Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Iormlund]

From the officer:

.... observed that the press reports did not identify who had been at the gatherings, no one had come forward to admit presence at any of the gatherings, and there was no evidence from social media showing these gatherings taking place, and from which those present could be identified.

It followed that if these events had taken place, the organisers could not be identified from the material available to the police at that time and nor could [the officer] draw any conclusions as to whether the gatherings breached the Covid regulations, and if so, whether those present at the gatherings had no reasonable excuse for their presence at the gatherings.

It feels like it would be a great idea to set up an organisation whose job is to investigate crimes and gather evidence about them

We truly live in the stupidest timeline.

[Syt]

New Yorker about Cressida Dick.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/the-misogyny-that-led-to-the-fall-of-londons-police-commissioner

The Misogyny That Led to the Fall of London's Police Commissioner

Cressida Dick was supposed to be a pioneering reformer, but she couldn't overcome the culture of the force.

On Thursday evening, Cressida Dick, the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and Britain's most senior police officer, announced her resignation. The Met, as it is known in Britain, is in a bad place, stricken with allegations of racism, homophobia, corruption, incompetence, and, most grievously, an appalling capacity for violence against women. Dick, a counterterrorism specialist who has led the Met since 2017, was the first female commissioner in its hundred-and-ninety-three-year history. For a while, she seemed to be the perfect—the only—person for the job. "I have absolutely no intention of going, and I believe I am—and have been, actually—for the last five years been leading a real transformation in the Met," Dick told the BBC, on the morning of February 10th. But, a few hours later, Dick was summoned to a meeting with Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, who oversees policing in the capital, to explain her latest plans to get a grip on the force. Rather than attending, Dick quit. "It is quite clear that the mayor no longer has sufficient confidence in my leadership," she said. "He has left me no choice but to step aside. I say this with deep sadness and regret." Maybe Dick was exasperated. Maybe she didn't grasp the extent of the crisis. Dick has previously enjoyed almost unanimous support from Britain's political leaders, in part because of the symbolism that she represents. In her resignation statement, she didn't say that she had done anything wrong.

Although there were many problems, Dick was finally overwhelmed by the misogyny (and worse) of the men she led. In March, 2021, Wayne Couzens, a Met officer, came off a security shift at the United States Embassy in London and used his handcuffs and warrant card to kidnap, rape, and murder Sarah Everard, a thirty-three-year-old woman who was walking home. Couzens strangled Everard with his police-issue belt and attempted to dispose of her body by burning it in a fridge. The Met's response to the murder was boneheaded to the core. Officers tried to cancel a vigil for Everard on Clapham Common, which was visited briefly by the Duchess of Cambridge, because of coronavirus restrictions. That night, male officers ended up dispersing female protesters by force. In the days after Everard's murder, the department told women in London who were worried about being approached by lone plainclothes male officers to call 999, the emergency number, or hail a passing bus. "I have forty-four thousand people working in the Met. Sadly, some of them are abused at home, for example, and sadly, on occasion, I have a bad 'un," Dick said, a few months later.

The fallout from Couzens's crime has been limitless, and has focussed attention on a sickening casualness about rape and the bodies and rights of women, and on a moribund culture of police "banter". Last December, two Met officers were jailed for taking selfies with the bodies of two murdered sisters, and sending pictures of the "dead birds" to their colleagues on WhatsApp. A further five officers—three serving in London—were found to have exchanged racist and misogynistic material with Couzens in 2019. Each investigation has pulled on the thread of another. Earlier this month, the Independent Office for Police Conduct, which investigates complaints against the police in England and Wales, presented the findings of Operation Hotton, a series of nine interlinked inquiries into misconduct centered on a single police station, in Charing Cross, in central London. The I.O.P.C. report was almost unprintable. Officers joked about beating their partners: "Knock a bird about and she will love you. Human nature. They are biologically programmed to like that shit." One police constable was known as "mcrapey raperson" for his "particular fondness of IC3 and IC4"—Met codes for people of Black and Asian ethnicity. Bullying, racism, and misogyny were constant. Junior officers went unsupervised for weeks. One male officer texted his female colleague, "I would happily rape you." Of the fourteen officers reprimanded by the investigation, one was dismissed. Nine are still serving.

