Starmer accused of rape gang cover up

0:02The Telegraph

0:10Keir Starmer has been accused of yet another cover-up, this time by rape gang victims, who accuse him of denying them the inquiry that they want and deserve. They've now called for Jess Phillips, the safeguarding minister, to stand down after she accused them of lying. We're also going to be speaking to a former copper who has written an explosive book about the force that the police don't want you to read. Welcome to The Daily Tea with me, Tim Stanley. And me, Camilla Tomini.

0:47Tim, you're back from PMQs. Yes. Kemi Badenoch's had another good week, do we think? She has. She asked six questions about the child grooming gang scandal and the difficult state that the inquiry is in. And what was clever was she put the questions that people who had stepped away from that inquiry put to her. So her questions are not necessarily Kemi Badenow's questions. They were questions raised by women who walked away from the inquiry. So quite Jeremy Corbyn, that tactic of actually quoting a member of the public. It's a tactic, but it's powerful because it meant that the prime minister could not dismiss them and say 14 years, which is what he normally does.

1:28because if he did that, he'd be dismissing questions put by real people. So he was forced to take them very seriously and do his best to answer them. He was in earnest mode. There was a weird moment where there were cries of shame in response to Kemi Badenok speaking on behalf of the four survivors that have withdrawn themselves from the inquiry process. Elizabeth, who was abused in Rotherham from the age of 14, had this to say, and I quote, The government has created a toxic environment for survivors. They were looking for answers from the Prime Minister and what they've heard is Labour MPs saying shame at their words.

2:07The general gist of what they're saying in justification for why they're stepping away is they don't have confidence in the inquiry being laser-focused on the largely Pakistani nature of the abuse against white girls. They're saying this needs to be a specific inquiry into this specific offence, which they claim rightly to be racially motivated, why was it that so many Muslim men who largely descended from Pakistan decided to abuse largely working class white girls? Why was it that? They don't want to have a child sex exploitation inquiry in the general sense of the word. They don't want to look at other forms of paedophilia.

2:47They just want to hone in on this. So the big picture is Labour didn't want this kind of inquiry. Labour has always favoured inquiries which have been about sexual abuse in general, because it doesn't want to focus on abuse specifically by Asian gangs. It was forced to hold this inquiry. And now it's doing it. Some of the victims feel that it's dragging its feet and it's trying to reintroduce that idea of discussing all forms of sexual abuse. So you mentioned that concern they have. The other thing they're concerned about is who is chairing the inquiry. There currently isn't a chair, though the lead on it is the safeguarding minister, Jez Phillips.

3:27Now, the victims are saying, why don't we get a judge? Yes. The government is saying we shouldn't have a judge. One, because it would take a long time to get a judge. And this did trigger some titters in the House of Commons because it's taken 10 months to get the inquiry running. Yes. So the argument that we can't get a judge because that would delay things is undermined by the delay that they've already endured. The other thing is he said, I don't want to judge because judges judge after criminal proceedings have taken place. So, again, I believe it would delay it even more. Why do they want to judge?

4:04Well, they don't want people who they feel are institutionally aligned with the abuse and cover up. Yes, and I think that's a fair point. They don't have police officers because police officers dismiss their concerns. OK, so Jim Gamble, who was the former head of the Ulster Police Force, he's pulled his name out of the hat. He had been a contender because survivors said, well, I'm sorry, you're a former copper, so you may be likely to align yourselves with the police force, who we in turn have accused of being complicit in this. We interviewed a grooming gang survivor on the Daily Tea who said that she was treated like white trash, her words, not mine, by the police as much as she was her own perpetrators.

4:47And this is triggering, right? So there's a lot of concern in our culture, particularly among the progressive left, about avoiding doing anything which rakes up traumatic memories. Well, to put a whole load of people through an inquiry chaired by someone who they associate with past cover-ups and abuse. Yes. And then to do these things like trying to expand the remit, giving the impression that it's trying to bury a specific problem. This is what we would call triggering. Yes. And normally Labour is very concerned about triggering. Yes, but at the moment... But on this occasion, it's not. And then there's one more factor which victims are very upset about, which is they say that the government has been briefing against them.

5:31The other person who has withdrawn their name is a social worker called Annie Hudson. Again, survivors complained. a lot of them were targeted because they were in care, because they were vulnerable, and they claim that social services didn't protect them. Actually, say, in some cases, social services offered them on a plate to the people that abused them. Another thing that those participating in the inquiry or withdrawn are very concerned about is they say the government is briefing against them, which again taps into that theme of cover-ups. Again, it's a replay of everything they've been through.

