Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice – he of the supposed party of law and order – is promoting the idea that members of the public should set up vigilante groups to patrol the areas near hotels housing asylum seekers.
It’s the ‘gentlemanly thing to do’ apparently. Rather than give the police any resources they need to have to tackle crime – if in fact they are not already doing so, after all we already have plenty of laws in place to deal with the sort of crime he thinks is going o – he believes that they’re too busy ‘pursuing online tweets and other unnecessary things” such that all other crime is going investigated and unprosecuted.
Someone who is in more of a position to actually understand what is going on with the police – the Policing Minister Dame Diana Johnson – does not like this idea. Firstly, she has seen no evidence of the migrants “leering and jeering” outside schools that Tice is alleging is one of the drivers for his recommendation, nor heard reports of it.
Tice thinks there is “plenty of evidence”, but in fact cites none. Johnson reports that opposite.
I haven’t personally seen evidence of people hanging around outside primary schools other than obviously parents and carers. And I often go and talk to people in my constituency outside school gates. I haven’t seen that myself.
She also makes the point that the UK does still have a police force – the people that are responsible for dealing with crime. So even though it’s the duty of all us citizens to call out unacceptable behaviour:
…what I would say is this country on the whole is a very law abiding country and we have a police force who have the tools and the officers to make sure that if there is criminal behaviour happening that that is addressed. So if Richard Tice thinks that there are problems in his own constituency, I assume that’s what he’s talking about, he should be raising that with the authorities and getting the police to look at what’s happening.
If he’s really seeing all this crime going on then he’s really abdicating his basic patriotic duty to report it to the proper authorities. But it seems unlikely he has the vast array of unnamed evidence he claims to have. Rather:
I think unfortunately Mr Tice might well be trying to whip up an issue there.
This is shortly after ex-Reform MP Rupert Lowe started “urgently chasing” a dinghy he sighted off the coast, rabidly tweeting that “Britain needs mass deportations NOW”.
The boat of course was nothing to do with illegal immigrants. It was being sailed by a charity rowing crew raising money for motor neurone disease.
Elsewhere we have recently seen probably the exact type of British citizen Tice intends to recruit to his team of misinformed vigilantes run riot with violent protests outside hotels perfectly legally housing asylum seekers. They’re certainly not helping the police get on with their job preventing crime by damaging their equipment.
What could possibly go wrong?
As Arnold Carton notes, the “history of vigilante patrols has been anything but ‘gentlemanly’“. He worries, quite rightly, that winding up a bunch of unregulated, unsupervised men to go out onto the streets looking for trouble may not end well.
Normally, in our society, people who exercise authority over others (teachers, police etc) are subject to clear rules and to supervision. None of this applies to amateur vigilantes. Unless we are careful, we will end up with impulsive, angry men reacting on instinct on our streets at night, with no supervision.