Operation Hotton proved insurmountable for Dick. "We believe these incidents are not isolated or simply the behavior of a few 'bad apples,' " the I.O.P.C. concluded. Earlier this week, Khan said that he was waiting to receive a plan from Dick to reform the Met and win back public confidence, and that her job depended on it. The commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is appointed by the Home Secretary (currently a member of the Conservative Party), but the force is overseen by the mayor. Khan styles himself as a progressive, and he has previously worked closely with Dick, supporting her in difficult moments. Just last month, the Met made a last-minute and ill-advised intervention in a government inquiry into parties held in Downing Street during Britain's coronavirus lockdowns. Dick has previously been criticized for increasing the use of "stop and search" powers, which disproportionately target young Black and ethnic-minority men in London, and for the Met's handling of a series of murders of gay men, in 2014. But, until now, Dick's experience and symbolic importance protected her. She started out as a bobby—a beat cop—in 1983. Dick is gay, and her partner was also a police officer. In 2005, Dick was in charge of the counterterrorism team that killed Jean Charles de Menezes, a Brazilian man, on the Tube, after mistaking him for a suicide bomber. Dick always handled that momentous error with dignity and grace. The idea of a female leader of Britain's largest police force gestured at the kind of society—and policing—that a city like London might aspire to. But the symbol has been undone by the reality.

[garbon]

And it's not entirely unheard of for national railway companies to somehow incorporate the national flag:

It does feel a bit weird for the UK flag though. Also, none of those examples look quite so...jarring.

[Sheilbh]

New Yorker about Cressida Dick.

The big point from me is that she should never have even been in the police for the last 15 years. She was Gold Commander of the team that shot Jean Charles de Menezes. Obvioiusly there are mistakes in policing and sometimes even tragic ones. But the response from the Met and from her team following that was to lie about what they'd seen, lie about de Menezes, issue doctored pictures of him to make him look more like one of the 7/7 bombers and basically do anything to cover it up and escape the blame.

She should have been fired in 2005. Instead she kept getting promotions, she got a rather mysterious role in the Foreign Office and was then brought back as Met Commissioner. The recurring issues in her career - de Menezes, her lack of cooperation with corruption investigations, the culture in Charing Cross - is always to cover up and "protect" the Met. When the same issues around covering-up and lying about victims etc keeps happening it stops being accidental.

Obviously she's not the first police officer or leader with those characteristics and no doubt, like the other Commissioners who've had to resign she'll now get a peerage etc. But I think she had a lot of the worst characteristics for her job.

For successors I've seen people suggest some of the leadership of the Fire Brigade - as they have an excellent internal culture - or someone from an outside force with no links to the Met. The model people want seems to be like Sir Robert Mark in the 70s who cleaned up the Met a lot.

[mongers]

New Yorker about Cressida Dick.

The big point from me is that she should never have even been in the police for the last 15 years. She was Gold Commander of the team that shot Jean Charles de Menezes. Obvioiusly there are mistakes in policing and sometimes even tragic ones. But the response from the Met and from her team following that was to lie about what they'd seen, lie about de Menezes, issue doctored pictures of him to make him look more like one of the 7/7 bombers and basically do anything to cover it up and escape the blame.

She should have been fired in 2005. Instead she kept getting promotions, she got a rather mysterious role in the Foreign Office and was then brought back as Met Commissioner. The recurring issues in her career - de Menezes, her lack of cooperation with corruption investigations, the culture in Charing Cross - is always to cover up and "protect" the Met. When the same issues around covering-up and lying about victims etc keeps happening it stops being accidental.

Obviously she's not the first police officer or leader with those characteristics and no doubt, like the other Commissioners who've had to resign she'll now get a peerage etc. But I think she had a lot of the worst characteristics for her job.

For successors I've seen people suggest some of the leadership of the Fire Brigade - as they have an excellent internal culture - or someone from an outside force with no links to the Met. The model people want seems to be like Sir Robert Mark in the 70s who cleaned up the Met a lot.

Entirely agree with all of this.

Thanks Shelf, you've saved me typing out an incoherent version of that.

[Sheilbh]

Entirely agree with all of this.

Thanks Shelf, you've saved me typing out an incoherent version of that.

