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Great Britain: Time to make yobs fear the police again, says Howard
The Telegraph (U.K.) ^ | April 1, 2005 | George Jones

Posted on 04/01/2005 9:36:51 AM PST by Stoat

Time to make yobs fear the police again, says Howard


By George Jones, Political Editor
(Filed: 01/04/2005)

Michael Howard promised yesterday to combat a growing "yob culture" that was turning town and city centres into no-go areas at night and weekends.

He would ensure that lawless teenagers once again feared the police, he said.

 
Michael Howard
Tough love: Mr Howard ‘wants yobs looking round in fear’

A Conservative government would end the "defensive policing" and political correctness that had allowed teenage yobs free rein.

As home secretary in the last Tory government, Mr Howard angered libertarians with his tough law and order policies, claiming that "prison works" because it took career criminals out of circulation.

Yesterday he told a Tory party press conference that it was time to take a stand against the yob culture that was disfiguring many communities.

Decent, hard-working families were regularly intimidated: "The husband and wife who no longer walk home from the pub on a nice evening; the dad that dare not take his kid to the park to play football any more; and the pensioners who have become prisoners in their own home."

Asked about the six-month jail sentence imposed on Linda Walker, a teacher, for firing an air gun at the feet of yobs who had been terrorising her, Mr Howard compared it with a two-month sentence given to a drink-driver who had killed a young child.

There was something "seriously out of kilter" with the justice system, he said.

He accused Mr Blair of having "lost the plot on crime" because lawless teenagers were no longer afraid of the police. It was time to give them a "dose of the fear" they had been dishing out.

"I want policemen and women to have the confidence to eyeball these characters; to invade their body space, just as they are invading ours; to confront and challenge their unacceptable behaviour. I don't want members of the public looking over their shoulders - I want the yobs looking round in fear."

Mr Howard said he would not support constables giving them a "clip round the ear" but he wanted the yobs to "fear the police".

He promised that a Conservative government would scrap "a politically correct" requirement, to be introduced today, for the police to fill in a form every time they stopped someone on the street.

The Conservatives would keep the new community support officers who patrol the streets in some towns and cities. They would also recruit an extra 5,000 police officers a year.

Central crime targets would be scrapped. Instead, forces would be required to publish local weekly crime statistics on the internet so that communities could see what progress they were making. Mr Howard said that this technique had proved successful in holding New York's police to account.

After nearly a week on the back foot over the sacking of Howard Flight as a Tory candidate, Mr Howard went on the offensive over Tony Blair's record on law and order.

All the parties were effectively on a war footing last night after the Prime Minister invited television cameras into No 10 to film a special Cabinet session that discussed Labour's election plans.

It was the clearest signal yet that he will ask the Queen on Monday to dissolve Parliament for a May 5 election.

The Tory attempt to make crime a central election issue was criticised by several chief constables who accused the party of exaggeration.

Richard Brunstrom, the chief constable of North Wales, said that a Conservative advertisement highlighting rising violent crime locally was misleading.

Peter Neyroud, the chief constable of Oxfordshire, protested about an "abuse of statistics" over an advertisement showing an increase in violent crime in Oxford.

The Association of Chief Police Officers said it was concerned about the "selective use of statistics".

Labour was forced on the defensive after the publication of figures showed that middle class incomes had fallen for the first time for nearly 15 years as a result of tax increases introduced by Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, after Labour's 2001 election victory.

Mr Brown dismissed the figures, saying that the living standards of the "typical family" had risen "by something in the order of 20 per cent".



TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; Government; Politics/Elections; United Kingdom; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: bang; britain; crime; england; greatbritain; howard; michaelhoward; tories; tory; uk; unitedkingdom; yobs
Conservative Party - News Story

Taking a stand against the yob culture

Taking a stand against the yob culture

Michael Howard has unveiled plans to encourage the police to take on Britain's street yobs and "wipe the smile" off their faces.

In a keynote speech on crime, the Conservative Leader said the police should have the confidence to "eyeball" hooligans, "invade their body space" and challenge and confront their unacceptable behaviour.

And he made clear that an incoming Conservative government would make the police more accountable - by having to publish weekly crime statistics on the internet so that their local communities can see what progress is being made in tackling street crime, hooliganism, and disorder.

"In New York Compstat - the weekly publication of crime statistics division by division - meant the police stopped trying to explain the problem away and started taking action to tackle it. There is a word for it - accountability," Mr Howard said.

