Bernard Dineen: Jack Straw sneers at our brave police officers

At any sign of trouble, he is nowhere to be seen. Wherever there is blame, he slips away unscathed. He is the great survivor.

Straw is also not lacking in impudence. He has been criticising police officers who "sit in warm offices" instead of being out on the beat. If they are sitting in offices, it is because they are filling in useless forms that Straw and his fellow politicians have inflicted on them. Police called to a playground scuffle have to fill in 50 forms. They have to waste hours filling in forms to show how many leaflets they have handed out.

As Home Secretary, Straw shackled the police until they felt powerless. He undermined their authority and played into the hands of thugs. Most police officers want to catch criminals but the Jack Straws of the political world make it well nigh impossible. In the remote event of getting a criminal into court, political correctness and soft sentencing make them wonder why they bothered.

A former officer says that, when he joined the Police Service in 1969, there was constant talk of reducing paperwork. Since then, it has increased ten-fold, most of it to satisfy the statistical requirements of the Home Office and other government departments.

In our cities, a police officer's wife never knows whether he will end up in hospital after being caught up in a drunken brawl. Labour's contribution has been 24-hour boozing, with drunken youths fighting at 3am outside bars. Nor has the legal shackling of the police come entirely from Labour. The Tories' Police and Criminal Evidence Act was responsible for turning local police stations into bureaucratic nightmares. My father was on the desk in a small inner city police station long ago: heaven knows what he would have made of the chaos his successors have to cope with.

Up and down the land, you will see small memorials to public servants killed on duty. I have never yet seen one marking the death of a politician or a civil servant. They were all police officers, like the Bradford policewoman shot by a cowardly gunman, leaving a young family bereaved. Or the fine Leeds officer shot in cold blood by an American thug on the outskirts of the city. He wasn't sitting in a warm office: he was risking his life on the street. You will find another memorial opposite Leeds Parish Church.

How dare Jack Straw insult the memory of those brave men and women who died serving the community with his blanket sneer? Does he not remember the brave young policewoman shot outside the Libyan embassy in London? If she had stayed in a warm office, she would still be alive.

HAVE exams been dumbed down? Perish the thought, says Ed Balls, the bumptious Education Secretary: "You are running down our hardworking students." No-one is running down students: the blame lies with meddling politicians like him who are ruining education.

Take science teaching. Do you have any difficulty with this GCSE question? "People observe stars using a) a telescope; b) a microscope; c) an x-ray tube; or d) a synthesiser."

It is an insult to teachers and pupils alike to ask that kind of question. No wonder the Royal Society of Chemistry has protested: "The science community has identified entire science papers with no underlying mathematics, and science questions with no science."

Examining boards are competing to make their exams more attractive to schools. The Society highlights a question set to 14-year-olds last year which asked: "Where does the energy come from for a solar-powered mole scarer?" It adds: "For all the science needed, they could have said a toothbrush or nail-clipper."

The same goes for other subjects. At the fee-paying school which Balls was lucky enough to attend, they wouldn't have put up with such nonsense.

BETTER late than never, I suppose. A cross-party group of the great and the good have called for the political parties to give a manifesto commitment to curb immigration, which is officially projected to swell by another 10 million within the next 20 years, rising to 70 million.

They include Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, Baroness Boothroyd and others. Lord Carey

has called for balanced migration for some time without the rest of the church – or other churches – paying him much heed.

He says the sheer numbers of immigrants put the resources of Britain under enormous pressure, and threaten the very ethos or DNA of our nation. We must look to our language, institutions, and our shared history in valuing what it means to be British, and what we could lose if the make-up of our nation changes too rapidly.

The trouble is that some immigrant groups are actually hostile to our democratic institutions such as the monarchy, Parliament, the judiciary, the Church of England and our free press. The tiny group of Islamist extremists threatening to march through Wootton Bassett are an example. It is tragically significant that none of the main parties dares to make restricting immigration a manifesto commitment. As Lord Carey says, they are running scared of the issue.