I think it's just slightly disingenuous given especially her involvement in the de Menezes case to position Dick as somehow outside of rather than indicative of the culture of the Met. Obviously I don't think she's misogynist or homophobic and I think she finds all of these issues deeply shocking. But her entire career is a list of attempted or actual cover-ups, of not cooperating with investigations etc.

Edit: Also I really push against the idea that she always handled the shooting of de Menezes "with dignity and grace" as widly wrong.

[Admiral Yi]

Is that the Brazilian dude who got shot on the Tube?

[Sheilbh]

Is that the Brazilian dude who got shot on the Tube?

Yeah.

[Richard Hakluyt]

A career-destroying fail.....but for some reason it didn't....mystifying me ever since 

[Sheilbh]

A right-wing (and correct) case for building more everything:

Stuff the nimbys and build, build, build — the future of Britain (and the Tories) depends on it
Robert Colvile
Saturday February 12 2022, 6.00pm, The Sunday Times

During the first year of the pandemic something weird happened. The economy was cratering. Yet Britain's households found themselves almost £900 billion richer. Partly that was driven by a surge in stock markets. But for most people that extra wealth came from the soaring value of their home, which sometimes seemed to be the only thing growing more quickly than infection rates.

The result, as we report today, is that the number of £1 million properties outside London has sky-rocketed. But in the process the already cavernous gap between have-homes and have-nots has grown even wider. Last year the cost of a deposit jumped from 102 per cent of average income to a record 110 per cent. In London it would take the average worker more than 15 years to save for a deposit. And a combination of pandemic-driven relocation and the cladding crisis has reduced the number of properties on the market to an all-time low — so prices are likely to go higher still.

This is only the latest chapter in a slow-motion tragedy. Being able to own your own home is the essence of the good life. In a country with a functioning housing market it should happen almost by default. But we are woefully, humiliatingly far from that point. As recently as 1991, 78 per cent of those aged 35-44 were owner-occupiers. Today, the figure is 56 per cent. Among those aged 25-34, it's dropped from 67 per cent to 41 per cent.

This crisis is not just poisoning the dreams of a generation. It has all manner of toxic side effects. A recent essay on the Works in Progress website pointed to a laundry list of problems that are being exacerbated by housing shortages, including inequality, wage growth, innovation, productivity, fertility rates and obesity.

What is so irritating for those of us banging our heads against this brick wall (or, rather, wishing there were more brick walls to bang our heads against) is that the problem is easily soluble. Britain is not cramped or overcrowded, not even remotely. In England homes take up just 1.1 per cent of the land, and gardens a few per cent more. Our cities are scandalously low rise. A majority of voters would welcome a large increase in housebuilding, even in their local area.

But time and again politicians shy away from the fence. Faced with a parliamentary mutiny, Boris Johnson not only ripped up his planning reforms but fired the minister responsible, Robert Jenrick. Last week Stuart Andrew became the 11th housing minister since 2010: hardly a sign that this is a priority.

The Conservative Party keeps telling itself a familiar lie, which is that you can build all the necessary homes where voters won't notice them. In his latest party conference speech Johnson argued that there was plenty of room to build — "not on green fields, not just jammed in the southeast but beautiful homes on brownfield sites in places where homes make sense".



This is not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. Yes, we should build on brownfield. No, there isn't remotely enough of it. And even if levelling up is a triumphant success, you cannot fix years of undersupply in the south by building in the north, in the hope that economic activity will follow. "Places where homes make sense" tends to mean "places where voters don't want them".

This is why many in the industry are nervous about the planning rules being drawn up by Michael Gove. The levelling-up white paper suggests that the government sees extra building in deprived areas as the way to relieve pressure in the southeast: the exact opposite of supply and demand. The scuttlebutt in the housing industry is that Gove will not only water down Jenrick's proposals but slash housing targets for the south by a third or more.

Those around Gove reject this analysis. They insist that he remains committed to housebuilding. His strategy, they say, is to incentivise communities to want housing rather than oppose it. The favoured acronym is Biden: beautiful homes, with appropriate infrastructure, under democratic control, which enhance the environment and are approved by the neighbourhood. But to get houses built you need sticks as well as carrots. The government points to recent increases in housebuilding and a surge in first-time buyers driven by its support schemes. But new houses are still well short of the 300,000-a-year target, and the surge relied on pushing 400,000 planning permissions a year through the system. Many councils have been sitting on their hands in the hope that Gove will lower their quotas. Meanwhile, activity stalls.