After visiting a crime-infested estate in Hackney, Mr Howard vowed that a Conservative government would beef up police muscle power and make a priority of combating thuggery and yob behaviour on the streets.

Accusing Labour ministers of "losing the plot" on crime, he contrasted the way Britain's hard-working majority of people did the right thing, while their lives could be made a misery by the "thriving yob culture" in which hooligans and tearaways did the wrong things - often unchecked.

"Decent hard working families are regularly intimidated by yobs on their streets and in their town centres. It makes me sick that people have to put up with this kind of nonsense. In today's Britain no-one seems prepared to take a stand - to hold these arrogant young yobs to account for their appalling behaviour.

"Instead of yobs being afraid of the police, ordinary folk are afraid of yobs. In Britain we are in real danger of slipping into defensive policing. Mr Blair is creating a culture which puts moral correctness, form filling and box ticking before intervening and confronting criminal behaviour - however minor," he said.

Mr Howard said that under a five point action plan a Conservative government would "put fear back into the hearts of the yobs" by recruiting more police, scrapping central targets, slashing police red tape, making the police publish weekly crime statistics, and giving local people power to decide how their communities are policed.

Read the full speech


1 posted on 04/01/2005 9:36:54 AM PST by Stoat
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To: All
Conservative Party - Profile

About Michael

Michael was born in 1941 and educated at Llanelli Grammar School and Peterhouse, Cambridge. In 1962 he was elected President of the Cambridge Union. He was called to the Bar in 1964 and was appointed a QC in 1982.

Michael's Experience

Michael was elected Member of Parliament for Folkestone and Hythe in 1983. The following year he was appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Solicitor General. In 1985 he entered the Government as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at the Department of Trade and Industry with responsibility for corporate and consumer affairs.

In 1987, he moved to the Department of the Environment, first as Minister of State for Local Government and then as Minister of State for Water and Planning. In 1990, he entered the Cabinet as Secretary of State for Employment, abolishing the closed shop and playing a crucial role in negotiating the UK's opt-out from the Social Chapter at Maastricht.

Following the 1992 election, Michael was appointed Secretary of State for the Environment. In this position he played a major role in securing the participation of the United States at the Earth Summit in Rio, which he attended on behalf of the Government.

In May 1993, he became Home Secretary, a position he held for four years. During his term of office, crime fell by an unprecedented 18 per cent. When he left office, nearly a million fewer crimes a year were being committed than when he became Home Secretary four years before.

From 1997 to 1999, Michael served as Shadow Foreign Secretary. In September 2001, he was appointed Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. In November 2003, he was elected Leader of the Conservative Party and of Her Majesty's Opposition.


2 posted on 04/01/2005 9:37:14 AM PST by Stoat (Rice / Coulter 2008: Smart Ladies for a Strong America)
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To: Stoat

How about allowing honest people to own guns and making the 'yobs' afraid of THEM!


3 posted on 04/01/2005 9:38:44 AM PST by Spok
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To: Stoat
What is a 'yob'?
4 posted on 04/01/2005 9:39:06 AM PST by CzarNicky (The problem with bad ideas is that they seemed like good ideas at the time.)
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To: CzarNicky
What is a 'yob'?
 

It's a part of British slang...."boy" spelled in reverse when the goal is to cast a 'boy' in a negative light.

More about British slang here:

BBC America - Dictionary

Dictionary of English slang and colloquialisms of the UK

5 posted on 04/01/2005 9:42:17 AM PST by Stoat (Rice / Coulter 2008: Smart Ladies for a Strong America)
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To: Spok

Give him time.


6 posted on 04/01/2005 9:43:10 AM PST by agere_contra
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To: Stoat
Paging mayor Giuliani!
7 posted on 04/01/2005 9:43:23 AM PST by 2banana (My common ground with terrorists - They want to die for Islam, and we want to kill them.)
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To: Spok
How about allowing honest people to own guns and making the 'yobs' afraid of THEM!

Careful, you're thinking logically   :-)

8 posted on 04/01/2005 9:43:40 AM PST by Stoat (Rice / Coulter 2008: Smart Ladies for a Strong America)
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To: 2banana
Paging mayor Giuliani!

applause.gif

9 posted on 04/01/2005 9:47:06 AM PST by Stoat (Rice / Coulter 2008: Smart Ladies for a Strong America)
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To: CzarNicky

What is a 'yob'?

