McNorry

Northerner and football fan. Views are my own!

[Natalie Allison @natalie_allison]

POTUS to SLOTUS: William Taft was a large man. Very large. Loved the hotdogs at the baseball games. He was our heaviest president, and I have to be careful because I don’t want to supersede his record. That would be possible if I allowed it to happen. Keep yourself in good shape.

[Metropolitan Police Federation @MPFed]

PC Alice Beer thought she was going to die when she was violently attacked by a man. https://t.co/ScDCHeNFtF

[Kelvin MacKenzie @kelvmackenzie]

From The Spectator

[McNorry @stevemcnorry]

@ScottMoone71780 @BettyBoochichi2 Definitely! They could certainly divert funding from certain training to have a faster more proactive social media team. With community notes, it's much easier to label incorrect information or provide needed context.

[McNorry @stevemcnorry]

@BettyBoochichi2 Wow! Thanks, I'll have to get looking for that one. That version should be the one being shared. I don't think Birmingham Police did themselves any favours with their short tweet / post.

[Metropolitan Police Federation @MPFed]

“PC Yasmin Mechem-Whitfield, PC Cameron King and Inspector Moloy Campbell are a credit to the Metropolitan Police Service. They put their lives on the line and put their duty to protect others above their own personal safety." https://t.co/ZinuVYKwDg

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

West Midlands Police Saw Nothing Wrong. The Public Saw the Footage.

West Midlands Police looked at the footage of a man being knocked to the ground, punched, and then arrested, and found nothing to trouble them. "We have no concerns over the officer's actions," the force said. "We are satisfied that they were reasonable and proportionate." That was their verdict before the public had properly seen it for themselves.

The footage shows a white man attacked by a group of black men in Birmingham on June 21. One shoves him to the ground. Another swings for him. As he tries to get back up, an officer pushes him against a wall. He swings back and catches her on the head. By then, the men who started it have already walked off. He alone was charged, with assaulting a police officer. He is due before Birmingham magistrates on July 23.

Only after the clip spread and the criticism grew loud did the force shift its position. On Friday, weeks after the event, West Midlands Police admitted an assault had taken place and said it was now trying to "identify those involved." Nothing in the footage changed between that first statement and this one. What changed was the volume of people watching it.

That reversal is the story here, more than the arrest itself. A force's first instinct was to defend its officer's judgement, not to ask whether an assault had occurred at all. It took public pressure, not internal review, to produce the admission that should have been the starting point.

This is not an isolated reflex. In Southampton, officers who arrived at the scene of Henry Nowak's stabbing handcuffed him as he lay dying, having accepted his attacker's claim that Henry had been racially abusive, while the wound in front of them went unattended. A judge later found Henry had said nothing racist at all. Hampshire's own Race Action Plan commits officers to weigh the racial dimension of an incident as a matter of policy. When forces are trained to treat a claim of racism as more urgent than the injury in front of them, this is the result: victims judged first by the identity of their attacker, not the harm they have suffered.

There is a second admission buried in West Midlands Police's own statement, easy to miss. Officers were "in the area" when the assault happened, the force says, but tied up arresting someone else. Present, yet unable to stop a man being knocked down and punched in the street. The same force found the resource to charge him within weeks once he struck out at an officer, while the men who put him on the ground in the first place remain unnamed a fortnight later.

Robert Jenrick, the Reform UK MP, has called the arrest "baffling" and demanded the force release the full footage. "The police have lost the benefit of the doubt in the eyes of many," he said. "They've had enough of two-tier policing." Whatever one thinks of the label, the sequence of events gives it weight. A force does not reach for "no concerns" and "reasonable and proportionate" by accident. That was a judgement, made and defended, before the facts were fully public.

None of this requires assuming bad faith on the part of the individual officer, who was, by the account given, pushed into a confrontation not of her making. The charge is institutional, not personal. It is a pattern of forces reaching first for the racial framing of an incident and only later, under pressure, for the facts of what actually happened.

Release the full footage, as Jenrick has asked. If it vindicates the force's original line, let it be shown plainly and the matter closed. If it does not, the public deserves to know why "no concerns" was ever the verdict, and why a young white man ended up in the dock while the men who put him on the ground did not.

[McNorry @stevemcnorry]

@LPSimcox Yeah! I prefer your verson although not sure about the red border still.

[McNorry @stevemcnorry]

@Pott_Shrigley_ Could do with a few more of those signs these days! 😉! While they develop Park Hill, I mean! 🤣

[McNorry @stevemcnorry]

@zeadbat @SheffieldUnited Yeah, I'm not a fan of the red around the Adidas badge. These are better! It would be a tough choice! Could easily be the next four seasons sorted! 😉

[Secretary Kennedy @SecKennedy]

Meeting with a few of my senior advisors on our next MAHA win.

[Jim Chimirie 🇬🇧 @JChimirie66677]

This Is What It Looks Like When a State Stops Protecting Its Own

Billy Howarth does not sound like a man at peace. He calls Shabir Ahmed the "devil incarnate." He speaks of gathering a "s--tload of Rochdale lads" for what he calls rapid response patrols. These are not the words of a calm man trusting his government. They are the words of a man who has stopped waiting for one.