6:03In particular, survivors have accused Jez Phillips of trying to broaden the inquiry. So it's not just about Asian rape gangs, but about all forms of sexual abuse. She says that's not true and has contradicted their claims. And they interpret that to be an accusation of lying. Yes. One survivor, Fiona Goddard, said, I think she, Jess Phillips, needs to step down because she's publicly accused a grooming gang survivor of lying over and over again. That is part of the whole scandal. Let's remember, these are victims who waived their anonymity, an incredibly difficult thing to do, and they believe that the safeguarding minister has lied to them and about them.

6:51One of the survivors has said, and I quote, Jess Phillips needs to be removed because I don't think her conduct during this has been acceptable for the position that she holds. That is, those aren't my words. Those are the words of a survivor. It is a shame that Labour MPs are drowning that out. Yes, I've not been believed, and now I'm being called a liar by the woman who is in charge of safeguarding. Also, Jess Phillips gave this extraordinary performance, frankly, in the Commons, because it's all about this row over Oldham and whether she has allowed some councils to sort of stick their oar in and stop the investigations taking place that need to take place.

7:32It is absolutely nothing to do with the idea that Oldham is telling me what to do. And the more people from that side... Oh, he can hold up his paper and have a smug face, all he likes. But the fact of the matter is, is that there is absolutely no council in this country who will tell this inquiry where it can and cannot go. I have said that one million times from this dispatch box and yet the same thing gets peddled again and again. It's vintage Jess Phillips, actually. First of all, she seems to think she's the only person on earth, let alone in Parliament, that cares about the safety of women and girls.

8:15I don't know how she's managed to gain this reputation as somehow a spokeswoman for all women everywhere. And she does have a record of working with them. I know she does, but she's not the only one. The point is, she's just not the only one. No, exactly. And that doesn't put her above error or criticism. No, of course not. And also, when she is criticised, I think legitimately in this case, she becomes so indignant and so over-emotional. It's so much sort of mouth and no trousers with her. This isn't your platform, your personal platform, to reassert your political credentials. Yes. This is about, sorry, note to Jess Phillips, This is about something bigger than you and your own ego?

8:55This comes up time and again when we discuss Jess Phillips. She always thinks the big issue is her integrity. Also, can we just... Not doing the right thing. No. It's always with her. I've been impugned in some way. What is the damage to me personally? Yes. It's not about you. Don't care. No. You're a politician. You've got to suck it up. Also, can we just discuss the elephant in the room here as to why survivors don't trust Jess Phillips? Yeah. Jess Phillips is the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley. She nearly lost that seat at the last general election. A 10 ,000 majority was reduced to, let me just double check, 693.

9:33The reason she was nearly forced out is because the second person who came in second place was a representative of the Workers' Party, which is unashamedly pro-Gaza and pro-Palestinian. OK, so she, also the demographics of Birmingham Yardley are predominantly Muslim. Therefore, there is a suspicion that she is not a neutral actor because, and this could be right or wrong, in the back of her mind, everything that she does is going to be judged at the next general election and there may be a fear by Jess Phillips, regardless of all the work she's done for women and girls, that she may lose some Muslim votes.

10:10I prefer a gentler interpretation, which is that Labour is just oversensitive to issues of race and racialising crime. So something else Kemi Badenoch raised were remarks by Lucy Powell when speaking to Tim Montgomery. Yes, that was on Any Questions, wasn't it? And you'll remember that he made reference to the Asian rape gangs and she accused him of jumping on a right-wing bandwagon. And Kemi and Baden-Ock used those words. There are those, and I understand why, who just think the soft left are nervous about losing their seats. Of course they are. But I think the explanation that I prefer is they genuinely are ideologically opposed to any discussion of ethnicity, which is why they've been dragged kicking and screaming to this point of having this particular inquiry.

11:04And as the prime minister kept asserting, saying they will look into the role of ethnicity in all of this. I think you can tell the story of Labour's attitude towards this whole issue from that quote of Lucy Power when speaking to Tim Montgomery and saying right wing bang wagon to a quote from about a week ago in which it was brought up in an interview and she apologized unreservedly for having made that remark. that's the transformation that's gone on in Labour but they have been dragged to this position like so many things that they claim now to believe sovereignty of borders, controlling illegal immigration they're not things they believed five minutes ago they're stuff they've been compelled to believe Although don't forget that Jess Phillips had that extraordinary moment on Question Time where she likened that sexual assault that took place in Cologne when a number of migrants rounded on young women in a crowd situation and said that it wasn't dissimilar to a night out in Birmingham.

