TRIGGERnometry - Ex-Police Detective Reacts to UK Riots - Peter Bleksley
Episode Date: August 7, 2024Peter Bleksley is a former Police Detective who worked undercover for Scotland Yard for many years. He is well known as the Chief in Channel 4’s cop-based reality show ‘Hunted’. Peter has been v...ery outspoken about the violent unrest that continues to rage on in Britain’s streets, which began as a response to the fatal stabbing of three young girls on 29th July. Peter’s website: https://peterbleksley.com/ Go to https://ground.news/triggernometry to see through media bias and get the full story. Use our link to save 40% on the Ground News unlimited access Vantage plan this month. Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | info@xentricapc.com | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: marketing@triggerpod.co.uk Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Terminal 2, Manchester Airport, that raised tensions hugely.
All of that laid the fuse.
We then fast forward to the dreadful events at Southport.
The spark that lit the fuse disinformation on social media.
And any senior police officer could have seen that and dealt with that and gone public.
If you don't tell the truth, people think it's being suppressed.
Social cohesion is hanging by a threat.
Following the logic of what you're saying, this is going to get worse.
And that's where we're at.
Peter, great to have you on the show with all your policing experience
and also you do a lot of social commentary now.
You police the Brixton riots.
You've been working undercover with gangs, etc.
What have you made?
It's exactly a week since the stabbing attack in Southport.
whatever have you made of it in the last week?
Well, that, of course, was utterly ghastly.
Three girls.
I mean, sort of first day out of summer holidays.
I'm a parent of three.
The summer holidays come along.
You think, okay, what are we going to do with them?
What activities are we going to do?
Where are we going to play sport?
Are we going to go fishing?
My three were all boys.
But an equivalent kind of thing, perhaps, for girls.
You find something they're going to enjoy.
And I can just imagine the excitement and the joy these children must have had
on going to a Taylor Swift themed event.
You know, the biggest megastar in the world, isn't she?
And people just adore her.
She's such a thing and they go to that and for it to end
in such utter abject horror, bloodshed, loss of young.
young, precious, beautiful lives.
It was ghastly, truly ghastly.
And there's people still in hospital now,
extremely seriously injured.
And of course, the nation were utterly horrified
and I guess remained so.
And what's happened from then is, you know,
we can talk about police communication and whatever,
but we can see that there's been a lot of tendrils,
and bubbling under the surface in this country for a long time now.
And it is spilling out onto the streets into pretty horrific scenes.
I would think as a particularly as a retired officer,
seeing whatever you think about the motivations of the people and whatever,
just the fact that police officers are having bricks thrown and them
and all of that must be really awful to see.
Yeah, dreadful.
Utterly dreadful.
And anybody who engages in that kind of criminality,
I'll be polite, is an idiot.
and should desist immediately.
It's not going to achieve anything
apart from many, many people
get in very lengthy jail terms.
The establishment comes down very hard
when we have rioting.
Just go and ask anybody you got nicked in 2011
when some very hefty jail terms were handed down.
And if we look at the images of complete idiots
trying to set fire to that holiday inn in in Tamworth,
other night. Arson with intent to endanger life carries a maximum punishment of life
imprisonment. There are going to be huge jail terms handed down if those people are identified,
charged and convicted and they will only have themselves to blame. Many, many people are going to
have a lot of time in a jail cell to reflect about their actions. And we've already seen some people
apparently there was a fella appeared in court today and was asking for his mum or something
and was booing in court.
You know, act in haste, repent at leisure.
But I fundamentally don't think the whole, shall I say, very robust language that we've seen
from the prime minister and ministers, I don't think that's really going to be, well, it's
falling on deaf ears at the moment, so it's not having the right.
right effect, and I think a more, and I'll explain this if I may, if that's okay.
Yeah, go for it.
I think a more conciliatory approach would be much, much better.
But I better explain myself before, you know, people start kicking me at death on social
media, so to speak.
And can I rewind a bit?
Can I actually speak about why I think we're at where we're at?
Absolutely.
And it's not going to be a massive history lesson.
We're only going to go back.
No, Peter.
To the 23rd of July.
Take your time.
The thing we really tried to get on the show is the context, the depth, where this has all come from.
So we definitely want to talk about that.
So take your time, don't rush.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You nailed it when you said tensions have been bubbling under for a long time.
Yeah.
And all right, let's go back a bit further.
Many, many people think that they didn't get the Brexit they voted for.
And let's face it, Brexit was so much about immigration.
And clearly since 2016, there's been almost unfettered migration into the UK,
which a lot of people feel very strongly about.
We can't deny this.
Since 2001, actually, but yes.
Yeah, indeed.
And in many parts of the country, the demographic has changed beyond all recognition.
There are certain communities that are not.
not integrated into what many perceive as a British way of life.
Now, I don't mean to say that people have got to eat roast beef on a Sunday
and play cricket and that kind of stuff.
But many people are, and it's true some communities, are not integrated.
Certain communities forbid their women from speaking English, for example.
