“If we are honest with ourselves, the solutions will follow.” Tugendhat’s public order speech. Full text.

This is the speech delivered by Tom Tugendhat today. 

I want to get straight to the point. The disorder we have seen on our streets in the past two weeks has been completely unacceptable. Every single perpetrator and instigator must be investigated, prosecuted and severely punished. And as a country we have some serious soul searching ahead of us.

It would be easy to take solace – as we so often do at moments like these – in the small acts of kindness, of service, and humanity amid the anger, pain and destruction. The people who ran towards danger to shield those innocent little girls as they were attacked by a knifeman. The courageous police officers who stood firm against the malicious mob, against the thugs and rioters. The volunteers who picked up the pieces, swept streets and literally mended fences and walls. They protected and restored that old principle of law and order – the King’s peace.

It is true that all those people deserve our gratitude. And of course they do represent the best of us. But we cannot use these rays of sunshine to ignore those whose actions reflect the very worst of our society. The racist thugs who attacked a mosque in Southport. The sectarian gang who burned down a Muslim-owned shop in Belfast. The mob who set fire to a hotel housing migrants in Rotherham. We need to ask ourselves how we got here and what we must do about it.

Too often, over the last two decades or more, we have avoided being brutally honest about the underlying social unrest across society, preferring instead the warmth and false comfort of denial and complacency. Bombs have been detonated, and we have moved on. Attempted terror attacks have gone by without much comment. Wicked and violent crimes have taken place, with little said or done. In May, a nine-year old girl was shot in a drive-by attack in London. Two weeks ago, three little girls – aged six, seven and nine, roughly the age of my own children – were stabbed to death as they danced to Taylor Swift in Southport.

The denial has taken many forms, from displacement to forgetfulness.

My friend Sir David Amess was murdered nearly three years ago by Ali Harbi Ali, a fanatical Islamist, and instead we found ourselves, for no related reason, debating online civility.

And then four years ago three gay men were murdered in an unprovoked attack in a park in Reading, we were told we would debate what happened, and why, after the trial. By the time the attacker was in prison, the country had moved on, and of course, we never did have that conversation.

Sometimes the problem is partisanship. Those who should know better are blinded by politics and fail to respect the hard-won British right of equality before the law.

After the attack on those little girls in Southport, Nigel Farage claimed “the truth is being withheld from us.” Later he justified amplifying this false information by saying he had believed influencers like Andrew Tate, and chose to condemn the “breakdown” of law and order preceding the riots, but not the riots themselves. I want to be clear: this is not leadership. It is deeply irresponsible and dangerous.

Later, when gangs of masked men gathered in Birmingham brandishing weapons and, live on camera, threatened female journalists, and attempted to slash the tyres of broadcast vans, Jess Phillips – a Home Office minister – chose to justify their behaviour instead of condemning it, because these were not Far Right hooligans, but young Muslim men. One man attacked by these vigilantes ended up in hospital.

This was a failure of leadership just as surely as that of Nigel Farage. And it is not the only failure of leadership by Keir Starmer’s government over these last two weeks.

Today I want to talk about the future of our police and criminal justice system, and the problems we face with violence, extremism and social trust. This isn’t just about the state. This is about who we are as a society.

But first, I want to consider this issue of leadership.

Leadership

This has been the Government’s first real test, and the Prime Minister fell short. When we needed a strong government, we got a party still in the mindset of opposition. When we needed a leader, we got a lawyer waiting for the case to reach court.

These are early days for the Government, and government isn’t easy. But government isn’t a game, either.

It is more than press releases and tweets. And you can’t just be wise with hindsight – something Labour mastered in Opposition – you have to be determined and aware throughout. You have to be ready to do the job from day one.

And public order is too precious – too essential to all of us – to be taken for granted. I have seen the cost of failure too often around the world and know that we cannot afford to allow chaos to grow.

But peace and order does not come about spontaneously. It is made possible by the rule of law, reliable justice, and the willingness to use force where necessary. It rests upon intangible assets: social trust, reciprocity, respect for the fairness of the law, and the knowledge that we all have a stake in our security. As Conservatives, we understand that order is not the product of freedom – rather, our freedom depends on order. None of us are bystanders – we don’t have that luxury.

