Fierce Patriots

Conservative Political News

  • Subscribe

United Kingdom

UK’s Top Police Force No Longer Trusted by the General Public – Report

by Leave a Comment

Britain’s top police force no longer has the trust of the general public and needs major reform, a review of the organisation has found.

An investigation into the state of the London Metropolitan Police (Met) has found that the force no longer has the support and trust of the general public.

It comes shortly after one member of the force was convicted as a serial rapist and sexual abuser, being said to have frequently used his position inside the force as a way to abuse women.

According to the review published on Tuesday, the Met police force is no longer providing the services it is meant to, with a combination of financial cuts and complacency resulting in a serious deterioration in frontline law enforcement.

“London no longer has a functioning neighbourhood policing service,” the report explained, adding that women and children in particular have been poorly served by the force, and left in danger as a result.

The police are in “denial” about the problems they face and have institutional roadblocks to improvement including “hubris” — believing only they really understand what it takes to police London, and therefore refusing to take external criticism or help — and “optimism” manifesting itself as glossing over issues. Protecting the reputation of the force is seen as more important than actually having a good police force, Casey says.

As well as these failures, the report also zeroes in on accusations of systematic racism, sexism, and homophobia. The fact that black officers are considerably more likely to face disciplinary procedures than white officers, and that black Londoners are more likely to have an interaction with the police than white, are both identified as evidence of racism within the force.

Nevertheless, while black Londoners are more likely to have a negative view of the force than their white neighbours, the report found this trust gap was rapidly closing as trust in the police to do a good job was falling among white Londoners.

Overall, the report reckons that overall confidence in the force has now dropped below the 50 per cent mark, with it ultimately expressing doubt as to whether the Met can still operate a model of “policing by consent”.

The report said: “The model of policing by consent, pioneered in London and admired and copied around the world, requires the Met to both earn and maintain public trust in everything it does. However, there is declining public confidence and trust in the institution.”

The fact that public confidence in the Met has collapsed is rather unsurprising considering a recent slew of inexcusable scandals coupled with rising violent crime. The litany of serious sexual crimes committed by members of the force has brought it into disrepute with the general public.

Tuesday’s report even goes so far as to describe itself as being ” book-ended” by such rape scandals, with it starting shortly after the rape and murder of Sarah Everard at the hands of Met police constable Wayne Couzens.

Couzens abducted the 33-year-old woman under the auspices of arresting her for breaching COVID restrictions, before raping and murdering her.

The report now comes out only a little more than a month after another office for the force, David Carrick, was sentenced in court for being a serial rapist and sexual abuser, pleading guilty to two dozen rapes in January this year.

Carrick is said to have used his position in the force to gain the trust of women before raping them, with some of his victims being subjected to prolonged instances of sexual assault.

Some victims are even said to have been locked inside a small cupboard for significant lengths of time with no food.

Follow Peter Caddle on Twitter: @Peter_Caddle
Follow Breitbart London on Facebook: Breitbart London

Con-Servatives: UK Net Migration to Remain in Hundreds of Thousands Despite Tory Promises

by Leave a Comment

Contrary to long-standing promises from Britain’s governing Conservative Party, net migration is expected to remain in the hundreds of thousands for the foreseeable future, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) predicted this week.

In its list of Spring projections, the Office for Budget Responsibility said that net migration will remain at around 245,000 per year until at least the 2026/27 fiscal year, revising the estimate up by 40,000 more migrants compared to its previous release in November.

Alongside increases in refugee applications from Hong Kong and Ukraine, the statistician agency pointed to the post-Brexit points-based immigration system implemented by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson as a key factor in the continued high waves of migration, given that it failed to set a firm annual cap on migration.

However, in comments provided to Breitbart London, Alp Mehmet, chairman of Migration Watch UK, suggested that annual arrivals over the coming years could actually be even higher: “The OBR’s assumption of net migration settling at 245,000 per annum has no basis. It was over half a million in the year to June 2022 and very likely to have been even higher for the whole of last year.”

“The expectation that it will be around a quarter of a million by 2026 is fantasy. It also suggests that the government has no intention of getting a grip of the scale of immigration, as the public want,” he explained.

“Failing to do so will only lead to further massive, unsustainable population increase, as happened in just 20 years when it was the prime driver of an eight million growth in our population.”

Despite many voters backing the Conservative Party in the 2019 election in the hopes of finally having a government free from European Union rules and able to actually reduce the number of migrants coming to the country, the opposite occurred, with a record 1.1 million visas being issued to foreigners and net migration hitting a record half a million last year — nearly doubling the peaks seen under the leftist Labour administration of Tony Blair.

