Slavemaan? For Peace’s sake!
Is Westminster so very different from Herent?
Gemeente Herent is the branch of government in Belgium that regulates local affairs for me. They organise the street lighting, the removal of waste and repairs to minor roads. Herent Borough Council has responsibilities of its own, and it has responsibilities that it must coordinate with others. On the whole, it runs as smoothly as a Swiss watch.
When they made my street into a cycle street a few years back, I wrote to the mobility officer and enquired what that all meant and he dutifully responded to my questions. One question got an obvious answer. I’d asked what measures would be taken against those who flouted the new rules and he quite properly replied, “That, Mr Vincent, is a matter for the local police constabulary.”
In short, the council enacts rules but it is the police, in the criminal sphere at least and not the administrative, that enforces rules, and traffic laws are within the criminal sphere.
Now, one would have imagined that such a universal principle would be recognised and applied elsewhere as well. But, in London, principles of government seem to be on the qui vive.
Whether one backs, roots for, supports or dislikes Ms Suella Braverman, the UK’s Home Secretary, there can be little question but that she cocks a snoot to the e pluribus unum principle of Cabinet responsibility, that she believes decisions on matters within the purview of London’s police force lie in fact within her domain as the executive, and that lashing out at law enforcement for allowing peaceable demonstrations to take place is a contribution to the peaceable opposition to a peaceable demonstration.
Ms Braverman is a citizen, and she has rights to express herself as she will. But not when those rights are exercised perniciously in a verbal attack on the police force that lies within her own purview. Matters of policy in policing should be discussed behind closed doors and not on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers.
I have no grounds for questioning the fitness for purpose of Mr Rowley, the head police officer for London (even if I did have plenty of grounds to question that of his predecessor, Ms Dick); however, Ms Braverman is now giving plenty of grounds for me to question her own fitness for purpose as a member of the government of the United Kingdom: openly defying her own boss, the prime minister; openly intruding on policy matters belonging to the London police; and drawing wild comparisons that cause hurt and division in Gaza, in Muslim communities across the UK and the world, and in Northern Ireland, a part of the kingdom that teeters on a new brink after half a century of outrages committed by terrorist and government alike.
A Home Secretary who is repeatedly and consistently unwilling to embrace the notion of keeping the peace is one who needs evicting from the home of government. For Peace’s sake.
Image: Suella Braverman (free image licensed under the Open Government Licence).