Latest news with #lawless
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Virtue signalling on-stage protestors should be prosecuted
Around 50 per cent of the population now feels that the UK is becoming a 'lawless' country, according to an opinion poll. It is understandable the public should feel this way. Police and prosecutorial inaction when dealing with protestors, judicial failures in sentencing violent or sexual offenders, horrific increases in open anti-Semitism, mindless vandalism – the list goes on. A large part of the reason for the view that lawlessness is prevailing is because the public see incidents like the protest at the Royal Opera House last weekend, when a cast member unfurled a Palestinian flag on stage during the curtain call of Verdi's Il Trovatore, going unpunished. (Ironically the flag was actually an invention of the British colonial authorities in 1916 so not as symbolic of independence as some imagine). It's not the first time West End productions have been disrupted. Activists held a protest on stage midway through a performance of The Tempest at Drury Lane in January when protestors walked onto the stage. Protesters previously disrupted a performance of Les Miserables. There was also an interruption to the First Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in 2023. The law-abiding public are sick of the constant self-indulgent virtue signalling by people who think their cause trumps the right of everyone else to go about their lawful business. The enjoyment of hundreds of other people and the hard work of hundreds of cast and crew is affected by the disruptive actions of a handful of people. When the authorities fail to act against such incidents it has a consequence. It empowers others to indulge their own protests on another occasion. Many audience members have been looking forward to their attendance at these productions. The disruptors care not a jot. But there are things that can be done. As a former arts minister I would say that it is sadly now incumbent on all theatres to have a protocol in place to deal with a protest the moment one occurs. Lower the curtain immediately, cut the stage lights, silence the sound system. Press a cut-off switch like the BBC failed to do at Glastonbury. The police should always be called. There are offences under the Public Order Act which may apply. For a protestor in the audience, the offence of aggravated trespass may apply. It occurs when a person trespasses on land and intentionally disrupts a lawful activity. For a crew or cast member, the police and Crown Prosecution Service may consider legislation such as the very rarely used Theatres Act 1968. This was the Act that abolished the ancient role of the Lord Chamberlain in supervising theatre productions. But the Act allowed prosecutions for such things as obscenity and public order offences. If a cast member can be said to be 'putting on a performance', for example, with intent to cause 'provocation of a breach of the peace' that might potentially be applicable. The Act applies to people 'presenting or directing a performance.' Arguably a cast member could be said to be 'presenting' a performance even if he or she acts independently of the rest of the cast. Some imaginative thinking may be required by the authorities – but ignoring this sort of thing is a recipe for more audience members having their special occasion spoilt.
Telegraph
2 days ago
- Politics
- Telegraph
Farage's fix for lawless Britain is to bring back The Sweeney
Reform's anti-crime plan was launched in a Victorian library, with curtains drawn, spooky purple lighting and screens flashing mugshots. It felt like a Jack the Ripper Experience at the London Dungeon – 'the year is 1888, the streets are stalked by a killer' – till a fire alarm went off and Nigel Farage arrived to segue masterfully into a press conference. 'Sorry about the fire alarm,' he said, 'but you know what? We do have a bit of an emergency!' Britain was 'lawless', he announced; the country was 'close to civil disturbance'. The solution? More coppers, who should be tall and frightening – like Lee Anderson – so if ' people are looking for trouble and they see a couple of big strapping police officers', they'll think twice. Of course, he'll get push-back from the woke coppers who say the force must reflect the community it polices, in which case, why not stuff it with shoplifters and bicycle thieves? Diminutive pansexuals seem over-represented. Farage wants to bring back The Sweeney, as do I, along with kipper ties, 'evening all', grasses, slags, falling down the stairs and 'put your knickers on, love, you're nicked'. Stick 'em, he said, in 'nightingale prisons' – let's forget those were empty – or ship 'em to El Salvador, which is definitely not covered by the ECHR. A wet liberal asked if he cared that Salvadorian prisons were