply Google Brian Paddick, the real-life police commander who posited legalizing cannabis in the interests of “community relations”. This isn’t to unnecessarily disparage Brian, who in my experience was a fundamentally decent man. Serving in Brixton in the early Eighties, he became evangelical about reforming stop and search. The results of his experiment in what I’ll call “Total Tolerance” are disputed, but like the Mayor’s review, it was about much more than implementing drugs laws. It was, again, about a direction of travel, part of the ouroboros of a debate between “robust” versus “soft” policing. The answers are, of course, situational, complex and uncomfortable. This reality is too often lost on policymakers.

My experience suggests that drugs laws are like speed limits. If you set the motorway limit at 70mph, invariably the police (although not money-grubbing cameras) will usually turn a blind eye until you hit 90-ish. Why? Resources. Discretion. Common sense. It’s the same with minor drugs offenses. Politicians like Sadiq Khan don’t really like stop and search. They don’t trust the police, either. Why doesn’t Khan simply say so? Or would that involve opening fresh cans of worms about police funding, training, recruitment and leadership? Including, of course, the Mayor’s. He is, after all, the de facto Police and Crime Commissioner for Greater London.

The wheel goes round and round… and where will it stop? We all know, actually, but that never deters progressives like Khan from trying another spin. In the meantime, the Mayor has his headline for the day. The quangocrats of his drugs review board will have been paid their stipends. The slow, inexorable creep of progressive policymaking continues, only ever heading toward one destination: failure.

Meanwhile, for operational police officers, the mood music is clear. It’s also clear to the activists seeking to undermine or even defund the police. All parties know that stop and search is something frowned upon by the powers-that-be. Should something go wrong, an officer is unlikely to be defended by those at the top. All this means that thief-takers like Stuart are no longer welcome in London’s police. Parts of London already resemble cannabis-stinking favelas. Perhaps, until Sadiq Khan notes the lessons from Portland and elsewhere, that’s where the city’s future lies.

I spent years talking to people like Darren. Over a beer. In interview rooms. In the back of police cars. I’ve listened to criminals having hair-raisingly candid conversations, courtesy of the listening devices we planted in their houses. I also remember doing the occasional “gate arrest” at Wormwood Scrubs. These occur when an inmate’s wanted by another force and arrested immediately upon release — sometimes without the prisoner’s prior knowledge. Our man, having just finished a six-stretch, gazed longingly at the pub at the end of Du Cane Road. It was a traditional stop for newly-released cons to enjoy a pint. Then he clocked us getting out of our unmarked car. You’ve never seen true misery etched on a man’s face until you’ve done a gate arrest. So, yes, Darren the informant was being honest: I know how much criminals hate prison.

Which is why I chuckled when I read David Gauke’s entirely predictable prison Sentencing Review. Gauke, a Mayite Tory of the wettest kind, proposes a package of reforms aimed at creating prison spaces through — you guessed it — a brace of early release schemes. He also suggests sentences of less than a year be scrapped entirely. Gauke proposes to reform community punishment via vague promises of “technological progress” (despite Serco being fined for failing to tag prisoners) and investment in the probation service. It’s the usual bromides from the militant wing of the penal reform establishment. This lobby has informed prison policy for decades, and only ever fails upwards.

There’s one shiny policy in the report, clearly added to distract journalists and commentators: the voluntary chemical castration of sex offenders. This is a good idea, but it doesn’t mitigate releasing every other flavor of criminal too. This is, Darren told me, because they don’t care about non-custodial sentences. They really, genuinely don’t. Probation? Please. The probation service refuses to accept that any criminal is beyond rehabilitation. For them, the word “recidivist” simply doesn’t exist. This isn’t an ex-policeman’s bias; I’ve had the policy explained to me by a senior probation officer. “What about serial rapists?” I asked her. She gritted her teeth and repeated the party line. “Nobody is beyond rehabilitation.” It was like talking to a cultist.

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Criminals are acutely aware of this orthodoxy and, if they can be bothered to make appointments (online, of course), they’ll tell their well-meaning probation officer exactly what they need to hear. Then it’s off to the pub to sell drugs, or indulge in a spot of consequence-free shoplifting. This is part of the wider problem with prison reform, which Gauke’s recommendations typify: the Government wants to save money while displaying a socially liberal distaste for incarceration. It’s not that the lanyard classes don’t accept the necessity of prison, but only consider it an extreme sanction. For them, it’s something reserved for the worst types of criminals (or people who post idiotic but politically forbidden posts on social media).

Yet on sentencing, Gauke is catastrophically wrong. Whatever he claims, short sentences really do have a role to play. Offenders given, say, a six-month term will already have a lengthy criminal record. It’s a circuit breaker. But if short sentences have limited efficacy in terms of reoffending, but what about the victims of crime, the communities blighted by recidivist offenders?

I once worked on a west London council estate. One of our regulars was a 19 year old given to criminal damage, robbery and stealing cars. He was violent, clever and sly, often targeting elderly women for their pension money. You won’t be even remotely surprised to learn he later became a prominent gang member, dealing in drugs and firearms. Even the “dogs on the street”, as they say in Belfast, knew this was his career trajectory, and no earnest probation officer was going to stop him from fulfilling his potential. As police officers, we made it our mission to put the teenager in prison. He was gone for six months, during which time the estate felt palpably different. The crime rate also dropped significantly. This was due to a single kid, who required a lengthy criminal record (and hundreds of hours of police time) before a court was prepared to send him to Feltham.

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So no, my concern wasn’t for the offender — it was for his victims. I’ve seen how locking up vicious, antisocial offenders offers respite. What about them, Mr Gauke? Not that we should really be surprised. The British criminal justice system is like a crumbling house with the world’s worst plumbing. The police, inexperienced and badly led, are meant to see their role as protecting the law abiding from criminals. They’re pumped, via leaky pipes, into the courts. The courts, run by lawyers paid by the hour, tend to endlessly re-route the u-bend. The courts feed into the prison service, who view their role as keeping a lid on the madhouse until their charges are released on license. This feeds, via a septic tank, into the probation service, charged with the Herculean task of reintegration and mentoring.

Punishment, in this context, is conspicuous by its absence. Again, criminals know this, even if David Gauke doesn’t. Unlike criminal justice, the criminal mindset is about results not process. It’s clever. It views rules merely as weaknesses to be gamed. Any half-decent criminal would run rings around the millionaires on Dragon’s Den. They understand how drug markets work, how to safely fence a stolen Land Rover. They can run multi-platform retail fraud schemes. They’re fully equipped to exploit a criminal justice system designed by David Gauke.

As for the prisons themselves? As an anticorruption investigator, I saw how the prison service was unremittingly hostile from an intelligence perspective. More than a few of our cases involved prison officers assisting offenders. The prison service, like the police, was hollowed out by austerity. Experienced officers left, replaced by a younger and more impressionable cohort. The recent case of Keri Pegg is instructive. Pegg, who joined the Prison Service as a graduate entrant, was made governor in only six years. She’s now a prisoner herself, after being caught having an affair with a major drug dealer. As part of her defense, she stated how her “progressive approach” upset senior prison service figures. Quite. My team once ran a surveillance operation on a prison to track a target visiting an inmate. We ran our plan via a police prison liaison officer to explore opportunities for assistance. “No way,” came the reply. “The screws control heroin distribution inside, so they monitor the carparks for potential police activity. I’d stay well clear.” As I said, the criminal justice system is a badly plumbed house, and the septic tank leaks everywhere.

Then there’s rehabilitation. Yes, it can rebuild their lives, but it’s still a roll of the dice, in more ways than one given the expense required. Criminal lifestyles are exactly that: lifestyles. Counseling or learning a new skill are unlikely to persuade career criminals to work a nine-to-five like everyone else. It may be uncomfortable to say: but there are too many criminals for whom “rehabilitation” as currently constituted is unlikely to work. Yet, as we have seen, that’s taboo across Whitehall and beyond.

Are there alternatives? Possibly. It would require intrusive intervention and lifestyle management around work, accommodation and healthcare. But even if that worked, and that’s by no means guaranteed, you’re still left with a massive bill at the end — to the point where you risk rewarding those who break the law, to the millions detriment of taxpayers who don’t. The report mentions one possible sanction with teeth: fines and restrictions on travel and driving. Yet sanctions must also come with the means to enforce them, and be in no doubt: this work will fall to over-stretched police officers.

And anyway, not even the good ideas really deal with what I call the “spectrum” of criminality. After all, the very term “criminal” is pejorative. The British criminal justice establishment tends to fixate on socially troubled people as opposed to career criminals. These are people who habitually find themselves in court for minor offenses and are, eventually, jailed. They might be homeless and often suffer from mental health or dependency issues. Or they might just be listless and foolish. There’s excellent work being done with these kinds of offenders by charities, who I don’t see mentioned in this review, who offer common-sense solutions like skills and training mentoring, as well as treatment for dependency issues. Prison isn’t the most suitable place for many “accidental” criminals with chaotic lifestyles to put their lives back on track — though sometimes establishment sympathy bleeds into excuse-making. Where is the line between personal and societal failure? And where does protecting the public fit in?

