One of the UK’s most senior police officers has warned public figures not to fuel the “incredibly febrile” atmosphere around Brexit, as he set out plans to tackle possible rioting, looting and hate crime arising from a no-deal departure from the EU.
Martin Hewitt, the new chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, said people such as MPs and campaigners should be wary of “consequences that weren’t intended” when expressing their opinions.
“This is highly emotive as an issue as we all know and clearly everyone will have their opinions,” he told journalists on Wednesday. “But I think there is a responsibility on those individuals that have a platform and have a voice, to communicate in a way that is temperate and is not in any way going to inflame people’s views.”
The continuing uncertainty over Brexit has given rise to an increasingly polarised public debate, with protests, marches, and accusations that some parliamentarians were acting as “traitors” by “betraying” the outcome of the referendum. Anna Soubry, a former Conservative MP who joined the Independent Group of MPs in opposition to Theresa May’s stance on Brexit, said last month she was unable to return home to her constituency because of death threats made against her.
“We are in an incredibly febrile atmosphere as a result of the whole EU exit scenario,” Mr Hewitt said. “In any scenario like [this], where there are a range of outcomes, it’s incumbent on anybody in a position of responsibility, and who has a voice, to just think carefully about the way that they express their views and their opinions, so that what they’re not doing is inciting behaviour or causing anybody to behave in a way that we wouldn’t want them to behave.”
The UK is scheduled to leave the EU on April 12 but Theresa May, the prime minister, plans to ask other EU leaders for more time for parliament to approve a deal.
Later in the briefing Chief Constable Charlie Hall, who leads on operations for the council, confirmed there are now more than 10,000 police officers from the UK’s 43 police forces poised for deployment in the case of a no-deal Brexit. Of these, at least 1,000 could be scrambled within an hour to incidents of public disorder or violence.
However, the chief constable made clear that officers should be called upon only “if absolutely necessary” and not just to maintain order within queues at ports or maintaining the supply chains of food, fuel and medicine.
“Our push has been back to those sectors, those parts of government, the private sector, to say ‘it’s your responsibility to look at your individual supply chains and you should not be looking to police to come in to supplement and keep your supply chain running’,” Mr Hall said.
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Local resilience forums, which include representatives from councils and the police, have carried out training exercises to deal with shortages and wider public disorder, including looting. So far, 15 forces have imposed restrictions on leave and two have submitted requests for mutual aid from elsewhere in the country — Kent, which covers the port of Dover, and Hampshire, which covers Portsmouth.
According to the NPCC, the number of crimes linked to Brexit has more than doubled in a fortnight, with 26 last week and 11 the week before. About half of the 26 were malicious communications, while the rest included offences such as verbal abuse, harassment and protest activity. This week, British Transport Police said they were hunting attempted saboteurs who planted devices intended to bring trains to a halt in Cambridgeshire and Nottinghamshire.
Hate crime has increased since the 2016 Brexit referendum. In total, 94,098 hate crime offences were recorded in 2017-19, a rise of 17 per cent on the previous year.