Now, that's not integration in any way, shape or form.
and it's very unfortunate because it does not help.
So all those tensions that have been bubbling under many people.
Peter, can I just interrupt you there?
Because I think it's important that we speak plainly.
When you're saying certain communities,
what communities do we actually mean?
Who are these communities?
Certain sections of the Bangladeshi community in East London
and certain men within that
forbid their women from speaking English.
Okay?
I was in East London last night.
actually at one point, I'm a bit of a jolly up, a leaving do for someone.
But I spent quite a bit of time talking to a group of Bangladeshi businessman,
some of whom had flown over to the UK on a short holiday to see relatives
and others who were established in East London and had businesses and all of that.
And I've got to tell you, judging by the look of them,
you'd like to have been a pound note behind some of these guys.
They were obviously some of them, very astute businessmen.
And they're all in a booze for having a drink and a chat, and there's that in the other.
I got gnaturing to them.
I'm that kind of person.
I do enjoy talking to people.
And of course, there are Asian communities that are not integrated.
Brown-faced people that don't dress like us and do not integrate with us.
And, of course, they are invariably followers of Islam.
Let's not be around the bush, as you say.
So all those simmering tensions have kind of manifested themselves very recently in the Reform Party getting over 4 million votes, for example.
And reform essentially were on a platform of migration issues, and clearly that chimed with over 4 million people who voted for them.
So this is not a tiny minority of people who have concerns.
about immigration. And again, to flesh that out, I know we said, please take your time and
please do take your time, but just to flesh that out, actually, for two decades now,
successive governments have been elected on the promise of reducing immigration to the tens of
thousands. So reform is perhaps a more hardline position, but I think it's important for people
to understand in the context of this discussion that actually the majority of the British
public have consistently voted against mass immigration on the scale that we've seen.
Cameron, didn't he say he was going to get it under 100,000 all those years ago?
You know, fail, fail, fail, come all the way up to Sunak, stop the boats, utter nonsense.
The boats are still arriving on a daily basis, weather permitting.
So it's not been tackled, clearly.
Right.
And many people.
many very decent, reasonable, hardworking, moderate mainstream people who raise wonderful kids
who go on to contribute to society and these people would never break the law, pay their taxes,
pillars of communities, length and breadth of the country, harbour concerns about immigration
and also harbour concerns about the rise of Islam in the UK.
thoroughly decent people.
But of course, there are lazy politicians
who will take out their big broad brush
and paint them all as being far right.
When many of them, I'm sure, probably voted Labour as well
in the last general election and all that stuff.
I'm sure there's many people that voted Labor last time around
that harbour concerns about the rise of Islam.
and unfettered migration.
But you all get painted with that brush as being far right.
So much so that people are afraid to have sensible conversations,
within which there is not a scintilla of racism,
not a trace that people are afraid to have those conversations
because it is very easy for lazy politicians,
and rampant left-wingers to go,
racist, racist, when it's complete utter nonsense.
I don't have to prove my credentials to anyone about race,
so I'm not going to go on about friends and family and this and that.
Now, I've got nothing to prove to anyone,
although I do know people who are married to people who have migrated in the UK,
who have concerns about the rise of it.
of Islam and unfettered migration.
I came here in 1996.
In 1996, 55,000 people a year came into this country.
Now we have 50,000 people coming into this country illegally every year.
So the number of people that came legally the year I came is now coming here illegally.
Right.
So your point is absolutely right that there is no reason to suggest, by the way,
legal immigrants are quite a lot of them very concerned about illegal immigration in particular.
So in the spirit of having that conversation,
no one here is going to call you racist
for saying any of that
because it's just a statement of fact.
When you say that the events over the course of the last week.
You said racist is a statement of fact.
Just clarify what you've said.
No one here is going to call you racist
because everything you've said is a statement of fact.
Yeah.
That's what I'm saying, right?
Thank you.
No worries.
So having said that,
we've talked about briefly at the top
about the fact that some of the people
committing the criminal acts are atrocious and they're going to get lengthy sentences.
And then we moved on to the tensions bubbling under the surface.
So how do you connect those tensions with this particular incident?
Because for some time, we didn't know who'd committed this act, right?
Yeah.
The police, in my opinion, and the government were very, they were not very smart about
communicating about the identity of the attacker.
It seemed to me like they were trying to conceal it, actually.
Would you agree with that?
Yeah.
I'll expand on that.
Yeah.
So then how do we get from a society in which you say lots of people have concerns about immigration
and the lack of integration and the rise of Islam to riots in the streets of a dozen
British cities in which you have people burning things, attacking things?
And now also you have Muslim men gathering, arming themselves and trying to get there and have
those fights.
How do we get from concerns to that?
Terminal 2, Manchester Airport, 23rd of July.
That's when the fuse was laid.
Okay?
And by that, I mean, first of all, we saw a very short, judiciously edited clip from somebody's phone of a police officer, very ugly, almost impossible, I think, to justify that snapshot of kicking a man and stamping on his head when he was laying on the floor.