To me, the Government appears to have conflated two problems — “accidental” and career criminals — yet proscribed a single solution. This is a mistake. Sometimes, the only tool available to police to take a criminal out of circulation is a provable offense carrying a short sentence. These, under Gauke’s proposals, will no longer exist. The career criminal I mentioned earlier, that granny-robbing future gangster? He’d be at home, playing his Xbox and waiting to slip off his tag.

And so the Government will shave money off of the prison budget, no doubt to ameliorate Labour’s backbench insurgency over benefits. Carefully gamed, the inevitable spike in crime figures caused by releasing thousands of criminals early, aided and abetted by ineffective police performance, will hopefully be forgotten by the next election. In fact, I suspect the next prison review, written by a “Blue Labour” figure with more traditional views, will duly arrive by about 2028. It’s just a shame that our political class only ever seems to listen to people like David Gauke.

Scotland’s current gang war can feel like a Netflix series, from the mob dynasties and the firebombing to the villains-in-hiding nicknamed “Miami”. The current bout of feuding apparently concerns the theft of a cocaine shipment worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yet amid the social media threats and the Costa-del-Dubai exiles, the country’s gangsterism is actually a lot like Hay Drive itself — a strangely retro throwback, to a time before mass migration and when gangsterism was strictly local. It all speaks to the relative isolation of Britain’s Celtic fringe, and offers a useful reminder that not all our problems can be blamed on foreigners.

Much like the country itself, English organized crime is increasingly cosmopolitan. Dominated by multinational gangs, it’s a teeming bazaar, chaotic and transient. Loyalties change and business models adapt, all to the buzz of 24/7 TikTok commentary and grime crews. Criminal intelligence analysts find tracking this stuff like nailing jelly to the wall. By comparison, the Scottish underworld has a vibe reminiscent of a Berkshire high street circa 1995: dependable and dominated by big names. The Daniels and Lyons, two of the long-standing crime families involved in the current feud, might as well be Debenhams and The Gap. To paraphrase another retro classic, it’s a case of two tribes go to war.

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I’ve had a taste of crime north of the border. Serving as a London detective, I was sworn in as a constable at Glasgow Sheriff’s Court. It felt curiously like being in an old Western, swearing an oath like a deputy and signing a register. Working on a corruption investigation, I was given local police powers; English cops have no jurisdiction in Scotland (except for specific offenses, usually around terrorism). As a London copper, Glasgow felt reassuringly familiar, and not just because it’s my favorite Scottish city. Prior to the 2013 amalgamation of Scottish forces into Police Scotland, the city’s police were part of the Strathclyde force, known as the “Scottish Met”.

In my experience, Met officers enjoyed a good working relationship with their Glasgow counterparts. And, like the Met, surrounding forces saw Strathclyde as overly dominant. They were happy to see it taken down a peg or two. Many Glasgow coppers lamented its passing, as police are wont to do whenever change occurs.

Even so, criticism of the new force is about more than nostalgia. Politics often trumps operational effectiveness, with performance-obsessed restructuring sucking up organizational bandwidth better spent on crimefighting. Relations with a deeply political SNP administration have occasionally been strained too — and that was before the investigation into Nicola Sturgeon. Some officers have also felt the SNP are more focused on independence than bread-and-butter issues like education, health, or indeed crime. Did this mean the police took their eye off organized crime? This is the immediate context in which Scottish gangsterism should be viewed: that of distracted ministers and a mismanaged police force.

Even so, Scottish mobsterism is about something deeper than bureaucracy. The country only hosts 5.5 million people, or about 8% of the UK population. And, despite its regional differences, it’s 95% white, something England hasn’t been since the Eighties. The occasionally overegged issue of religious sectarianism aside, that makes Scotland practically a monoculture, certainly compared to Birmingham or London. More to the point, these demographics also make the working class communities of Glasgow and Edinburgh less transient, more cohesive, and more able to resist the encroaching globalization of Somalis or Kurds.

Nor is this simply a Scottish phenomenon. Right across the Celtic fringe, the old ways survive, offering real life folk-horror, with houses burning instead of wicker men. I’m thinking, for instance, of Liverpool, forever an outpost of the Irish Republic. Liverpool boasts the UK’s primary seaport linking the UK to the coca fields of South America. As such, it’s coveted by criminals. Yet law enforcement legend has it that even the brutal Albanian mafia are wary of the city: local Scouse gangs are too well-organized and violent. As for Belfast? Northern Irish gangs overlap with psychotic paramilitaries. They’re armed with assault rifles, and deeply embedded in their communities, strutting like central-casting bad guys in an action movie. The long-suffering, politically hamstrung and underfunded PSNI can only operate a strategy of appeasement and semi-containment.

Contrast all this with London’s traditional crime families. These days, they’re good for little more than straight-to-streaming movies, ghost-written memoirs and the occasional nonagenarian funeral. Terry Adams, the former scourge of Clerkenwell, now spends more time with his art collection. “Dodgy” Dave Courtney shot himself. Other old-school “faces” keep their heads down.

And not only that. For apart from remaining mostly untouched by globalization’s international criminal diaspora, Scottish criminals also employ an MO The Krays and Charlie Richardson would recognize.

This old-school works on familiarity. On personalities. On an understanding of the other side’s way of doing business, be it drugs or protection rackets or smuggling. Not so much movie talk of “codes” or “honor” — but more of knowing what to expect from whom. The threats, acts of violence and feuding all follow a time-honored pattern. Furthermore, the criminals enjoy significant ties to the “respectable” non-criminal world. Compared to, say, London? It’s an anachronism. The south’s multicultural postcode gangs, middle-market cocaine dealers and county lines retailers operate in a relative state of freewheeling anarcho-capitalism.

Then there’s corruption. Organized crime of the sort blighting Glasgow and Edinburgh can’t exist without palms being greased. I’m not suggesting Scotland is uniquely prone to graft. It is, however, vulnerable for the reasons I’ve described: a close-knit monoculture, ruled by cliquish elites. This is why I’d suggest political institutions and law enforcement north of the border are disposed to a specific type of compromise. For instance, Glasgow’s Labour-dominated political machine, prior to the ascension of the SNP, was no stranger to scandal.

As for the police, it’s in a similar vein to the corruption that dogged the Met until the early 2000s, some of it involving working-class detectives and the criminals they grew up with. Some years ago, a Scottish detective told me about an investigation into drug money. It ended mysteriously, when the trail meandered too close to establishment figures. In more recent times, Police Scotland’s Organized Crime and Counter Terrorism Unit was recently compromised by corrupt detectives leaking intelligence. That flavor of corruption is less common in London nowadays, replaced by something equally damaging but perhaps more fragmented: corruption stemming from poorly-vetted, hastily-selected cops, led by inexperienced and out-of-touch managers.

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What, then, is the answer? As the violence escalates across Scotland’s two largest cities, the SNP-led administration has promised urgent action. A 100-strong task force is on the case, backed up by The National Crime Agency (NCA). As for the gangs themselves, the old ways are both a strength and a weakness. Yes, they’re deep-rooted, tough to infiltrate, operating a code of omertà. On the other hand, their identities are largely a matter of record. When your organized crime group has its own Wikipedia page? Yes, you’re lighting up the police radar. The authorities, therefore, know precisely who their targets are. The rest is a question of time, resources, political will and luck. Police officers specializing in proactive operations know all four are as rare as gold dust. And make no mistake: the Scottish Parliament will throw the kitchen sink at the gangs who so blatantly challenge their authority, even if the SNP has to grit its teeth and get support from south of the border.

Nor is needing help from Westminster very surprising. The “pointy end” of fighting organized crime can sometimes feel more like counterinsurgency than beat policing. The mantra “Clear, Hold, Build” sounds like something you might attempt in Basra or Helmand. And it’s something our establishment prefers to deny, not least as it undermines their cozy image of British policing. In this case, anyway, Police Scotland can’t handle the gang crisis alone: 100 officers is a trifling number for an operation of this scale. The NCA, and possibly the Security Service, will need to provide technical know-how and assets (like MI5 did with the Adams Family). At the less glamorous end of the business, meanwhile, local police will have to work doubly hard to develop intelligence by winning trust on the streets. This, as Scottish politicians are about to discover, illustrates the consequences of neglecting neighborhood policing, which has suffered swingeing cuts from Taunton to Aberdeen.

A three-ring circus of law enforcement will therefore be pitching up in Scotland, with its attendant politics, agendas and egos. Can its thoroughly modern methods, reliant on theoretical models, proportionality, human rights and technology, defeat such a tried-and-tested enemy? In Glasgow and Edinburgh, the Wicker Man burns. Let’s hope the officers sent to extinguish it have more luck than Edward Woodward.

Behind the scenes, though, these operations are actually far closer to movie-making. The terrorists are the actors, albeit unaware of their starring roles. Like a real-life Truman Show, their performances are watched, tracked and analyzed by a small army of detectives, surveillance operatives, technical specialists and intelligence officers. Finally, the director calls “Action!” and armed officers blow doors off hinges. Surprised-looking suspects are bundled into police vans. Then, because no bombs exploded, and no civilians died, we switch off. Keep scrolling. Continue with our lives. Which is as it should be.