12:04There is violence against women and girls that you are describing. A very similar situation to what happened in Cologne could be described on Broad Street in Birmingham every week where women are baited and heckled. Now, we have to attack what we perceive as being patriarchal culture, coming into any culture that isn't patriarchal and making sure we tell people not to be like that. But we should be careful in this country before we rest on our laurels when two women are murdered every week. And again, it was like, well, you're not looking at the racially motivated nature of this. And again, to Labour, don't racialise this.

12:40This is an issue of male violence against women. It's possible in all male communities. And it's a distraction to focus on one particular racial group. That is to ignore the central tenet of this. The survivors have proven that's not true. They have forced them to hold an inquiry into it. And I do think the length of time it's taking to set up, the controversies around who's in it, the controversies around over what it's about, all pull us back to Labour is doing this without really wanting to. As I said, the thing to remember at the very beginning is they did not want this specific national inquiry.

13:15Do we think that now Keir Starmer has said he has full confidence in Jess Phillips, who he says must... She'll be gone tomorrow. Well, quite. I mean, every time he said full confidence in either Peter Mandelson or indeed Angela Rayner, who we'll get onto in just a moment, they've obviously ended up leaving their post. And the other interesting revelation from today is we're going to leave Jess Phillips in charge, even though she's lost the confidence of a number of survivors. And we're going to get Dame Louise Casey, who can I just describe her as the Miss Rabbit of the government? And that's a reference to Peppa Pig and a particular character that works at the supermarket, at the school, down at the local fish and chip shop.

13:55Like this every woman who seems to be the person to whom the Prime Minister delegates and devolves any decision-making at all. And they're often very difficult decisions. Is she now running the country, Dame Louise Casey? She's a busy, busy woman. Yes, yes. So leaving it in those two ladies' hands. But I think if more survivors come forward and criticise Jess Phillip and call for her to go, her position is going to be untenable. It's not about the prime minister's confidence anymore. And you're right. We have now witnessed him say of several members of his government and Peter Mandelson. I have full confidence in that person.

14:29And then they're gone. That's because actually it's not just about the prime minister's confidence. This is about whether or not the victims of rape have confidence in Jez Phillips. Yes. And if she loses any more of them, then she has to go because her job is to help victims of rape. And if they don't trust her or like her, then she can't do that job anymore. I think the pressure is going to keep on mounting because there's a number of others who are coming forward and they're going to be giving interviews later and tomorrow and all the rest of it. Shall we talk about your bestie, Angela Rayner?

14:58Angela Rayner, another person in whom the prime minister had complete confidence. Complete confidence. And you stayed on after PMQs because you wanted to see her resignation statement. I caught a bit of it and I said on X, this resignation statement is turning into a party political broadcast on behalf of the Labour Party. I mean, it went a little bit awry, didn't it? There was a statement beforehand about Heathrow expansion. And of course, a junior minister in that now is Keir Mather, who's about 12 years old, who I don't think has yet flown on a plane. I'm told that his parents say if he does well enough in his GCSEs, he could ride in the cockpit.

15:35In all seriousness, there are some Labour backbenchers who are really angry that some kid straight out of university who's in a seat with a small margin that he will lose has been given a ministerial position and they've been overlooked. It's an example of how the party is dominated by, frankly, middle class white men. I mean, isn't all of life. Hang on a minute. It's the people's party. We go on winning. It's the workers' party. We go on winning. So I mentioned that because that's the background to Angela Rayner standing up, that many Labour people feel she represents a part of the party, socialist and working class, that's actually excluded from Keir Starmer's party.

16:16We weren't quite sure what she was going to say. We thought maybe she'd have a go at Keir, but then we thought maybe she won't because she wants to get back into government. And she had a very good conference by not being there. She probably had a better conference than she intended it. and there was this weird arms race at the conference, one speaker after another saying, I love Ange even more than you do. Yes, just to get flaws on the audience floor. We had Wes Streeting going, she needs to be back. Then we said to him, does she need to be back? And then he was giving that whole, I'm not a Blairite really, we love Ange because she's a single mother who left school with no qualifications and is now, well, she was deputy leader of the party.

16:51We got all of that. We got the biography. We got, I grew up in a council house as a single mum. I know the power of politics, Mr Speaker, to change lives because it changed my own. The last Labour government gave me the foundation to build a better life for me and my young son. A council house to support me. Sure start to help me raise my kids and the security of a minimum wage. People wrote me off. I wanted to prove them wrong. And I wanted to prove that I could get off benefits. I mean, if you're cheeky, you could argue that, like, 30 years later, she was living in a grace and favour house being paid for by the public.