Okay. Ugly, horrible.
I could sit here and give you the imaginings of my mind
as to how somebody could seek to justify that,
but that would just be me as a dramatist of written plays imagining something.
So it wouldn't really be necessarily helpful.
Let's deal with it as I dealt with it at that time
when being asked to comment on it.
It looks ugly and I'm sorry.
struggle to find any justification for it.
Then, of course, a few days later,
we see, I think it was 23 or 26 seconds
that preceded that.
Ugly, ugly scenes at Manchester Airport
with a couple of brown-skinned men
flailing wildly punching, repeatedly punching police officers,
including women,
one of whom we understand got a broken nose,
We see them getting knocked over and all of that.
And we see the lead into the first kickoff stamp from that police officer.
That raised tensions hugely.
Now, I spend quite a lot of time on social media monitoring what's going on.
My feed is not solely an echo chamber of what I might think,
because I deliberately confuse the algorithms
and also I think it's very interesting and helpful
to find out what people who have opposing views to yours are thinking.
So I will open up many, many articles and many, many comments
that I am diametrically opposed to.
So my algorithms keep giving me feeds from all across the political spectrum
and all across various news outlets.
And there's a lesson there.
I wish more people would do it.
Otherwise, those algorithms will just turn your social media feed into an echo chamber
and you might end up going deeper into a rabbit hole that you really don't want to get ensnared in.
But that really fired up an awful lot of people.
The comments, many were dreadful.
The tensions were palpable.
You could feel the tension in communities through the screen of your phone.
if you knew what to look
and you knew what you were looking for.
It was obvious.
So many people had a feeling
that there was no justice
because these men whilst they've been arrested,
they've been released on bail.
And people were going, well, why haven't they been charged?
The evidence is there.
Even so, those two clips,
the very short one and the longer one that preceded it,
still did not paint the full picture
of everything that had happened among these people.
We know there was an incident in Starbucks in the airport terminal
and there were incidents on an aeroplane that landed at the airport.
We haven't seen any of that.
So we don't know what preceded even the stuff that we have seen.
So the full, clear, accurate picture has not yet been painted.
Of course, there is an inquiry, or should I say, witch hunt into whoever released the longer clip of those images of the fighting and what have you.
And you can see that somebody, I think, that will have done that might have been very, very frustrated that the only clips anybody was seeing was of that police officer with the kick and the stamp on the head.
So maybe that person was motivated to release that because they wanted to add some context and some backstory to what so many people were very swift to condemn.
I'd make no adverse comment about that because, as I say, that clip remains ugly and incredibly difficult to justify, if not impossible.
But still, being so decontextualized, you'd almost think there should be an inquiry into whoever released the short clip, right?
Because that's what's actually started a lot of this because it's not representative of what happened.
It may not be justifiable.
But nonetheless, there's a bigger context to it.
But if we go on and on and on with inquiries into who did this,
and inquiries who released that and what their motives were,
we might as well have an inquiry as to why I'm so scruffily dressed in shorts today.
I feel that that's an important thing for us to do.
But what I'm saying is this speaks to something we wanted to talk to you about as well,
which is the allegation of two-tier policing.
The idea that some people get away with things and some other people don't.
And this seems like a good example where people are being given a false narrative about what happened.
And if you had one of these characters that you see on the streets now,
punching an police off, an armed police officer at an airport in the back of the head or breaking a woman's nose,
I don't know that they would have got off on bail.
They're already appearing in court.
Yeah.
There are already people appearing in court.
There's 450 arrests so far.
Yeah.
That figure will be dwarfed as things carry on,
especially if they do carry on,
be utterly dwarfed.
And I'll get onto the factors to how the police
can't arrest their way out of this, by the way,
nor the government at some point.
Yeah, and people are already being held in custody
in appearing in court the following day.
So I have been broadcasting and commenting
about what I've called inconsistent policing
for over two decades,
just of late,
it's now got the name two tier.
It's inconsistent police.
Why is it happening?
That's what it is.
Well, because policing is, of course,
full of people.
So it will never be perfect.
And no two circumstances are ever identical.
And what may be seen to be a course of action
by one police officer
might be dealt with rather differently.
by another police officer.
I kind of mourn for the lack of discretion
that police officers are allowed these days.
I think it was a lot better
when individual officers with experience
were allowed to exercise their discretion
from time to time.
I think it did an awful lot
for serving the public.
But that's kind of like a whole different debate possibly.
So inconsistent police.
and it's very relevant to what we're seeing playing out on the streets today
when we talk about those inconsistencies in policing
I'll bring myself up to speed to tier policing
look at Rotherham, Oldham, Rochdale, grooming gang scandals
and others where the police didn't go in,
didn't give the victims any kind of service,
didn't arrest the perpetrators
like they should have done.
Only some years later
and even now as we speak
the National Crime Agency
have taken over certain investigations
and brought people to justice
for the kidnap
plying with alcohol,
drugs and then rape
of young white girls.