Over the weekend, police held seven Iranian nationals in a textbook operation. The arrests were for offenses under the Terrorism Act and the new National Security Act (2023). Though the suspects were split into two unspecified groups, reports suggest they were only “hours away” from launching an attack. The target? Sources suggest it was possibly a synagogue. Or, given Tehran’s propensity to pursue dissidents abroad, a member of the Iranian diaspora. Whatever the truth, the potential for state-sponsored terrorism presents a sophisticated challenge for Britain’s security services — especially when balanced with so many other threats, and when internal instability only continues to soar.

On and off, I worked in counterterrorism policing and counterextremism for over a decade. And as a single cog in a vast machine, I witnessed firsthand how the threat evolves, from the IRA to Al-Qaeda. I’ve also seen how our security apparatus occasionally behaves like First World War generals: fixated on fighting the last war. After all, mass casualty, cell-based Islamist terrorism differs markedly from the lone-wolves of more recent times. Then there are the loose cannons, neo-Nazis like David Copeland or internet-radicalized killers like Axel Rudakabana. The latter, especially, now consumes much of counterterrorism’s operational bandwidth. Yet CT policing is also expected to deal with them all, like a chef asked to prepare sushi one minute and a Baked Alaska the next.

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It’s no wonder, sometimes, that they hanker after signature dishes. Is the flavor of the month now state-sponsored terrorism, possibly involving the infamous Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)? If so, they may be in for a struggle, not least in the way it could herald the rise of asymmetrical warfare on Britain’s streets. Sometimes known as “grey zone” operations, it inevitably means espionage and paramilitary activities blend into policing. My very first operation was a stark reminder of how blurred things can become, as I watched paramedics working on the body of an IRA man shot dead by police.

Later, I witnessed the challenges of investigating state-sponsored criminality during the Alexander Litvinenko murder inquiry. Wider political and diplomatic considerations impact on operational decision-making. Noses are tapped. Leads are declared “not in the public interest”. We can see this already, with the Foreign Office arguing the IRGC shouldn’t be proscribed as a terrorist organization (even though it unambiguously is). Our diplomats view the well-connected IRGC as an influential conduit into the Iranian regime. The politics, given Labour’s attempts to tread a fine diplomatic and political line over Gaza, are extremely sensitive for the Starmer government — a government, its critics allege, which is strategically over-reliant on Muslim votes.

To be fair, not all foreign spies possess the efficiency of Bond movie villains. As I discovered during the Litvinenko case, the Russian FSB were slapdash, operating flashily in plain sight. We hardly made it difficult for them; London in the 2000s was a sordid playground for dirty Russian money. MI5, preoccupied with mass-casualty Islamists, also took its eye off the Russian threat. Nonetheless, Litvinenko’s killers were hardly discreet, leaving traces of radioactive poison on an airliner and in a hotel room. Then there were the Russian military intelligence operatives who, as a cover story, declared an improbable interest in the spire of Salisbury Cathedral. In fact, they were trying to poison the defector Sergei Skripal, as open-source intelligence quickly proved. A recent trial of a Russian-sponsored spy ring consisting of Bulgarian agents was similarly amateurish. The hapless agents were nicknamed “Minions” by their handlers, after characters from the children’s movie Despicable Me.

Sadly for British intelligence officers, Iran poses a more substantial challenge than the GRU or FSB. The Iranians are, arguably, more disciplined and committed. There’s also a significant diaspora community in the UK. And though many British-Iranians are implacably opposed to the Mullahs, cover opportunities for agents are easier to find. The current legality of the ICRG also means regime front organizations can operate with relative impunity. No doubt the Home Office will be squaring up to ever-obdurate Foreign Office mandarins, seeking to pursue diplomacy whatever the cost.

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Then there’s the issue of motive and proportionality; the Russians, although shameless, intuit a line in the sand when murdering their own abroad. They are reckless, as they were when they released poison into the hotel where they met Alexander Litvinenko, but their targets are usually strategic. Though Putin is happy to crush potential turncoats, I suspect he wouldn’t back mass-casualty terror. The Iranians have no such qualms, considering themselves at perpetual war with the West and particularly Britain: the “Little Satan” to America’s plus-sized version. Jews are another target. Iranian-backed terrorists blew up a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, killing 85. I therefore find myself unsurprised to learn the regime is suspected of trying something similar in the UK, with MI5 publicly warning of hostile Iranian intelligence activity in this country.

The authorities face another challenge too. Terrorism — and counterterrorism — is a destabilizing issue in our increasingly Balkanized society. Countering state-sponsored threats involves a rapidly evolving kind of hybrid conflict. It’s a shadowy, difficult and sometimes controversial arena for the police and security services to operate in. Human rights laws and “proportionality” will be tested to their limits. Mistakes, as happened at Stockwell, will inevitably happen. Politics, usually of the grubbier variety, will be engaged. And, tragically, innocents will die if terrorists succeed. As the IRA famously said of their attempt on Margaret Thatcher’s life, the police have to be lucky every time. The terrorists? They only have to be lucky once.

Such terrorism, especially when linked as it is to religion, also has a knock-on effect to what we used to optimistically call “community cohesion”. The truth is that there are many in Britain who would be equivocal about an attack on the country’s Jews. Some would even support it. Chief constables, politicians and the Home Office are acutely aware how an attack might well provoke public disorder, as it did in the summer of 2024. As MI5 Director General Ken McCallum has warned: “There clearly is the possibility that profound events in the Middle East will either generate more volume of UK threat and/or change shape in terms of what is being targeted.”

No wonder, then, that radicalization and extremism will continue to flourish on all sides. Are the police ready for these grim consequences? Of allegations of two-tier policing? As I’ve written before, if the “Prevent” program is anything to go by, I doubt it. As it is, I would suggest we’re in an early-Seventies scenario, one where the situation in Gaza replaces Vietnam in helping to radicalize a new generation of activists. Only a tiny proportion need to convert their anger to violence to prompt widespread societal disruption.

Even worse, mainstream British policing is in a sorry state. Counterterrorism is well-funded, but draws its personnel directly from existing forces. Labour’s plans to create a national counterterrorism force doesn’t change the fact it will continue to recruit from the same pool of demoralized, inexperienced and poorly-led officers. Specialist officers aside, the societal impact of terrorism — such as the public disorder, which terrifies senior police and politicians — is still dealt with by conventional police officers using conventional methods. Counterterrorism and extremism is a broad, interconnected spectrum. To continue the movie comparison I made earlier, if an operation was a Hollywood movie, the hard yards of counter-extremism intelligence are a niche BBC 4 documentary, and even the biggest studios can only film so many epics at once.

If my experience is anything to go by, anyway, there’ll be barely time for the production team to enjoy a beer before they’re summoned to work on one sequel, and then another. Each time, there’ll be new stars. New plots. New locations. The directors and producers will have unrealistic expectations and deadlines, cursing the studio’s endless and contradictory demands. Meanwhile, the production team will follow their unsuspecting stars through viewfinders or rifle sights. They’ll listen to covert signals intelligence. They’ll meet in backrooms with nervy informants. And they’ll all be thinking the same thing: will we be lucky this time, or will they?

And so the counterterrorism show will trundle on, from the CCTV trawls to the criminal trails at the Old Bailey. Yet on the streets, and on the internet, angry voices will amplify, and the causes of extremism will only persist. The overlooked police and intelligence service officers who deal with it are the runners and extras of counterterrorism. And we should wish them luck too: over the years ahead, they’re surely going to need it.

Focused on extremism and counter-terrorism (CT), the government’s plans potentially mean UK forces finally adopting a continental-style model, one encompassing tiers of municipal, regional and national units. If nothing else, that could mean centralized, government-directed police bodies. Combined with the looming return of ID cards, there are reasons to worry. He may not mean to, but there’s a real chance that Sir Keir Starmer could yet establish a de facto secret police force — with ominous consequences for everyone in Britain.

According to the National Police Chief’s Council’s official report into the future of CT policing, our current policing model will last until at least 2030. But speaking to The Guardian, an official government source stated counter-terrorism policing units would now gain independence from local forces, becoming part of a new force and sitting in a newly minted “national center for policing”.

The issues this raises, not least in terms of accountability, are stark. The UK’s counter-terrorist policing network is vast, involving everything from the surveillance of Islamists to so-called “domestic extremism” — both of the far-Right and law-breaking protest group variety. The controversial Prevent programme is also part of its remit, even as CT policing works closely with MI5. The spooks, used to running rings around the police in Whitehall, will undoubtedly have their own views on this hefty-looking competitor.

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This isn’t to say reform is necessarily a bad thing. Having worked on several high-profile terrorist investigations, I understand the value of effective CT policing. Yet in the aftermath of the riots last summer, I fear an illiberal ghost in the machine. I suspect the hastily rejected Home Office “sprint report” — dismissing discussions of two-tier policing as “far-Right talking points” — has left an impression. The report may have had a stake hammered through its heart, with Security Minister Dan Jarvis insisting it contained no “new policy”. But does its spirit live on? I think it’s possible. After all, we have a Prime Minister whose views on the subject largely seem influenced by Netflix.