crowded and accused of torture, and Nige replied 'obviously, El Salvador is an extreme example', as if the press had suggested it. But it's an example Reform included on its own press release, emphasised in bold by an author who clearly thought it was a topping idea and hadn't googled it first. There was also a question about castration. All eyes turned to Zia Yusuf, demoted to a seat in the audience. His legs were crossed. On the up are Sarah Pochin MP, a magistrate, and Laila Cunningham, a former prosecutor and Robo-mum who said that when her AirPods were stolen, she chased the culprit for three hours (no doubt the Met has since charged her with stalking). Sadly absent was James McMurdock, who could've shared some insights into the young offenders system – but he's no longer with Reform and is helping the standards commissioner with his inquiries. Were I a politician, I'd dedicate myself to making the justice system as lenient as possible. Just in case… Hang-and-flog 'em dinosaurs will lap all this up – I know I did – and it was vastly more entertaining than Keir Starmer's end-of-term appearance at the liaison committee, itself duller and more cruel than making us sit through double-geography on a Friday afternoon. I used the time to plan a holiday to Ffestiniog. MPs pinched themselves to stay awake. The only colour was Emily Thornberry, the foreign committee head, rocking a you-only-live-once perm and a jacket that was Dolce & Gabbana or a respectable knock-off. Truly, she is the foreign secretary of gay men's hearts. Pity the school trip that listened to Starmer drone about 'stock-takes', 'interim reports' and anti-poverty plans with 'four limbs', the misery guaranteed to put any radical 16-year old off voting for life. We should turn the liaison committee into a 'scared-straight' programme for at-risk youth. 'Stay away from politics, kids, or this could be you.'
The Guardian
2 days ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Enter Nige's fantasy UK, where crims operate with impunity and only the lucky get out alive
A darkened room in central London. Curtains drawn to keep the lawbreakers out. A few dozen brave journalists who have dared to walk the streets. Mugshots of convicted criminals along with the sentences received line the walls on video screens. Though weirdly, none of James McMurdock. Perhaps Reform has yet to update its own database of undesirables. Young James is taking a break from the party whip while the Public Sector Fraud Authority investigates Covid loans to his companies. That's the trouble with London today. Trust no one. Just after 11am, a siren goes off and Nigel Farage, the Conservative-turned-Reform councillor Laila Cunningham and Tory-turned-Reform MP Sarah Pochin settle down behind a table. To their right is a lectern with the slogan 'Britain is lawless'. Miraculously, none of them have had their phones nicked or been stabbed on the journey into London. A city where crims operate with impunity. Dante's seventh circle of hell. A place where only the lucky get out alive. First up is Laila, a woman who freely admits she expects to get robbed every time she leaves her front door. She's almost sorry when she makes it back home in one piece. Laila has something she wants to get off her chest: she doesn't actually like anyone. Her country has been betrayed. One day, she might ask who was responsible. The answer might be closer to home than she imagines. Nige has done as much to shape the UK in the last 10 years as anyone. If you want to know why we're broke, you can start with Brexit. But for now, Laila is beyond thinking. She's just a heartbeat away from taking out an AK-47 and mowing down a nearby gang. Next came Sarah P, AKA Nurse Ratched. The unthinking person's idea of a thinking person. She too is in despair. London is a ruined city. The only people out in daylight hours are shoplifters and drug dealers, most of them foreigners. Sarah is almost in tears as she goes on to say that most Afghan migrants are potential sex offenders. How she yearns for the days when you could rely on all rapists to be white. But that's two-tier justice for you. Spare a thought for poor Lucy Connolly, who was sentenced to prison just for inciting people to burn refugees alive inside their hotel. Where was the harm in that? It was obviously only a joke. And Sarah is still laughing her head off at it. Worryingly, Farage appears to be lining her up to be his home secretary. She's one of the few Reform MPs he hasn't yet fallen out with. For the details, such as they are, we have to wait for Nige. He, too, is living out his own fantasies of a London that is one large no-go area. Crime is out of control, he says. Don't believe the statistics that show violent crime is going down. Just turn the graphs the other way up and use your own data. Stop and search everyone. Especially