And why didn't senior police officers
want to go into those areas
and arrest people
and do what they bloody well should have done
because they were fearful of being branded racist.
And also, they're frankly, were incompetent
and not fit to wear the uniform or carry a warrant card.
So you see those inconsistencies
because crimes such as that committed by different demographics
in different places would be dealt with very,
robustly. Then we boil it down, as we've just highlighted, that investigation into the
Manchester airport scenario, still ongoing, as great a Manchester police told us through
their press release of the other day, still ongoing, and the Independent Office of Police
conduct investigation into the behaviour of the police officer that kicked and stamped,
still ongoing. Now, I get they have got other work to do. Starbucks that I'm in.
The aeroplane that I mentioned, is there footage out there, is there CCTV on the plane,
is there phone footage and all that kind of stuff?
I get it, but it really doesn't take weeks and months to do that.
It really, really should not.
So, brown people bashing up police officers, including women police officers,
they're released on bail, they're not charged, all of that,
laid the fuse, completely laid the fuse.
And I went on to social media,
and I think this is virtually word for word why I said,
social cohesion is hanging by a thread.
Suppressing the truth does not help.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
Words to that effect.
I knew it after that, Manchester thing.
The tensions were palpable.
You didn't have to go to Plymouth.
or Hartlepool or Liverpool
or anywhere else where there's been unrest
to get it, to see it, to know it,
to really have a firm grip on this is what,
this is all bubbling under.
And where were the police?
Where were the politicians?
Did they get it?
No.
Were they across it?
Clearly they couldn't have been.
Were they monitoring it?
Surely not.
Otherwise they would have done something about it.
They would have gone into these communities
and done something to reduce the tensions.
But they didn't.
So we then fast forward to the dreadful events at Southport.
Fuge laid by Manchester Airport,
the spark that lit the fuse,
disinformation on social media.
That one tweet put out by that bot false account
at Channel 3 now, I think it was,
that gave a kind of Muslim-sounding name to a man
and said he'd come in on a boat and all this kind of stuff
recently and was subject to MI5 or MI6 interest.
Completely and utterly fake.
And any senior police officer could have seen that
and dealt with that and gone public,
get the microphones, get that press conference,
or do it instantly on your phone and push it out there and go,
this is fake, this is nonsense.
We'll tell you what we can about this person,
barely in mind 17 at the time, when we can.
And therein, as well as that tweet being a spark,
another kind of spark from the flint, shall we say, came when Chief Constable,
Serena Kennedy said,
that the perpetrator lived in banks, an area of Southport,
and was, quote, originally from Cardiff.
Now, I understand this person has been charged, of course,
and I am not going to be held in contempt of court in any way, shape, or form,
and I'm not going to be irresponsible to discuss the case or the evidence
in any way, shape or form, other than to say, of course, how dreadful it is.
So I'm not going to do any of that, and there's no need for it.
But I'll focus on what the Chief Constable said.
Originally from Cardiff.
Many people who harbour concerns about lack of integration, rise of Islam,
and unfettered migration, all of which we've been speaking about,
might be my age or my 95-year-old mum's age,
and bless her, she's still with us.
many, many people, millions of people
will hear originally from Cardiff
and may conjure up an image
of a flame-haired rugby player
who sings in a youth choir.
I know they're kind of typically Welsh kind of
wonderful things.
I like flame-haired Welsh rugby players
who sing in choirs and all of that.
But that's what it might have done.
people are not daft, never underestimate your audience.
That will be seen by many to be slight of hand.
But it was slight of hand.
Yeah, I mean, it was.
Of course, Serena Kennedy, if she were here, will say it was actually factual and it was true.
It was factual, but also slight of hand.
Slight of hand.
That's what factual, that's what slight of hand is when you use the facts to tell a false story.
Yeah.
And so, of course, that was another spark onto this fuse that then was well and truly lit
and has got us to the dreadful situation where we are now with stupid people doing very seriously stupid things.
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with IP Vanish. And let's touch on what Kier Starrmer said. Do you think that what he's actually
done unwittingly is just made things worse?
with the use of the term far right,
which we have already spoken about.
Yeah.
I spend a lot of my time in green rooms
for various broadcasters
before going on different channels
across a very wide range
and I have done for many, many years.
So I spend quite a lot of time
in the company of special advisors
or former special advisors,
sometimes politicians,
but a lot of people that,
eco living in that Westminster bubble and it is a bubble.
I've never, well, I've often marvelled and shaken my head at how some very unworldly,
naive people can get a job as a special advisor.
It astonishes me and they live in that bubble.
they are unworldly.
Holding a surgery as an MP once a week does not make you worldly
when you sit in Westminster for the rest of your time.
It really doesn't.
And likewise, I find some people in the media quite unworldly.
So when you throw these things together,
and particularly,
senior police officers
unworldly
and this applies to Westminster
and senior policing
in fact policing broadly
they are echo chambers
they are absolute
echo chambers
where so many people
get told what they want to hear
rather than what they need
to hear
very true in policing
of course it's a
disciplined organisation, so voices of dissent are pretty quickly put down, but unfortunately
so are voices that might have a better idea. They tend to get put down as well.