Why, then, this sudden change of direction for CT policing, especially when rumours of a national CT regime have clung to New Scotland Yard for years? Think again to the aftermath of the 2024 riots. Sir Keir, shaken by his inauspicious debut, acted tough with rioters and those accused of online incitement. Intriguingly, he also suggested the formation of a national public order force to quell future disturbances. A cynic might note that Labour has never been a keen advocate of public-order policing. Certainly, the party appeared to recuse itself over the contested pro-Palestine marches that have dogged London. Before last summer’s disturbances, indeed, the Labour seemed most worried about disorder in… 1984. Shortly after the last election, Labour committed itself to a public inquiry into the disturbances at Orgreave during the Miners’ Strike, red meat to the party’s restless Left.

Starmer’s proposed “gendarmerie” was short-lived. After all, a standing force of 2,000-plus riot cops would mean significant costs to cash-strapped constabularies. Instead, existing “mutual aid” arrangements, whereby forces lend each other personnel, will be rehauled. Nonetheless, the proposal offers a clue to government thinking: its ongoing desire for a centralized force it can direct and influence, if not control directly. Politicians will strenuously deny it, but this is as true now as it was in the late Nineties and early 2000s, when Tony Blair bewailed a lack of joined-up policing during disputes over petrol and farmers.

What, then, of the specifics? As it stands, National CT policing is headquartered with the Met in London. Its officers work on regional counterterrorism units, seconded from their home police forces. This causes issues around employment regulations: sometimes officers are forced to transfer forces completely to take a CT role on. These are legitimate concerns, which might say more about inflexible police regulations than the efficacy of the CT network. Nonetheless, CT is chronically short of experienced detectives. Why? Because it draws them from austerity-hit local police forces, which themselves suffer acute shortages of qualified investigators.

In short, CT doesn’t exist in isolation from mainstream policing: it’s umbilically attached to it. But does that mean Starmer craves a British version of the FBI, with its own directly recruited staff? This is where the vicious politicking between senior law enforcers and spooks comes in, not least in the form of the National Crime Agency (NCA). Formerly the Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA), the NCA was a Blairite attempt to create a national force, liberated from the tedious bonds of police control, scrutiny or accountability.

Rising from the ashes of the old National Crime Squad, the wonky phoenix was still riven by turf wars between former police and customs investigators. The NCA is now colloquially known as either “No Coppers Allowed” or the “National Chaos Agency”, with its officers drawn predominantly from the civil service. Essentially there to fight organized crime, it’s not been a tremendous success. This isn’t simply sour grapes from a former copper either. I’ve spoken to serving officers, and they bemoan its risk-averse and sluggish culture. The NCA also has accountability issues. After all, the NCA answers to central government. Its “agents” can simultaneously hold the powers of police, immigration and customs officers (something they’ll proudly tell you).

The NCA, which initially couldn’t decide if it was an intelligence or law-enforcement body, was once cruelly mocked as “MI7” by the real spooks. Yet that hasn’t stopped the Government from airing another idea: “brigading” national CT policing with the NCA. That’d create a veritable super-agency, one responsible for terrorists, gangsters — and, er, incels.

The NCA will undoubtedly be salivating at the prospect: CT is the jewel in the policing crown, offering prestige, promotions, influence and funding, and will finally condemn those “MI7” jibes to history. Indeed, this internecine struggle is as important to some senior officers and civil servants as catching terrorists. That’s unsurprising: a national CT body would, at last, be genuinely comparable to a British FBI. More alarmingly, it might even be a prosecutorial version of MI5, a powerful, European-style secret police, of the sort Britain has traditionally shied away from. After all, the existing Security Service shares similar thematic responsibilities, but has no powers of arrest. Though it has primacy over CT intelligence, it doesn’t over any reactive investigations.

How would this new all-powerful CT agency fit into existing British law enforcement? It’s not hard to imagine a national body, some 10,000 officers strong, eventually flexing its muscles and rebelling against the spies. MI5 won’t take this lying down, possibly leading to a dilution of the CT model, dysfunction — or, given the current British state, both. On the other hand, MI5 might be told to concentrate on its pre-9/11 counterintelligence role, focusing on catching foreign spies on British soil. Certainly, there’s ample evidence of Russian and Chinese spooks operating in our towns and cities.

What about the operational issues at stake? In my experience, one of the British CT model’s strengths is precisely that umbilical connection to local forces I mentioned earlier. A detective with SO15, the Met’s counterterrorist command, can pick up a phone and talk directly to a community PC in a London borough. The detective might even have worked on the same beat. Local knowledge was immediate and easily available. Having experienced liaison between the Met’s intelligence bureau and the NCA, I cringe at what the future might look like. Sure, there will be the usual hot air about integrated local liaison, which too often means coalface officers grafting while specialists take the credit. I can anyway imagine local goodwill towards a national unit evaporating fast. CT operations can also only work if officers are flexible. Intelligence gathering — managing sources, analyzing reports, surveillance — is generally less resource-intensive than post-crime investigation. The latter usually involves literally hundreds of “boots on the ground” as detectives gather evidence, take statements and trawl CCTV footage. The current arrangement, with forces supporting operations on their own patches, therefore makes sense.

My real concern, though, is proportionality. As we saw with the Home Office’s notorious sprint report, an illiberal aura emanates from the department’s mandarins. Our political elites are obsessed with online “harms” and discourse, desperate to determine what constitutes “disinformation”. If you doubt how much police officers mimic the concerns of their political masters, consider this recent bulletin from the Prevent program to parents, prompted by none other than Adolescence. To quote the scheme’s coordinator, the fictional drama has prompted some “incredibly important” discussion, not so different from the Prime Minister’s own take.

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This week also saw more devils, more details, and potentially more unintended consequences: ID cards. A group of Blue Labour MPs aligned to Morgan McSweeney are rolling the turf for mandatory digital identification. This is another piece of reheated Blairism, adding credence to theories the former PM still wields considerable influence. An implicit justification for the move is surely illegal immigration — but, interestingly, Starmer would rather make us all carry papers than simply leave the ECHR.

I’ll leave the contradictions in the Prime Minister’s blend of human rights and authoritarianism for political commentators. Suffice it to say, a national CT force would be strongly in favor of universal digital ID. It would make tracking us all, for whatever reason, much easier. And never mind the ocean of contradictions. The average Labour MP usually has plenty to say about stop and search and racial profiling. Add identity cards to the mix? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

As I mentioned earlier, all this feels strangely European, oddly French, where every government department gets its own spooks to spy on each other. Britain has traditionally thumbed its nose at continental models of hapless municipal coppers, gendarmes and secret policemen.

That, it seems, is about to change. Most fair-minded people will agree the police must be as effective as possible, especially when protecting us from terrorism. But reasonableness and accountability matter too, things we largely took for granted when dealing with our cops in the past. We need to be confident officers are focused on the real threats to our safety, especially around Islamic extremism, and not get distracted by political hobby-horses. I’d therefore say this to our political class: be careful what you wish for. Especially given modern Britain’s grim record on free speech, I’m reluctant to trust what might well become Starmer’s secret police.

The place he’s talking about isn’t Turkish — nor is it much of a hairdresser. But it is almost certainly laundering drug money. Most UK high streets have similar barbershops, or nail bars, or mysteriously diner-free restaurants. Speaking under a pseudonym, Liam meets me not on a gritty housing estate, but in rural Hampshire, in a village with a green and a coaching inn. It’s hard to think of a better example of modern British drug dealing, of county lines stretching right across the nation.

The phenomenon has usually been depicted as an invasion of urban street gangs, trafficking narcotics to far-flung provinces. These days, though, the model has evolved, “growing arms and legs” as we used to say on the force. Dealers once ran drugs from their city redoubts. Now they’ve moved the business model into local communities. With the dealers, of course, comes misery: eye-watering violence, yes, but also innocents pressured by gangs into ruining their lives. It demonstrates how buyers are complicit in the suffering of others — and how even law-abiding Brits now struggle to escape the chaos, as disorder creeps from London estates to the leafy Home Counties.

The most obvious way of understanding Britain’s drug problem is by the numbers. Official statistics put the annual value of the country’s narcotics market at £10 billion, even as drug-related crime costs about the same again. This is before you consider the wider culture of drugs. Our national appetite for narcotics is insatiable. Gak. White. Chop. Chisel. Luca. Drugs permeate our society, like needles in an addict’s arm. A new Danny Dyer movie is called Marching Powder, for fuck’s sake. Apparently it’s a romantic comedy.

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Then there are the gangs themselves, bewildering in their variety. Somali gangs from southeast London traditionally ran drugs down to Kent, from Mogadishu to Margate if you will. All the while, Albanian and Turkish gangs from north and east London work Hertfordshire and Essex; west Londoners, mainly Afro-Caribbean, take Hampshire, Berkshire and Surrey. As those Home Counties names imply, this is a business that long ago transcended its urban roots. One year, a detective told me, the biggest post-Carnival party happened in that famous west London neighborhood — Basingstoke.