17:28So you could say she never really moved on. Tim, that's naughty. That's very naughty. But she did all the biography stuff. She used the S word, which is never used in the Labour Party anymore. Socialist values. Oh, I thought you were going to say Elton John. Sorry seems to be the hardest word. Socialist, the S word. No, she used the socialist word. I mean, she looked good. She was wearing this interesting green trouser suit, which, embarrassing, I think Rachel Reeves turned up wearing exactly the same thing. But it's OK. They sat very far apart. There was no comparison. And the whole thing was designed...

17:57She was sitting next to her junior minister who was sacked along with her. And the whole thing was designed to say, I'm here. I'm here in the future if you should be interested. Take a chance on me. I'm happy to come back. I am ready. And remember, you like me. It's an ABBA revival of sorts, isn't it? It is. She's the ginger one. But there are two problems with this statement. One, watching it, an alien wouldn't be able to figure out why she resigned. No. Because according to her statement, she did everything right, she was totally transparent and she has no shame. There is no excuse not to pay taxes owed and I will do so.

18:35Yeah. This was an honestly made mistake. But when you make a mistake, you take responsibility. It's an honest mistake, she said. And she would like to thank the public for supporting her. So she did now wrong. The public all thinks she's great. Yes. So why was she resigning? She said, of course, it's not about me. Never. It never is about... It never is in Parliament, is it? No. About the MP standing up and talking about themselves for ten minutes. It's not about me and my reputation that I'm desperately trying to restore. It's about the people she serves. But then the other thing that really wound me up about it was it was classic Labour.

19:12Labour is now a party that is 90 % rich lawyers who went to Oxbridge, right? So the function that Angela Rayner serves, which is why they can never quite get rid of her, is because she can stand up and honestly say, I'm from council house, benefits, single mum, etc. And Labour, all the Labourites who are sitting there sort of practically in tears, going, oh, you go, you go, Ange. And at the end, they're going up and slapping her on the back. They're not from council houses. No, they're not. They're not single mums. But by having her there, she fulfills this role that makes them feel this is what Labour's really about.

19:45But is Labour really about that? Because what has Labour done since it's been in office? It's raised taxes, killing jobs. It's tried to reform welfare, backed off on that. But that was about cutting people's benefits. It wasn't about helping them. And we all know, she kept mentioning the employment bill, what a great bill it is. We all know that Reeves and Co. wanted to water it down. Yes. And arguably, it's been rescued by Rainer's resignation. because they had to give the left this thing or else they would have nothing. But the party is really moving so far to the right so quickly. This idea that it's the workers' party is just nonsense nowadays.

20:21And it just really winds me up that Labour MPs can still play that card. But do we think it was a positioning for a future shot at leadership? It was, yeah. It was just about reminding people of why you love me, why you in the Labour Party like me and you don't want me to go away because no one else can say these things and sound like they mean it because the alternative is 14-year-old Keir Mathur sitting on the front bench. What do you want the party to look like in 10 years' time? Do you want it to be run by working people or do you want it to be run by university graduates who've just gone straight into university?

20:54If you were advising Angela Rayner, you might urge her to be stalwartly on the side of some of these survivors. Yeah. Wouldn't you? Yes, yes. It would be quite a good stick. And opposed to welfare cuts and the whole lot. But I think she's got to be careful. You don't want to be associated with an open rebellion because Labour MPs right now are very nervous about their seats, etc. So they don't want someone rocking the boat too much. But she has put the offer out there. If at any point in the future you're sick of this complete failure of a Prime Minister, I'm here. I'm ready and I'm tested. Right, coming up next, we're going to be speaking to the man who has written a book the police don't want you to read.

21:37Jay Darkmore spent 10 years in the force but left through stress and his dissatisfaction with police officers having to meet completely unreasonable targets.

22:00Jay Darkmore resigned from the police last September after nearly a decade in the force, claiming in a now viral social media post that the rotten organisation, quotes, breaks the law to chase stats, punishes officers who don't toe the line and ignores police welfare. Now he's written a book about his experience. I sat down with him earlier to talk about public trust in policing, arresting people for tweets and why all cops should have tasers. Jay Darkmore, welcome to The Daily Tea. I've got your book in front of me now. It's very subtly titled this, isn't it? It's number one best-selling author, Jay Darkmore.

22:35The job's fucked, pardon my French, The Secret Diary of a Police Officer. You're so young to have been in the police force and then left it and written a book about it. Well, you know, I work quickly. So tell me, how did it all begin? Why did a young Jay Darkmore decide to join the police force in the first place? So I guess the political answer, the correct answer, would be that I wanted to help people. And where that is true, that wasn't necessarily my full motivation for eventually joining the police. Prior to me joining the police, I was actually a delivery driver and I wasn't a very compliant one with the road traffic act, shall we say.