So Peter, because what I wanted to talk to you about, especially was the reaction from mainstream
politicians where the condemnation of these, let's call them what they are, the people causing,
rioting, burning places down, burning down libraries.
They're thugs.
They're thugs and it's abhorrent behavior
and they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Every single rational, sane person
and everybody in this room agrees with that.
But then I go on Twitter
and then I see groups of Muslim gangs
with blades
and then I think I saw,
I think it was a tweet for,
Jess Phillips saying that, oh, you know, they were just coming out to protect their, you know,
their businesses and whatever else. And you're going, hang on a minute. Hang on a second here.
You can't do that. You can't arrest whole groups of white people who are committing acts of violence
and vandalism. And then when people come out on the street with a blade, you're like, well,
yeah, but they're just protecting your business.
Or as a police officer was filmed saying to a group of Muslim men the other day,
just drop your weapons off at the mosque if you've got any.
Right?
I think that was in Stoke.
Yeah.
What I was kind of saying about my echo chamber thing was an apology.
I was going all the way around the houses,
was to answer your question about Kirstama and the big brush of far right painting.
When they live in these echo chambers,
when they are pretty unworldly people,
And believe you and me, going on a tour of the country as part of a general election campaign does not make you worldly.
They're all stage managed.
Everybody's lined up in the right position, the right questions are asked and all of that.
These politicians in the Westminster bubble and the policing bubble are unworldly and have a disconnect.
And that is why Stama got it very wrong, I think.
by immediately going far right using that term.
Again, it's the laziness of the use of that term.
And it truly is lazy, broad brush, very lazy and easy to apply.
But in doing so, it alienates many, many people.
I go back to that point about honest, decent, art work in wonderful people,
afraid to sit in a bar, for example, if this were a pub, and I wish it was, you know,
having a conversation because, you know, a whispering guardianist at the next table might go,
racist, racist, racist, and people don't want it. It's shutting down debate. It's shutting down
reasoned conversations by going far right racist. And I think, and I agree with you, but
But let's come back to the point about Jess Phillips,
because what that says to me,
and by the way, my mother is an immigrant to this country,
and I'm going, well, hang on, it's one rule for them and another rule for me.
And that, like, I didn't vote for Labor,
but that has really angers me and frustrates me.
And if it angers and frustrates me,
I know that there's going to be a hell of a lot of people watching that
who are going to get even more angry and even more frustrated.
And then there's going to be people above that who are more volatile
who think, right, well, I might as well do something then.
And it feeds in to the two-tier policing thing, doesn't it?
If people then see one group of men being told to drop your weapons off at the mosque
and another group of men having their heads slammed into the pavement
and handcuffs slapped on, again, it feeds into two-tier policing.
inconsistent. And people want the law to be applied evenly and consistently. That's right. So the one thing
I wanted to explore with you is I see a lot of people criticizing Keir Starman. Now, I am no big fan of
Keir Starma, but I have to say, I think he's done the only thing that he really can do in the
situation. I'm not saying it's a good thing to do, but he has to, he's the prime minister of a country
that's got riots everywhere. He has to crack down on it. He has to crack down on it.
very hard. As you said he will. We saw the same thing in 2011. Any prime minister of a country
in which this is happening is going to have to do that. And then in terms of the far right
comments, I mean, I understand why people say that. But who are we saying are the people who
are doing this rioting? Are we saying that loads of them are normal, decent, hard work in ordinary
people? No, of course they're not. So then I guess I don't know how else you could have handled
it, as opposed is what I'm asking. And our viewers will be surprised at me standing up for
Kirstama, but what I sort of am, I think.
There's a very apt word that could be used for all of them.
And it's far better than far right than it is criminals.
Criminals conducting criminal behavior.
The temperature needs to be taken out of where we're at.
We don't need to quite, you know, make things worse.
I was going to say fuel to the fire, you know what I mean.
But we don't need to make things worse.
We don't need anybody stoking the temperature.
We need voices of reason and calm and truth-telling.
If you don't tell the truth, people think it's being suppressed,
and then people will kind of be irritated by that.
And the whole far-right and racist conversation, name-calling,
and all of that, is out of the post-war sense,
Starzy Communist Playbook,
stop conversations.
Don't let people have conversations.
Don't let them discuss an alternative view.
And again, it's damaging to the millions of people
who harbor the concerns that we've spoken about.
I guess because the other thing is with those riots,
is there are far right people in there.
There are people who are racist, who, you know,
who despite...
People doing Nazi salutes.
Yeah.
I saw this horrendous video.
It came up on my feed.
And there was about five or six white guys,
and there was this black guy,
and they took turns in beating him.
It was vile.
It was vile.
Just throw him in jail.
Just throw him in jail.
But my point is, is,
if someone goes to me,
those people are far right.
I mean, I don't want to make a case that they're not.
I mean, that looks like pretty far right to me.