Given this ubiquity, across the southeast and beyond, it’s perhaps unsurprising that Britain’s drug trade happens more or less openly, clear enough when I swing by that barbershop in Hampshire. It’s a sepia-colored, dusty sort of place. Quiet. The sign looks amateurish. A young woman appears in the doorway, smoking a cigarette and checking her phone. She looks up and down the street, then disappears back inside.

The obviousness of the façade is almost comical, even as these places are the terminus of the whole business. Cash-only, high turnover businesses like barbershops are ideal places for laundering money. Some of the proceeds of drug-dealing enters the cash register dirty, coming out the other end as clean as a head of freshly washed hair. They are quickly set up and closed as necessary. And, in quiet rural communities, they can hide in plain sight.

At the other end of the funnel are mostly North African and Albanian mafias, importing drugs through corruption-addled ports like Rotterdam and Le Havre. Drugs are smuggled in lorries, cars and even body-packed. They come in on cargo ships, yachts and barges. The ingenuity of the smugglers is driven by profit and demand. These networks are violent and determined, prepared to murder judges, journalists and politicians. Parts of the Low Countries increasingly resemble soggier analogues of Juarez.

Then there’s the middle-market, the retailers, who brazenly use social media to plug their wares. They offer cheap drugs as tasters, to get users hooked. They also offer ubiquity and ease of supply. Cocaine dealers will always promise the best stuff, even though it’s often heavily cut.

For low-level dealers and for many users, this is basically victimless crime. The punters crave and the market provides. They’re wrong. Liam mentions an operation where a teenage runner kept hassling him to score cannabis. Liam wasn’t interested — he was after Class A drugs — but made the buy to get the kid off his back. When the police raided the teen’s house, they found a Kalashnikov in his bedroom. “People fail to appreciate how young they are,” one officer tells me. “These kids literally have nothing. They join gangs for a new pair of sneakers.” The lines have swallowed an entire generation of underclass children, lost boys and girls disappearing into an underbelly of near-Victorian squalor.

If you know where to look, there’s even worse here too. Another detective once told me about a North London drugs line operating in semi-rural Scotland. A local dealer “skanked” the gang out of £200. To set an example, London gang members forced him to have sex with a dog. At gunpoint. This isn’t an Irvine Welsh novel. This is real life.

All the while, dealers and runners bully vulnerable people into surrendering their homes to use as bases of operations — a practice known as “cuckooing”. This remains a hidden crime, far from the stereotypical Top Boy world of street gangs, zombie knives and drill music. It is, however, as crucial to the whole business model as those deserted rural barbers. Among other things, cuckooing offers cheap, discreet accommodation. It also provides a steady source of slave labor.

To understand how cuckooing works, I visit Catalyst Support. A charity supporting victims, it’s based in Woking, a commuter town off the M25. Hardly the hood — but Surrey is county lines turf now. Nick, a veteran caseworker, has the air of a man who’s seen and heard it all.

“We had one client coerced into moving county line gang members into his elderly parent’s house,” he tells me. “They ended up using the place to store and deal drugs.” Age seems to be no barrier to falling victim to cuckooing. In fact, middle-aged and older people, especially those with learning difficulties, are especially vulnerable.

Catalyst Support can offer assistance, but one theme is grimly familiar. As Nick says of another cuckooing case, which took place in a small English village, “it was obvious. A vulnerable person, living alone, suddenly has loads of new visitors? Yet none of the neighbors said a thing.” I can’t help but think of Liam’s barbershop, and how drugs are a “crime accelerator” prompting other types of offending. I’m thinking here of a spate of cashpoint thefts plaguing quiet service stations, gangs using gas tanks to blast ATMs from garage walls.

There are victories. The charity assisted the Home Office and other public bodies to formulate legislation that will make cuckooing a specific criminal offense. That’s progress, especially when victims are sometimes offenders too. Making it a specific crime, the charity suggests, helps clarify the status of cuckooing victims. Still, issues remain. Cuts often hit preventative services like Catalyst Support. Then there’s the perennial bane of third-sector organizations: performance indicators used to justify funding. Whitehall targets are often aimed at eye-catching problems like knife crime, rather than the hard yards of crimes like cuckooing.

The police have responded too: mapping gangs, markets and trafficking routes. In law enforcement vernacular, this is “Level Two” cross-border crime under the National Intelligence Model. Chief officers love theoretical models. They offer an illusion of control, despite highlighting the essentially parochial nature of UK forces. Criminals, it goes without saying, don’t recognize borders. But the cops? The border between Orpington and Swanley — marking where the Met gives way to Kent Police — once resembled the 38th Parallel.

This was a weakness gangs took advantage of, until police changed tactics. They formed cross-border task forces, to proactively target offenders. Even so, austerity-decimated local constabularies often found operations too time-consuming and resource-intensive. By the time they caught up, the lines were dug in. To be fair, officers tell me, support from the center has improved significantly. That’s especially true around identifying offenders from communications data.

Yet all the while, organized criminal groups have multiplied. This is partly due immigration patterns. For example, gangs from Sub-Saharan Africa are slowly replacing the Somalis who dominated southeast London a decade ago. Then there are settled ethnic gangs from Eastern Europe, who’ve been in the UK for decades. Criminals also rely on refugees from war-torn nations: young men used to chaotic lifestyles involving violence. And, crucially, these gangs quickly cross-pollinate with local, white criminal groups in provinces outside the big cities. The county lines are a truly multinational, multicultural enterprise.

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These new criminals are offering new products too. After the Taliban stymied heroin production in Afghanistan, the street price in America rocketed, leading to an increase in highly dangerous synthetic opioids from China. According to investigators, drugs like Nitazenes are the next big thing. Cheap to produce, and offering a fuzzy, heroin-like high, they offer a huge return on investment. If misused, they can also be very dangerous — Nitazenes can be 800 times as potent as the equivalent dose of morphine.

What hasn’t changed is the young age of offenders, both dealers and runners alike. Once ensnared, and subject to violence and sexual abuse, some became dealers themselves. “The question I’d ask,” one officer wonders, “is how did we get to this point? There’s a massive failure of parenting and education in the US.”

I’m soon tempted to ask myself the same question. In another semi-rural town, this time in Surrey, I see another barbershop. Two kids in hoodies loiter outside a convenience store, like meerkats, their eyes scanning the streets for trouble. An Audi SUV is parked nearby, cannabis smoke bleeding from the semi-open, blacked-out windows. I’m not even looking for this stuff, but here it is. I wonder what the kids are thinking. In their minds, is this pretty village their corner? Their ends?

It’s impossible not to see this as a symptom of full-spectrum societal failure — and those kids are just the start. I’m reminded of the familiar argument: if you saw how meat pies were made, you’d never eat one. Perhaps well-heeled Surrey commuters, ordering their weekend baggies of poorly-cut cocaine, should set foot in a traphouse or watch a teenage runner bleed out on the pavement. In the lines business, that’s exactly how the pie is made. Yet this weekend alone, nearly 50 kilos of dirty powder are destined to hit America’s collective septum. For some reason, our opinion-forming and media classes rarely protest about that particular drug. Then again, they’ve probably never been cuckooed.

The police insist they welcome the public’s assistance in the fight against crime. Chief Constables urge us to become special constables, police station volunteers, neighborhood watch coordinators. For many, though, beat-plodding and curtain-twitching don’t get the blood pumping quite as fast as pedo-hunting. There are over 100 such vigilante groups all over Britain, arranging stings and catching offenders — and journalists are increasingly keen to tag along as well.

As the M4 tragedy so desperately implies, however, online vigilantism can quickly go wrong. Lacking any of the protections offered by law, the targets of the mob are easily crushed. And even when they aren’t, online detectives often misunderstand the laws they claim to defend, with every dubious Facebook post putting justice in peril. But with the police in bureaucratic meltdown, and new tech making amateur sleuthing simpler than ever, don’t expect the pedo-hunters to vanish — quite the contrary, as vigilantism goes from online hobby to grim reality right across the country.

The appeal is understandable. It offers moral certainty, a sense of achievement and a soupçon of excitement. And, like most types of crime, pedophilia is impossible for the police to manage alone. Home Office statistics reveal nearly 40,000 child sex abuse image offenses were logged in 2023-2024: and that’s only reported cases.

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Britain's police need a MAGA revolution

By Dominic Adler

I recall a conversation with a former colleague, an officer I’ll call Mark. “The most depressing thing about this job?” he once told me. “After a while, you begin thinking everyone’s a pedophile.” Mark was starting his fifth year as a full-time covert internet investigator, and spent his days hunched over a keyboard, tracking predators. “There’s thousands of them,” I remember him telling me, exhaustion on his face. “You could nick ‘em all day and all night, there’d still be more.” Like many police officers, Mark thought the only way to manage these criminals was either life imprisonment without parole or capital punishment. Otherwise impeccably liberal doctors and academics I’ve met are similarly hawkish — citing the tactics pedophiles use when pretending to engage with treatment.