23:10So me and the police met each other quite a few times. Oh, I see. And I found that police officers were always very friendly, very professional. Sure. And what I found was through chatting to officers, I thought, this actually sounds really, really interesting. So I thought, you know what, I'll try for the volunteer police first because you have two types of police, you have volunteer police and you have full-time officers. Yes. And I managed to get in. And I did that for about two and a half years. So then I tried my hand at going full time. Yeah, I did from 2015 to late 2024. Yes. And I left last September.

23:45OK, so we started at the beginning, but let's go to the end and then we're going to fill in the bit in between afterwards. Why did you leave? I left because I joined the police, like I said, to help people. And I wasn't able to help people. I saw officers around me going off with stress, officers being burnt out, the amount of work they had to do. I was unable to actually support myself and support the people who are supposed to be looking after. I was getting so many cases through that I was actually missing victims and I was unable to properly investigate crimes properly. Yes. So I then went off with stress for a couple of weeks, which is something I've never done.

24:25came back after a couple of weeks and it was exactly the same, thrown back into the frying pan and officers were dropping like flies. The system was just getting worse. The immoral practices that I was seeing happening right in front of my eyes, I couldn't ignore anymore. It's interesting when you started because I would imagine that 2015 was around the time that Theresa May, as Home Secretary, cut police numbers. Because there'll be some people listening to this saying, oh, you know, this is just, you're a symptom of your generation. There's a degree of snowflakery that's crept in. Police officers are taking time off work for stress.

25:03Get on with it. You're meant to be running towards danger, not away from it, etc. I mean, respond to that, Joe. The amount of trauma what a police officer and paramedics and frontline emergency service workers are exposed to, I believe in a career they can experience up to 300 or 400 traumatic experiences. the average person will experience maybe two or three in their entire life. Plus then you have... But you kind of know that when you're signing up, right? You do, but there's a difference between being told what you might see and actually seeing it, being there in the flesh. Yes. And it's not a case of you may see one in isolation either.

25:40In the period of a shift pattern you may experience two or three really serious traumatic incidents. And some of them won't necessarily affect you. I mean, I went to all sorts of incidents, deaths, hangings, you know, all sorts of things. You can learn to switch off from, you get a bit of a thicker skin, you don't necessarily pick it up and carry it away with you, but some of them you do. Whether that's because it affects you on a personal level, or whether it's because at the time it doesn't affect you, you're thinking about it later. And it's that delay in the PTSD which can then have serious issues later on.

26:15Do you think that the public doesn't really have a clue what goes on on the mean streets of Britain when it comes to the criminal end of the wedge? We all live our lovely lives in our lovely houses, big, small, terrace, detached, whatever. Most of us are law-abiding. We don't really encounter the police unless we're the victim of so-called petty crime. Don't like that phrase because any crime is serious to the person that it's perpetrated against. we maybe have a burglary or a bike or car theft we come into contact with you maybe we see you at football matches and in recent times pro-panestinian or other marches but we don't really understand the dark underbelly that you lot are dealing with night and day yeah you only ever hear of the incendiary kind of instance what officers attend for example an officer goes and arrest somebody for an online tweet, for example.

27:12Yes. Yeah, so you all never hear of the things which cause kind of outrage. Obviously, those things do happen, but you don't hear of the hour-by-hour instance what the officers have to go to. So, for example, an officer reached out to me recently and said that they were single-crewed on a late shift. This was probably about 9 o 'clock, 10 o 'clock at night. I didn't think people were single-crewed. I thought you went out in pairs. So many officers are single-crewed. Right. Right. We have this vision, don't we, of two coppers in a cop car. No. Isn't that a bit dangerous? It's extremely dangerous.

27:45Sometimes officers work in pairs. Most of the time they are single crewed because the supervisors in charge of the shift or the people above them, they will have a list of calls to action, whether they're urgent calls, whether they're what's called a grade two, you have to get there in an hour, and the time frame goes down depending on the severity and the risk, etc. etc. Often officers are single crewed because it means there's more of them to go to a different instance. So it's a stats game. Yeah, so this is about numbers, right? If there's a cut in numbers, you've got to spread yourself more thinly.