Once lost, public order can be difficult to regain and social unrest can rear its head, which is why the police response to disorder must always be swift and determined. For officers on the streets, policing a violent crowd is a dangerous job. We sometimes hear of the need to go softly, softly, and to make arrests later. But visible lawlessness encourages others to join in and commit crime.

This was a problem that reared its head during the pro-Palestine marches. As Security Minister, I constantly had to encourage the Police to make arrests as crimes were being committed, rather than waiting until after a protest had finished. Once people cross the line, they need to be met with immediate and uncompromising force.

Sophisticated capabilities need to be deployed, of course, and instigators need to be made an example of. But on the street, sheer numbers, physical force and a willingness to deploy it determine whether order prevails or not. During a time of national disorder, the police need the total backing – in substance, not just rhetoric – of the Government.

This is where Keir Starmer stumbled. The riots began on Tuesday 30 July, but the Prime Minister did not chair COBR, the Government’s all agency response meeting, until one week later. At one point, he talked of creating a “standing army” of public order police officers. But this was a news line without content. We already have officers with specialist training and mutual aid, where police forces send officers to help others.

Of course, we never did find out if Sir Keir was talking about what already existed – or if he was proposing something new that could never have been created quickly enough. It was a PR line, not a policy.

If he had chaired a daily COBR meeting – with senior police officers, the security services, the army and others – the Prime Minister could have given the police more of what they needed. They could have cancelled leave, extended mutual aid, and confronted the rioters earlier with an overwhelming police presence.

We did not see this leadership.

They could have backfilled policing roles by calling up all special constables and using the army for back-office duties. They could have decided – before the shameful scenes outside the hotel in Rotherham – to allow the police to use appropriate force.

But they did not.

And when Jess Phillips sought to justify vigilantism and violence, to excuse a militia on our streets, Keir Starmer should have sacked her, because ministers should always defend the principle of equality before the law.

In all, these riots lasted for more than a week – longer than the more severe riots of 2011. The lessons were already there. They were not applied. They could and should have been stopped earlier.

Policing and the criminal justice system

The riots have, rightly, thrown up lots of questions about the police and our criminal justice system. Are public order policing tactics right? Why is it that some are now claiming that there is “two-tier policing”? Does the criminal justice system have the capacity it needs?

Conservatives should always be good friends to the police – they uphold the law and order we cherish. But friends speak honestly to each other. I want a tougher, bigger police force, but that also requires better police leadership, and the honesty to address recent failings.

Politicians of all stripes have avoided the raw honesty the country needs, and if we are brutally honest, policing and the wider criminal justice system are not working as they should. This goes beyond the perma-crisis at the Met and the appalling scandals from Wayne Couzens to the murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, and the finding of the inquiry into the murder of private investigator Daniel Morgan that London’s police are “institutionally corrupt”.

Claiming there is “two tier policing”, some critics of the police have compared the recent riots with the anti-Israel marches in London or direct action by Just Stop Oil. But that isn’t quite right. There is a difference between public protests in which a minority turn violent, and disorder started deliberately by those intent on violence.

There is a difference between blocking a road – even if that is a dangerous and selfish criminal act – and plotting to burn down shops, mosques and hotels, or carrying weapons on the streets. The right comparison for these riots is with those of 2011. Then the police were robust, and the judges quite rightly very tough.

And yet there is something to criticise. The approach to public order policing has been inconsistent and, too often, too weak. There was inaction in the face of blatant criminality during the anti-Israel protests.

Their justification for not wanting to ban those marches was that the threshold in the Public Order Act 1986 was not reached. But if the chief constable did not believe banning the marches would prevent “serious public disorder” how could they claim arresting lawbreakers at the time would lead to wider disorder?

This is quite obviously a contradiction. Last week, we saw a senior officer from West Midlands Police explain that officers had been absent during violence by young Muslim men because they had discussed their plans with “community leaders, with business leaders… to understand the style of policing we needed to deliver.”