I myself have helped convict a would-be contact offender by posing as a pedophile, even if the nightmarish evidence, and the offender’s laughably short sentence, meant I subsequently declined work in the area. Yet, DIY pedo hunting only continues to soar — and not merely, I think, because of the ethical rush it provides. As Adrian Smith’s tormentors showed, all you need to start is an internet connection.

So-called “digilantism” arguably started after the Boston Marathon bombing, in 2013, when online sleuths tracked down witnesses and suspects. Never mind that their hit rate was dubious: a new craze was born. True crime podcasters now work cold cases, while wannabe spies glean data using satellite images. For their part, pedo-hunters have their own MO. After arranging a meeting between a fake child and their would-be abuser, they detain their targets and call the police, handing over the evidence they’ve gathered.

Collaboration between police and civilians isn’t wholly new. During my covert training, tabloid journalists were sometimes cast as Sherlock Holmes, the police as the hapless Lestrade. Back then, hacks were happier to go to the “real world” and confront their targets, warning us police in advance if they were about to buy guns or drugs. Then they’d hand over their notes and, I imagine, wander off to the pub. Their findings could even be compelling, even as they sometimes collapsed into hearsay. Like builders asked to come in and complete a half-done extension, the professional detectives would sigh and get on with it.

Given the shocking scale of pedophilia across Britain, one policeman I know is predictably sanguine. It helps that, among officers, pedophiles have a reputation for presenting negligible physical risks when confronted. As for the digilantes themselves, they seem increasingly aware of law and procedure. Many observe the “agent provocateur” principle of not encouraging a crime, which renders evidence inadmissible (this is the closest English law has to entrapment).

Paedo-hunters also video their activities for transparency. For officers given the task of arrest and prosecution, you might argue that the hard work’s already been done. It’s not dissimilar to the days when officers actually took shoplifting seriously: you’d arrive at a supermarket to find a thief sitting in the security office, a statement prepared and evidence bagged and tagged. Police called these mundane arrests a “GIC” (Given Into Custody). I must admit, I never thought I’d see the day pedophiles were treated as GICs.

Even so, the process isn’t flawless. First, there’s the welfare of the hunters. Notwithstanding their reputation, there’s always the chance that their targets will lash out when cornered. That’s before you consider the safety of the suspect. This is something police officers always do — and which some paedo-hunters clearly don’t. A broader issue is evidence. Though the digilantes are becoming more sophisticated, professional officers understand something they don’t: every theory, no matter how outlandish, offers a potential get-out when cases come to trial. In court, a barrister is perfectly entitled to ask: “Officer, why didn’t you investigate theory X or Y?”

Each piece of well-intentioned online speculation, then, might offer another slither of reasonable doubt. After the former Russian FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered, in 2006, I was given the job of investigating just such conjecture. I researched online allegations and spoke with experts to examine leads. Yes, internet sleuths, your caffeine-fueled Reddit theory might end up being some poor detective’s day-job.

We’ve seen the limits of online detective work elsewhere too. The Nicola Bulley case is a prime example. She disappeared in January 2023, having fallen into a river. But the subsequent tsunami of poisonous, ill-informed commentary by TikTok “detectives” (some of whom arrived at the scene to create content) only impeded the investigation. Jay Slater, a 19-year-old tourist who fell into a ravine in Tenerife, faced a similar fate, with some true crime obsessives conjuring outlandish theories about how he died. That’s hardly strange. Crime has always been an adjunct to entertainment. And now the internet offers another dimension — interaction, immersion, even as the real-world suffering is all too real.

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By Jacob Furedi

In the end, though, I suspect that some officers disapprove of digital paedo-hunters not for ethical reasons: but because it infringes on their turf. Most police work is boring. Once coveted detective roles now involve call-center busywork. Local CIDs investigate a sisyphean landfill of safeguarding cases, domestic disputes and drunken assaults, all to satisfy arbitrary performance metrics. Little wonder officers seek to ringfence genuinely useful online work from amateurs — if UK policing were the British Empire, the few specialisms left would be like pre-1997 Hong Kong.

Ironically, of course, that bureaucratic malaise means officers are stuck with the amateurs whether they like it or not. To give one example, digilantes aren’t bound by the strictures of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act. The administrative treacle police wade through to monitor an open, publicly-viewable Facebook profile is comical. As I once said to my detective inspector: “I could just go home, boot up my laptop, use a VPN, intrusively research this suspect and phone the results into Crimestoppers. What’s to stop me?” The inspector shrugged.

As bureaucracy grows, and operational budgets shrink, it seems inevitable that digilantism will only increase — especially given the proliferation of easy-to-use online tools and AI. You could therefore argue a forward-thinking police service should incorporate digilantes into the investigative mix. They might offer training, or work towards some sort of licensing regime. That, I suspect, wouldn’t work. The entire point of being a vigilante is to be outside the system, a workaday superhero, stepping beyond the mundane. Batman was never a special constable with the Gotham PD. Batman never had to fill out a 12-page form for permission to monitor a Facebook page, or complete a risk assessment to knock on a front door. Batman never suffered DEI courses or spent days cutting-and-pasting his internet search history into a disclosure schedule. And, to my knowledge, Batman never gave evidence at Isleworth Crown Court.

More to the point, the end-user of a digilante’s work will always be a cop, posing significant risks when detectives are required to manage overenthusiastic or malicious actors. And if the challenges are clear enough online — depressingly apparent from the Canaries to Bristol — just wait until less internet-savvy vigilantes want in on the action too. With law and order collapsing from city centers to quaint Wiltshire villages, it makes sense that posses of wannabe superheroes are heading to the streets, with Birmingham just one of towns now stalked by gangs of vigilantes. But don’t worry: I’m sure the police have a form for reporting that too.

Talk to officers, and there really is an “end of days” feeling at stations up and down the land. If, to put it bluntly, we failed the victims at Rotherham and Telford and a hundred other places so catastrophically, how can we ever recover, either professionally or in our relationship with the public? The answer must begin with reform. No — not another report, but genuine change, a red-tape-cutting Trumpian revolution everywhere from the law to leadership, which together can expunge 30 years of failure, and finally build a service fit for the 21st century.

The last few decades have been torrid for British policing. Austerity led to plummeting officer numbers, and a recruitment and retention crisis. The service’s obsession with DEI impressed activists, but led to no discernible improvements to performance. Then came Covid, casting the police as government stooges. All the while, the public became tired of authoritarian busy-bodying around Non-Crime Hate incidents, especially with the virtual decriminalization of theft, and after Sarah Everard was murdered by a serving officer.

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Why Prevent isn't fit for purpose

By Dominic Adler

Amid all this rot, it’s surely worth asking: what, in this day and age, is policing actually for? It’s a question that seems to baffle the Home Office, College of Policing, Police and Crime Commissioners and the National Police Chief’s Council. Conquest’s Third Law of Politics springs to mind here: the simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume it’s controlled by its enemies. It’s an overused term, but it’s impossible to avoid “Blob” here too. Spend long in British policing and you’ll see what I mean: the self-interestedness, the sluggishness, the groupthink, even as trust collapses and crime soars.

Once you grasp that basic fact, it’s easier to conceive of a solution: a Musk-like insurgency, with a Milei-like chainsaw, against complacent bosses. In practical terms, I’d start with a wide-ranging Royal Commission on policing. That’s surely needed, and not just because the last one was in 1960. Turbo-charged public inquiries, Royal Commissions are independent and uncomfortable to the powers-that-be.

What would this fantasy Royal Commission conclude? In the first place: that the police need to do less, but better, and concentrate on their core mission of fighting crime and keeping the peace. That would reverse the decline into a “social work policing” model, whereby officers pick up the slack around mental health, the homeless and youth services. The police, to be fair, are beginning to address some of the problems. Yet talking to officers on the ground, so-called “precautionary principles” mean they’re still routinely diverted from core duties. This is before we even delve into the issue of public order and demonstrations, another drain on resources.

From there, our Commission would hopefully embark on a DOGE-like spree. For one thing, we need fewer forces (there are currently 43 in England and Wales) but with local commanders enjoying much more subsidiarity. Forces are already collaborating sneakily via “strategic partnerships” which means collaborating on things like fighting organized crime. The genius of this arrangement for police chiefs? It doesn’t threaten the 43-force model, meaning senior officer posts are preserved. So pass me the chainsaw: modern technology would easily allow local policing to operate without multiple layers of management. While we’re at it, officer numbers will need re-examining too. Norfolk’s case is instructive: the chief constable is being forced to hire cops rather than admin staff due to central diktat, obliging him to use cops as admin staff.

When Toby Young first introduced Free Schools, I wondered what it would be like if the Home Office allowed Free Constabularies: officers empowered to use their initiative and be answerable for the results. That, however, would require technocrat cops to relinquish control, or anyway be forced to relinquish control. As it is, policing is currently ruled by spreadsheets and process maps, not common sense and discretion. Virtually every police function, from arrests to basic investigation to safeguarding, involves overwhelming policy, bureaucracy, guidance and advice, with some officers avoiding certain duties altogether.

