Police

Rarely has that old adage that week is a long time in politics seemed more appropriate. Seven days ago, few of us would have predicted that we would be in the middle of a crisis that could dramatically effect how politics is run, the press are regulated and the standing of the police.  This morning is probably one of those days when, to borrow his joke from yesterday, David Cameron wants to shut down all the newspapers. The Mail and The Telegraph lay into him for his call to end self-regulation of the press. Indeed, their editorials on the matter speak to a broader anger in both papers that despite

Westminster is rife this afternoon with rumours that there’ll soon be a high-profile arrest in the phone hacking case. For David Cameron, this issue is going to remain incredibly difficult as long as the focus remains narrowly on News International. But Cameron has one tool he can use to try and broaden out the issue, the inquiries he mentioned yesterday at PMQs. If Cameron were to move quickly on setting up judge-led public inquiries into the police and into journalistic abuses, he would regain some of the initiative. These inquiries are really the only tool he has, given that the government is hemmed in on the takeover of BSkyB as

Even by the standards of what has been a particularly shameful episode in British media history, the latest phone-hacking revelations are disgraceful stuff. According to the Guardian, private investigators hired by the News of the World targeted the phones of the then-missing schoolgirl Milly Dowler and her family, in 2002, to listen into their voicemails. And, worse, the paper is said to have deleted voicemails from Milly Dowler’s phone to make room for more — an act which it thought to have given the police, and her parents, hope that she was still alive. There is much more detail here, including news that the Dowlers are now pursuing a damages

The PSNI is clear that last night’s riots on Castlereagh Street, East Belfast, were not linked to sectarian paramilitary activity. Rather, this was a ‘spontaneous demonstration’ against the police. As I wrote last week, gangs on both sides of the Ulster divide have been targeting the police in recent months; and they rely on exploiting current economic hardship and ancient sectarian divisions to further their criminal ends. The continued violence is a test of Stormont’s ability to govern without the close supervision from Westminster. It’ll be interesting to see how the authorities, and Peter Robinson and Martin McGuiness in particular, respond in the coming weeks, recognising that this violence does

Target culture. It’s a pejorative phrase, and understandably so. As we discovered during the New Labour years, targets designed to encourage good public services can frequently do the opposite — replacing genuine care with box-ticking, and action with bureaucracy. I mention this now because of an article in this week’s Spectator (do subscribe, etc.) by an anonymous Metropolitan Police officer. He describes how a target culture has skewed the work of the force and, in some cases, even the law itself. Here’s one anecdote, which rather sums it all up: “I know of one instance in which a uniformed sergeant stole (or neglected to hand in) some confiscated cannabis. Instead