But what's the point in that political labelling?
When we've had so many tensions in the country
throughout pro-Palestinian marches, for example,
there you go with your two-tier policing accusations again.
You know, they've been thrown around for months and months a month and then you have
marches organised by people like Tommy Robinson that are essentially peaceful.
and I do actually know a lot of very reasonable aforementioned decent people that have gone on those marches
and they are not far right.
You know, some of them voted Labour.
You can vote Labour and still go on one of those marches and still have a union flag draped around your shoulders
and still be patriotic without being far right.
It's very unhelpful, lazy and often inaccurate labelling.
So you mentioned several things which seemed to be somewhat in contradiction,
perhaps I misunderstood, but you said in terms of these people throw them in prison,
which I think everybody agree with.
But you also mentioned that the government and the authorities
are not going to be able to arrest their way out of this problem.
Yep.
No contradiction there.
Tell me why.
No contradiction there, because they won't be able to arrest their way out of this problem
if this disorder continues.
Okay.
They are simply not.
Because whilst today, they're very keen on releasing numbers, the police, they love doing it.
450 arrests, I believe, so far when I left home.
That number will have been superseded by now, and that number will be trumped time and time again in the coming days, weeks and months.
Some of these investigations will unfortunately take the long time because of the sheer number of them.
If this dreadful unrest continues, if, as we saw yesterday, groups of brown-skinned men masked up, hooded up, mobilising themselves, some of them arming themselves, in essence, looking for conflict, not, you know, joining arms around a mosque, but out on the streets looking for conflict, if we are in, you know, joining arms around a mosque, but out on the streets looking for conflict, if we
then see groups of white men doing exactly the same, there will be dreadful, shocking, irreparable
damage to property and lock of the life. And we don't want that. We've got to take the heat
out of this. So what I'm saying is they can't arrest their way out of it if it escalates.
and we do not want it escalating in any way, shape or form.
I think, I hope there's none of it, there's no more.
But, you know, we don't have a crystal ballier, do we?
We can't say.
But it will be impossible.
They could arrest 4,500.
They could arrest 45,000 people,
but the disquiet about unfettered migration
and the rise of Islam and a lack of integration will still remain.
Well, this is what I was going to ask you,
That's what I mean when I say you can't reach the way out of it.
I understand.
This is what I was going to ask you because you talk about the need to take the temperature down.
And I agree with you.
No one wants to see this escalate.
And yet on the other hand, I don't.
What I see is these people who've been doing the criminal damage and going out on the street,
they're going to get arrested.
They're going to get, as you said, hefty jail sentences.
Let's assume that that gets things.
to quiet down. None of the masked and armed Muslim men that we saw in our videos are being
arrested. They're not going to get locked up. They're not going to get lengthy jail sentences
from what we see so far. Kirstama, he's talked about protecting Muslim communities instead
of protecting all law-abiding people. There's a continued divisiveness going on. Mass
immigration is going to continue. Islam is going to continue. And
you know, immigration leads to more Islam and on and on and on. So even if the government
are successful and the police are successful in deterring further criminal activity now with
harsh sentences and all of it, isn't this, forgive me for being pessimistic, but I'm just
looking at what you're saying in a logical way. Isn't all we're doing right now is kicking
the can down the road so that there's going to be another fuse and another.
another spark and another breakout of violence like this and probably worse.
You paint a very gloomy picture indeed in terms of the unfettered migration continuing and
immigration continuing and all that sort of thing.
Surely, surely our politicians have to listen and have to do something.
But they're all saying this has got nothing to do with immigration.
They're all saying this is the far right.
these are just racist people being racist.
Yeah.
So following the logic of that reality,
I'm just saying to you,
I'm not, I don't want any of this to happen,
but following the logic of what you're saying,
this is going to get worse.
And that's where we're at.
And that is a very, very depressing thought, isn't it?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was hoping you were going to talk me out of this.
Maybe I'd miss something.
No, I think you've kind of stopped me in my track,
quite rightfully and pointed out
that if they don't listen,
if they don't have the conversations,
if they don't do
what needs to be done
to address people's fears and concerns
and that is get a grip
on immigration,
I mean, and a proper, proper grip
and stop people rocking up every day
on rigid inflatable boats at Dover
and primarily Dover and other places.
If they don't get a grip on that,
if we do not have
significant players
within the world of Islam
coming out and saying
we don't want to take over your country
we don't want
Sharia law imposed on Britain
we don't want to turn the entire world
into one Islamic state
if people don't do those things
and yeah they will still harbour the concerns
and maybe
maybe I hate to say
Maybe this is just the warm-up act.
I mean, that is terrifying because what you're talking about, Peter,
is a collapse of a society.
Because it's a society descending into civil war.
Can't say that.
Elon Musk has got himself in a trouble, isn't he?
For going on Twitter.
Yeah.
You know, and I think that was an unhelpful exaggeration,
but it could be, perish the thought.
what lies further down.
But see, this is what I don't understand.
