Why do we have armed police in this country at all? Our grandparents would have been horrified by the thought and the sight.
It was once a matter of national pride that our police, unlike those of Europe and North America, were unarmed and enforced law and order by persuasion and tact.
Police were only armed under exceptional circumstances. Sir Robert Peel, in establishing the Metropolitan Police, had ruled that they must be as unlike the weapon-carrying gendarmes of the continent as possible.
In pre-1914 Britain, when guns were readily available in high street shops but police did not carry them, constables faced with rare armed criminals even asked passers-by to lend them their weapons.
In the ‘Tottenham Outrage’ of January 1909, officers came under fire from an anarchist criminal gang of socialist exiles from Russia who used revolvers during a wages snatch.
Constables borrowed handguns from passers-by. We have come a long way since then, in many respects.
Since 1920 strict laws have made gun ownership among the public in this country very rare. But for much of the last century, armed crime has been very rare here too.
London’s police, who had occasionally carried revolvers for night patrols in some areas since Victorian times, gave up doing so in 1936, so peaceful and orderly had the capital then become. But it could not last.
There is evidence that the death penalty deterred armed crime – which rose during two suspensions of capital punishment in 1948 and 1956, falling again afterwards – and went up permanently after the final abolition of hanging in the 1960s.
The arming of police has since grown quietly over the years. Londoners have grown used to officers holding sub-machine guns, guarding embassies, or on duty in major transport hubs.
Downing Street has gradually become a sort of fortress, largely in response to terror threats.
Since 1989 it has been heavily gated, accessible only to visitors who have been carefully vetted, and guarded by conspicuously armed officers.
Given some of the violent scenes on London’s streets, from rocket bombs aimed at the PM’s home and rampage killings nearby involving knives or motor vehicles, it would be hard to argue against such measures.
But now The Mail on Sunday can disclose that, in the summer of 2020, during a Black Lives Matter demonstration, armed police were ordered to abandon the gates to No 10 amid fears protesters could seize their guns and storm Downing Street.
This is surely absurd. The main purpose of armed officers in this country is to deter. It would be a great failure of deterrence, and would lead to a huge political crisis, if such weapons were ever turned on a London crowd. But deterrence requires resolve if it is to work.
If police chiefs so completely lack confidence in the effectiveness of their armed officers, then why deploy them at all?
If the police really cannot do the job, perhaps soldiers in battle-dress could be deployed in Downing Street and Whitehall, as they were by Theresa May in 2017 after the Manchester Arena bombing attack.
It is hard to see the Army withdrawing soldiers for fear their guns might be snatched from them.
But this would surely be a defeat for our way of life. A country with a few armed police on the streets still looks like a functioning democracy.
A capital where armed soldiers in combat gear stand around public buildings would look rather more like an unstable banana republic. This withdrawal was a foolish mistake.