Here is a handy test to see if you are one. http://www.guardian.co.uk/quiz/questions/0,5961,408093,00.html


10 posted on 04/01/2005 9:55:01 AM PST by MaggieCarta (There is no distinctly American criminal class--except Congress.--Mark Twain)
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To: Stoat

Commanded to be tough, the British police would find the 'yobs' too hard a nut to crack and transfer their attentions to ordinary Britons. Count on it.


11 posted on 04/01/2005 9:58:06 AM PST by Grut
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To: Stoat
Politically Correct Plods

The superior ethical reasoning of the British police service continues to be a source of ever greater wonderment. You and I might fondly imagine that the purpose of policing is to prevent or detect crime and to treat everyone equally under the law. We could not be more wrong. For if lawbreakers belong to a minority group which comes under the magic heading of ‘diversity’, the police will treat them instead as victims and devote time and money to protecting their ‘rights’.

The priority for the police appears no longer to prevent offences, but rather to prevent the giving of offence. Thus Cambridgeshire police have just spent £10,000 on CDs encouraging travellers to take legal action over incidents they claim are racist or discriminatory. According to the Telegraph, 2000 of these discs — entitled Del Gavvers Pukker Cheerus, a Romany phrase for ‘give the police a chance’ — are being distributed to travellers in the Fenland district, with a further 500 being sent to local police officers to make sure they are up to speed on travellers’ rights.

Not surprisingly, local residents are outraged. For they say they are the victims here, suffering from anti-social behaviour, intimidation and criminality by travellers setting up illegal camps in the area. In their innocence, they thought the police would protect them by enforcing the law. Instead they find themselves effectively demonised as racists for making such an outrageous suggestion.

Clearly, they need to attend a few diversity training courses to reprogramme their brains into the permitted mode of thinking. This would teach them that it is racist ever to speak about travellers breaking the law, even though that may be precisely what has happened. They would be taught that Humpty Dumpty’s rule now prevails — that something is racist merely if someone thinks it is. So if the travellers call locals racist for protesting at the harassment they are enduring at the travellers’ hands, racist is what they are.They would learn that travellers have become a protected species, immune from the tiresome obligations that other mortals have to endure such as obeying the law. That is because they are deemed to be a minority group that is persecuted by the majority who are ‘intolerant’ of their alternative lifestyles.

The fact that these alternative lifestyles are often anti-social or unlawful is irrelevant. Tolerance now means tolerating the intolerable when practised by a designated victim group. Not to tolerate it is racist.This crazy and sinister thinking, which makes victims out of law-breakers and bigots out of the true victims of crime, has become the orthodoxy throughout the public services, including the police. Once the thin blue line defending a society’s fundamental values, the police have now grotesquely turned into a weapon against them.

Rather than upholding justice and order, they have become the enforcement arm of a culture which thinks that prejudice and discrimination are the worst crimes that can be committed. For PC Plod, now read Politically Correct Plod.

The rot set in after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, when the police cravenly accepted the politically malevolent verdict of the Macpherson report that the whole police service was institutionally racist. Absorbing this gross libel made the police service institutionally demoralised. Already weakened by a collective loss of nerve over earlier corruption scandals and miscarriages of justice, it set about purging itself not only of racism but of all politically incorrect thinking.

At the same time, it tried to raise its game by taking on a senior officer class with social science degrees. But because the universities had become the intellectual crucible of political correctness, these senior officers arrived programmed by idiotic and lazy thinking. Sound policemen further down the ranks were thus led by senior officers with no practical experience and heads full of ideological junk. Worse still, the only way to gain promotion was to go along with this betrayal of policing values and common sense. The outcome was ‘diversity training’, which made self-designated victim groups such as women, gays or travellers virtually untouchable. Eradicating prejudice became a major preoccupation. Instead of hating all crime, the police now targeted hate crime.

This led to the Metropolitan Police Diversity Directorate’s Orwellian diktat urging the public to report to the police anyone who had committed a thought crime -- abusing people because of their faith, race, religion or disability or because they were lesbian, gay, bisexual or transsexual. It led to the Met's posters on the London Tube, offensively suggesting that men reading them might be contemplating violence against women and warning them they will be pursued even if the woman does not make a statement — ignoring the fact that domestic violence is equally committed by women.

It led to the absurd decision by the new Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair to change the Met’s logo — at huge expense — not only to stress its inclusiveness but also to remove the italic script in which it was written, on the grounds that this discriminated against short-sighted people.