Since the days of David Cameron’s premiership from 2010 to 2016, Conservative governments consistently paid lip service to the notion of reducing the number of migrants coming into the country, vowing to cut net migration in their 2010, 2015, 2017, and 2019 election manifestos, yet numbers have only continued to increase.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said during last Summer’s leadership contest to replace Johnson — which he lost — that if put into office he would seek to reduce migration, but he refused to commit to a hard annual cap and has made no significant moves to restrict migration since being installed in Downing Street in a globalist-backed coup against the shortly-tenured Prime Minister Liz Truss.

While Home Secretary Suella Braverman has previously said that the government should fulfil its longstanding promise to the people to bring down net migration to “the tens of thousands”, her tenure in the Cabinet has so far been consumed with failed attempts to solve the illegal boat migrant crisis in the English Channel rather than tackle legal mass migration, despite it having far more impact on the demographic trajectory of the country.

Recent data from the once-in-a-decade Census also revealed that the percentage of native Britons in England and Wales had fallen below 75 per cent.

Despite promising to “take back control” of the nation’s borders, the foreign-born population rose from around 7.5 million a decade ago to around 10.4 million today — roughly equivalent to the combined populations of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, or around a sixth of the UK population overall.

Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka

UK Bans China’s TikTok from Government Mobile Phones ‘With Immediate Effect’

by Leave a Comment

Citing a “specific risk”, the Chinese-developed video-sharing app TikTok has been banned from UK government devices “with immediate effect”.

The UK banned TikTok on “government corporate devices” on Thursday, it announced in a Parliamentary statement. While government spokesman Oliver Dowden said the ban did not extend to the general public or the private mobile phones of government ministers, he emphasised that individuals should think hard before downloading some social media apps.

Noting that social media apps “collect and store huge amounts of user data, including contacts, user content, and geolocation data” and saying there was a “specific risk” to government devices, Dowden said from now on only apps from an approved list could be installed on government phones and TikTok wasn’t going to be one of them.

The government is “going to ban the use of TikTok on government devices. We will do so with immediate effect… Overall this approach aligns with action taken by allies including the United States, Canada, and the EU”, Dowden continued, saying “our security must come first”.

Nevertheless, there would be exemptions to the ban, he said, meaning TikTok could still be downloaded onto some government devices “where it is required for operational reasons”, presumably for posting government-sponsored content onto the platform in a bid to reach young people. In these cases, the installation of the TikTok app would be reviewed by security before going ahead.

Several government departments still have TikTok accounts.

As Dowden noted, the ban follows several other Western powers have already banned the app for government users over security concerns. Accusing the government of having taken too long to make the move, Britain’s left-wing opposition Labour said the action was “behind the curve”.

Dowden said in Parliament Thursday:

…it is clear there could be a risk around how sensitive government data is accessed by certain platforms. As many colleagues will know, social media apps collect and store huge amounts of user data, including contacts, user content, and geolocation data. On government devices, that data can be sensitive. So today we are strengthening the security of those devices in two key respects.

First, we are moving to a system where government devices will only be able to access third-party apps on a pre-approved list. This system is already in place across many departments, now it will be the rule across government.

Second, we are also going to ban the use of TikTok on government devices. We will do so with immediate effect… this is a precautionary move, we know there is already limited use of TokTok across government, but it is also good cyber-hygiene.

Given the particular risk around government devices which may contain sensitive information, it is both prudent and proportionate to restrict the use of certain apps, particularly when it comes to certain apps where a large amount of data can be stored and accessed.

This ban applies to government corporate devices within ministerial and non-ministerial departments, but it will not extend to personal devices for government employees or ministers, or the general public. This is because this is a proportionate move based on a specific risk on government devices.

However as is always the case, we do advise individuals to practice caution online and to consider each social media platform’s data policies before downloading and using them.

Of course, it is the case that ministers receive regular security briefings and advice on protecting data on their personal devices and on mitigating cyber threats.

We will also be putting in place specific, very limited exemptions for the use of TikTok on government devices where it is required for operational reasons. Those exemptions will only be granted by security teams on a case-by-case basis with ministerial clearance as appropriate.

Overall this approach aligns with action taken by allies including the United States, Canada, and the EU.

Our Security must always come first, and today we are strengthening that security in a prudent and proportionate way and I commend this statement to the house.

