At the beginning of Act V, scene 3, of the First Part of Henry the Fourth (Folio 1, 1623), prior to the entry of the King, the Prince, Lord John of Lancaster, and Earl of Westmorland, Shakespeare gives the stage directions “Alarum, excursions”. There is no doubt about what is meant and now, with a different spelling, and a non military connotation, we understand the word alarm to mean the sudden sharp apprehension and fear resulting from the perception of imminent danger, but clearly this is not the understanding of the ‘woke’ snowflakes now dominant in our police force.
No better illustration of this attitude can be found than in the Suffolk police investigating a potential hate crime because one anonymous local neurotic had complained about a pensioner, who, as an enthusiast for American Indian culture had installed a totem pole in his garden, which contained the image of a black person. The snowflake concerned claimed that this had ‘racist overtones’, but even the police decided that there was no case to answer. However the incident was recorded as “a possible public order offence, due to the visual representation which caused alarm and distress to members of the public”. To prevent further argument the pensioner concerned painted the black face white. I feel alarm as I contemplate the rise of China, and the fall of the USA, while I am distressed by reports of young children being murdered by their own parents, but I find the complaints of the idiots on Twitter to generate either amusement or nausea. I am sure that ninety per cent of normal people feel the same way.
What a pathetic, paranoid phobic anyone offended by such a representation must be, and how truly wretched the response from the police. This sort of waste of police time is occurring when violent crime is on the rise, when young girls continue to be abused by organised gangs of those the police are afraid to name, and ordinary members of the public find their interests ignored because the police claim to be over stretched. However it should be noted that, on the same day, the police are congratulating themselves on devising gender neutral uniforms, thus bowing to the demands of the liberal left.
I do not for one moment blame the ordinary copper who I am sure is disgusted as is everyone else by these displays of political correctness, but the senior ranks must be full of those with a very different agenda. Should this continue some of our favourite dramas of the past would need changing. Regan and Carter would be leading the Sweeney to arrest veterans at war memorials who were daring to wave union flags, and engendering hate against our ‘friends and partners’ the Germans, while DCI Gene Hunt would be raiding addresses where copies of Churchill’s war memoirs were believed to have escaped the ritual book burnings.
We have endured scenes of police ‘taking the knee’ in support of the Marxists, anarchists and nihilists of Black Lives Matter, while standing by to allow similar supporters of Extinction Rebellion to disrupt the lives of the public in the name of a cause based upon false premises. Unfortunately, if the liberal Left get their way, in future the police will only recruit those with degrees, so brainwashed products of our ‘woke’ universities will come to outnumber the real coppers. The majority of the lecturers and professors in humanities in these latter institutions are nothing but propagandists for those who hate our society, and desire to see it replaced by a politically correct dictatorship of those who think just like them.
All this political distortion of values is an insult to the brave men and women who form the thin blue line, and on whom we rely to protect us, and our democratic society. In the USA the lunatics of the Left have been advocating the defunding of the police, and should such people triumph in the UK, and fully undermine the ethos of policing, then the only way decent people will obtain justice is by the rise of vigilantism, a recipe for disaster. The timid middle class might do nothing, but one can be sure that the more assertive working class will not lie down forever as their daughters are violated, and their right to freedom of expression, crushed at the behest of these ideologues.
To destroy the police will first lead to anarchy, and then, as sure as night follows day, to some sort of dictatorship, with terrible consequences for all of us. Now is the time to reverse the direction in which the woke are taking us, and restore respect for the rule of law, not of the diktats of the morons of the liberal Left.