28:16But then the cost of that is the safety of the officers. Yeah. And just going back to what I was saying about this particular officer, they told me that they were single crewed, went to an incident where there was a male line in the street with a catastrophic bleed they got there and there was a member of the public there trying to stem the bleeding but they didn't know what to do no so then the officer said the training kicked him and for about 10 minutes they were on their own trying to stop this person from bleeding to death 10 minutes doesn't sound like a long time but it's an incredibly long time when you're in something like that so then what happens is after so long the person ended up surviving ambulance came more people were able to break off from what they were doing and come and assist but for 10 minutes that officer was on her own the officer has then said that they got off several hours late and then they got home they couldn't sleep the next day they were back in work some people asked are you okay but any real long-lasting kind of support wasn't really there it's sort of like well that's what this job is like i'm afraid just crack on with it exactly but that's the thing with PTSD is, even if you don't acknowledge it, it still compounds and it will come out eventually.

29:26Well, also the stress levels, cortisol at an all time high, being maintained for hours and hours and hours into the night, lack of sleep, lack of support. There would also be an argument perhaps to suggest, Jay, that it doesn't matter what the numbers are like, because in the book you point to a number of different sort of examples of dysfunctionality at the heart of the police force in general. and I use that as an umbrella term, don't need to necessarily be that specific, the police in general, which strikes me there wouldn't be that much of an impact even if there were more police officers, even if things worked better.

30:00There seems to be this crisis at the heart of policing in the UK and I just want to pick through why you think it is. One example that's been cited by other former coppers largely is that you're being expected to be mental health counsellors as well as police officers to the general public? Yeah. A lot of what officers attend is not crime. I would say, if not half, if not more, of what a police officer deals with in a daily shift is not going out and catching burglars and he's not dealing with crime. It can be somebody has taken an overdose and the police car is quicker than an ambulance. Police are there to preserve life.

30:39You can't section in the house, so you either have to wait for a mental health professional to become available or for ambulance to turn up or for the person to willingly go to A &E themselves for a mental health assessment. Police are not mental health trained. And it's a case of you trying to coach people and counsel people essentially to make sure that they don't want to end their lives and to willingly go to hospital with you. Now, if you imagine there's an officer there maybe sometimes three, four hours, that's three, four hours they're not out driving around doing what we want them to do.

31:10I mean, do most coppers want to be out and about driving around? Yeah, 100%. They don't want to be stuck in A &E. Yeah, and they also don't want to be going and locking up people for tweets. Yeah, tell me about that then. What's the internal view of, we've done so much about it on The Telegraph, not least because my colleague Alison Pearson was investigated for a tweet. And as the phrase goes, we'd rather you were policing the streets, not the tweets, right? And I think many people sympathise with that view. What do police themselves think? The internal view is that no cop wants to do it. No cop wants to go and arrest somebody or make somebody sign a piece of a thing on the pocket notebook and say, admit you're wrong, and there we go, and we won't go any further.

31:47No officer wants to do that. They would much rather be out doing what the public says they want them to do. The problem is, is in so many consabularies around the country now, is officers are graded on their arrests, they're graded on their stop searches, their intelligence reports and their traffic stops and traffic tickets. So if officers don't hit a quota, then they're in trouble. and not only that, a lot of officers what we see now that are on front line have less than five years experience because people have either left the service or have moved on to CID, promotions, other roles so we have quite an inexperienced police force at the forefront which means that they're less likely to push back on the orders they're given by their superiors for fear of reprise so you've got officers that are inexperienced who don't feel confident enough to push back they don't want to get into trouble they're also graded on how many arrests they get they're then being told go and arrest this person for x y and z chances are they're going to do it what is the penalty if you don't meet your arrest and other targets so what will happen is officers are now being graded green amber or red green means you're ticking all your boxes happy days you're doing what the bosses want to make the force look better not necessarily what the public want because the force wants their crime stats to be low obviously we are finding criminals we are arresting them and putting them through the so they're naturally they're going to go for the low hanging fruit yes they're going to go for the ones where well with something like an online crime all the evidence is there in front of you and sometimes it's there in black and white that's a really good point j yeah and if someone says okay if you don't sign this piece of paper here you'll have to come in for a voluntary interview or you might be arrested, you might seize your devices, etc.

33:34If you sign this here and accept responsibility, it means that the police get the tick in the box because then that's classed as a detection, as a community outcome. And the person on the other end feels, oh, OK, well, this saves me going to court and saves me being arrested and having my devices seized. I don't agree with that. We should be policing things like that. And a lot of officers, like I said, don't want to police things like that. But if they, for example, fall into the amber category where they're a bit low on their arrest statistics, then they might have a word with the supervisor who says you need to bump up your arrest, you need to do this.

34:08If they then fall below that into the red, they're then going to be on what's called an action plan, which is basically like a development plan. And if they fail that development plan, they could be looking at disciplinary. So it's the organisation, it's not the officer in front of the camera who's the problem. It's the senior officers who are pushing this down to make themselves look better. How hierarchical is it? I mean, I imagine it is because it's literally graded by rank and pay and it's all written down in black and white. How did you find it on the inside? So if you are all for the organisation and you want to make the organisation look good, you will go quite far.