Russia Now Confiscating Passports From Public Officials to Prevent Defections: British Intel

by Leave a Comment

Russia is taking passports from state industry employees and “increasingly disaffected” public officials to prevent them from fleeing abroad, the British Ministry of Defence (MOD) has said.

Russian officials and state company workers are “increasingly disaffected” and are now considered a flight risk by the government which is subjecting them to “increasingly severe foreign travel restrictions”, the MOD had said in their frequent Ukraine war intelligence update.

These extreme moves are necessary to “prevent the flight or defection of increasingly disaffected officials”, the MOD claimed, noting some have “likely had to forfeit their passports… Employees closer to the centre of power face more severe restrictions; Kremlin officials are banned from all international leisure travel.”

The intelligence update suggested these restrictions could continue to tighten with time and will come to encompass a wider group of state employees.

The move to prevent defections does not, perhaps, auger well for the levels of support for Putin’s prosecution of his war against Ukraine, even at the top of Russian society from which Kremlin officials will be drawn. The British MOD compares the development to moves by Russia during the Cold War, when travel between the communist nations of the Soviet Union for work and leisure was possible for many, but going outside was considerably more difficult.

The claims by the UK MOD follow similar reports on the passport crackdown in independent Russian-language media last week, with reports citing an investigation claiming that civil servants with access to state secrets had been asked to hand over their passports to state security for “safe keeping”. Those who refused, it is claimed, were given the option to resign their positions.

In other cases, it is alleged, that lower-level employees in Russian state companies may not have their passports confiscated, if they make a request to take a foreign holiday outside of Russia-ally states, they simply have their time off request turned down. It is claimed the most recent crackdown — similar restrictions, though less severe, have been in place since Russia annexed the Crimea in 2014 — after a Russian politician went on holiday to Mexico earlier this year, causing a scandal in Russia.

The move to snatch passports from government officials is strangely at odds with the eagerness the Russian state has shown to give out passports in Ukraine, however. As part of a push to colonise newly occupied areas, officials issue Russian passports to Ukrainian citizens in what has been described as a “fast track” system. By February 2022 some 720,000 people had been given paperwork in this way, it was claimed.

Escalation Risk? Hours After USAF Drone Downed, NATO Jets Intercept Russian Planes Over Baltic

by Leave a Comment

Fighter jets from the UK’s Royal Air Force and the German air force intercepted a Russian strategic tanker on Tuesday, it has been revealed, just hours after the USAF lost a drone in a confrontation with Russian jets over the Black Sea.

Eurofighter Typhoon jets from the United Kingdom and Germany assigned to the joint NATO Baltic air policing mission in northern Europe were scrambled Tuesday to intercept a Russian military aircraft near Estonia which failed to respond to Estonian air traffic control, the Ministry of Defence said Wednesday.

The NATO jets visually identified and escorted the Ilyushin Il-78 air-refueling tanker, which was flying from the Russian mainland to Kaliningrad, a Russian exclave state in Europe between Poland and Lithuania formerly known as Konigsberg. After the intercept, the jets then escorted another Russian aircraft, an Antonov An-148 airliner.

In a Ministry of Defence statement seen by Breitbart London, a Royal Air Force pilot described the scramble to intercept the Russian aircraft, saying: “We were scrambled to intercept an aircraft that was approaching Estonian airspace. We identified and monitored it as it transited close to NATO airspace… Any aircraft that are not communicating with Air Traffic Control or on a recognised flight plan will be intercepted by us to ensure we know who they are and maintain flight safety for all airspace users.”

The interception came just hours after an unmanned USAF aircraft — a Reaper drone — was lost in the Baltic. The United States accused the Russian air force of downing the recon and attack drone by flying aggressively near it, dumping jet fuel onto it, and by coming into contact with the drone’s propeller, causing it to lose power and crash into the sea.

Furthermore, the U.S. accused the Russians of acting in an environmentally unsound manner because of their tactic of dumping aviation fuel from their own tanks onto the drone — possibly to try and cause a fire or to confuse optical sensors.

The Russian ambassador was subsequently summoned by the U.S., but Russia has insisted on its innocence in the matter, stating the drone crashed by itself without help from its fighters while acting aggressively towards what they claim as Russian airspace.

There are risks of escalation associated with bringing down equipment like Reaper drones, even though no U.S. lives were lost in the incident. There was nearly a retaliatory strike on Iran which, it is claimed, could have killed hundreds after the Iranian military brought down a Reaper drone in 2019. But the attack was called off at the last minute after President Trump weighed that killing a large number of people in retaliation for an unmanned aircraft was not just.