Hundreds of Irish artists on Monday urged Ireland’s Eurovision entrant to be on the “right side of history” by boycotting the song contest over Israel’s participation in the event in Sweden next month, AFP reported.
“We are asking you to withdraw from Eurovision 2024, to heed the call from Palestinians to boycott the competition due to the participation of Israel,” said a letter signed by more than 400 Irish artists.
“By participating in Eurovision you will be standing with the oppressor,” it said.
The letter pointed to Irish artists and musicians like Irish-language rap group Kneecap, who pulled out of the SXSW Music Festival in the United States last month in protest over the US military’s sponsorship of the event.
“You have the chance to be on the right side of history and to be remembered as an artist of conscience, who, in a time of genocide, chose to do no harm, to truly stand with the oppressed,” the letter said, according to AFP.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) announced in December that it rejected calls to ban Israel’s participation in Eurovision 2024 because of the war in Gaza.
The EBU made clear at the time that Israel complies with the rules and as such, will take part in the competition.
After the EBU’s announcement that Israel will take part in Eurovision, Iceland’s public broadcaster, RUV, announced it will consider withdrawing from the Contest due to Israel’s participation.
RUV’s announcement came after nearly 10,000 Icelanders, representing 2.5 percent of the population, signed a petition calling for Israel to be disqualified from the competition.
In contrast, more than 400 leaders from the entertainment industry in February signed an open letter in support of the EBU’s public commitment to include Israel in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest.
Ireland’s entrant faces counterparts from Ukraine, Cyprus, Poland, Serbia, Lithuania, Croatia, Slovenia, Iceland, Finland, Portugal, Luxembourg, Australia and Moldova in the first of two semi-finals on May 7.
The final takes place in Malmo on May 11.
Israel-Ireland ties have been strained in recent months over the war in Gaza and Ireland’s desire to recognize a Palestinian state.
Former Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar recently launched a tirade against Israel, accusing the country of becoming “blinded by rage” as it doubles down on plans to launch a ground offensive on the southern Gaza city of Rafah.
His successor, Simon Harris, was criticized by Israel after he used his first speech after being elected leader to condemn Israel’s war in Gaza and said that “men, women, and children are being slaughtered” there, while failing to mention the hostages being held by Hamas.
In a subsequent interview with CNN, Harris rejected Israel’s criticism and said its sense of reason has been “replaced by revenge”.
A Jordanian citizen on trial for a series of rapes and sexual assaults has begun in Munich, Germany, but the case has already made headlines for the defendant’s wild antics and threats in court.
The 40-year-old rejected asylum seeker, Fadi M., has disrupted the trial several times with outbursts, and during the reading of the indictment, he threatened the public prosecutor by making a throat-cutting gesture in his direction.
The man has been living in an asylum home with his wife since 2019 and is also furious that his defense attorney is a woman, saying: “I would rather be killed than go through this torture here,” and that “the reason for the torture is my lawyer.”
Fadi M. said he refused to be represented by a woman, telling the judge: “I ask you to pass judgment immediately. I admit everything without having said a word so that the court and the lawyers can have their peace.”
As a result, Fadi M.’s family has also hired a man to defend him at the same time, according to German newspaper Bild.
The Jordanian migrant is accused of threatening and sexually assaulting women in the Lake Tegernsee region in Bavaria.
The first incident was in spring 2021, where he grabbed a woman’s breast in his asylum home, but the woman managed to push him off. A year and a half later, he held down another 18-year–old Iranian woman, groped her, and kissed her. When the mother of the woman confronted Fadi M., he threatened her with a knife. In August 2023, he found the same 18-year-old woman, pushed her to the ground, and forced his finger inside her vagina and then forced her to give him oral sex.
The 18-year-old victim testified over video about the incident.
The defendant admitted that he already served five years in prison back in Jordan for sexual offenses and violence.
According to Europe 1, a year nine pupil at a Toulouse secondary school slapped his technology teacher four times and threatened to kill him. The teacher and the headmaster of the college have pressed charges. The pupil is wanted by the police.