Then there’s law and procedure. This is policing’s operating system — which, at the risk of revealing my age, resembles Windows NT 3.1. Law, for understandable reasons, moves glacially. Sadly, modern society moves cheetah-fast. Add to this the clunky Blairite legacy, a hybrid of common law muddied with continental-style statute, and a rights-based framework designed by a cabal of London lawyers, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Unless, of course, you’re a lawyer paid by the hour.

Therefore our notional Royal Commission should consider a bonfire not only of red tape, but of wider legislation too. Policing doesn’t exist in isolation. It relies, rather, on its partners in the wider criminal justice system: the courts, legal profession, prisons and probation services. Penal reform is a case in point: the Fabian-esque British establishment holds a traditional distaste for incarceration. This is unfortunate, because it works, as any police officer (and, indeed, criminal) will tell you.

When I say works, I mean it’s an effective way to offer respite to working-class victims in crime-plagued communities. These, too often, sit at the bottom of police priorities. Strangely, nobody listens to police officers, despite being one of the few professions to whom criminals speak candidly. From hundreds of hours of listening to criminals, occasionally while monitoring covert audio of their conversations, I can assure you the “criminal fraternity” are utterly contemptuous of the bleeding hearts who run our criminal justice system.

Then there’s the 500-pound gorilla in a custodian helmet: leadership. Pass me a dozen chainsaws. Post-Macpherson services, desperate to erase the smear of institutional racism, were uniquely vulnerable to the insidious effects of social justice politics. And so a querulous chief officer cadre took the police from being an organization with problems around race to — an organization with even more complex problems around race. From DEI programs to allegations of two-tier policing, senior officers indulged in an orgy of meaningless virtue signaling. Why? To fit in with the dominant political culture, one in which advancement is contingent on ideological compliance. Yes, the “canteen culture” of laddish humor is dead. Now, though, there are non-denominational prayer rooms and soulless “patrol bases” on the edge of industrial estates. Meanwhile, shiny headquarters are full of promotion-chasers wearing rainbow-lanyards.

It would be some comfort if my views were merely the grumblings of a disillusioned backwoodsman. Sadly, they’re not. There is, however, hope. The police have demonstrated an ability to pivot. To blow with the wind. If the political will exists, the police will change accordingly, if only for reasons of self-preservation. Which brings me back to my point about the current administration. Unfortunately, Sir Keir Starmer seems to me Conquest’s Third Law made flesh. So why not parachute in a new breed of leader, I hear you ask? They’ve tried that: there’s little point in having direct-entry senior leaders if they’re recruited from the same civil service cohort responsible for all that rot.

What’s the way forward? The party manifestos on law and order at the last election were uninspiring, just platitudes about bobbies on the beat and being tough on crime. Tough on crime? The increasingly ludicrous College of Policing takes a dim view of “zero tolerance” policing, even as it’s loathed by many academics for ideological reasons (which is a shame, because it works). Like every other part of the British state, in short, the wishes of our elected representatives play second fiddle to the civil service and special interest groups. Reform, intriguingly, offered a tiny ray of hope, promising to do away with the College. Considering many coppers refer to it as “Hogwarts”, you can imagine how they’d feel if it went.

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Not that any of this is easy. Quite aside from all those blobbish reactionaries, reforming a police force is like changing the wheels on a speeding train: you can’t just shut it down while you fix it. More to the point, meaningful change implies upending the existing political and cultural settlement. And is a Leftist government — by which I mean Highgate Left, not Hartlepool Left — likely to accept the challenge?

Beyond targeting “far-Right” rioters and Facebook posters, the answer is obviously no, even as a leaked Home Office-commissioned report on the disturbances suggests large segments of the British establishment are happy wallowing in clichés over “behaviors of concern”. Even the public itself is a potential stumbling block here: we like robust policing in principle, until we’re actually policed robustly. Just recall clown-show decisions by the Independent Office of Police Conduct (IPOC), let alone the old saw that a conservative’s a liberal who’s been mugged, and a liberal is a conservative who’s been arrested.

Yet with officers increasingly charged with serving an increasingly balkanized society, to say nothing of rising anarcho-tyranny in towns and cities, perhaps we no longer have the luxury of being policed by consent, reforming chainsaws or not. All the while, the question looms: what will happen when the next disaster finally, inevitably, arrives? I suspect the constables behind the riot shields will offer a familiar answer: TJF.

As a young special branch officer, I worked on the Admiral Duncan bombing, a gay pub blown up by the neo-Nazi David Copeland. Towards the end of my service as a counterterrorism investigator, I worked online, tracking offenders and investigating extremist content. I’m painfully aware how the troubled, deranged and just plain dangerous walk among us. Those tasked with intercepting such offenders face possibly one of law enforcement’s most difficult challenges: we can’t predict where and when lone wolf offenders will strike. The challenge is complicated by the politics swirling around violence linked to terrorism, extremism or what’s known as “Individualized Extreme Violence” (IEV) a term you can expect to hear much, much more of.

Loosely translated, IEV means “violent, mentally-ill young men we can’t pin an ideology on”. And, at first glance, Rudakubana is a classic case study. Yet his possession of Al-Qaeda manuals is problematic for the Government. Merseyside police and counterterrorist officers initially chose not to link the killings to terror, allegedly on the advice of the Crown Prosecution Service. Rudakubana, they said, left no manifesto, made no confession: though they surely wouldn’t have been so nervous about a suspect with Mein Kampf by his bedside.

But if that hints to Britain’s grim squeamishness over the politics of race, the real problem here is with the police itself. Given vast incentives to box-tick, and constrained by unfit laws and a looming army of bureaucrats, officers are increasingly unable to spot the monsters in our midst. Rather than announcing yet another knife ban, then, Labour should instead focus on sending counterextremist police out into the community.

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The inconvenient truth about Southport

By Simon Cottee

I was only ever interested in politics inasmuch as it related to motive, profiling, identifying and predicting suspect activity. As well as routine public order intelligence, I’ve worked on operations against the IRA, Loyalist paramilitaries, neo-Nazis, the Animal Liberation Front, al-Qaeda, and a dozen other groups you might never have heard of. Ultimately, each posed an actionable threat to the public. Then, after 9/11, everything changed. We entered an era of suicide terrorism, one that made the IRA’s pre-bombing warnings seem quaint.

In response, the Government introduced a strategy called CONTEST. This approach is built on four ‘Ps’: Prevent, Pursue, Protect and Prepare. It sparked the single most comprehensive restructuring in the history of British internal security. Like most wide-ranging government strategies, it was also extremely complicated, which brings me to Prevent. It’s already being blamed for the Southport stabbings, not least given officers reportedly identified Axel Rudakubana as a person of interest on three separate occasions.

Prevent has a troubled history. Embedding multi-agency working into counterextremism, it was meant to flag people of concern before diverting them from violence. Soon enough though, the usual cultural sensitivities shone through. “Prevent had become a safeguarding crèche for unhappy teenagers who were unlikely ever to take up arms,” Professor Ian Acheson of the Counter Extremism Project has noted. “This distraction and mission creep — fuelled by an unjustifiable focus on far-right extremism — made it more likely highly dangerous people would fall through the cracks.”

The practical workings of Prevent were just as woolly. To some in law enforcement, Prevent became little more than an attempt to turn counterterrorism into an adjunct of social work. I remember colleagues viewing it as a punishment posting, one involving the usual police chicanery around performance figures. Metrics were based on a nebulous concept of “interventions” — with predictably facile results.

Consider, for instance, a meeting between “faith leaders” and police at a place of worship. That counted as an intervention. Taking down a beheading video from YouTube? An intervention. Submitting a report on a child whose teacher thinks they might be a racist? An intervention, one which I imagine would be familiar to any retired Stasi officer. Points mean prizes, and in the difficult-to-quantify world of counterterrorist performance, prizes mean promotion. I think the only prize worth winning is an absence of violence, but that’s probably why I left at the rank I did.

Perhaps it was inevitable that a performance-based system would concentrate on low-level extremists, those presenting a negligible level of risk. Yet if genuine “lone wolf” attackers are notoriously difficult to track, let alone prosecute, they can clearly sow chaos. Consider people such as David Copeland, the Admiral Duncan bomber, or else the self-starting Islamists who committed the Westminster and London Bridge attacks. Did the sheer quantity of Prevent subjects, caught up in the “safeguarding crèche” Acheson describes, create too much extraneous work for investigators? I suspect it did.

In the end, though, to blame Prevent for Rudakubana is only half right. The law, after all, has been subsumed by a thoroughgoing counterextremism industry, one supporting a coterie of academics, researchers, think tanks and quangos. That’s turned it into a hydra, too many of its heads consisting of beard-stroking academics, identity-politics experts and serial conference attendees. In a similar vein, Prevent’s approach is overly shaped “by committee” — unduly impacting how officers deal with risky subjects. That is if subjects wish even to cooperate: Prevent referrals are wholly voluntary. I’d argue the program’s real value lies in intelligence-gathering, but without action, intelligence is meaningless.