You say it's an unhelpful exaggeration,
but I don't see why it is if this is where we are.
It's like all Elon Musk is doing is playing the movie forward,
just like I did with you just now, right?
And this is the problem that we've had for years in our society
where if you look at reality and you say,
this is what I see,
and if we keep doing this, this is where we're going to end up,
you then get blamed as if you made this thing happen.
when you merely saw it coming.
Yeah.
Right?
So I'm a little bit lost, to be honest, because, you know, I'm a first generation immigrant
in this country.
I want this country to thrive and for people to live in cohesion.
But I just, it seems to me, because the politicians are pretending the problems
you've been talking about aren't there and this is just the evil far right, then I don't
think their response is going to be what you wanted to be.
No, probably not.
Gloomy, gloomy thought.
What they will do, and it does need addressing, of course,
is since the 2008 economic crash,
generally speaking, from then until now,
the only people who feel better off and are better off
are people that either owned property
or had tangible assets and savings.
Everybody else's standard of living has dropped
and people don't feel as well off as they would like to be.
So we do need to throw it into the mix
the fact that we do have millions of people in poverty.
Yeah.
We can't skirt around or ignore that either.
I mean, there's also the factor as well of summertime.
In summertime, there are always riots.
We look at the Brixton riots.
We look at the riots that happened in 2011.
I don't think you can say in summer,
they're always riots.
I think what you mean is the rioters.
They're always happening.
Yeah, they were sorry.
Brickson was April, so.
Yeah, yeah.
But how much of this is also down to the fact that the kids are out of school,
they can see things happening.
There's anarchy happening on the streets.
They'll be thinking to themselves,
I can get involved in a bit of this, et cetera, et cetera.
The weather's nice.
Yeah, I don't think.
The fact it's the school holidays and all of that is necessarily a factor.
I think I've laid out pretty clearly what I think became the real big moments
in people's unhappiness and disquire about the matters we've spoken about,
being Manchester Airport, and then that disinformation and Serena Kennedy's sleight of hand.
I think those really have been the big moments in what we're now,
witnessing. Peter, we've established that, let's say, in my opinion, the government aren't going
to do anything that they need to do. If you were in charge of the police, this is your area of
expertise, is there something the police can do that will address these tensions and concerns?
I'm not talking like right this second. I'm talking over a longer period of time. You know,
how can they, for example, address the perception that they just don't police the Muslim community
the same way they police white people, let's say. It's put it.
as bluntly as that.
Very interestingly today,
Chief Constable Stevens,
who's the chair of the National Police Chiefs Council,
kind of started to change the rhetoric a bit today.
I noticed that he was talking about reaching out to communities
and asking communities to not partake,
so he's kind of trying to take the temperature out of it.
He wasn't bombastic,
we're going to arrest you all,
you're all going to get nicked, you're all letting for the back of a police van and a jail cell,
because I think he's realised that if it continues, it's going to be beyond the capabilities of the police
to contain it as much as they have done.
If it breaks out in greater numbers and in greater places,
and if it becomes that race kind of conflict, which we've been talking about,
the police are not going to be able to cope.
They are stretched like you would.
wouldn't believe in terms of the investigating capacity, because now they've got all these
thousands of crimes to investigate, they're really, really stretched.
So I noticed with huge interest today that he's just, I think, trying to take the heat out of it
because he realizes that this could be beyond their capabilities to control it as they, as much
as they have done thus far.
And then, of course, you get into the realms of, well,
would they bring the military out onto the streets,
which I noticed a lot of people have been talking about?
And that would be pretty catastrophic in a number of ways.
Firstly, the military are not very well practiced,
or at all practiced, actually,
in policing civilian populations really
certainly not the UK
they don't police the UK
they haven't got any experience of police in the UK
so it then put them out in a policing role
is going to be very very problematic
if it did happen
and I sincerely hope it doesn't
I really truly hope it doesn't
not only would it be
the end of that old chestnut
of policing by consent
because it would be policing at the end of a barrel, behave yourselves or else.
That's what it would then become.
So policing by consent would go out the window probably forever.
But it would the look, the global look.
You know, so many people still harbour that image of the British Bobby
with the tall hat on perambulating down the street with his hands behind his back.
You know what I mean?
good morning all and all of that kind of stuff.
That would be gone forever
because all the imagery would be of the military
on the streets of Britain.
So all those kind of things would be gone,
never to be recovered.
And the only way I think you could possibly do it
is if you went cop, soldier, cop, soldier.
So you sent each cop at a soldier on asylum.
So you increase the resources,
but you keep the policing
alone being in charge of things.
I mean, that would be a disastrous look
on a global level.
I mean, the public image of us
as a country around the world,
I mean, that's horrifying.
We look like a banana republic.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think there's another factor
that we're missing here that people
really get frustrated about.
And I include myself in this,
which is, you know, Islamic extremism
when you see the amount of people who are on the police watch list, tens of thousands of people,
people get really angry about that.
And look, misinformation is disgusting and what happened was awful.
