“The police are the public and the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen.”

This is one of the Peelian Principles underpinning our tradition of policing by consent. Our police do not enforce the law via physical coercion but by mutual consent: the power they exercise comes from all of us, not some remote and abstract state institution.

Spend five minutes online, reading newspapers or listening to certain politicians and you will find an argument that the police are failing us. Too woke, too biased, too harsh, too distant. Our national conversation about policing is all about its flaws.

In fact, we are failing the police. The young men and women who sign up to uphold our laws deserve better from politicians and the voters they serve. That conversation about the failings of the police is fostering a culture that threatens the traditions of British policing and the people who deliver it.

Last week Del Somerville, a 42-year-old father of two, was jailed for two years for violent disorder during an anti-migrant protest in Portsmouth. He threw a bottle at a police line and abused officers; the judge called him a “thug” who should be jailed to signal society’s commitment to protecting the police. According to Reform’s Robert Jenrick, that’s evidence of “two-tier” justice. “The British state has a legitimacy crisis,” he says.

In Southampton in June, 11 police officers were injured as “protesters” threw bricks and bottles at them. That violence was ostensibly about the murder of Henry Nowak, which Reform also used to promote its “two-tier” narrative. Nigel Farage said the proper response was “pure cold rage”.

Farage rejected any suggestion that he was responsible for that violence, which he has deplored. And questions about the Nowak case are legitimate and should be considered calmly and civilly; the police should never be beyond scrutiny and criticism.

But politics matters. Words matter.

No politician can be held responsible for every idiot who throws a bottle at a police officer. Yet nor can politicians pretend that endlessly telling people the police are biased or politically captured has no consequences, especially in a country where policing rests on the consent and trust of the population.

Those consequences are borne by ordinary coppers, who deal with a public less and less inclined to accept their authority or respect them as fellow human beings.

Tales of routine abuse are common across policing, but a story from Humberside is worthy of attention. There, officers felt it necessary to launch the “Protect the Protectors” campaign to highlight and challenge the racist abuse routinely experienced by some of their colleagues. To be clear, that campaign wasn’t started by a woke chief constable playing identity politics. It was set up by the local Police Federation, the staff association for rank-and-file coppers.

This is what lofty arguments about “legitimacy” eventually come down to: a constable standing in the street being screamed at, spat at, threatened or assaulted while trying to do his job. Increasingly, that constable is very inexperienced. The old joke says that policemen are getting younger. This is now true, but there is nothing funny about it.

A decade ago, just 14 per cent of officers had served for less than five years. Today the figure is almost 30 per cent. The police are getting younger because officers are walking from the job before their careers have even started. In the year to March, more officers left the police through voluntary resignation than through normal retirement. Of those who resigned voluntarily, 60 per cent had served for less than five years.

Policing depends heavily on experience. Much as the Army depends on its non-commissioned officers (NCOs), policing needs the veteran officer who has seen 100 drunken scraps, who knows when to talk and when to arrest, who can calm the nervous young constable beside him. Lose people before they acquire that experience and policing gets harder. But increasingly, officers are walking away from a job that offers abuse and stress and little thanks from the people they serve.

Isn’t this a government responsibility, something for ministers to fix by providing more support and more money? Yes, but that’s necessary but not sufficient. Neither government nor policing exist in a political vacuum – the wider social and cultural context is important too.

Police Federation surveys showing poor morale are clear that the way officers are seen and treated by the public are a key factor in their misery. Eighty-four per cent of officers surveyed said they did not believe police were respected by the public.

That must change. The country needs to remember that officers are fellow citizens doing a necessary job on our behalf – and that those who make that job harder should be put beyond the pale.

Recreating a civic norm of respect for officers isn’t just the duty of government. It’s a responsibility of everyone with a public platform and aspirations to lead. And the burden falls heavily on politicians of the Right who present themselves as champions of law and order.

If you shout “fire” in a theatre, you cannot be surprised if people run. If you spend six days of the week telling people that the police are politically captured, unreliable and illegitimate, you cannot be surprised when on the seventh day, an officer gets a bottle in the face.

The political class should always debate the principles and policies around policing. But the timing and manner in which we exercise our free speech matters. As John Stuart Mill observed, there is a world of difference between writing an essay about the role that corn dealers play in setting food prices and standing outside the house of a corn dealer telling a hungry crowd that the man inside is starving them.

Leaders who genuinely believe in the rule of law must champion the people who deliver it every day, even when they enforce laws you dislike or make decisions you disagree with. The thin blue line of British policing can be thin as long as the nation as a whole is committed to law and order. Weaken that commitment and the line begins to fray.

 

- James Kirkup is a former Executive Editor (Politics) for The Telegraph and was a lobby journalist for 16 years. James has a particular interest in subjects including economics and defence. Before joining The Telegraph he was Political Editor of The Scotsman, covered European politics and economics for Bloomberg, and reported from countries including Iran, Zimbabwe and the USA.