Colin Sutton’s victory as Norfolk’s Police and Crime Commissioner last Thursday was astonishing. He received nearly double the number of votes secured by the second-place candidate.
Given that he is Britain’s best-known living detective, I cannot think of a better man to do this job over the next two years and begin changing the national debate around policing culture.
I think Colin will become a major part of the national debate around law and order, because here is the strange thing: there is hardly any national debate around law and order.
I was with a farmer from Essex recently who told me rural crime is off the scale. It is not just the theft of machinery, crops or even livestock, but people coming onto the land to pursue all sorts of illegal hobbies and activities. If he challenges them, he is threatened with having his buildings burned down.
It is the Wild West. It is lawlessness, and it is happening all over East Anglia.
We have a capital city, London, where men now do not wear watches and women do not wear jewellery. One of the reasons hundreds of thousands of people are leaving Britain each year - very often some of our brightest and best - is fear of crime and of being unable to live their lives normally.
We have the early release of prisoners, with people who committed heinous crimes serving nothing like their full sentences. This is attacked by the Conservatives, who themselves let out 160,000 prisoners early.
The two-party system has failed Britain in so many ways. When it comes to law and order, it is our job to push this issue back up to the top, or very near the top, of public debate in this country. Colin Sutton’s election will help us do that.
One of David Lammy’s last acts in government was to attempt to use the law to stop us finding out who the perpetrators of crime are. We know some basic statistics. We know that an Afghan male is 22 times more likely to be convicted of rape or a sexual offence than a British-born male. But there is so much more that we do not know.
All of this gets wilfully misinterpreted as Reform UK wanting to paint anybody from a different religion, skin colour or background as somehow being a bad person. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We understand and recognise our relationships with the Commonwealth and the wider world. Just as our talented people often want to go and work somewhere else, we welcome talented people who want to come and work here - yes, to work and pay taxes and to benefit the country. If they choose to settle, we want their children to become British and to integrate.
As a country, we have been more tolerant and more open-minded than any of our European neighbours on this issue. But what is unacceptable is for Boris Johnson to have allowed 3.8 million people to come into Britain when only 17% of them were on work permits. Most of the rest will place massive cultural and economic strains on this country if they are granted indefinite leave to remain. I thought Shabana Mahmood was going to take up our proposal to extend the qualifying period from five years to 10 years. Given how left-wing the Labour Party is now, however, I very much doubt that is going to happen.
When it comes to those crossing the English Channel, be in no doubt: there are many young men coming into this country with the intention of joining criminality in our communities. In fact, in many cases, it is the criminal gangs that pay the trafficker a fee to get them across.
We will keep the pressure on the Labour government to provide the full facts and figures. They can provide them. If they are, as I suspect, causing a disproportionate amount of crime in our communities, we deserve to know the truth.
This is an edited extract from a speech given by Nigel Farage in Norfolk on 21st July. Watch the full rally here.
Given that he is Britain’s best-known living detective, I cannot think of a better man to do this job over the next two years and begin changing the national debate around policing culture.
I think Colin will become a major part of the national debate around law and order, because here is the strange thing: there is hardly any national debate around law and order.
I was with a farmer from Essex recently who told me rural crime is off the scale. It is not just the theft of machinery, crops or even livestock, but people coming onto the land to pursue all sorts of illegal hobbies and activities. If he challenges them, he is threatened with having his buildings burned down.
It is the Wild West. It is lawlessness, and it is happening all over East Anglia.
We have a capital city, London, where men now do not wear watches and women do not wear jewellery. One of the reasons hundreds of thousands of people are leaving Britain each year - very often some of our brightest and best - is fear of crime and of being unable to live their lives normally.
We have the early release of prisoners, with people who committed heinous crimes serving nothing like their full sentences. This is attacked by the Conservatives, who themselves let out 160,000 prisoners early.
The two-party system has failed Britain in so many ways. When it comes to law and order, it is our job to push this issue back up to the top, or very near the top, of public debate in this country. Colin Sutton’s election will help us do that.
One of David Lammy’s last acts in government was to attempt to use the law to stop us finding out who the perpetrators of crime are. We know some basic statistics. We know that an Afghan male is 22 times more likely to be convicted of rape or a sexual offence than a British-born male. But there is so much more that we do not know.
All of this gets wilfully misinterpreted as Reform UK wanting to paint anybody from a different religion, skin colour or background as somehow being a bad person. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We understand and recognise our relationships with the Commonwealth and the wider world. Just as our talented people often want to go and work somewhere else, we welcome talented people who want to come and work here - yes, to work and pay taxes and to benefit the country. If they choose to settle, we want their children to become British and to integrate.
As a country, we have been more tolerant and more open-minded than any of our European neighbours on this issue. But what is unacceptable is for Boris Johnson to have allowed 3.8 million people to come into Britain when only 17% of them were on work permits. Most of the rest will place massive cultural and economic strains on this country if they are granted indefinite leave to remain. I thought Shabana Mahmood was going to take up our proposal to extend the qualifying period from five years to 10 years. Given how left-wing the Labour Party is now, however, I very much doubt that is going to happen.
When it comes to those crossing the English Channel, be in no doubt: there are many young men coming into this country with the intention of joining criminality in our communities. In fact, in many cases, it is the criminal gangs that pay the trafficker a fee to get them across.
We will keep the pressure on the Labour government to provide the full facts and figures. They can provide them. If they are, as I suspect, causing a disproportionate amount of crime in our communities, we deserve to know the truth.
This is an edited extract from a speech given by Nigel Farage in Norfolk on 21st July. Watch the full rally here.