Criminal acts committed during protests – whether by Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil or the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – were not stopped, with police seeming to stand by the wayside. And in Birmingham, police deferred to so-called community leaders while pubs and cars were attacked, windows broken and citizens intimidated.

This is not, as the police oath requires, policing “without fear or favour”. No police officer should ever tolerate the presence of a militia, no matter what the provocation or the cause they claim. The intrusion of politics – the politics of protest, the politics of self-appointed “community leaders” – into policing must end.

We need a new programme of police reform to make sure it does. The institutions of policing should be reviewed and reformed, including the College of Policing and the National Police Chiefs Council. The culture of police leadership – how leaders are recruited, trained and rewarded – must change.

The structure of policing – not least the Met’s confused mix of national and local responsibilities, and its reporting to the Mayor of London and the Home Secretary – with each blaming the other – must also change. Removing Counter Terrorism Policing from the Met to create a new National Security Police force, whose focus is not just counter-terror but also state threats, would be one way of doing so.

Our response to conspiracy theories and disinformation – and our response to the truth, when those in authority find it inconvenient – cannot be silence.

The antidote to conspiracy is transparency, and transparency is vital to knowledge. Where possible the police – subject to the protection of the right to a fair trial – should err towards sharing more information, not less.

Silence feeds lies and allows our enemies to exploit the darkness to spread disinformation and try to divide us.

In the criminal justice system, we also need change. It is true that we do not have the capacity in the prison estate that we need. There is little point spending vast sums on more police officers who arrest more criminals only to see them given trivial or non-custodial sentences. Research shows that only one tenth of criminals commit more than half of all crimes. And even with this group, a number of “super-prolific” criminals are responsible for an even greater share.

The first rioters to be convicted sum up the problem. Derek Drummond had fourteen previous convictions from nineteen offences and a history of violence. Declan Geiran had thirteen previous convictions for eighteen offences. Adam Wharton had sixteen previous convictions for 26 offences, including robbery and burglary. As more people are prosecuted, we are likely to find many repeat offenders among them.

According to research compiled by my friend, Neil O’Brien MP, the number of offenders with more than fifty previous convictions who were convicted but not sent to prison rose from 1,299 in 2007 to 3,196 in 2018. The number of offenders with more than a hundred convictions but who still avoided jail doubled to 295. Over the years of Neil’s study, 206,000 criminals with 25 previous convictions avoided prison for their next offence. Instead, more were handed community sentences.

This is madness, and under Labour the problem is only going to grow worse. Just as he is set to raise taxes, Keir Starmer is doing here what he fundamentally believes in – in this case, releasing criminals early – while pretending he is forced to do it because of his inheritance from the Tories.

We know this is nonsense for two reasons. First, he appointed a prisons minister, Lord Timpson, who thinks only one third of current prisoners should be behind bars. And second, since the riots, the Government has done what it had previously said was impossible. It has created an extra 567 prison places from within the existing estate. Yet the Government’s mass prisoner release scheme does not start until September.

Nobody denies that there are problems with prison capacity. And of course we should be better at prisoner rehabilitation, and much better at probation. But prison punishes offenders and takes dangerous and prolific criminals out of circulation allowing the rest of us to live in peace. We should be updating and improving our prisons, not releasing criminals.

Violence, extremism and social trust

So as well as police reform, we need probation and prison reform – and we need more prison capacity.

But we also need to look a little deeper, at what kind of society we have become.

The story of the last two weeks is not only one of violence and destruction. It is a story of a nation divided – the result of social unrest we’ve allowed to percolate below the surface. A story of a senseless, horrific crime against innocent children. Of people quick to believe baseless claims that the perpetrator was an illegal immigrant and a Muslim. Of people taking to the streets and targeting innocent people on the basis of their race or religion. Of thugs so rapt with the thrill of destruction, they attacked their own neighbourhoods. Of vigilantes forming groups and attacking innocent people themselves. Of police officers openly admitting they defer to unelected, unaccountable “community leaders”. And politicians of Right and Left picking and choosing who they condemn instead of upholding the rule of law.

