3 days ago
With hounded police and pampered criminals, Britain is upside down
Our country is being taken for a ride and the public are sick to the back teeth of it. In April, Hashem Abedi, one of the men responsible for the Manchester Arena bombing, attacked prison guards with hot oil and a stabbing attack that seriously injured three officers. Abedi was also granted more than £1,200 in taxpayers' cash to launch an equal rights case in prison.
Prison officers do invaluable work protecting the public and deserve better protection. Yet those who do the right thing and put their lives on the line for us often get hounded and harassed.
Take Sergeant Martyn Blake for example, a specialist firearms officer who faced down real danger and took action to stop the dangerous and violent gang member Chris Kaba.
Instead of a medal, Sergeant Blake got a murder trial – a disgraceful decision. Thankfully, he was found not guilty. That should have been the end of it. But it's not.
Sergeant Blake is now facing gross-misconduct charges by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, a quango that said on his acquittal they wanted to 'acknowledge Chris Kaba's family and friends today as they continue to grieve his death. Our thoughts and sympathies remain with them and everyone else who has been affected.'
This is the world we've built – where the people risking their lives for us get treated like criminals by their own oversight bodies, while the criminals are venerated. Britain used to be about the person who put in the hard work, who did the right thing, who waited patiently in a queue for their turn and stood up for what is right. Slowly but surely, something is changing.
When I talk to people around the country, I get a sense of profound frustration. The shop worker, getting up at the crack of dawn for their shift, driving past the house at the end of the street, curtains still closed, bin full of takeaways, sleeping off a hangover after a night watching TV (all paid for by the taxpayer).
It's the electrician, who can't afford to replace the latest set of tools stolen out the back of his van, driving past the asylum hotel full of people who arrived here illegally and are about be told they can stay in Britain forever and live a life paid for by his taxes.
It's got to stop. And it starts with enforcement and re-establishing order. When the Conservative Party is in government again, that's exactly what we will do. The party of law and order is back. And I am unashamedly on the side of those who do the right thing.
Our cities are descending into chaos. It's not a public health emergency, as London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan keeps saying. It's a lack of bloody enforcement. We've all had enough of having to step over drug addicts while we go about shopping. Of toiletries and meat kept under lock and key in the supermarket. Of trains that seem to work for fare dodgers, not commuters – as highlighted by the shadow justice secretary Rob Jenrick in his excellent video this week.
Labour is too busy releasing prisoners from their sentences early to get a grip on the situation. We have four more years of this, and when the time comes, we will need a party that knows how to fix problems, not just make noise. That starts with the broad-based plan the Conservatives are building.
Our policy renewal programme is well underway and we are commissioning experts across the board to come up with the solutions to the challenges Britain faces today and will face over the next decade.
Tomorrow, Robert Jenrick sets out another stage in our criminal justice proposals, which would help get a grip on the disorder in our prisons. The respected former prison governor, Ian Acheson, has conducted a rapid review to come up with solutions the government can adopt now. And this is just the beginning, there is more to come.
Our problems are connected. We can never hope to get control of our streets if we are importing people who commit more crimes and don't deport them. We have to deal with immigration.
Shadow home secretary Chris Philp and I set out the early stages of our plan to deal with that earlier this year: a hard cap on numbers, no pathway to citizenship without contribution, zero tolerance of foreign national offenders, and a real deterrent to stop those who try to come illegally.
It says everything that one of Labour's first decisions in office was to scrap the Rwanda deterrent with no replacement. Now they vote against new proposals to tackle migration in Parliament, while offering milquetoast policies that do nothing to tackle the issue.
Despite talking tough on migration, Reform's big idea is a new minister for deportations. Creating more politicians is not the solution for any of the problems the UK has right now.
Conservatives are building for the long-term. I am ending the practice of rushing out policies and announcements with no plan. This approach may have been good for polling, but it was bad for the public.
Instead, I am working on credible policies that will actually fix the UK's problems and ensure that those who work hard, make sacrifices and deliver safe communities and prosperity are rewarded, and those who break the rules are punished – severely.
Other parties may race to the bottom of more hand-outs and more benefits. We are working on building a secure and prosperous country of which we can all be proud.
