Policing, crime and personal responsibility, Peter Hitchens

forgiveable in men and women who have sworn a
solemn oath to uphold the law. Let others campaign
for lawlessness. If oaths mean anything (and if they
mean nothing we are lost) then a sworn officer
should never be involved in any sort of campaign to
weaken the laws he or she enforces.
Nor can they be completely excused for
submitting to a perpetual politically correct
inquisition into their thoughts and beliefs, more
rigorous than that inflicted on any other body of
people in the country. If police officers can protest,
when off duty, about their pay or pensions, then
they could also protest against this extraordinary
imposition of left-wing orthodoxy on an
instinctively conservative institution. I have seen no
sign of it.
I am not trying to be harsh here. There is no part
of our society that can claim to have put up much
of a fight against the stealthy abolition of Britain.
Nor, to be honest, have I much to offer the officer
whose instincts remain conservative, but who is
compelled by overwhelming forces to enforce the
weird programme of ‘Equality and Diversity’ which
now has us all in its grip.
Without a tremendous counter-revolution in
thought and power, a British person can now act
according to his or her conscience only in private
life. Even there, the dissenter must be careful.
Subversive activities, such as fulltime motherhood
or home schooling, are already frowned on by the
state. If the first becomes economically impossible,
as it often is already, then the second will die out.
Most of us are aware of a need to be careful what
we say at public meetings, school governors’
gatherings, or in letters and phone calls to official
bodies, lest we are reported to the Thought Police
for some ‘ism’ or ‘phobia’ which exists entirely in
the mind of our accuser but, since Macpherson,
constitutes an offence to which there is no defence.
Upholding the Queen’s Peace 53