Police Under Consistent Fire
British police forces have been under consistent – and justified – fire for a number of years now for the kind of conduct the report wants to eliminate. The first category is symbolic politics: the visible and irritating tendency of police officers and police forces to involve themselves in fashionable political causes while insisting, with decreasing plausibility, that they remain neutral.
Examples range from the symbolic but annoying, such as police officers being filmed “taking a knee” during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, to blatantly inventing their own laws, such as an example from Merseyside Police where officers drove around an advertising van with the slogan “being offensive is an offence”. It is not.
These incidents may be dismissed by defenders of the police as trivial or merely presentational. But presentation matters. When police officers take the knee for one political cause or decorate their institutions in the symbolism of another, the public are entitled to ask whether those same officers can be trusted to police opponents of those causes with absolute impartiality. The answer may, in some cases, be yes. The fact that the question now has to be asked is the problem.
The second category is speech policing: cases in which the police have appeared much more energetic in monitoring or punishing controversial opinions than in protecting the public from crime.
For example, in 2020, former police officer Harry Miller was contacted by Humberside Police over gender-critical tweets regarding the transgender debate. The tweets were recorded as a “non-crime hate incident”; he had not committed a crime, but was warned about his future behavior. In 2021, the Court of Appeal found that the College of Policing guidance created a “real and significant” interference with freedom of expression and could have a chilling effect on public debate.
In 2025, Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan was arrested at Heathrow over social-media posts concerning transgender issues. Reports said he was detained on suspicion of inciting violence through posts on X; Linehan and his supporters interpreted it, reasonably enough, as an outrageous example of the British state policing gender-critical speech.
These cases matter because they speak directly to the public fear that the police have, in some areas, become arbiters of permissible opinion. It is not simply that the public disagree with the police on a given political issue. It is that many people now suspect the police of having taken a side.
The third category is the most serious: cases where the police appear to have prioritized political sensitivity, reputational caution or ideological fashion over the protection of vulnerable citizens.
In 2023, West Yorkshire Police arrested a 16-year-old autistic girl after she reportedly said an officer looked like her lesbian grandmother. The incident was treated as a suspected homophobic public-order matter, with footage showing several officers at the family home. The girl later faced no further action, but was significantly distressed.
Inventing Laws Where None Exist
On occasions, the UK police have seemed eager to actively invent laws where none exist, such as in the case of the Batley Grammar School row, which followed a teacher showing a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad during a religion lesson. The teacher was forced into hiding after protests and threats. A later review by Sara Khan said the teacher had been “totally and utterly failed” by the school, council and West Yorkshire Police. Then Home Secretary Suella Braverman later folded this type of case into her critique of police “enforcing non-existent blasphemy laws”.
Finally, and perhaps most prominently, there has been the recent case of Henry Nowak. Police officers stand convincingly accused of ignoring his complaints that he had been stabbed and focusing instead on a false accusation that he had made a racist comment to his murderer. Nowak died while the police were still trying to figure that one out.
Taken in the round, these examples and many others too voluminous to mention have painted a consistent picture of the UK’s police forces in the public eye: woke, political and more interested in enforcing political conformity than in keeping the streets safe from actual violent crime.
The significance of today’s report – coming as it does from two credible and retired senior politicians from both the left and right of British politics – is that it largely validates those concerns and calls for urgent reform to address them.
Obstacles to Reform
The likelihood of that reform taking place, however, is only low to moderate. In the first instance, Britain’s governing Labour Party is supported from the backbenches by several hundred MPs of a distinctly left-leaning persuasion on the kind of political issues the report asks the police to desist from. Given the fragility of the Labour government, it would be a brave home secretary indeed who chose to try and push through a “de-woking the police” agenda at the very time Labour’s own backbenchers are in a state of high panic about the perceived rise of the “far right”.
Second, turning around the culture of the police force is not a matter of an afternoon’s work: the cultural mores that have seeped into British policing were not installed in a single day or with a single report, and would take years of sustained and focused management to eradicate. Senior officers committed to the current approach have been promoted over a long number of years; strategic partnerships with left-wing NGOs have been deeply embedded into police management structures; and even small things like police participation in Pride events are underpinned by an entire infrastructure of civilian communications personnel who know very few other forms of public-relations strategy.
Third, the report itself is curiously quiet on these structural challenges. Reading it gives a fair assessment of the problem and certainly identifies some key training for senior officers, but it does not seem to acknowledge the structural factors that create the conditions for police politicization to thrive.
However, the report remains a landmark moment: for the first time, in a major official document, senior British politicians are acknowledging what the public have suspected for some time – that their police force has been very seriously politicized, in a very dangerous way. In that sense, a key issue of debate has been taken off the table. The question in Britain is no longer “are the police biased?” but instead “how do we fix the biased police?”
That is, by any measure, a major political development in a civilized country. And also, something approaching an existential problem.
