Jack Straw has a nerve. His shocking critique of our brave police force, accusing them of being "too lazy" to fight crime, on the front page of today's Daily Telegraph, is a tawdry beginning to an election year. It reeks of cheap buck-passing for Labour's failure to tackle crime and social breakdown. His dismissive view that police officers are not over-worked, and that targets and form-filling are not to blame, but that instead the police "quite enjoy staying in the police station in the warm" is jaw-droppingly insulting to the men and women who try to protect us.
Undoubtedly the police are not perfect. I am sure there are individual police officers who are lazy, just as there are individual police officers who may be guilty of racism, heavy-handedness, misconduct or error. The tragic killing of Jean Charles de Menezes in 2005 is proof enough that the police are fallible. But to accuse the police force, in general, of being lazy and preferring to stay in the warm rather than be out on the streets is insulting, not only to the police but to our own intelligence. Jack Straw needs to re-examine the culture of bureaucracy his government has built up, in which the manager, the management consultant, the spin doctor and the petty bureaucrat creating targets have replaced the frontline policeman, doctor, teacher and soldier in ministers' priority lists. Jack Straw should apologise.