He had recently converted to Islam. A 14-year-old pupil, who according to a police source has “a serious criminal record”, threatened his technology teacher with death on Monday. The teenager, who attends the 9th grade of the Collège Bellevue in Toulouse, was reprimanded by his teacher for what he perceived as disrespectful behaviour during class. Europe1
April 22 is “Earth Day,” the annual progressive event that gives a modern makeover to what is nothing more than Gaia worship. And this year, on Earth Day, a fire has been raging in a New Delhi, India, landfill. It’s a very, very dirty fire that’s a reminder about where pollution really comes from…and it’s not America.
Democrats adore Earth Day because it gives them a reason to remind us that we’re all burning up in the Hell that is Earth. Of course, anybody who knows more than the info garnered from TikTok videos understands that, historically, global warming (and the earth has warmed many times before) is good for humans. It means more sun and more water, which are the crucial ingredients for life. It’s when things get cold that the hard times kick in, complete with famine and, once a starving population is weakened, epidemic disease and marauding armies.
But, as I said, Democrats adore Earth Day because there’s big money in it for them—by which I mean that the government transfers your money to Democrats:
President Joe Biden is marking Earth Day by announcing $7 billion in federal grants for residential solar projects serving 900,000-plus households in low- and middle-income communities. He also plans to expand his New Deal-style American Climate Corps green jobs training program.
Democrats are unmoved by data showing that climate change is a scam from start to finish. Or, more accurately, “anthropogenic climate change” is a scam.
In fact, the earth’s climate has changed unceasingly from Day One. It gets hot; it gets cold; old life forms die; new life forms come into being. That is the endless cycle of life on this planet. We have a moral obligation to refrain from polluting and otherwise despoiling our world, but we’re not changing the climate.
John Stossel has a short rundown of the intellectual garbage that leftists—led by a communist, antisemitic, mentally ill Swedish high school dropout—keep spouting in order to control the world. (And make no mistake: If you grant yourself the power to control CO2 outputs, you control every aspect of life.)
Climate alarmists like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez say, “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”
Really?
In order to get you ready for other scary “facts” you will hear on #EarthDay, 3 scientists address some climate myths: pic.twitter.com/CiQN15X3RY
And speaking of garbage, with exquisite timing, there is a massive fire burning completely out of control in New Delhi, an Indian city with a population of almost 29 million people, if you include the whole suburban sprawl.
One of India’s largest rubbish mounds is on fire, continuing to burn after almost 24 hours and spewing toxic fumes into the air of a densely populated area on the outskirts of the capital Delhi.
The Ghazipur landfill, which takes up more than 40 football fields and rises to a height of 65m, caught fire on Sunday evening amid soaring temperatures in the region.
The fire was still burning on Monday and at least six fire tenders were on the spot trying to put it out, local officials said.
I don’t see a fire that size being put out anytime soon. And even when the fire itself ends, I suspect the pollution will continue to spew forth:
In Delhi, 27 million people, the Ghazipur landfill, which is considered the largest in India, and possibly in the world, is on fire. pic.twitter.com/PxA6rJvgJB
— S p r i n t e r F a c t o r y (@Sprinterfactory) April 22, 2024
The fire is a reminder that, if you’re looking for pollutants that allegedly have the power to change the earth’s climate (rather than affect regional conditions), you shouldn’t look to the first world. You must look to the third world. It’s in developing countries that governments build coal-fired plants as fast as they can, that poorly-built factories spew pollutants, and that the people fill the waterways with garbage, especially plastic.
If the Democrats really wanted to clean the earth, they’d unchain the American economy. That’s because rich countries have the luxury of building cars and factories that are less polluting. They’d also stop fighting nuclear power, which is the only clean energy. Well-built nuclear power plants have a very good safety record, although they probably shouldn’t be built on known fault lines, and they produce limitless clean energy.