Ahmed walked free from prison this week. He led a gang that gave girls as young as twelve drink and drugs, then sold them for cash in flats above the shops where he once worked. He cannot be deported. A rule in the Immigration Act 1971, built for a different country in a different age, keeps him here, though his citizenship was stripped from him years ago.

So Billy Howarth's men now guard the homes of women too frightened to venture outside. This is not law. It is what fills the space when law goes silent. When the state will not stand guard, will not close the gap in the law, will not act, ordinary men pick up the slack with nothing but will and no lawful might behind them.

Look too at Chloe Crosby, twenty-seven, who says she is scared to start a family in her own town. That fear did not appear from nowhere. It came from watching a man who ruined so many young lives walk free with a tag on his ankle and a ban on entering streets he can still reach by phone, through men who have not forgotten him. When a young woman weighs whether to bring a child into the world because she no longer trusts her own street, the state has failed at its first and plainest task.

Jim McMahon and Paul Waugh, the local Labour MPs, have called for the law to change. So has the Home Office, in vague terms about "doing everything possible." Fine words are cheap. The law has stood for fifty-three years while men like Ahmed used it as a shield. Nobody who wrote it in 1971 pictured a man calling a judge racist for convicting him of raping children, yet here we are, watching that same rule protect him still.

Andy Burnham is days from Number Ten. In 2022 he said governments should do everything in their power to deport men like Ahmed. That was easy to say from outside government. It is about to be tested from within it. He will inherit a Home Office that has just told Ahmed's own victims that the man who broke them cannot be removed.

Burnham has two paths. He can use his first weeks in office to close the loophole that has sheltered foreign-born predators for half a century, and give Rochdale back its streets. Or he can let Howarth's men stand watch indefinitely while ministers speak of reviews and considerations that never end in action.

And there is a warning worth adding here: even if the law is rewritten, Pakistan has already refused to take back two of Ahmed's own co-conspirators. Closing the loophole may not be enough on its own. But it is where the work must start, and it is squarely Burnham's to do.

The girls who were twelve when this began are now grown women. They were failed once by a state too slow to listen. They are being failed again by one that hears them clearly and still will not act. Burnham's test is not what he says about victims. It is whether Rochdale still needs Billy Howarth's watch once he takes his seat.

"Billy Howarth's men now guard the homes of women too frightened to venture outside."

[Nik Boyle @NikBoyle]

Salt has been open for one month and one day.

I’m fucked.

I’ve had two evenings off and I’ve been here from 8am until 11pm for 31 straight days.

But I think we’re almost ready for the summer season.

We wrote, tested and delivered a menu in a week.

We wrote and tested wine lists in a week.

We recruited and trained 24 staff members in nine days.

We opened an ice cream and coffee hatch.

We dealt with a broken food lift on the first weekend.

We’ve managed to serve two separate 60-cover restaurants, a terrace and a food hatch from one kitchen.

I’m 50 this year and, somehow, it feels like my first restaurant all over again.

Fucking buzzin.

[Leftwaffen-Watch ⬜️ @LeftwaffenWatch]

Het @ElonMusk Please help with legal representation for this lad

Absolutely disgusting behaviour from the police

[Inspector Gadget @InspGadgetBlogs]

#ThinBlueLine https://t.co/SbjgvG1INi

[Sheffield Football Club @sheffieldfc]

A new chapter begins.

We’re proud to announce our partnership with @adidas and @ProD_Soccer Pro:Direct Clubhouse as Sheffield FC’s official technical and retail partners for the 2026/27 season.

[David Atherton @daveatherton]

Henry Nowak Mark II. A white man is set upon by some Africans & the West Midlands @WMPolice arrest him.

They must have seen 👀 he was not the aggressor. In two-tier Britain 🇬🇧 claiming self-defense will be rejected, unlike the Manchester Airport scum.

[WasAcop @WasAcop]

🚨As I said from the very beginning — right when the bodycam footage first emerged and people were calling for criminal charges — this was never going to go criminal.

It was always going to be an internal discipline / gross misconduct matter handled by the IOPC. That’s exactly what’s happening now.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct has today confirmed it is investigating two Hampshire officers for potential gross misconduct.

Not criminal charges. Not misconduct in public office. Gross misconduct — the highest level of internal police disciplinary proceedings.

The IOPC has specifically highlighted: failure to recognise Henry Nowak needed urgent medical attention, failure to act immediately after he said he’d been stabbed and couldn’t breathe, choosing to arrest and handcuff him instead of providing first aid, and one officer appearing to dismiss his claims.

These are serious professional standards breaches (duties & responsibilities, use of force, discreditable conduct, and authority/respect/courtesy).

They’re also looking at whether race, religion or prejudice played any part in the decision-making. But the key point remains: this is a misconduct investigation, not a criminal one.

Gross misconduct can lead to dismissal from the force. That’s the route the IOPC has taken — exactly as I predicted from day one.

I said it weeks ago when emotions were running high and people were demanding prosecutions: this would be dealt with through internal discipline, not the criminal courts.

The IOPC’s update today proves that.

Sometimes it’s not about what people want to hear — it’s about what the process actually delivers.

#HenryNowak #IOPC #HampshirePolice