34:46If you rub shoulders with the right people, if you do what your boss tells you to do and you enforce what the boss tells you to enforce, you'll generally progress up that greasy ladder. If you are quite a moral officer who stands up for what they believe is right and wrong, regardless of what the policy says or what this inspector says, then you are considered a bit of a problem. But then presumably the superiors are more experienced. I mean, let's look at the figures here. The figures for those departing the police force are quite stark. 8 ,795 police officers left 43 police forces in England and Wales in the past financial year alone.

35:25That's 6 % of the workforce. The most common reason for leaving was voluntary resignation. That's 53.1%. And then we've also got stats to suggest that trauma, trauma, moral injury, burnout and internal conflict between what's expected versus what's right has influenced a lot of people to leave the force. We've also got a statistic which suggests that's staggering. UK police officers endured 55 ,954 assaults. So you then have supervisors who presumably do have some longevity. Surely there are still good top cops running good forces that do good things. I know of some very, very good supervisors, and they've kind of hit a wall.

36:08They've kind of hit a ceiling. Because in an organisation like the police, you're not, like I said, you're not graded on merit. You're graded on how well you can make the organisation look. It's that question, how much is your soul worth? It's actually worth a lot less than you think. So, for example, I knew of an officer who was, when they were sergeant level, were all for their staff. They hated the organisation, hated the bosses, they were all for the staff. But then over time, as they climbed up the ladder, it then quickly became apparent that they shifted in their mentality. Then they were all for the organisation and the staff would just have to deal with it.

36:43This supervisor, who was all for their cops, then put out a directive saying that officers at custody were not allowed to use the cups to have a drink of water because it was costing the force too much on paper cups. Yes. But that's just bad management. I mean, you could witness that in any industry in the world. True. Just, you know, playing by the rule book in a bid to get ahead. That happens everywhere. Why is it so pernicious when it happens in the police? Because, and I know what you're saying, that could just be one bad manager, but anecdotally, I've seen it with quite a few different managers.

37:15Also, from what I've been told from countless officers who message me all the time, it's happening everywhere. In my opinion, the police is being run like a business. Yes. And it shouldn't be run like a business. It shouldn't be stats focused on how many arrests you have, how many people's liberty you've taken away. Because like we saw with the burnout statistic and the stress, that is a direct result of cops being overworked. But then I'm going to be devil's advocate here. If we don't judge you by the results that you get, what do we judge you on? We want to know fundamentally as members of the law-abiding public how many criminals that you are catching in the act of the crime and pushing through to the Crown Prosecution Service to charge and prosecute and end up with a conviction.

38:03I agree with that. And there has to be a way of measuring the performance of the police force. And how that's done is through arrests and through detections. The issue is, is those stats are manipulated. So, for example, if there is one incident, that might generate five or six different crimes. So someone goes to the shop, they steal from the shop. They then, on the way home, they then smash a window. They then do X, Y and Z. that generates so many different crimes. What then happens is when that case is sent to the Crown Prosecution Service, it's a case of throwing so much dirt at the wall and seeing what sticks.

38:36If one thing then sticks out of those six or seven different crimes, they all get logged as a positive outcome. So the numbers are inflated. Well, this is what also confuses many people, this ongoing debate about whether violent crime particularly is going up or down. People constantly saying that they feel that the country is more lawless than it was. You can't go out in London wearing a Rolex. People seem to be the victims of personal assault a lot. A member of my family recently had a knife pulled on them and their mobile phone thrown across the street. Thank goodness, no serious damage done.

39:12Did we report it? No. What's the point? These people are in balaclavas. So we get that impression and then you bring in the two-tier policing accusation, particularly when it comes to, for instance, recently the pro-Palestinian marches. there's this sense that we are suffering from more crime and that the police is less effective at investigating crime and locking up criminals. I don't know what the truth of the matter really is. What do you think the truth of the matter really is? So my opinion with that is, I think you answered the question partially in what you said, is that you didn't report it.

39:47So if we grade the amount of violent crime and the amount of incidents that occur via reports, if less people report that that gives the illusion that violent crimes dropping yeah with the manipulation of statistics it may look like the police are detecting more crimes than they actually are so you have violent crimes dropping and we're doing more detections in reality people just aren't reporting crimes as much and we're inflating our detections and our statistics when it comes to the actual investigation side as you said six percent of police officers have left recently, we're also really struggling to not only retain officers, but to recruit them as well.