But limitless clean energy is the last thing Democrats want because where’s the money and power in doing that? “Climate change” policies aren’t about changing the climate because Dem politicians know that one good fire in New Delhi will rewrite the climate script. They are now and always have been about the only green that really matters to progressive Democrats: Money.
Italy’s Parliament voted to let pro-life activists be present in clinics that offer consultations about abortions.
Using an April 16 amendment to its European Union post-covid recovery plan, the Government said “non-profit groups with qualified experience in supporting maternity” will be allowed into abortion counselling centres.
European Commissioner for Economic Affairs Veerle Nuyts insisted the pro-life activists and any State funding they may receive “have no connection” with the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility cash hand-outs. Italy is the biggest recipient of those funds and is due to receive a further €194.4 billion by 2026.
The issue has now become an EU-wide row, with other governments in the bloc having since come out to criticise the move.
Spain’s equality minister Ana Redondo said Italy was allowing “organised harassment against women who want to terminate their pregnancies” and was “undermining a right recognised by law”.
Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni responded in an interview with Italy’s ANSA news agency, saying: “When you are ignorant on a topic you must at least have the good manners not to give lectures.”
Meloni has accused her opponents on the Left of “fake news”, saying it was they, not she, who wanted to change the country’s abortion legislation – called Law 194.
Social policy is an area where Meloni has sought to attract voters from the hard Right, who might otherwise support Matteo Savlni’s Lega party.
Half of Lega’s deputies, including group leader Riccardo Molinari, abstained from the vote on an amendment from the centre-left opposition Democratic Party, which reiterated women’s right to access abortions in publicly-run clinics.
With Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party holding a hard-right position on abortion, her coalition partners appear to be offering more nuanced view.
Forza Italia’s leader and Deputy Prime Minister Antonio Tajani has issued several calibrated statements on the matter, such as: “There is a law in Italy that certainly cannot be changed” and “there is no intention to do so”.
Adding another level of complexity to Italy’s abortion debate, the country’s largest pro-life association Pro Vita e Famiglia has said it has no intention of having its members present in clinics — but it also attacked the Lega members who had abstained in the “shameful” vote.
Pro Vita said it would organise a national demonstration against abortion to be held in Rome on June 22.
In the wake of the April 16 vote, Italy’s evening Porta a Porta TV news programme on Rai 1 offered a panel of “seven men debating abortion” — as Italian doctor Nino Cartabellotta quipped.
While abortion has been legal in Italy since 1978, about 70 per cent of gynaecologists refuse to perform them, as is their right, according to a CNN report. In addition, 37 per cent of public hospitals ban them altogether. In some regions, such as Sicily and Abruzzo, closer to 90 per cent of doctors refuse to carry out terminations.
Some members of Italy’s Parliament have argued that a legal right to abortion is meaningless without enough doctors to perform them.
With June’s European Parliament elections approaching, abortion is increasingly part of the European debate also.
The EP adopted a resolution on April 11 that included a call for the right to abortion in the EU’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, although doing so would require unanimous approval from the 27 Member States, noted Martina Rubino, an Italian women’s rights campaigner in Brussels.
The German Parliament, or Bundestag, passed one of the world’s most far-reaching sex self-determination policies on April 12, despite protests from women’s rights campaigners. The Self-Determination Act (SBGG) establishes ‘gender identity’ as a protected characteristic and allows parents to change the sex marker on their children’s documents from birth.
Supported by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s three-party coalition and promoted and supported by the Socialist Democratic Party (SDP), the SBGG also creates the potential for citizens to be fined up to €10,000 (approx. $10,800 USD) for revealing a person’s given name and birth sex without their permission – an action that trans activists staunchly oppose and refer to as ‘deadnaming.’
Germany's Socialist Democratic Party has published a video featuring trans-identified males in promotion of a gender self-identification bill.
The draft bill, which passed the Cabinet on August 23, includes a $10,800 fine for "deadnaming." pic.twitter.com/mgKoC0uxnS
But arguably the most troubling aspect of the law relates to a portion of the bill which permits parents to alter the recorded sex of children beginning from birth. From the age of five years old, it allows for name and sex changes if there is “mutual consent” between the child and their parents.
