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Pic:Police form a line as climate activists demonstrate outside Downing Street on November 14 (Getty Images)
Staff reporter(wp/es):
Almost £40m has been paid in overtime to Metropolitan Policeconstables in the last two years, official figures show.
In 2017 and 2018, Pcs in London worked more than a million hours in overtime, clocking up a total of 1,799,741 extra hours.
Figures released to the Standard under Freedom of Information show how police are being called on to shoulder increasing hours on duty.
London's mayor Sadiq Khan said the Met had faced £1bn in cuts since 2010. This week he raised council tax to help make up the shortfall in police funding.
£22,625,288 was paid out in overtime in 2017. In 2018, from January to October, this figure was £16,855,056.
The Met said that the last two years have been an “unprecedented period for policing with a number of terrorist incidents, increases in violence, and other major incidents such as the Grenfell Towerfire”, requiring more officers.
The force said “it is only right officers are paid the correct overtime for their hard work".
Mayor of London Sadiq Khan said we are going to continue seeing money spent on overtime because without funding, it will not be possible to invest in more officers that we "significantly need".
Mr Khan said officers were currently being "overstretched".
Ken Marsh, Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, said he would like to see more officers in employment, as he claims the money spent on overtime could have "trained thousands" of new officers.
The Home Office said "there are more officers for each Londoner than anywhere else in the country".
Mr Marsh said: “We are seeing a lot of overtime, and a lot of it is for firearms [trained officers], and this is because it’s cheaper to pay officers overtime than train up new ones.”
He added: “It’s not an eight-hour job and then you go home, you can be told to stay on longer at work. It’s one of the few jobs where you can be told to stay longer. It’s not a day time job, if something happens, officers have to stay, it’s something that is factored in.
“We do need more officers, but how are we going to get them when they are starting out on such a low salary?”
Mr Marsh added working so many extra hours can have a big effect on Pcs, as he said: “having a good work/life balance is a difficult thing for officers to have”.
A spokesman for the Home Office said: “This Government has ensured police have the resources they need to carry out their vital work, by providing a strong and comprehensive settlement that is increasing total investment in the police system by up to £970m in 2019/20.
“There are more officers for each Londoner than anywhere else in the country. The Metropolitan Police will see a total increase in funding of up to £172m next year including pensions funding and precept.
“Decisions about the allocation of police resources and the recruitment of officers are for Chief Constables and democratically accountable Police and Crime Commissioners (PCCs).”
Mr Marsh said he would like to see more officers in employment and said he “would like to see the Government bring the number to over 30,000 officers in employment”.
Mr Khan said: “The Met are overstretched and officers are being overworked because of the eight years of damaging cuts to police funding by the government.
“The Home Secretary promised to give the Met Police the funding he acknowledged it needs to tackle the rise in violent crime and yet when he had the chance to do so, he failed to reverse the £1 billion of hugely damaging cuts the government has inflicted on the police.
“His police settlement was a one-year sticking plaster which means we are going to continue to see money spent on overtime because without long-term funding we are not going to be able to invest in what we really need, which is significantly more officers on the street to keep Londoners safe.”
A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said the amount spent on overtime must be considered along with how big the force is.
The spokesman said: “The Metropolitan Police Service is the largest police service in the country.
“Overall, Met officers account for around a fifth of all the police officers in the UK - it is important that our overtime spend is viewed in this context.
“The Met is a seven-day-a-week, 24-hour organisation. Overtime provides the flexibility and resilience the Met needs to keep London safe and allocate resources to meet demand.
“Police officers sometimes have to work on rest days, and sometimes at short notice and on bank holidays, and it is only right they are paid the correct overtime for their hard work.
“We are committed to their support and welfare and we continue to have enormous gratitude for the dedication they show day-in and day-out to keep our city safe.
“2017 and 2018 has been an unprecedented period for policing in London with a number of terrorist incidents, increases in violence, and other major incidents such as the Grenfell Tower fire with ongoing investigations – all of which involved significant overtime expenditure.
“We have also faced additional overtime costs in relation to our restructure of the delivery of policing across London boroughs and as a consequence of falling officer numbers, although we continue to actively recruit.
“Overtime costs and contingency are factored into annual budgets, and do not incur an additional cost which impacts other business areas.”
In 2013, 30,398 police officers were in employment across the entire Metropolitan police force, according to the Office of National Statistics.
Of these, 23,283 were working as PCs. In May of this year the number of police officers protecting the capital symbolically dropped below the 30,000 mark for the first time.
On Thursday, Sadiq Khan said he would be raising council tax to tackle the "brutal reality" of crime in London.
Two teenage boys have been arrested on suspicion of murder following a fatal stabbing in Tottenham.
Police arrested the pair on Sunday and they both remain in custody at north London police stations at this time for questioning.
A 25-year-old man was found stabbed on Saturday morning at around 1.20am, in Albert Place, and died of his wounds after being taken to hospital.
He was pronounced dead just before 2.15am.
The two boys, aged 15 and 16, were arrested on Sunday, the Metropolitan Police said.
Detective Chief Inspector Glen Lloyd said: "Whilst we have made good progress with two arrests, I still need to hear from anyone who has information that could assist with my investigation.
"At the heart of this, we have an innocent young man who has been brutally murdered just days before Christmas.
"If you are reluctant to speak with police directly, please share what you know with Crimestoppers anonymously."
Anyone with information is asked to contact police.
Pic:Nancy Stringer (left) has launched a fundraiser to pay for her sister Hope's cancer treatment/bbc Staff reporter(wp/bbc):
A campaign to raise money for a woman's cancer treatment has received almost £92,000 in five days.