foreigners. Zero tolerance for anything. Apart from James McMurdock. Three strikes and it's life imprisonment. Send our worst prisoners to El Salvador – with any luck they might get tortured there. Send foreigners back to foreign lands. Build Nightingale prisons and throw away the keys. Recruit 30,000 new police officers. Abandon all diversity and equality targets. If you want a proper copper you need to get a white, heterosexual man to do the job. Only then will you feel safe. This was Nige's fantasy world. A country on its knees, reduced to lawlessness by the woke and the Blob. A land only he could save by locking every crim up. No offence would go unpunished. To prove his point, he passed around a sheet of paper with some bogus figures explaining how he would pay for everything. Shrink the state, cut net zero and HS2 and you can do what you like, he said. He was asked about El Salvador. Was he serious? Oh, no. Not that El Salvador. He couldn't think why he had said it. He was all heart really. Nige and reality have a small intersection area. Elsewhere in Westminster, the government was winding down before the summer recess. For Keir Starmer, this meant one of his thrice-yearly appearances before the liaison committee. A chance for the select committee chairs to ask the prime minister a few – reasonably – polite questions about his performance so far. It was noticeable that the Labour members of the committee were a great deal tougher than they had been last time round. Meg Hillier got things going by asking what he thought the country would look like in three years' time. It would be amazing, Keir replied. Everything would be hunky-dory. No one should take his brilliance for granted. The Tories had broken everything. He was the saviour who would mend things. In the public seating area, the first eyelids began to droop. Starmer has the unique gift of being able to put any crowd to sleep. It's got him out of bigger holes than this. The session drifted on as Keir talked technobabble – 'no silver bullet', 'delivery targets' – while the committee tried to reintroduce him to the real world. If he was really committed to ending poverty, why didn't he consider getting rid of the two-child benefit cap? And even the diluted reforms to the welfare bills were going to increase poverty. Debbie Abrahams insisted these weren't Labour values and that she felt ashamed. Liam Byrne wondered why Starmer was so reluctant to make changes to capital gains tax? Then he could afford to give tax breaks to the less well-off. Keir mumbled something about not setting the budget months ahead and the forecasts constantly changing and we all went back to sleep. Hillier ended by asking what had been his highlight of his first year in office. 'Easy,' said Starmer: walking into Downing Street for the first time. Which rather suggested it had all been downhill from there.
Daily Mail
3 days ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
NIGEL FARAGE: If you're a criminal, I'm putting you on notice. Follow the law or face serious justice
Britain is lawless. Over the past 20 years, crime has become commonplace across Britain – something Labour and the Tories have accepted rather than challenged. Labour's relentless focus on restricting free speech, raising taxes, and releasing hardened criminals early has come at the direct expense of policing and public safety. We must hold the Conservatives equally accountable, they've been in power throughout this crisis. They introduced the disastrous £200 shoplifting charter, effectively incentivising theft under that threshold and allowing criminals to face no real consequences. They eroded public trust and safety. There's no question: Britain is lawless and it needs Reform. That is why today I am laying out my party's plans for how we take back control of our streets from the criminals who currently plague them. Over the last 20 years, witnessing and experiencing crime has become normalised, with Britons feeling helpless and an overworked police force struggling to keep up. Government funding seems to be going to everything except keeping the people of this country safe on the streets and secure in their homes. Moreover, the Government seems to be doing everything it can to increase the likelihood of crime by importing droves of unvetted men into our towns and cities. Total crime is now 50 per cent higher than it was in the 1990s, and twice as high as in the 1980s. The current figures today are four times greater than they were in the 1970s. Something is fundamentally wrong with both our justice system and the approach towards criminal prosecutions. Our prison system is broken and, in most cases, at full capacity. Violent repeat offenders are being released early and in many cases people do not feel confident that reporting crimes to the police will lead to justice. A recent study