Faulty reasoning signals

• Confirmation Bias - 31.8% (329 hits)
• Anchoring Bias - 0%
• Availability Heuristic - 11.7% (121 hits)
• Representativeness Heuristic - 0%
• Hindsight Bias - 5.2% (54 hits)
• Overconfidence Bias - 10.2% (106 hits)
• Framing Effect - 1.4% (15 hits)
• Loss Aversion - 2.8% (29 hits)
• Status Quo Bias - 0.8% (8 hits)
• Sunk Cost Effect - 0%
• Optimism Bias - 0%
• Pessimism Bias - 15.3% (158 hits)

Article text

How Britain’s cops became the armed wing of wokeness

Insulting Muhammad.

Criticising a local councillor.

Being a white lad who gets punched in the head by a gang of black kids.

In Britain in 2026, these are the ‘crimes’ that get the cops off their arses.

They might not be able to find the lowlifes who burgled your home or the gang members who groomed your daughter.

But they’ll come running if you diss Islam or have a pop at a Green politician or commit the heinous sin of being white and male on a night out.

Welcome to your two-tier tyranny.

After this week, anyone still denying Britain’s cops have become the armed wing of wokeness needs to give their head a wobble.

First we had the Birmingham scandal.

Footage emerged of a chilling incident that reportedly took place on the night of 21 June.

A young white fella who appears to have had the benefit of a few pints gets into an altercation with some black lads.

He is pushed to the ground by one of them, and seemingly punched by another.

A gaggle of keystone cops swarm in and you won’t believe who they go for?

Yep, the white boy.

It’s a staggering, infuriating spectacle.

Every normal observer of this late-night spat will have considered the white lad the victim.

Yet it’s he who is brutishly shoved by the police into the metal shutters of a shop.

His assailants, meanwhile, walk off.

One of the officers speaks to him as if he were a piece of shit.

‘Walk to the fucking car, you dick’, she says.

Since when was it acceptable for cops to use such gutter language, least of all against a lad who appears to have just been assaulted?

It has reanimated the debate about two-tier policing.

Coming so soon after the Henry Nowak atrocity – when an 18-year-old white boy was fatally stabbed by a Sikh and then cuffed by cops – the Brum incident has got people talking about the ‘anti-whiteness’ ingrained in the woke state.

This looks like ‘clear unequal treatment by the police’, says Robert Jenrick of Reform UK.

With nauseating arrogance, West Midlands Police said they had ‘no concerns’ over what happened and said the footage should not be ‘further shared’ online.

In short: pipe down, plebs.

They’ve now admitted an assault did take place and are promising to ‘identify those involved’.

Cops doing their jobs?

How novel.

It feels undeniable now that the indoctrination of cops with the baleful ideology of DEI has nurtured an ugly, simmering prejudice against ‘whiteness’.

In the wake of the death of George Floyd in particular, police across these isles were expressly instructed to treat the ‘races’ unequally – to take a softer approach towards historically ‘oppressed’ communities compared with the majority white community.

Indeed, West Midlands Police itself instituted a Race Action Plan that implored officers not to ‘over-police’ the black community.

Can we really be surprised by what happened on 21 June?

It makes depressing sense that in a woke society where being ‘pale, male and stale’ is tantamount to a crime, and where the academy devotes itself to the study of the scourge of ‘whiteness’, and where the phrase ‘white man’ is almost always spat out as a pejorative, the police, too, would come to be intoxicated by such elitist white-wariness, making themselves its brutish enforcers on the street.

Before we even had time to take in the madness of what happened in Birmingham, we got news from Leeds about the arrest of a man for insulting Muhammad.

Video footage shows a bloke taunting a ‘pro-Palestine’ march with barbs about the Islamic religion.

He’s grabbed and cuffed by cops.

He asks why he’s being arrested and the reply of the arresting officer is one of the most unnerving things I’ve ever heard a police officer say: ‘Because you called Muhammad a rapist and a killer.’

There it is, on film, for the world to see: the arrest of a man in Britain in 2026 for taking the piss out of a supposed prophet.

This is an abomination.

We binned our blasphemy laws in 2008, so why the hell is someone being hauled off for spicy remarks about Islam?

Everyone who values liberty, especially the liberty to utter, should be horrified that our police are behaving like Islamic Republic goons and manhandling someone for ‘speaking ill’ of Islam.

Then we had the Chiswick incident, also last week.

A man enjoying a pint in a pub in Chiswick, west London, was asked by cops to step outside for a ‘conversation’.

His misdemeanour?

He’d written social-media posts slagging off the local council’s plan to ban riverside boozing, and he alleged that a Green Party councillor was the driving force behind this nanny-state madness.

The cops accused him of filming outside the home of the Green councillor, which he adamantly denied.

We’re ‘raising awareness’, the officers said, to make sure you know not to cross the line.

Pulling a citizen from a pub to reprimand him for his criticism of the political class?

These are Stasi tactics.

It’s obscene.

Who do the police serve?

In the above instances, they seem to have been serving Allah, and the Green Party, and the soulless diktats of DEI.

This is not policing for the people but against them.

It is the enforcement of ruling-class orthodoxy against individuals who merely want to speak freely and fruitily about Muhammad or the political establishment.

Or who just want to be white and have a pint.

A new report on the state of our police, led by Lord Blunkett, is published today.

It says police should quit the ‘culture wars’.

Too right.

For we can all now see that in the hands of the armed wing of the state, the culture war becomes an actual war against ordinary people and our fundamental liberties.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked's chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O'Neill Show.

Subscribe to the podcast here.

His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now.

And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.