New Statesman: Munira Mirza: the former radical leftist advising Boris Johnson

Those who know Mirza describe her as an independent thinker, intelligent, intellectually curious, reasoned, articulate and unflappable. Far from being a strident right-wing Tory, she once flirted with Marxism and is now a libertarian. Like Cummings, her fellow Downing Street iconoclast, she is not a Conservative Party member and is said to harbour no political ambitions of her own. [...]

Mirza does not deny that racism exists in Britain, but she argues that racial inequalities are the result of cultural and socio-economic factors more than institutional racism. She contends that efforts to promote racial equality through diversity programmes and “box-ticking multiculturalism” serve merely to deepen divisions, stoke tribalism and foster a “culture of grievance”. She rejects identity politics based on race and religion in favour of a universal humanity or “universalism”. [...]

Through PX she published “Living Apart Together” (2007), a paper that argued multiculturalism had encouraged Islamic extremism in Britain by dividing people along ethnic, religious and cultural lines instead of promoting a national identity. [...]

She was a principal author of the Tory party’s manifesto for the 2019 general election. As a northerner, like Cummings, she champions the idea of “levelling up”. There has been speculation, given her libertarianism, that she may have encouraged Johnson’s costly reluctance to impose the coronavirus lockdown last spring. True or not, she certainly would not have expected to be overseeing government interventionism on a scale unprecedented since the Second World War.

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The Guardian Longreads: Speed kills: are police chases out of control?

In the 1980s, Alpert was invited by the UK government to consult on the subject. He found “enormous similarities between Britain and America,” he recalled, recently. “Crazy police driving, serious injuries, deaths – and very little interest around the departments in exploring this further. It was seen as the natural thing, same as in the States. Bad guy runs, cop chases.” A sharp spike in fatalities at the end of the 1990s did lead to the IOPC (then under a different name; it has transitioned through several rebrands) bringing in a criminologist, David Best, to investigate accidents resulting from chases. Best came to the conclusion that standards varied wildly from district to district and that, in the main, officers were given a lot of leeway once the sirens were on and the suspects in flight. There seemed to be a received locker-room understanding: most chases turned out fine. “We’ve done a lot of work on this in America,” Alpert said, “where an amazing number of officers don’t wear a seatbelt. It’s called ‘phantom ninja’ [syndrome]. You’re inside the car with lights and sirens blaring and you think you’re immune and nothing bad can happen. But it can. It does.” [...]

Chase lots, or chase little. What mattered most, said Martin Cooper’s solicitor, Michael Oswald, was that police drivers were not only taught but incentivised to keep their heads. The report into the deaths of Rozanne and Makayah, sitting on the conference-room table in front of us, included findings by the IOPC “that two officers may have committed criminal offences both during and following the pursuit”. Martin and his family had been confused, then, to receive a letter from the CPS, agreeing that, yes, there were evidentiary grounds to bring charges against the officers; but there would be no such charges – “not in the public interest”. The phrase jarred with Diana. For the first time, sitting in the conference room, she spoke up, asking softly: “What are we?” [...]

Around this time, I met an off-duty coroner who, discussing the new ramming tactic, raised an eyebrow and asked: why not swear the police in as judge and jury too? “It’s wild west stuff.” Because what if a suspect was thrown off their bike (injured, killed) and later found to be innocent? This happened at least once, to another client of the Cooper family’s solicitor Michael Oswald. The client was under 18. The city did not tend to look fondly on young men on scooters just then. But he was guilty of no criminal offence when, riding around on a London A-road, he was rammed off his bike by a police officer. A barrister called Michael Etienne, a colleague of Oswald’s and a fellow member of an organisation called the Police Action Lawyers Group, told me he is profoundly uneasy about the changing flavour of policing. Etienne acknowledged that running thieves off their scooters probably was effective as a crime suppressor. “But so would be cutting off their hands.”

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Haaretz: Jeremy Corbyn's anti-Semitism Problem Is Actually a Kremlin Complex

Corbyn's inability to understand those who consider anti-Semitism to be central as a narrative of politics and not incidental has ideological underpinnings.

In the far left’s political bubble, mainstream Jewish organisations become peripheral and unimportant, but marginal ones are publicly courted. This is why he chose to go to the alternative Jewdas Passover seder and stayed for four hours; why he wants miniscule, irrelevant groups like the Jewish Voice for Labour present at a roundtable discussion on anti-Semitism he has called with mainstream Jewish representative organizations; why he prefers groups on the far Left in Israel to the mainstream sister Labour party. [...]

With Jews, it is the exact opposite. Listening to "the people" does not count. There may well be justified criticism of the blunt-edged approach of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, but as several authoritative surveys have demonstrated, it broadly represents the Jewish community’s relationship to the State of Israel and its concern about anti-Semitism emanating from the Left.  [...]

In contrast Corbyn has perfected the expression of selective outrage. He therefore condemns Saudi Arabia for the war in Yemen, but remains silent on the protests against corruption in Iran. He praises Maduro’s Venezuela, but turns a blind eye to the hungry queuing for food, the use of force and the arrest of opposition figures.

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