Sadly this is not the first warning sign. We can go back to the riots in northern English towns in 2001 and read the Cantle report that followed. We can read the Casey report of 2016 and find the same conclusions. Cantle argued, “separate educational arrangements, community and voluntary bodies, employment, places of worship, language, social and cultural networks, means that many communities operate on the basis of a series of parallel lives.”

Casey found “discrimination and disadvantage feeding a sense of grievance and unfairness, isolating communities from modern British society.” But she also found “high levels of social and economic isolation in some places and cultural and religious practices” that hold citizens back and “run contrary to British values and sometimes our laws.”

We could commission another report following these riots, but we already know what it would find. I will address our economic challenges another time. But for now, let me say that too many people live in communities shorn of civic pride and social capital. Too many have lost their sense of self as they are denied opportunity and purpose in their lives. Many people are told, in effect, that they are not needed – that they have too little to contribute. They are parked on benefits and forgotten.

And social trust is collapsing. Instead of trying to build a sense of national unity under one civic identity – through a common culture, solidarity, and a shared understanding of the obligations and not just rights of citizenship – we have for decades, under governments of all Parties, pursued the opposite: promoting difference between communities instead of shared values and beliefs.

In recent years we have seen this policy turbocharged. We have seen equality of opportunity give way to critical race theory, while the root causes of inequalities go ignored. Activist groups warp the language of inclusion to get what they want. Universities indulge in ideologies of grievance instead of transmitting knowledge. Schools, museums and galleries apologise for our country’s history instead of objectively explaining it – and, yes, celebrating it.

We have seen inter-ethnic tensions and violence in Liverpool two weeks ago, in Leicester two years ago, and in other towns and cities before and since. We have seen sectarianism in our elections and even in the House of Commons. After years of militant identity politics, much of it imported, we have seen the politicisation of race by extremists and thugs.

The right response to this cannot be more of the same. Yet we have already seen enough from Labour to know that this is indeed what we will get. Ministers are promising a legal definition of “Islamophobia”, creating a blasphemy law for one faith, when anti-Muslim hatred is already a crime. This will undermine free speech, afford special protections uniquely to the beliefs of one religion, and protect extremists from scrutiny and investigation. And we can already see that activists on the Left are trying to use the riots to silence those with mainstream concerns about immigration.

We need a government that unites, not divides. That recognises that all citizens are equal and represented by the structures of our democracy – not by sectarian affiliations. We need patriotism and purpose. The patriotism that sees us as all part of one nation, and the purpose of seeing the goal of our shared prosperity and security.

And we need to end the culture of denial – the tendency to move hurriedly on from acts of extreme violence, to obfuscate about the identities and motives of the perpetrators, and to take comfort in the mantra of diversity.

The truth is that diversity can bring great advantages, but it also brings great challenges that need to be successfully navigated. Denial creates a vacuum in which extremists – of all kinds, and claiming to represent different ethnic and religious identities – can divide us.

So the mission must be for those of us in the mainstream to lead. To tell the truth about the scale of our challenges. To admit that too many live without opportunity, purpose or hope. To admit that too many of our towns and cities are divided. To admit that the politics of sectarianism – the emphasis on what sets us apart rather than what brings us together – has failed. And to accept that unless we do this differently, things will not get better and could yet get worse.

But this is not a counsel of despair. If we are honest with ourselves, the solutions will follow. The reform of our police and criminal justice system. The renewal – and in some cases replacement – of our national institutions. The restoration of pride in our country, its history and its culture. The rejection of militant identity politics in all its forms. The construction of a new economic model and the promise of a new social contract, in which we understand our obligations as well as our rights, and we all have the respect – and self-respect – that comes with fending for ourselves, providing for our families, contributing to our common life together.

It will take honesty, and it will take courage and leadership. But of course it can be done. Because what needs to be done in the national interest must be done. And because this is Britain: my country and your country – the greatest country in the world.

The post “If we are honest with ourselves, the solutions will follow.” Tugendhat’s public order speech. Full text. appeared first on Conservative Home.