Neo-Nazis are the fastest growing cadre of violent extremists in our prisons, and now yet another offender motivated by far right ideology has entered our creaking jail system. Last week, Andrew Dymock was jailed for seven years for terrorist offences. Earlier this year Dymock, 24, was found guilty of multiple charges of encouraging and fundraising […]
You’ll probably need a strong stomach to wade through the Troubles oral history archive, one of the proposed innovations announced by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland yesterday afternoon to replace the basic notion of justice and accountability. ‘My skull fractured like an eggshell. The eye sockets in my skull disintegrated into my head, […]
What are the Covid rules at the moment? If you are confused, it’s understandable. There have been over 600 sets of Covid rules in the last 12 months. Trying to find out what they are, especially if you are about to be fined for breaking one of them, is not easy. And of course there […]
Who can possibly object to the restitution of objects to their lawful owners? No one doubts that after the Second World War Germany was right to restore stolen property to Jewish families or compensate them for its loss. In those circumstances, the identities of the Jewish wronged and the Nazi wrongdoers, and the relationships between […]
Last week, when I wrote about the need to reform the way we do public order policing, I noted in passing that the British public take a much sterner stance on maintaining public order than much of the political class. That was in relation to police tactics rather than the rules governing protest, but it […]
Events over the weekend put a spotlight on the thorny issue of the proper relationship between government and the police. The aftermath of the clashes as the Metropolitan Police dispersed a vigil for Sarah Everard saw an unedifying row over whether or they were accountable in this particular case to the Home Secretary or the […]
As public relations disasters go, it’s hard to top. Police officers bundling into a group of women who had come together in sorrow and disgust at the murder of another young woman, turning what should have been a sombre moment of reflection and tribute into one of anger, frustration and fear. Even the most fervent […]
Locked up in Lockdown has been something of a blessing in disguise for our beleaguered prison service. Before April last year, when draconian Covid restrictions froze regimes and prisoners in place, most metrics of decency, order and control were in freefall. Extremely high rates of assault against front line staff sent huge numbers of hastily […]
The day before former President Trump was removed from Twitter, Neil Basu, the UK’s Chief Counter Terror official, took the unprecedented step of warning that extremism had become so widespread online that it simply couldn’t be policed. Extremists have long exploited gaps in existing laws to push their agendas – the rise in anti-Semitism being a […]
Tomorrow, Tory MPs have to decide which is more important to them: their conscience, or career advancement. They have a chance to vote for an historic amendment that will end decades of dither over action to stop genocide, and in so doing to be on the right side of history. The Genocide Amendment to the […]
I don’t think we’re living in Orwellian times. In 1984, the future is “a boot stamping on a human face – forever”. Say what you like about the regime, but its objectives were quite straightforward. You never imagine it ended up that way because Big Brother got himself into a bit of a muddle. Boris […]
Sir Geoffrey Nice QC knows an atrocity when he sees one. He prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic for genocide and has been an expert on international human rights and humanitarian law ever since. He’s been involved in investigations into the Rohingya genocide in Burma, crimes against humanity in North Korea and allegations of forced organ harvesting of […]
In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd under police custody, and amid the wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations in UK, concepts such as structural racism and systemic discrimination have been thrust into the spotlight. Trust and confidence in the police force, the allocation of rewards and opportunities, and the broader well-being of […]
Imagine a national company that makes very important widgets. The company has an annual turnover of £3 billion. The failure rate of the widgets after a year is nearly 50%. That company is going to go bust. What I’ve just described is our decrepit and failing prison system. Each year we pour in a vast […]
“Stephen Lawrence: Did Britain Change?” was the timely question that ITV sought to answer last night. “Nowhere near enough” is the clear verdict from black and Asian Britain, in a major new, nationally representative poll of 3,000 people, including 1,500 from ethnic minorities, conducted by Number Cruncher Politics. I thought about Stephen Lawrence most days in […]
If you were so inclined, where would you plant the seeds with the best chance of growing into a post-caliphate ISIS 2.0? You would do a lot worse than start in the teeming, unstable camps in Kurdish-controlled North East Syria where, according to the latest US analysis, all the components exist to radicalise the next […]
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