Britons used to have one of the best law enforcement systems in the world. OK it was not perfect, not by a long chalk, there were abuses by officers of their authority, of suspects and of evidence. But, by and large the police were mostly trusted and respected and supported by the majority of the population as it was recognised that despite the faults in Britain’s police, and that was a view that I say lasted for the bulk of the time period following the Second World War.

Britons could, even if they had misgivings about police behaviour, brought about by cases such as the Guildford Four or the Birmingham Six, could console ourselves that at least we didn’t have the sort of openly and egregiously capricious, dishonest, corrupt or violent police that characterised many places in Europe. We didn’t have the Stasi or the Gestapo or the French CRS and neither did we have the quasi-military Carabineri of Italy or the politically motivated Higher Police Corps of Franco’s Spain which investigated ‘political offences’.

However, sadly that previous view of Britain’s police forces when compared to the police forces of other, less happy nations, no longer applies. We can see and many have experienced the bias that has infested the way that we are policed. We know, for example, about the problem of Islamic Rape Gangs, a problem that was swept under the carpet for decades by police forces eager to appease Islamic ‘community leaders’ and avoid unwarranted accusations of ‘racism’ against police, had the police done their job properly and investigated these crimes.

We now understand, beyond all reasonable doubt, that we have police forces that are quite frankly as bent as a fork. These forces will fail to turn out for burglaries or car crime or any other of the myriad crimes that actually bother Britons, but will turn up mob handed or devote oodles of resources for the ‘speech crimes’ that never used to sully our body of modern legislation. The Met Police for example recently pulled out all the stops to prosecute and idiot who sent a banana to a Black customer in a pub. The Met admit that they threw lots of resources at this very minor case and they did so at a time when London’s streets are awash with blood in certain areas, due to ongoing knife and gun crime. Never before has there been such a case that illustrates the contrast between things that the police need to be tackling and things that should never had had so many resources thrown at it or wasted on it. We are policed not equitably or honestly or without fear or favour, but on the basis of skin colour, religious belief, political views or membership of what is sinisterly termed in the Equalities Act of 2010, ‘a group with protected characteristics’.

Our police have also become as thuggish and unnecessarily violent towards Britons as were the sort of Continental police forces that we once looked at, shuddered and thanked out lucky stars that Britain’s police were not as egregiously violent as them. This is no longer the case. Britain’s police forces are increasingly violent towards those who merely question authority or government policy or who want to raise issues that are important to them, yet give free passes to genuinely disruptive movements such as the Black Lives Matter/Marxist grouping.

A prime example of the police being excessively violent without either justification or good cause comes from yesterday’s anti-lockdown demonstration in London. From what I’ve seen so far of the livestreams, the police were provoking conflict by the nature of their policing. Officers in full body armour pushed demonstrators back into Trafalgar Square in a manner that I, being a person who has, as a photographer, covered a lot of public disorder incidents in the past, believe could have been designed to rile people up. Again this is a very stark contrast to how the Metropolitan Police have managed Marxist protests such as that of Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion.

For the record, I’d like to make it clear that I do not agree with many of those who spoke at yesterday’s London demo. I’m not an anti-Vaxxer, as some of the speakers that were there were and neither do I support those from the anti-5G movement who turned up yesterday, a mob who are so ignorant of physics that they cannot even get their heads around Newton’s Inverse Square Law. However I do support calls for the lockdowns to be ended as based on the data that I’ve seen on Hector Drummond and elsewhere, they are no longer justified and are doing immense damage to the physical and mental health of Britons and are completely trashing the economy. I got the impression from the livestreams that I partially saw that these anti-Vax and anti-5G types did not constitute the majority of those attending, unlike the short lived British Yellow Vest group. Those thousands of people attending were, as far as I could see, primarily there to protest an increasingly authoritarian approach to Covid by Boris Johnson’s government and were not tin foil hat anti-Vax or anti-5G types. They looked to me like ordinary Britons who had had enough. I support the idea that the average Briton must have the right to peacefully demonstrate against government policies that they see as damaging and destructive. It goes without saying that I support this right even for those with whom I vehemently disagree.

However, this right to peacefully assemble and voice concerns was not respected by the Metropolitan Police. Firstly the act of pushing people into Trafalgar Square was done not by ordinary officers in normal uniforms using calm and reason but with aggressive tactics and heavily armoured officers who went out of their way to intimidate protestors. Secondly we have the behaviour of individual officers themselves who meted out the sort of violence to these anti-lockdown protestors that they would not dream of dishing out to either Black Lives Matter or Extinction Rebellion.

The video below is a good example of the differential policing that we now suffer. In the video you can see an officer continually punching in the face a man wearing a MAGA hat. Now this video, supplied by Mr Tommy Robinson over on Parler, is shown out of context, but having seen on livestream some of the other aggressions by the police, I cannot but help to come to the conclusion that this violence by this officer is unjustified. Even from this short clip you can see that the police have gone into the crowd, isolated certain sections of it and have attacked or harassed demonstration attendees.

Mr Robinson was 100% correct when he commented on Parler about this incident on the subject of the dichotomy in how we are policed. Mr Robinson said that if the guy in the MAGA hat had been wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt then he would probably have been left alone. We have all seen the disgusting kneeling by members of the Metropolitan Police in the face of BLM and been sickened by it. To see officers from the same force punching an ordinary Briton in the face for being part of a demonstration that the government obviously does not like, is even more sickening.

As someone who as a court reporter once worked alongside police when putting together background for stories, whose view of the police was respectful, I took the view that they were a body of hard but mostly honest men, it grieves me to have to say that Briton’s have seemingly lost the police, or at least that type of police.

The police were once as Sir Robert Peel intended them to be, which is a body of citizens in uniform dedicated to protect the public and given powers of arrest that they used with the consent of those policed. We do not have such police now. What we have is what Sir Robert Peel didn’t want and warned against, which is a paramilitary grouping, guided not by honesty and fairness but by political diktat and one that far from policing with consent, sees the public as some sort of enemy. I no longer recognise the Peelian Principles in Britain’s police today. Too often all I see are a British equivalent of the politically motivated and guided Francoist Higher Police Corps, the violent thuggery of France’s CRS and the militaristic conduct and mindset of Italy’s Carabineri. We deserve better than this sort of policing, we really do.