Servants or masters?

Craig Guildford has retired as Chief Constable of West Midlands Police, the UK’s second largest force. He has retired on a full pension at the age of 52. The British taxpayers get to pay for him for the rest of his life. It seems that he may have received a severance payment to persuade him to resign. The speculation is that negotiations for such a payment are the reason for the delay in his departure.

Simon Foster, the West Midlands Police commissioner, is reported to have said he was “pleased” with the outcome. He insisted that Mr Guildford had “acted with honour.”

Much of what has gone wrong with Britain is that this typifies the attitude of the public sector to wrong-doing among state apparatchiks. The members of Britain’s Deep State are arrogantly unaccountable for their actions.

What did he do wrong? The police force he led – aware of explicit threats of violence from local Muslims if Jewish football fans came to Birmingham for a match between Aston Villa and Maccabi Tel Aviv– sought a ban on visiting fans. They didn’t seek to justify such a ban as being for the safety of the visitors, however. That might have been justified but it would have been too embarrassing.

The British State did not want Birmingham to be portrayed as a “no go zone” for Jews.

Instead they submitted fabricated evidence to the Birmingham Safety Advisory Group to secure the ban. For example, they falsely attributed to Tel Aviv fans actions taken against them by Muslims in the Netherlands at a previous match. They said Israelis had thrown Muslims into canals, when the truth (as subsequently confirmed by Dutch police) was the precise opposite. Dutch Muslims on an organised “Jew Hunt” (their words not mine) had actually committed the violent acts that English Muslims were threatening.

West Midlands Police offered no evidence to the authorities about the actual threats. With the usual excuse of potential damage to “community relations”, they falsely portrayed the visitors as the danger. “Community relations” with Britain’s Jews or (still less) Britain’s relations with Israel were not a concern, apparently.

Essentially his force was guilty of cowardice. They bowed before a threat of violence. They were too gutless to be honest about it.

Apart from the lies his force told to the Birmingham Safety Advisory Group, Guildford himself admitted misleading Parliament when subsequently questioned about the matter. He’d lied about the local Jewish community (with whom neither he nor his force consulted at all) supporting the ban. He’d lied about conversations with the Dutch police. He lied about Artificial Intelligence not being used in generating the report in support of the ban. Microsoft AI made up an imaginary match between Tel Aviv and West Ham, which was mentioned as fact in the report. He’s still – implausibly – insisting that “mistake” was made by Google.

Any one of these lies should have led to him being fired in disgrace. Such immoral behaviour would damage the reputation of even the least savoury corporation in the private sector. But not the British Government, apparently.

The mindset that allowed many thousands of young British girls to be victims of Pakistani Muslim rape gangs and that covered up that horror to protect “community relations” has not changed at all. Our public “servants” will consistently lie to us, their masters, rather than embarrass their government paymasters.

I think the current rape gangs enquiry is a waste of time, for precisely this reason. The actions of our “servants” in both cases were criminal. The correct response to such behaviours is to prosecute those crimes. If our servants knew there were criminal consequences to their lies and cover-ups, they might begin to think more carefully.

This story reveals however that the likes of Mr Guildford can arrogantly assume that the worst that can happen if they’re caught in lying to us, is that they get to retire early on (at the very least) a full pension.

That’s why they behave, not like servants, but like masters. It has to end.