Nigel Farage shrugged off an avalanche of finger pointing over anti-murder protests turned to riot, reflecting that it is easier to try and blame him for unrest than address the core issues, as he calls for an urgent end to ethnically biased policing.
Brexit pioneer and Reform UK leader Nigel Farage has warned failure to urgently fix British policing, returning to equality before the eyes of the law and a colour-blind approach will turn ordinary law-abiding people against the police and government.
Mr Farage’s latest remarks, which came after protests in Southampton where 18-year-old Henry Nowak was murdered in in a killing that was further exacerbated in the public eye by his having been arrested on the grounds of a spurious hate crime report even as he lay dying of a stab wound, follow others where he warned of the risk of public breakdown of trust. If police can’t do their job to the bare minimum standards the public rightly expects, he said, “I fear for where our society should be in a few short year if we don’t grip this and do it very, very quickly.”
Speaking on Wednesday night, Mr Farage referred to official police documents and whistleblower reports he had received from serving and ex-police officers about the “the indoctrination they’re currently receiving” in police training. Laying out that the actual written instructions police receive command officers to treat different races differently, Mr Farage stated:
…it would seem that politicians and mainstream media haven’t quite got the message. So let’s be clear. The Police Anti Racism Commitment produced by the College of Policing and the National Police Chief’s Council makes very clear in this document that when they’re dealing with policing issues it does not mean treating everyone the same or being colour-blind. Namely the police act differently with different ethnic groups… the police are being told that you must deal with ethnic minorities in preferential ways over white people.
…From the very top of the police all the way down to the way officers are given race training, they are being told to treat people in this country differently.
Mr Farage received a torrent of criticism from political figures, particularly other Members of Parliament and journalists for his remarks on the quality of the police, and accusations that he was encouraging rioting by pointing out problems. He rejected this notion in his remarks, stating that what he had achieved was breaking “the wall of silence” around the problems with the police force, reflecting that now the problems he’d identified are being widely and openly discussed. He said:
You will get political commentators saying that I’ve stirred up this problem. Well of course they always do that, they don’t want to address the issue. But I will make this prediction. If we don’t end two-tier policing in this country we will turn millions of ordinary, law-abiding citizens against the police and against the authorities in this country. I want us to stop and dampen down anger and strife on our streets. This needs, from the Prime Minister down, that an absolute assurance that this nonsense about treating different communities, of different ethnic backgrounds, in different ways is going to end.
Somewhat buttressing Farage’s point was a report in The Daily Telegraph on Sunday which stated that police officers in Hampshire Constabulary — whose officers handcuffed murder victim Henry Novak moments before he died — which claimed whistleblowers had come forward to say they felt pressured to think and say certain things during mandatory diversity training organised by the force.
The day-long Inclusion Matters course saw officers “controlled and pressured to be certain ways”, it was reported, with some constables worried “if I made a mistake, it would have been held against me”. But those who felt so were in a minority in both cases.
There are those who strongly disagree with Farage’s diagnosis of police forces riven with anti-white racism, and who think the present settlement should be preserved. Britain’s left-wing newspaper of record The Guardian cites Chief Inspector Andy George, the President of the National Black Police Association, who claimed re-working how police officers see race could set policing back “to the 1960s and 1970s”. The officer continued to decry “the attacks from the far right which have been growing over the past few years, and which are becoming more mainstream”.
As previously reported, although the government’s official story on the two-tier policing that Mr Farage diagnoses simply doesn’t exist and is a fiction intended to cause division in the country, actually practically everywhere except with the Prime Minister itself, Labour figures are quietly admitting that things are not as they should be.
The latest to join that group is Labour grandee Jack Straw, the former Blair-era Home Secretary under whose watch the present policing norms were decided and set in motion. The very ideas that he oversaw have now gone “too far the other way”, Straw is reported to have said, as he called for “greater care”.
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