According to a description of the bill on the Bundestag’s official website, the Self-Determination Act was designed “to implement a core idea of the Basic Law, the protection of gender identity, by giving people the opportunity to change their gender entry and first name without discrimination.”
It continues that following a change, a one-year “blocking period” will apply where no further changes are allowed, though a person may change their name and sex once again after the year passes.
If parents choose to do so, they may alter the identifying information of their children from birth. The SBGG stipulates that the consent of a child is necessary from the age of five, and, “from the age of 14, minors can do it themselves, but require the consent of their guardians.”
However, should parents refuse to provide legal permission, “a family court would decide based on the best interests of the child,” thus allowing the state to overrule the wishes of parents or legal guardians.
Crucially, the law includes a ban on disclosure that prohibits naming the sex and former birth name of an individual. This prohibition also applies to family members in the SBGG. Anyone who violates the ban on disclosure will face a fine of up to €10,000, which could discourage family members from coming forward to discuss how the identity change impacts them.
During the hearing on the SBGG, two trans-identified male politicians were present to advocate for and support the bill’s passage.
Tessa Ganserer and Nyke Slawik were elected to Germany’s Bundestag in September 2021 as representatives for the Green Party, taking positions that were reserved for female political representation.
Marcus ‘Tessa’ Ganserer (L) and Nyke Slawik (R) applaud during the Bundestag hearing on the Self-Determination Act.
In 2013, Ganserer, under his given name of Marcus, was elected as a member of the Landtag of Bavaria, representing the constituency of Middle Franconia on the Alliance ’90/The Greens list.
A 2019 article published by Welt states, “Marcus Ganserer ceased to exist on December 12, 2018. Then Tessa Ganserer gave Marcus’ clothes to a friend.” He has for years been campaigning to introduce sex self-identification policies in Germany, and has claimed that “a penis is not a male sexual organ” and “there are women who have penises.”
During a 2019 press conference that year, Ganserer explained how, at the age of 41, he decided to begin identifying as a woman after years of stealing his wife’s clothing.
“At first I was totally surprised at myself. But I immediately felt that there was more, it wasn’t a fetish, I felt like a woman,” said Ganserer at the time. He has reportedly been using facilities designated for women ahead of the passage of the SBGG, and in advance of a legal alteration of his identification from a ‘male’ designation to ‘female.’
“This is an incredibly important historic decision and that’s why it really takes a load off my mind that after so many years of hard work and so many years of waiting, I will also receive official ID documents in the future that will have my real name on them,” Ganserer said in a series of videos posted to Instagram account following the vote.
“It is about time that we put an end to the unnecessarily long expert opinions and court proceedings to change names as an injustice, and that we finally respect the dignity of trans, intersex, and non-binary people today,” Slawik added.
Germany’s prior “transsexual law” (Transsexuellengesetz), implemented in 1980, required individuals who want to change sex markers on official documents to first obtain assessments from two medical experts “sufficiently familiar with the particular problems of transsexualism,” in addition to a court decision.
Unlike Ganserer, Slawik began to claim a transgender status at the age of 16 years old. In a 2021 interview with Zeit, Slawik describes living in a shared flat with a woman and buying tampons in a bid to hide from them that he was male. Slawik has previously used the slur “TERF” — an acronym which means “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” and is often used alongside threats of violence — to mock and insult women who oppose gender identity policies.
The SBGG was supported by the Socialist Democratic Party (SPD), the Greens, and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), as well as Die Linke. The law was voted down by the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Sarah Wagenknecht Alliance and the Alternative for Germany (AfD).
A protest involving approximately one hundred women was organized outside of the Bundestag on April 12, despite the announcement that the bill would be debated having been made on the government’s website just days before – something that critics noted as unusual.
https://t.co/wwx5ZUJbF4 CALL TO ACTION: Stoppe das #Selbstbestimmungsgesetz und schreibe JETZT an Deine Abgeordneten! Laut Gerüchten soll das Gesetz in den nächsten zwei Wochen in die 2. und 3. Lesung kommen und verabschiedet werden. Die @initiative_lfs hat den Brief als…
Speaking with Reduxx, Duwe explained that the women who attended were afraid for their safety, and that during the demonstration, trans activists “mocked” and “laughed” at them.