40:27So we're seeing a lack in recruitment standards. We're seeing people who maybe can't pass a fitness test, for example, still being allowed to get in. I mean, because Hendon has been downscaled, that was like where the Met Police were trained. It's not the same training, the rigorous training that we saw 30, 40, 50 years ago, is it? So the training that I had was like 16 weeks in the classroom, it was death by a powerpoint you did a couple of weeks of your personal safety training and then you were did some time in company and my tutor had like nine to ten years service now officers are generally they have a degree so they're a lot younger I think you should scrap the degree program completely I did 10 years for online I like to think I was very good at my job and I I never went to university at all we don't need degree training to be a good officer we need to is open it up more to people with more life experience.

41:22By having a degree, you are alienating so many people who may want to join the police, but you may not be the best academically. If the police is supposed to represent everybody, why are we putting it as a degree profession? The best officers I've ever worked with didn't have a degree. They had life experience. And the most valuable asset you can have as a police officer is life experience, but more importantly as well, being able to speak to somebody. So communication skills. Communication skills. Courage? Oh, yeah, absolutely. What about all police carrying a taser? I agree with that. You're armed with a trunction.

41:55When you went out on the beat, did you think, God, I feel underarmed here? It depends what incident you would go to. If someone pulls out a knife, you want a taser. Yeah. Knives are being carried more and more, where people carry more and more. There was an incident that I went to where a very heavyset male was, for want of a better phrase, having a very serious mental health episode, and he was armed with a pickaxe. We didn't have a taser. There was four of us there. We basically had to, as best we can, subdue him and then take the pickaxe off him and manage to get him under control. Thankfully, no one was severely hurt.

42:27If someone had a taser, they could red dot him, pull out the taser, put the red dot on him. Often that's enough to make people drop the weapon. Yes. You don't actually have to deploy it. No, so even just drawing the taser and aiming it at them is considered a use of force. If then that would escalate, you then got the right amount of distance to then deploy the taser and, you know, subdue the person and make them safe. Do you think that the public have got the police's back or is something broken down in the relationship between the police and the public lately? Seems to be a lack of trust creeping in, which must be very difficult for officers.

43:03I think, on the whole, the public do have the police's back. I think the police are well supported by the public. However, all you have to do is look on social media or maybe the news or something like that, and you will see people criticising the police. Also, with the directives from senior officers telling officers to go and do things they might not necessarily want to do, such as policing online tweets, for example. We see the police as a punitive force that lock people up over nothing, and yet, like you said, you know, you didn't feel confident enough to bring the police when you had someone very close to you got assaulted and attacked.

43:44so I think people do respect the police but I think that respect and faith is certainly dipping and that is also reflected in the thinking the police morale as well because people feel that the disparity between what you join to do and what you actually do Final question Jay on the back of this book the blurb says this is the book they didn't want you to read and obviously it's a secret diary of a police officer unflinching insider's account of a service on the brink of collapse what's been the reaction from your former bosses and others you've actually painted a really sympathetic picture of how difficult it is for those on the thin blue line but you haven't held back in criticizing the police for all of the mistakes they're making so are you persona non grata what's the deal what i tag myself as is i back the brave and i battle the bullshit pardon my french that's a great quote so i'm unsympathetic in the sense of if i if i see officers doing something wrong or i see unethical practices happening in the police force under the guise of statistics and pursuing somebody's own agenda for their career at the at the expense of the public and at the expense of police officers i'm absolutely going to call that out the reaction I've had from my old superiors, from my bosses, I haven't heard anything.

45:10Because frankly, I don't think they care. They're okay. They're still going to keep doing what they're doing, which is why I love being on things like this, because it does hold them to account. It says, listen, you can't work in isolation and destroy the police force, what we have. The police force I was a part of, my brothers and sisters who I, you know, was in the Blue family with for years, and we attended so many incidents and helped so many people. You are irrevocably destroying that for the sake of your own promotions and your own status. I'm here to make sure police officers who don't have a voice are heard and police officers who do go to the incident which nobody hears about.

45:49There were so many things which happened probably during the course of our conversation. I mean, you mentioned police assaults earlier on. If this conversation is a half an hour long, chances are there's been two police officer assaults. People don't talk about that. All we see is the officer who's been made to go and lock someone up for a tweet. And then as a result of that, that then goes viral. And then all this really good work over here is forgotten about. And then you wonder why so many people are leaving the service. And I'm the voice, hopefully, which says, you are doing a fantastic job.

46:17You are incredibly valued. I've been there, I've done it. And the world is a better place with you. And you guys, if you get to the point where your morality is for sale, you're in the wrong job. Jay Darkmore, thank you very much indeed for joining me on The Daily Tea.