has revealed that 44 per cent of violent crimes go unreported and over 64 per cent of robberies and thefts. One of the greatest measures of how a country is faring is the level of trust the public holds with government officials and their ability to keep us safe. From successive Labour and Conservative governments, that trust has been completely lost. By deporting 10,400 foreign prisoners, Reform will end the crisis of prison overcrowding. There's no justification for taxpayers funding the lives of criminals who shouldn't be here in the first place. Many break the law just by entering the UK, then commit further crimes once here – disrespecting our laws, culture, and civility. The only acceptable response is deportation. Reform will commit to the building of five new 'Nightingale' style prisons across the UK. Similar to what Denmark has done, we will negotiate a deal with countries such as Kosovo to ensure prison overcrowding is not a problem that occurs in Britain. For too long, Labour and the Tories have sent the message that crime in Britain carries little to no consequence. Reform will change that. We will ensure that the punishment actually fits the crime – not our current system where people are jailed for tweets while violent criminals walk free after serving a two-year sentence. Reform will build a justice system that properly investigates and prosecutes all crimes. Britain will no longer send the message that robbery, theft, and antisocial behaviour are acceptable. I will ensure any crime, big or small, will be investigated and perpetrators will face justice. Under a Reform government, we will have full-tariff sentences. Life will mean life if I am your prime minister. There will be no early release and no suspended sentences for serious violent offenders, sexual offenders and knife possession. We will end the £200 shoplifters' charter – all shoplifters will face arrest. We will also introduce mandatory life imprisonment for drug trafficking. Reform UK will be the toughest party on law and order this country has ever seen. We will cut crime in half. We will take back control of our streets, we will take back control of our courts and prisons. If you're a criminal, I am putting you on notice. In 2029 you have a choice to make: be a law-abiding citizen or face serious justice.
The Sun
4 days ago
- Politics
- The Sun
Police and politicians must return to basics with zero-tolerance approach towards low-level crimes to win back public
Policing must get back to the basics VOTERS are fed up to the back teeth with the failure of successive governments to crack down on crime. As a shocking new poll shows today, half the public say the country is fast becoming lawless. 1 Even more — 56 per cent — say things have gone further downhill over the last five years. The violence and mayhem we see daily in our streets, from shoplifting and muggings for phones to brutal stabbings, have created a real sense of despair. The findings are a particularly damning indictment of the Tories. Law and order has traditionally been one of their strong suits, but their legacy after 14 years in power is crime-ridden chaos. But there is no good news for Sir Keir Starmer either. More than half of Brits said Labour is performing 'poorly' on crime. And a staggering 57 per cent said they had no faith in the Government to get control of the streets. This disastrous collapse in confidence should be a wake-up call for Labour. For starters, ministers must order Chief Constables to curb all woke policing and focus resources on combating street crime. Cops should spend less time poring over tweets and more nabbing proper villains. Inside UK's crime capital where residents fear for lives and lay out razor wire to stop thieves They should also take a zero tolerance approach towards low level crimes such as vandalism and soft drug use. Earning bit on the side OUR revelations today from a migrant hotel whistle-blower should make very sombre reading for Home Secretary Yvette Cooper. It is shocking enough that asylum seekers used taxpayer-paid accommodation to make a sex video for OnlyFans. But the scale of illegal working the whistle-blower reports — in kebab shops, barbers, car washes and takeaways — is staggering. This is the heart of black-market Britain which the Government must tackle. Serco, the firm responsible for maintaining the hotels, report all such breaches of the rules to the Home Office. What are they doing to punish the offenders? Ofwat's filthy rich WHILE sewage spilled into our rivers and seas, senior bosses at the regulator body that is supposed to be monitoring water companies pocketed £2million last year. The useless Ofwat, which also blew £6million on consultants, should be scrapped right away and replaced with a regulator with real teeth. Its performance has much in common with a sewage pipe. They both stink.