It should be clear, in short, that success comes on the ground, with police given the time and incentives to deal with genuine threats. To be fair, the situation isn’t hopeless, even somewhere like Parliament. Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, is one of the few experienced operators in Keir Starmer’s otherwise dismal cabinet. I remember how, as a young MP, she was entrusted with a place on the prestigious intelligence and security committee. If anyone in the cabinet knows what’s needed, it’s her. At the same time, Cooper could also do worse than listen to Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation. Well-respected and astute, Hall has a proven record in counterterrorism. He’s already made helpful suggestions around the release of post-attack material to the public and argued officers need extra resources to tackle IEV.

What should the police do? In response to the rape gang scandal, Cooper advocated covert internet operations against suspects. The right answer — but probably the wrong target. Unlike many pedophiles, the modus operandi of Rotherham’s sex offenders didn’t involve the dark web. But what, then, of lone wolves like Axel Rudakubana? They’re often internet-fixated, along with the terminally online edge-lords who inspire them.

I’d therefore say Cooper is onto something, though my solution would involve sending counter-extremism investigators into local police teams, and monitor suspects in the community. When I served in the Met, the officers focused on pedophiles were known as “Jigsaw Teams” — so-named because they used a multidisciplinary approach to piece together solutions and keep the public safe. The Jigsaw officers I met did an impressive but terrifying job, charged with keeping tabs on dangerous sexual predators upon their release from prison. I would add “IEV” to their list of duties, beefing them up with covert online monitoring, intelligence support, surveillance capability and counterterrorism liaison.

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I’d also look across the water, to the former Royal Ulster Constabulary. I’m reluctantly coming to the view that an increasingly balkanized Britain would benefit from the model which served the RUC well during the Troubles: keeping an occasionally intrusive eye on subjects of local interest. I’m biased, but we could even call it Special Branch. Rather than squatting in faraway headquarters, small, dedicated teams would work where suspects actually live. Just as important, these groups would be composed of officers who intimately knew their patch: and potential troublemakers like Rudakubana. Their interventions would be operational, designed to disrupt, deter and prosecute would-be lone wolves.

Naturally, such a revolution would involve the devolution of money, resources and personnel to local forces. It would also mean organizational risk, and upset the domestic extremism industry, as Home Office funds were shifted from university lectures to police stations. Yet whenever there’s a government emergency — one where “something must be done” — there are bound to be winners and losers. And political leadership, if it means anything, must involve hammering out these rivalries for the common good.

For the moment, at least, progress looks unlikely, with the Government soothing itself with working groups and committees. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: troubled individuals like Axel Rudakubana require intrusive policing. That means accepting trade-offs between individual rights and collective safety, exercised by experienced, well-resourced officers capable of demonstrating moral courage in the face of politically motivated criticism. Until then, where are we? Too scared of political shibboleths. Too worried by legal challenges. All the while, people organizing dance classes for schoolgirls wonder if they should book stab-vested bouncers. You know, to stand outside. Just in case. It’s not like the police can protect them, can they?

That, of course, immediately raises a simple, shocking question: why did British police services turn a blind eye to the gang rape of tens of thousands of young girls? I should have a fair idea. I was a police officer for 25 years, including five as a detective in the Met’s anticorruption command. Working on sensitive investigations into police wrongdoing, I saw first-hand how law enforcement responds to scandals and crises. I’ve watched senior officers, faced with uncomfortable truths, wriggle like greased piglets. I’ve witnessed logic-defying decisions for nakedly political reasons. I am firmly of the view, then, that the whole scandal has unambiguously revealed rank cowardice by constabularies across the UK, where the most senior whistleblower in the entire country was a lowly detective constable.

The answer, in the end, is simple. Racism, for police services from Chester to Penzance, remains the original sin. From the Scarman Report to the Macpherson Inquiry, the police have long served as Britain’s sin-eaters, devouring social problems on our behalf. As former Met Commissioner Sir Robert Mark famously wrote: “The police are the anvil on which society beats out the problems and abrasions of social inequality, racial prejudice, weak laws and ineffective legislation.” That was over 40 years ago, and little has changed since. This institutional reticence over race goes beyond the police themselves: even the Independent Office for Police Conduct’s (IOPC) review of the rape gang scandal tiptoed around the heritage and religion of offenders.

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There are two main reasons why race remains such a potent factor in police decision-making, The first is the politicisation of policing, and its role in supporting the state-mandated policy of multiculturalism. Ever since the late Eighties, successive governments have baked antiracism into law. The reasoning here was essentially benign: nobody would deny racism has long dogged British policing, from the bungled investigation into the Stephen Lawrence murder to concerns over stop and search.

Yet given the scale of the rape gang scandal, is it now unreasonable to ask if any babies were chucked out with the bathwater? I think they were. I describe it as “Tsunami Policing” — where the solution to a policing problem is, initially, like a gentle offshore wave. Then, as it rushes towards the landmass of reality, urged on by opinion formers and politicians and grasping police managers, it becomes a monstrosity. This describes the post-Macpherson Met’s obsession with race, whereby Scotland Yard played “trendy vicar” one minute, Torquemada the next. By the mid-2000s, any ambitious officer unwilling to play nice still was unlikely to make National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) rank, the policing equivalent to army brigadiers and above. This quickly shaped decision-making at senior levels across the country: what happens in London soon spreads to provincial forces.

With so many incentives to toe the line, no wonder more free-thinking coppers stayed away, with the remainder grimly susceptible to groupthink. We used to call it “having the CD Rom inserted” — whereby a reasonably competent copper would morph into a pound-shop commissar to achieve the next rank. The next time you watch a press conference with a senior officer, play “bullshit bingo” with the language they use, usually involving words like community, proportionality and diversity. Meanwhile, away from the TV cameras, thousands of young girls were raped, abused and treated like chattel in their own hometowns.

The second reason why race is a third rail issue for police? Public order. The raison d’etre of British policing, imprinted into its DNA, is Keeping the King’s Peace. And as we saw in Southport and elsewhere last summer, austerity-ravaged services are ill-equipped to deal with large-scale disorder. Riots, especially those with a racial element, are the ultimate manifestation of police failure, even as forces like Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire are petrified of seeing a repeat of the 2001 disturbances in Oldham. I suspect, then, that chief constables were inclined to see the rape gang scandal as another intractable problem, confined to a marginalised section of the white underclass. To pick at that particular scab might risk public disorder. Better to speak to “community leaders” — to keep the peace, even at the price of allowing organised paedophile networks to operate in plain sight.

Given the Government’s unwillingness to launch a full public inquiry, we’re sadly unlikely to see a candid account of the informal “corridor conferences” held at force HQs, let alone the “Gold Group” decision-making meetings held by senior officers. Instead, under-trained and under-resourced constables, working in child protection, will be used as scapegoats. Far better, instead, to boost transparency at the highest levels: wouldn’t it be glorious if officers at Gold Group meetings were forced to wear body-worn video cameras?

Of course, a lack of accountability infects every corner of the British state: see the public inquiries into Royal Mail or Covid. Yet, to my mind, this gives the police even less of an excuse. We expect the police to be better, to be held to a higher standard. There’s an old saying in the job: the public get the police they deserve. Except they don’t. The public gets the police a handful of technocrats and opinion-formers think they deserve. During the Blair years, a clique of lawyers framed laws like the Human Rights Act to embed progressive politics, and politicised continental-style judiciaries, into our national life.

A flexible, Common Law system was replaced by all-knowing, all-seeing diktat, designed to ensure fairness and equality and unicorns dancing on rainbows. And with them came reams of forms and risk assessments and meetings and committees: the panacea of multi-agency working, with police units moving into town halls and going native with their social worker colleagues. Suspects became “clients” and cases were viewed through the prism of equity rather than justice. Beard-stroking and hand-wringing became the order of the day, freeing officers to attend development courses and conferences while they planned their next promotion.

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By Julie Bindel

Of course, race wasn’t the only issue. Investigations into the rape gangs disaster have discovered the usual witches brew of public sector failure, from parlous resourcing to recruitment, training and retention. Yet all this surely raises one more question: what can be done? If nothing else, we need the same enthusiasm for reform as we saw in the Nineties, when a laddish “canteen culture” was rightly expunged, even as their technocratic replacements just made the same mistakes in reverse. As for more specific changes, there are currently far too many forces, leading to inconsistencies in operational practices and decision-making. Another problem involves a lack of proper oversight; far better to replace the disastrous Police and Crime Commissioner experiment with non-partisan local police boards. The post-Blair mass of ill-considered law needs to go too. On that last point, the police should find some courage, finally calling bullshit on time-wasters like Non-Crime Hate Incidents.

In the meanwhile? The centre cannot hold. The rape gangs scandal is the quintessence of two-tier policing, which is probably why the Government is more comfortable with public inquiries into ancient history like the Miners’ Strike. Whatever the answer, it requires moral courage. I hope, somewhere inside the policing machine, a new generation of coppers is prepared to show some minerals, to shake the tree, to remember why they joined in the first place. To police, in short, without fear or favour — because who wants to live in a society that stands by while children are raped?