The Telegraph, 20th April 2024
Enough is enough. Mark Rowley must go (telegraph.co.uk)
We’ve seen failure after failure and apology after apology. It’s time for a fresh start
Our police officers are required to police without fear or favour. Upon joining the service, they pledge to afford “equal respect to all people” and act with “fairness and impartiality”. This is so everyone can have confidence in their even-handed enforcement of the law.
But after this week, I’m beginning to wonder if this cornerstone of our policing still stands. I’ve seen too much fear and even more favouritism in the policing of pro-Palestinian protests.
Six months ago, I wrote about the perception of two-tier policing, with marchers engaged in weekly carnivals of hate treated with kid gloves while Jewish people were forced out of London at weekends and told to keep their heads down.
For this article I was fired by the Prime Minister. I had proposed laws to him that would have banned anti-Semitic symbols such as swastikas and chants like “from the river to the sea”, and would have given the Home Secretary the power to ban marches in exceptional circumstances. None of this has happened. One can only assume the PM disagreed.
Since the October 7 attacks on Israel, when more than 1,200 people were brutally killed, we’ve seen hundreds of thousands of people take to our streets in support of the Palestinians and in many cases, celebrating the terrorism of Hamas.
These marches have largely become a weekly fixture in central London. As of March, they have cost the British taxpayer more than £32 million and required 35,400 officer shifts.
What about the crimes that we need our officers to be out there preventing or solving? We are being let down by this waste of police time. The marchers have made their point: many people support Hamas and the Palestinians. We get it.
My complaint is not against officers on the ground. Their job is incredibly difficult. Most police just want to catch the bad guys and keep people safe. This is about the leadership.
Ministers and the mayor of London have either refused or been unable to hold the Met commissioner to account.
Now we come to last week, when we saw a man told that he looked “openly Jewish”, and threatened with arrest if he did not leave the area around the marchers.
If the marches are so peaceful, why was an “openly Jewish” man stopped from walking near them? Despite the apology and then the apology for the apology, the truth is chilling. Over the past six months, we’ve seen failure after failure by the Met.
Chants of jihad on the streets have been condoned by the police; advisers to the Met have been found to hold repellent views; a man carrying a placard stating that “Hamas are terrorists” was arrested, while those who are flagrantly anti-Semitic are waved on by the police.
Either this is gross incompetence, or it’s a culture coming from the top, where thugs are free to intimidate and harass while the rest of us have to keep our mouths shut and stay out of the way – and all allowed by the man nominally supposed to hold the Met to account, London mayor Sadiq Khan.
Where does this end? We should be worried that if this leadership of the Met and ministerial failure to change things continues, we will have failed to tackle Islamism and extremism on our streets.
We’ve had the speeches and we’ve seen the tweets. I’ve lost count of the apologies. There has been ample time to improve but it only gets worse.
If the Met commissioner is incapable of or unwilling to ensure that his officers enforce the law, and Sadiq Khan is happy with the soft approach to the hate marches, then the Prime Minister needs to finally get a grip.
It gives me no pleasure to say this, but after such a litany of failure and a wholesale refusal to change, the Met commissioner needs to accept responsibility. And he must go.