“We are afraid that the police, state and judicial persecution against feminists will increase. [Trans activists] are becoming more and more aggressive. Some also came to us during our protest and mocked us or laughed at us. One was shouting that all feminist organizations in Germany welcomed the Self-Determination law.”
Duwe has had multiple police reports filed against her since last year for speaking out against gender identity ideology and policies. At a protest she participated in last year, her attempts to speak with prominent politician Sven Lehmann, who has been one of the most vocal advocates of self-identification legislation, went ignored.
Lehmann is a member of Alliance 90/The Greens who has been serving as a member of German Parliament from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia since 2017. He also has worked as the Federal Government’s Commissioner for the Acceptance of Sexual and Gender Diversity (which has been nicknamed the “Queer Commissioner”) in the coalition government since 2021.
Lehmann has previously drawn criticism for confessing in an interview for Queer.de to using the application Grindr during meetings in Parliament, and justifying this by stating, “Grindr is also work.” In response to public outcry, the policitian took to Instagram to denounce critics as “TERFs”.
“Queer Commissioner” Lehmann has held a a leadership position in a government-funded youth project which has promoted BDSM in a publication co-designed by minors. Lambda Bundesverband, an organization which receives financial support from the Federal Ministry for Family, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend – BMFSFJ), has created resources describing “humiliation play” and “age fetishes” in collaboration with children as young as 14.
Ich begrüße sehr, wenn diese „Broschüre“ der Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien vorgelegt wird! https://t.co/evVrismb3V
Last year, Lehmann was instrumental in the censorship of a brochure produced in part by Duwe. The information resource, titled “Guide Out of the Transgender Cult” (Wegweiser aus dem Transgenderkult), criticized the medical ‘transitioning’ of children, and was aimed at parents who wish to protect their children from puberty-halting drugs and transgender surgeries.
A philosophy student overheard through the wall of his room saying ‘veganism is wrong’ and ‘gender fluidity is stupid’ was threatened with expulsion by his university, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. Robert Ivinson said he was disciplined after a student next door in halls of residence at Exeter University heard the comments then complained he had been offensive and ‘transphobic’. Mr Ivinson, who expressed the views in a phone call to a friend, was hauled before university officials and put on a ‘behavioural contract’ for the rest of his studies. He was warned he could be expelled if the university thought he had done anything else wrong, and told by letter he had been found guilty of harassment. […] At the time of the complaint, Mr Ivinson – who had just started his first year of a philosophy degree – was alone with the door closed. Mr Ivinson, who is 6ft 5in with a deep intonation, said his voice often carried without him realising. When an officer from the university’s estate patrol banged on his door to tell him his female neighbour had complained, the mature student was shaken. ‘It was like the Stasi had come to my door,’ he said. ‘He stuck his foot in my door and said you’ve been saying some very offensive things.’
If it is now licit for a neighbor to listen through your wall, and if what he hears you say is now actionable, despite it being an expression of personal opinion…well, the Stasi of the days of East Germany under Communism would be proud. Ivinson’s characterization is quite accurate.
I wonder about the unnamed female eavesdropper. What “disapproved” opinions might she hold? Do you think anyone will haul her up by the short hairs for expressing them? Possibly not, if they’re in conformance with The Narrative. It’s just as dominant across the Atlantic as here.
That’s Britain today, folks. No better than the U.S. and in some ways a good deal worse. Scratch it off your list of possible escapes.
Former Belgian Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne, screen grab youtube
A magistrate who committed a “gross and unacceptable error” that allowed Islamist Abdesalem Lassoued to commit October’s terror attack in Brussels will not face disciplinary action.
An internal investigation exonerated both the magistrate and his secretary, leading to a war of words with the governing liberal-conservative OpenVLD party.
