The New Culture Forum

This time on #SWYSI, Peter Hitchens discusses the British police’s historic transformation into a form unrecognisable from decades past. He agues that the British police were once unique in the world. They were an important conservative & very English institution which was set up in complete distinction from continental police forces. Parliament had seen European police forces become tools of oppression. They were armed & uniformed state police whose job was to enforce the will of the state — and it was not felt that such a body should exist in Britain. Consequently, the British police force that was set up was very different: unarmed, not given special powers, limited in their abilities. This is no longer the case.