Enforcing approved attitudes like this — however ludicrous — is as inefficient as it is frightening. It necessitates the creation of burgeoning bureaucracies to promulgate and service the whole diversity obsession. A surreal aspect of the Fenland travellers’ initiative was the emergence into the public spotlight of one Sergeant Vic Galpin, ‘hate crime manager’ of Cambridgeshire police. Why on earth should the police need a hate crime manager? Pursuing hate crime is bad enough; but why does it have to be ‘managed’? Would the police have a ‘murder manager’? Of course not; it would be the head of the murder squad. People are getting robbed and violent crime is rising on streets abandoned by the police to the gangs because we are told there are not enough officers to go out on patrol. Yet somehow there is enough money to pay for a hate crime manager.

Bogus values produce bogus employment. Throughout the public sector, ‘diversity’ has created whole empires of ludicrous jobs at public expense. The current issue of the BBC’s house journal Ariel, for example, devotes an entire page to Jonathan Man, described as ‘diversity assistant, radio drama’. He wants to see ’10 per cent gays and lesbians on air…and British Chinese faces too’. As he asks: ‘As a British Chinese gay man, where are the faces and voices that represent me?’

Where indeed. No doubt we would all wish to see more gay Chinese faces on BBC television, and no doubt we would all applaud this principled use of license-fee payers’ money. The fact that many playwrights now refuse to write plays for the BBC because they are required to include not only the required quota of Chinese gay characters but other racial, sexual and differently-abled individuals — thus wrecking all creativity — is of course neither here nor there.

How reassuring it is that while the BBC is making some 5000 staff redundant, and the police moan that they don’t have the manpower to put more officers on the beat, they can still find the cash to fund a diversity assistant and a hate crime manager. How comforting that these public servants have got their priorities so right — and that those who want them instead to do bizarre things like preventing crime or making quality TV programmes are merely bigots and reactionaries, to be scorned, smeared and simply ignored.

(Melanie Phillips in ‘Melanie Phillips Diary’, April 1, 2005)
http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/2005_04.html

12 posted on 04/01/2005 10:04:04 AM PST by quidnunc (Omnis Gaul delenda est)
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To: quidnunc

"It's not my Yob man". - Freddie Prince, Chico and the Man


13 posted on 04/01/2005 10:35:08 AM PST by massgopguy (massgopguy)
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To: Stoat

Wow! Thanks for those two links! Great sites.


14 posted on 04/01/2005 10:43:23 AM PST by hleewilder
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To: Spok

Amen! England is buggered.


15 posted on 04/01/2005 11:05:11 AM PST by TexasRepublic (BALLISTIC CATHARSIS: perforating uncooperative objects with chunks of lead)
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To: Stoat

16 posted on 04/01/2005 11:07:42 AM PST by Tijeras_Slim
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To: quidnunc

Wow, she's really good. This is the second thing I've read by her. At the risk of sounding unPC, that gal writes like a man!


17 posted on 04/01/2005 11:12:26 AM PST by jocon307 (We can try to understand the New York Times effect on man)
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To: jocon307
jocon307 wrote: Wow, she's really good. This is the second thing I've read by her. At the risk of sounding unPC, that gal writes like a man!

Melanie Phillips is a relative rarity, a Brit conservative who really is conservative in the American sense of the term — at least on most issues.

18 posted on 04/01/2005 11:15:21 AM PST by quidnunc (Omnis Gaul delenda est)
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To: quidnunc

A great article; thanks very much for posting :-)


19 posted on 04/01/2005 8:09:45 PM PST by Stoat (Rice / Coulter 2008: Smart Ladies for a Strong America)
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To: hleewilder
Wow! Thanks for those two links! Great sites.

You're quite welcome and thank you for your kind words   :-)

I hope that you will find the sites to be helpful, and do be advised that MANY more British slang information sites exist....you will get many hits if you search with keywords such as 'British slang dictionary'.

One of several variants on British slang is Cockney Rhyming Slang, which the BBC link discusses briefly.  To this furry stoat's ears, Cockney Rhyming Slang is delightful to hear and can provide additional insights to British language, traditions and culture.  Although it may be regarded by some as less than the very best of news sources, Britain's Sun tabloid is chock full of Cockney Rhyming Slang and oftentimes is a fun read just for that.  You can see a couple of examples of the Sun using this slang here:

Balding star's wiggo Jacko (Experts claim Jacko wears a wig - One of the worst I've ever seen )

(Look for the Cockney slang terms 'syrup' for Wig and 'bonce' for Head.)

20 posted on 04/01/2005 8:30:31 PM PST by Stoat (Rice / Coulter 2008: Smart Ladies for a Strong America)
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