Last year, it was revealed that the magistrate in question had failed to act on a request from Tunisia to have Lassoued extradited a year before the Islamist murdered two Swedish soccer supporters. The political backlash from the revelation led to the resignation of Justice Minister Vincent Van Quickenborne last October.
Van Quickenborne said at the time that the tragedy was due to the magistrate’s “individual mistake. A gross, unacceptable mistake with dramatic consequences.”
Before that, Tim De Wolf, then Brussels public prosecutor, said that an “unfortunate combination of circumstances” within his office was to blame, pointing to understaffing and a heavy workload.
screen grab youtube
According to Vrt Nws, Tom Bauwens, the magistrate’s lawyer, maintained his client’s innocence, while slamming the manner in which the matter had been handled:
During the whole phase of the file [Lassoued’s] arriving at the public prosecutor’s office and being processed there, my client was on leave. It is and remains astonishing that they threw overboard every principle of presumption of innocence and hung him out to dry without having done even the bare minimum in reviewing the case.
“It is to be hoped that the media will employ as much energy and pages that they used at the time for slamming him, for the restoration of his reputation,” he concluded.
In a reply to Bauwens, Van Quickenborne expressed displeasure with the matter being seemingly swept under the rug.
A blind man can see that something has gone wrong. A terrorist could go about his business freely. He should have been deported long ago, because a file was left in a cupboard at the public prosecutor’s office in Brussels. That was a mistake with dramatic consequences.
Van Quickenborne said that while he “rightly, as the responsible minister,” resigned after that mistake, he added that “everyone has to look in the mirror, including the judiciary.”
He also found it odd that the investigation did not manage to throw up any failings or misdoings.
So what went wrong? What happened is not nothing. I believe in the rule of law and have always defended the independence of the judiciary. But independence is different from irresponsibility. You have to be responsible for the actions you take. A credible justice department is one that is humble and apologizes for what went wrong.
Continuing the to-and-fro, Bauwens, in reference to Van Quickenborne, said:
A humble minister who defends his principles in this way could then just as humbly perhaps argue that he spoke out of turn. And that something went wrong is obvious: understaffing and years of substandard treatment of essential structures of the state. One magistrate is not responsible for that.
Van Quickenborne was quick to hit back: “If there had been understaffing: how does one explain that 30 of the 31 files that year were processed and that one file [Lassoued’s] was not?”
On X, formerly Twitter, chairman of the OpenVLD Tom Ongena, supported his fellow party member, remarking:
‘The man was on leave’. I sincerely hope our safety does not depend on the justice department’s vacation planning. Vincent Van Quickenborne took his political responsibility, now it is up to Justice to learn lessons from the mistakes made.
A major enquiry by the AfD party provides interesting insights into Saxony’s asylum seeker statistics. Out of a total of 17,484 asylum seekers in 2023, only 75 were granted asylum for political persecution in accordance with Article 16a of the Basic Law, which corresponds to around 0.43 per cent. A further 6,597 migrants were granted “protection status” through other legal channels. In contrast, 5,097 applications were rejected. Last year, the costs of migration totalled 652 million euros for the Free State of Bavaria alone; in 2021, the figure will be 376 million euros.
This figure is particularly interesting because, according to the latest police crime statistics (PKS), migrants have certainly contributed to an increase in crime. The number of recorded criminal offences has risen by 12,631 cases compared to the previous year. Particularly noteworthy is the significant increase in the number of suspects identified to a total of 92,358 people – an increase of 5,143 compared to the previous year. A large part of this increase is due to non-German suspects, who are significantly overrepresented in the PKS. In 2023, a total of 24,313 foreigners were recorded as suspects, compared to 19,905 in the previous year. This corresponds to 26.3 per cent of all suspects.
Sebastian Wippel, the AfD parliamentary group’s spokesperson on domestic policy, comments on the results of the enquiry. He points out that the vast majority of asylum seekers are not labelled as politically persecuted within the meaning of the Basic Law. This means that considerable costs could be saved if only those who are actually politically persecuted were granted protection.
