Bacolod

To the Metropolitan Police, You were the gold standard. The model every nation copied. When Scotland Yard spoke, criminals listened. That badge meant integrity. It meant courage. It meant the law applied equally, without fear or favour. Look at you now. You are a punchline. A cautionary tale. A force that clears up fewer than one in ten burglaries while your officers film TikTok videos in uniform. You arrested a man in Lancashire at dawn for a Facebook post in 2024 while grooming gangs operated in Rochdale for years with barely a raised eyebrow. You invented non-crime hate incidents so you could harass pensioners for wrongthink while real victims wait on hold. You kneeled for mobs in 2020 while statues fell and businesses burned. You stood aside while extremists marched with impunity, then raided homes over memes. You have turned the oldest police force in the world into a politicised enforcement squad for the narrative, not the public. You chose diversity dashboards over clear-up rates. You chose community engagement over enforcement. You chose the approval of NGOs and Twitter mobs over the safety of the people who pay your wages. You chose feelings over facts, and political safety over actual policing. You did not lose your way. You sold it. Slowly, deliberately, one diversity training course at a time, one apology tweet at a time, one decision to stand down while crime happened in front of you. The British people see you now. We see the double standards. We see the collapse in basic standards. We see a force that looks more like political commissars than police officers. We see officers who remember their oath sidelined while the ideologues get promoted. You wanted to be political enforcers. Congratulations. You got your wish. Now you get treated like political operatives. No more benefit of the doubt. No more automatic respect. You burned that. The mask is off. The receipts are published. The record is being kept. We are watching.

The Nowak case clearly highlights that we need to stop treating racism as an ~infinite evil, not because Nowak was racist (no evidence of this) but because any time you create a social superweapon like accusations of racism are now, it’ll be misused horribly. What is racism? Ask 10 people and you’ll get 12 opinions. Historically, it meant someone who treats people badly in interpersonal interactions because of their race. Which is just, like, kinda annoying and slightly boorish. It’s not the apocalypse. There are many personal traits that are equally or more annoying. Now the definition has been ludicrously expanded to include a bunch of things even less objectionable than that, including belief in very plausible scientific claims and policy preferences that were near-universal for almost all of human history. Racism just isn’t a big deal. We have to take it off its pedestal. If Nowak had said something racist, it would morally change exactly nothing about the horror of what happened to him. He didn’t, but I feel over-focusing on that distracts from the fact that it wouldn’t matter if he had. Murder is worse than racism. Hell, shoplifting is worse than racism. Enough. Who cares.

Owen Jones’ double standards: “Disturbing” “Art”