Chris Green MP: Much improvement at Greater Manchester Police

After years of poor leadership GMP has now made good progress in improving its service, catching criminals and deterring crime.

​Under the previous police chief, they failed to record crime or do the basics of arresting criminals which is why the Mayor of Greater Manchester could oversee the malaise become embedded and the closure of custody suites.

It is startling to know that the police had just stopped arresting criminals and so did not need all their custody suites. This was hardly the deterrent to criminals we needed.

I and other Conservative MPs across the GM area petitioned the then Home Secretary, Priti Patel, to take action and it was her intervention that saw the failing Chief Constable take, what many would call, a ‘sickie’.

This enabled her to appoint a new Chief Constable that actually wanted the police to make arrests and for the courts to do their job.

New leadership saw the transformation of GMP and an improvement in the morale of the police across all ranks which in turn led to His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary awarding it the status of most improved force in the country.

There is still so much to do but local policing has made immense improvements over the last two years but we know that there is still so much more to do.

On a few different topics, nothing is quite what it seems or at least reality does not measure up to common sense expectations.

I was a little surprised to read that Labour are backing a badger cull if they win the next General Election.

I had always thought that they would have opposed it but they now say that they will support the shooting of badgers until the pharmaceutical industry comes up with an effective bovine tuberculosis vaccine and we are not expecting one of those in the foreseeable future.

Shockingly, CoP28 is going to be the biggest climate change jamboree yet.

There will be 400,000 attendees in the Dubai holiday destination in the United Arab Emirates. It will be far larger than CoP26 in Glasgow and we can only speculate on how many of the delegates will have cycled there.

Last time, President Biden flew to Glasgow in a fleet of five planes while the Japanese Prime Minister’s aeroplane did a practice run return trip all the way from Japan.

To save the planet from dangerous carbon emissions, there is no amount of winter sun the world’s Prime Ministers, Presidents, Kings, oligarchs, billionaires and miscellaneous other hangers on will suffer.

Apparently, flying on a jet plane works better for the rich and powerful than a telephone call, letters by Royal Mail or perhaps using the opportunities presented by the internet.

Finally, just as the Government announce the next stage of investment in the railways and the RMT agree to end their strikes we have yet to hear if ASLEF will follow suit.

Fingers crossed for those regular commuters.