But I understand the thinking people had when they saw the stabbing of the young girls
and they go, and what I immediately thought of, oh my God, this is like another
Manchester bombing, which was at an Ariana Grindy concert,
which was young girls.
That's immediately what I went to.
And other factors, when they published a list of the most popular boys' names
and girls' names every year, and what's six at the top of the pile?
Mum is, you know, there are so many people that go,
what?
What's going on in this country?
Why not it Jack or George or Steve or Bill or Julian or whatever it may be?
People go, and it feeds in the people's concerns about a lack of integration and the rise of Islam.
And these are facts we're talking about.
Okay, so why are our politicians not understanding the concerns of people, once again, because Westminster is a bubble, an echo chamber and senior policing is an echo chamber.
These people are out, not out there on the streets, talking to people, engaging with people, listening to people each and every day.
And so how do we deal with that problem, Peter?
How do we deal with that problem of Islamic extremism where you have these young people who are born in this country and they have these radical ideas?
And they hate the West, they hate this country.
and they want to participate in acts of terrorism
that harm, maim and kill people,
innocent civilians in this country.
What do we do with that?
Can you really police tens of thousands of people?
We are incredibly lucky in that our police
and our security services do an absolutely brilliant job.
They really do.
They are never going to catch all, of course.
And there will be people that get through the net.
But every day we wake up and there's not a terror attack in the UK, for me is a victory for those wonderful men and women who do a fantastic job.
But will it be sustainable forever?
Very big question mark.
As the numbers grow, if indeed they do, would it remain sustainable?
Another question mark.
Will people get through the net and commit atrocities?
Yes, they will from time to time.
But we're very lucky that they do such a remarkable job.
Well, I'm sure that's true.
But I think the question a lot of people will be asking is, why is that, why are we supposed to tolerate that?
Despite the fact that those men and women are doing their job, and I'm sure they are, I'm sure they're working around the clock.
Oh, yes.
I know for a fact they are, and I know people who are doing that job.
But at the same time, there are, there's a hundred countries around the world that don't have a single terrorist.
attack, right?
Yeah.
There are.
I've been to many of them.
I've lived, my family live in some of them.
They don't have this happening.
So why should British people tolerate this?
I guess that might be a price you pay for being a flagship democracy, although, of course,
we have had terrorism in its different forms committed by different organizations and people
over the years.
as a child
I grew up
looking at every bag
on every train or tube
or bus journey that I did
you know
it was just drummed into me
as a kid
unattended bags
unattended bags
um
I think
we all need to remain hugely grateful
for the Good Friday Agreement
that last you bought
priests to Northern Ireland
and mainland UK
and huge thanks
and gratitude to the late
Mo Mo Lom
and
John Major, who actually started the process,
but pretty much gets overlooked in history for really kick-starting it
because Blair got all the photo opportunities.
But we need to be grateful to all of the aforementioned for that.
Very different kettle of fish, I think,
when you are dealing with a religious kind of ideology and fanaticism.
and I know that the IRA of course
were Catholic and one of the United Ireland
and all that sort of stuff
but I think it's
so that in itself was a
largely religious ideology
as is
the problem with
extreme Islamists
who want to wipe us all off the face of the earth
once again
hats off to those who do
such a great job
Why should we have to put up with it?
We can't exterminate it.
Do you know what I worry about, Peter?
I was talking about this with a mate of mine,
and I was having to talk him down
because he was getting very angry.
I worry that the next time there is going to be an attack,
because there is going to be a next time,
because these men and women you've talked about,
they do a fantastic job,
but they're not superhuman,
they're not all seen, they're not gods.
They're human beings.
Someone's going to make a mistake.
It's just inevitable.
I really do worry that when that mistake happens and there is an attack,
obviously the attack is going to be horrendous,
obviously people are going to be hurt.
But you worry what the repercussions are going to be.
Because if that boy had been an Islamist,
I think what you would see right now in the UK would be riots on a scale that
I don't think I'm 42 years old and I have never seen in this country.
Stop showing off.
We're going to park any further conversation about Southport.
Yeah.
But just focus on what you said of the first part of that conversation.
If there is another blatantly, you know, Islam,
perversion of Islam motivated terror attack in which there is loss of life.
Yeah, then I think that fuse I've spoken about and those sparks,
which have lit what we've seen in the last few days
could unfortunately be dwarfed by more like
there I mention it the sort of wider unrest
that sadly might happen
I think you're probably right I think the whole thing's going to go up
like a balloon if that were to happen soon
well there we go Peter thanks for coming on
we always end by asking the same question
which is what's the one thing we're not talking about
goodness me
I think we've spent the last
however long it was
talking about
what we've not been talking about
so I'm very grateful to you both
for the opportunity
to come here
that is that is what we've not been talking about
and we have discussed it today
and yeah
just once again
thank you for the opportunity
and thank you to anybody
who's watched or listen
thank you for coming on the show Peter
thank you for having me
What is the biggest change you have seen in regards to crime since you became a police officer and why?
