Her Majesty's Constabulary, The People's Police

The old Tory cry of "King and People" against the Whig magnates, essential to the Tory populism that went on to influence the Labour Movement in many significant ways, finds more than an echo in the actual status and role of the Police.

It is argued that the rest of us do not have their powers of arrest. But we all would have, if we happened to be sworn, as any of us could be in principle, not as a member of the Armed Forces, nor as any sort of civil servant, but as a direct officer of the law drawn from and part of the civilian population and deriving authority, not from the central government, but from the local magistracy likewise so drawn and so part.

That swearing confers the ability to exercise in ordinary circumstances the power of arrest that, at least in extraordinary circumstances, belongs to any of Her Majesty's subjects. It is nothing more than a statutory regulation of something aboriginal which existed before that statutory provision and which would exist without it.

I thought of all of this when informed this evening that the Police in a town very near here were going round instructing, as I am not at all sure that they can, the removal of Saint George's Flags from the pubs and the covering up of England football shirts worn by the punters. Come back nearer to or during the World Cup for what I think of those practices in themselves, although regular readers will be able to guess the gist of my view. But this is hardly the behaviour of a Police Force integral to its own community.

Quite apart from which, the town in question was found at the last census to be part of a then district with a White British population in excess of ninety-eight per cent, although that town has since acquired a Polish population nevertheless probably more notable for its novelty than for its numbers. But have the Police bothered to ask such ethnic minorities as there are whether or not they mind either the flags or the shirts? I bet they haven't. And I bet they don't.