Mick Hartley

Jenni Russell in the Times – It’s time for Keir Starmer to exercise his power:

Since the Cold War ended we have been happily extracting our crocodile teeth, shredding our armed forces, assuming Europe didn’t face much risk or that, if we did, America’s military would save us. Both those securities have been shattered, first by Putin, now by Trump. And yet Starmer is still blinking in shock, postponing any meaningful increase in defence spending to some distant parliament, deciding we can meanwhile safely spend that money on extending child benefits, or higher pensions, or paying Mauritius billions to take ownership of a military base we will have to lease back.

He’s lost: out of his depth.

Starmer is still dangerously inert — and even more reluctant to recognise that internally, Britain is similarly destabilised. If its safe, trusting society is to survive, it too must be underpinned by state force and a stronger commitment to policing, rules and order than in recent years. Curiously for a former DPP, Starmer doesn’t see this as critical. The only threat he enthusiastically recognises is from the far right.

The country is less peaceful and predictable than 20 years ago. Crime clear-up rates have collapsed by almost half in a decade, to only one in 14 crimes, while recorded crime has risen by more than half. Courts are chaotic and overloaded, cases delayed for years, prisons don’t have enough space to keep the convicted behind bars. The age of criminal impunity is dawning — and, fatally, criminals know it.

There are multiple causes: atomised communities, family breakdown, inequality, addiction. The recent enormous increase in immigration from many distant countries has added to the burden, as complex conflicts, angry demonstrations, novel criminal networks and culture clashes have arrived on Britain’s streets. The police haven’t the means, will, skill or understanding to do much more than tread nervously around these new problems. They cannot suddenly break in to tightly-bound Syrian, Kurdish, Albanian, Afghan or Nigerian gangs, or easily police boat migrants with uncertain identities, scarce English and unknown pasts.

Most alarmingly, they have abandoned impartial policing in favour of nervously placating groups that are too powerful to offend, like pro-Palestinian protesters who have called for the death or rape of Jews, or the radical preachers who instruct their audience on how best to stone women, or the Birmingham Muslims who successfully had Israeli football fans banned from their city on false grounds. Because the police know there is no political will from this or previous governments to enforce the law fairly, and no resources to do so, they surrender to threat.

This is naked weakness on the state’s part and if left unchecked it will worsen. Nobody wants the monstrous Trumpian version of law enforcement; just sensible British policing. Starmer’s vision of Britain is one that’s “open, tolerant and diverse”. But the only way to bond a diverse society of people with profoundly different beliefs about morality, religion, sex, violence, men’s and women’s rights and equality is to uphold and defend the laws Britain has argued for, voted for and passed. They provide the framework for how this country has, democratically, decided to live. They express Britain’s values, to ancestral Britons and newer arrivals alike.

A powerful state-of-the-nation piece. I don’t see any prospect of Starmer rising to the occasion, mind. More and more he looks like a deer caught in the headlights.

As an example – as today’s Times editorial notes – he can’t even get round to banning the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in the UK. Or the Muslim Brotherhood even.