The failure to build isn't just hammering home ownership. It's damaging growth. Last week a group of big investors wrote to Rishi Sunak asking for reassurances about the future of the Oxford-Cambridge arc, intended to be a major development area. They pointed out that Oxford and Cambridge are adding just 300,000 square feet a year of laboratory space for pharma research, while the university towns' American rival Boston has almost six million square feet under construction. The investors believe that local councils' reluctance to approve development is a direct threat to the UK's ambitions to be a scientific superpower — and to our future prosperity. Companies will not choose the UK if they cannot build facilities and their staff cannot afford homes.

Home ownership is not just driven by housebuilding. One of our biggest problems is that buy-to-let landlords have found it much easier to get mortgages than first-time buyers, thanks to misguided regulation and a wave of cheap money. In the decade after the financial crisis they snapped up two million extra properties — a lot more than we actually built.

Johnson has championed a solution proposed by my think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies: long-term, fixed-rate, low-deposit mortgages. But the Bank of England refuses to budge.

Likewise our suggestion of bribing landlords to sell to tenants was seen as heretical by the Treasury. And in the social housing sector councils and housing associations have successfully strangled the right to buy.

The collapse of home ownership isn't just scarring our society. As I've said before, it represents an existential threat to the Conservative Party.

If you don't create new homes, you don't create new Tories. Indeed, the most electorally successful governments don't just win elections: they create more of their own voters.

A Tory party that remains in thrall to the nimbys is one that doesn't expand its voting base but actively constricts it. Telling northern voters to get on their bike and look for work didn't go down well in the 1980s. Telling southern voters to get in their cars and look for homes will go down even worse.

@RColvile

Just to add on the Oxford and Cambridge point the home ownership is also a huge issue - the price of housing there is absolutely insane (even to a Londoner), which has its own impact on those cities and the types of workers they need.

Also striking how much of a fall there is in the New Labour era - I'm not sure why (something, something financialisation would be my guess).

[celedhring]

I'm late to the UK Rail flag commentary, but looking at it makes me dizzy. I hope it's not the same with the actual trains.

[Sheilbh]

Incidentally excellent piece on the need for police reform - there are good forces in the country but I'd note that Greater Manchester Police is basically going through a lot of mini-Met scandals right now not to mention Cleveland which is basically in the police equivalent of special measures because of how badly they're performing:

Conspiracy of silence over the police is truly criminal
Yes, policing is hard. But only thinking the unthinkable will fix our forces
Stephen Bush
Sunday February 13 2022, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

Imagine for a moment that a child is struggling in school. The mother is concerned about her son's difficulties with reading and writing and arranges a meeting with his form tutor to discuss it. At the meeting the teacher assures the worried mother that he is "as passionate about improving literacy as I am about pursuing beautiful women", and bombards her with emails asking her out.

The teacher is found guilty of gross misconduct — and then given another job working for the head teacher at the same school. We reveal the story to the public.

Does anyone seriously believe that the head would make it to the end of the next day without having to resign?

Yet that is the substance of the remarkable story broken by Emily Dugan last week, with the only differences being that the concerned mother was in fact a single woman and mugging victim called Kristina O'Connor, the errant teacher a copper called James Mason and the head teacher in question the Metropolitan Police commissioner, Dame Cressida Dick.

Although Dick did, belatedly, resign as head of the Met on Friday, she did so in a statement that made clear she had been forced out by Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, not that she was resigning as a result of failures in the organisation she runs.

She didn't find room in her statement to apologise to O'Connor, or to the families of Gabriel Kovari, Daniel Whitworth and Jack Taylor, three men whose murders by Stephen Port might have been averted had the Met not bungled the investigation of the 2014 killing of Port's first victim, Anthony Walgate.

Nor did Dick find space to apologise to the families of Sarah Everard, Daniel Morgan, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman. Each and every story involved a scandal of the same degree of obvious significance as Dugan's scoop, yet each and every story failed to rouse any sense on the part of the commissioner that her position and leadership was anything other than exemplary.