According to Wippel, it is particularly noteworthy that 88 per cent of the 73,320 recognised asylum seekers in Saxony have only been granted temporary protection status. This situation requires regular reviews, especially for the large group of people entitled to subsidiary protection, to determine whether the security situation in their countries of origin has improved and whether it is possible for them to return. He also points out that many European countries have already begun repatriations to Syria, while the Christian Democrats have been announcing this since 2017 but have not implemented it.
Britain is descending into a low-trust society as over half of the British public does not have faith in their increasingly woke police forces to actually solve crimes.
A survey conducted by YouGov for the Times of London found a “devastating lack of confidence” in the police, which in recent years have become increasingly preoccupied with professing their progressive bona fides and acting as woke censors on the internet while real-life criminals run rampant.
The poll found that more than half of Britons lack faith in law enforcement to solve crimes, while a third said they do not trust the police to maintain law and order in the country. The poll also found that just 26 per cent would expect police to make an arrest if they were burgled and just seven per cent believed that a pickpocket would be caught.
The photo features a child holding a sign with the flag of Palestine and the words ‘Save Our Children!’ Twitter
Meanwhile, only 37 per cent of respondents were confident that if they reported a sexual assault the perpetrator would be arrested and tried.
Overall, after nearly a decade and a half of Tory rule, just 37 per cent of the public think that the police are doing a “good job”, while a majority believe that the police are worse than they were 30 years ago.
The public’s concern is not without merit, with a report finding last month that police failed to solve a single burglary in nearly half of all neighbourhoods in England and Wales over the past three years, while the charge rate for burglaries fell to just 3.9 per cent last year compared to an already rock-bottom 4.6 per cent the year before.
Despite operating under a supposedly Conservative government, police forces across the country have devoted valuable manpower hours to policing “hate speech” and conducting workshops to promote leftist ideologies around race and gender rather than solving real-world crimes.
Former Metropolitan Police Detective Chief Inspector David Spencer warned in a 2022 report that “policing tweets” rather than burglaries, robberies, and theft, British police forces were at risk of losing public confidence.
As has been seen in Democrat-controlled cities in the United States, shoplifting is also on the rise, with the British Retail Consortium reporting 16.7 million instances of theft in the year up to August 2023. The increase resulted in a loss to shop owners of £1.8 billion, compared to £950 million in 2022. According to The Times, 61 per cent of businesses characterised the response from police as being poor or very poor.
The chairwoman of the department store-owning John Lewis Partnership, Dame Sharon White, said that the issue of shoplifting has become “systemic” and “organised”.
Arguing that the police are not doing enough to confront the growing issue, she said: “More than 80 per cent of shoplifting doesn’t have a police response, so there’s this sense that you can shoplift and you can be pretty guaranteed that there is not going to be a comeback.
“Unless somebody is dealing with your supposedly low-level crime issues, it creates enormous issues for faith and trust in the broader criminal justice system.”
Former chairwoman of the National Police Chiefs’ Council Dame Sara Thornton added: “The whole idea of the criminal justice system with prosecution and punishment as a deterrent is in danger of falling apart.”
A separate poll released on Monday from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) found that almost one-quarter of people living in London had been physically attacked or threatened with violence in the British capital over the past five years, equating to around 2 million people.
The survey also found that one in ten London residents believe they are at risk of falling victim to knife or gun attacks from criminal gangs operating in the city, the Daily Mailreports.
Over half of respondents said they wished there were more police on patrol — or ‘Bobbies on the beat’ as they are known in Britain — to protect their neighbourhoods, while nearly two-thirds supported stop and search powers for officers.
According to figures published last year by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, Fire and Rescue Services showed that the number of Bobbies on the beat in England and Wales fell from 23,928 in 2015 to 16,577 in 2020.
Former children’s commissioner Anne Longfield commented: “There are urban areas where people have got fatigued. They just expect to see violence and that’s deeply worrying.”
