Britain's KGB

Peter Hitchens writes: 

From time to time the British media completely miss a story of huge significance. This is one of those times.

 

We are about to get a national police force under direct government control. They like to call it 'Britain’s FBI’. But Britain is not the USA and does not need an FBI. 

For the sort of crime that concerns most people is small and local –  burglary, gangs of menacing youths in the street, shoplifting and vandalism. This does not need some posturing agency, just a few thousand plods on foot patrol with the freedom to use their own initiative.

Anyway, aren’t the grandiose, puffed-up MI5, and the equally self-important anti-terror squad of the Metropolitan Police, quite enough  to deal with the supposed terror menace? Neither of them saw the last major terrorist episode coming, nor were they any use after it happened, but who knows? Maybe they’ll do better next time.

Even so, the Government is already hiring top management for a sinister and worrying body to be known as the National Crime Agency. This is unconstitutional, as Parliament has only just begun to debate it.

Interestingly, the Bill to create the agency began life in the House of Lords, a favourite route for laws the Government wants to keep quiet about. 

The project is arrogant and anti-British. The NCA’s director-general will have the power to order Chief Constables about. He will answer directly to the Home Secretary. 

It is, in short, the very thing that, since the days of Sir Robert Peel, Parliament has striven to prevent –  a national police force under the direct control of the government. In Peel’s time, MPs understood that such a force, if it fell into the wrong hands, would be a terrible engine of oppression. That is why police forces in this country have always been local (by the way, an equally worrying scheme to centralise all Scottish forces under the Justice Minister is well advanced). 

An earlier failed attempt to do the same thing, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), flopped because it lacked the crucial power over Chief Constables. SOCA will disappear into the NCA, along with some other shadowy bodies. The NCA’s own officers will be civil servants, subject to government orders – quite unlike police officers who take an oath to uphold the law and can refuse what they believe to be unlawful instructions.

This is how Big Brother states are born. You are watching it happen.

I hope the Speaker takes the Home Secretary to task for hiring NCA staff without parliamentary authority. And I hope that peers and MPs, as their forebears would have done, chuck out the whole slimy thing.

It is not Britain’s FBI. It could be Britain’s KGB.