Equally alarming was the reaction of the Home Office to Dick's belated departure, which was to grumble about the lack of notice from Khan. It complains that the mayor gave no warning that he was about to declare his lack of confidence in the Met commissioner when, given the recent run of scandals, the Home Office surely should have been crosser that it took Khan quite so long. Again, let's imagine what would have happened had a teacher behaved in the same way as Detective Chief Inspector Mason. I don't think that Nadhim Zahawi, the education secretary, would have been taken aback if the local council had called for heads to roll. So why is Priti Patel's department complaining about Khan's action rather than his inaction?

What unites Khan's sluggish response, Patel's surprise and Dick's reluctance to quit earlier? Low expectations. It's true to say, as Dick often did when called upon to justify the latest mess, that the police have a difficult job, and that the Met, who are not only London's force but in charge of counterterrorism operations across the country, have an especially difficult job. But it's not clear why "having a difficult job" makes it harder for a police officer to understand that when a woman turns up at a police station having been mugged, it isn't an opportunity to set yourself up with a hot date.

It is also worth pointing out that the Met performs its "difficult job" with less effectiveness than many other police forces in England and Wales. For the past seven years the police inspectorate has ranked London's constabulary as "requiring improvement" on what some might describe as the police's No 1 metric: "Keeping people safe and reducing crime". Let's also remember that, among other failings, DCI Mason couldn't even track down Kristina O'Connor's mugger.

No head teacher could survive in their job after seven years of bad Ofsted reports: most heads don't survive one. But the difference is that we expect that particular "difficult job" to be done well, whereas neither the Met's departing commissioner, nor the two politicians in charge of the force, really seem to believe that policing can be done well. In her first public remarks after Dick's resignation statement, Patel sounded as if she were responding to the shocking exit of a police officer with an impeccable record.

Part of the problem is that if either the Labour mayor of London, or the Conservative home secretary, wanted to deliver a serious speech about how to improve the Met they would have little in the way of serious resources to draw upon from within either party. Although the Police Federation itself does impressive work on the question of police reform, the number of people who are seriously engaged with the problem across the two big parties can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

One reason for that is fear: Conservatives are scarred by what many privately blame for the political mess they got into under Theresa May. Her authoritarian leanings on a swathe of other issues mean that May's record on police reform is often forgotten, but the former prime minister was one of the most radical home secretaries since the war. She approved a number of initiatives and reports — public disciplinary hearings, for example — some of which ultimately contributed to Dick's downfall. But some Tory MPs blame May's reforms for the bad relations between the government and the police, and one of Patel's priorities as home secretary has been to repair the relationship. Few Conservatives have any ambition to build on what May did.

On the Labour side, while there is plenty of private discussion about how to get better policing, it is easier to get someone under witness protection to give you their full home address than it is to get Labour politicians to talk about it publicly. They fear that they will be seen as soft on law and order and they think they have their own repair job to do, to dispel the perceptions that built up about Jeremy Corbyn at the time of the 2019 election.

Both sides are missing a trick. Most voters know full well that the police have a difficult job, particularly with the advent of social media and cybercrime, and are equally aware that British policing in general and London's in particular could be revolutionised. By being too scared to tell the truth about policing, for fear of looking soft on crime, both parties simply sound out of touch to anyone who has had the misfortune to be the victim of crime in modern Britain.

Stephen Bush is political editor of the New Statesman Dominic Lawson is away

I think he's particularly right about voters being smart enough to get this stuff - I'd hope for a tough on crime and reforming the police to make that possible line from Labour (a bit like Blair's "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" - again voters were smart enough to understand both).

[Admiral Yi]

I'm trying to see if there is some pattern to the text you don't bold.

[Sheilbh]

I'm trying to see if there is some pattern to the text you don't bold.

Just the stuff I find less interesting

Edit: So any pattern is probably just good journos writing well. Strong intro, couple of key points/arguments and wrap it up with a nice/catchy conclusion

[Josquius]

I definitely have heard sniffs of labour pursuing a law and justice campaign. Though remains to be seen whether it would be right. If the economy keeps unravelling and prices rising people may have other priorities.