Hope Stringer, 27, from Billericay in Essex, recently found her sarcoma diagnosed in 2014 had returned and spread to her lungs and lymph nodes.
When the NHS said they could only manage her illness, her sister Nancy Stringer launched a campaign to raise £700,000 for treatment in the US.
She said Hope had been "overwhelmed" by the support she had received so far.
In its first 24 hours, the fundraiser received £55,000 in donations. It has since reached £91,793 and Miss Stringer said any excess funds would be given to Sarcoma UK.
The funds have come from more than 1,000 supporters, with donations ranging from £5 to £5,000.
Hope wrote a blog about her experience when she learned she had cancer in 2014. In the blog she described how she "looked like Uncle Fester's love child" while going through chemotherapy.
She was originally treated by the NHS, but her sister said this time it was unable to offer a cure and could only put her through chemotherapy again.
Miss Stringer, 29, said that Hope - who was proposed to by her boyfriend Sean Pearce shortly before her cancer returned - was feeling "scared and emotional".
But she added: "There is a company in America which specialises in her type of cancer so I set up the fundraising page to try and get her out there in the next couple of days for an appointment.
"We all feel very grateful, although we know there is a long way to go."
The family previously raised £90,000 for Sarcoma UK. The charity's chief executive Richard Davidson said he "can't thank them enough" and added: "It's never easy being told that your sarcoma has returned. We wish Hope the best of luck with her treatment."
Pic:Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe with her daughter Gabriella during a temporary release from prison/bbc Crime reporter(wp/bbc):
London mayor Sadiq Khan has called for the release of jailed charity-worker Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
Mr Khan met Mrs Zaghari-Ratcliffe's husband Richard and offered his support in urging the Iranian authorities to release her in time for Christmas.
The British-Iranian, who turns 40 on Boxing Day, was jailed for five years in 2016after being convicted of spying, which she denies.
Mr Khan described her imprisonment as a "travesty of justice".
He said: "Nazanin has been wrongly detained in an Iranian prison for over two years. She has done nothing wrong, has broken no laws. The charges against her are completely false.
"We - and indeed the whole country - know what a travesty of justice it is that Nazanin continues to be detained.
"With Christmas approaching, we are calling on the Iranian authorities to release her at once so she can return home and be reunited with her family."
Ms Zaghari-Ratcliffe was arrested at Tehran airport in April 2016 after visiting her family on holiday. She has always maintained the visit was to introduce her daughter Gabriella to her relatives.
The mother-of-one from Hampstead, north London, was recently reunited with her four-year-old daughter during a three-day temporary release.
But since returning to prison, after her application for an extended release was denied, she has suffered several panic attacks.
Health reporter(wp/bbc): Are we born with an innate moral compass or is it something we develop as we grow?
Whether humans are born good or evil has been debated by philosophers for centuries. Aristotle argued that morality is learned, and that we’re born as “amoral creatures” while Sigmund Freud considered new-borns a moral blank slate. Anyone who has read “Lord of the Flies” will expect children to be fully-fledged sociopaths just waiting to be freed from their adult-imposed shackles to (spoiler alert) start a cult and brutally attempt to kill each other.
Maybe the two most famous opposing views on this debate are those of Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hobbes describes humans as ‘nasty’ and ‘brutish’, needing society and rules to reign in their instincts in order to thrive; later Rousseau openly criticised him, arguing instead that man would be gentle and pure without the corruption of greed and inequality caused by the class system imposed by our society.
Recent developmental psychology studies show there may be some natural “good” in humanity (or, to be more technical, that at least kids are capable of passing moral judgements at an earlier age than previously thought).
One of the studies shown on ‘Babies: Their Wonderful World” was conducted to demonstrate if and at what age toddlers showed a preference towards “good” behaviour.
To do this, babies less than a year old were made to watch a puppet show where different coloured shapes acted in ways that were clearly recognisable as morally right or wrong. A red circle is shown struggling to climb a hill while an “evil” blue square tries to push it back down. Meanwhile, “good” yellow triangle attempts to help the red circle by pushing it up.
After the play, the babies were asked which shape they wanted to play with: evil blue square or good yellow triangle. As you may have guessed, they all picked the latter, the triangle that exhibited ‘helpful’ and ‘selfless’ behaviour. This applied even for babies as young as seven months.
The scene replicates the findings of a 2010 study from the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University, which went further to prove that babies were choosing the puppets because of their actions rather than other variables (for example, an innate preference or familiarity with a certain colour or shape). When the show was replayed with the shapes taking on the opposite role, the infants still mostly chose the shape that had taken on the role of the ‘helper’.
A 2017 study from Kyoto University had a similar approach and findings to the puppet study, seemingly confirming these results. Children as young as six months were shown videos featuring three Pacman-like characters, called ‘agents’: a ‘victim’, a ‘bully’ bumping aggressively against the victim and squashing it into a wall, and a ‘third party’ agent. The third-party agent would sometimes intervene to help the victim by putting itself between the victim and the bully, and would sometimes flee instead. After watching the video, children had to choose their preferred character and most chose the intervening third-party agent who had tried to help the victim.
Other studies have also shown babies exhibit altruistic behaviour, like the ‘Big Mother Study’ from Harvard, where infants who didn’t know they were being observed still acted kind and were helpful to others, suggesting that this isn’t just a learned behaviour to avoid punishment or scrutiny.
While these studies can’t completely disprove Freud and Hobbes’ more pessimistic views on human nature, they do seem to suggest that babies are naturally inclined to prefer altruistic behaviour and that parents can be fairly confident that, while leaving their children on a desert island is probably still not the best idea, they at least won’t try to squash the weakest one with a rock (sorry, William Golding).
Birmingham airport has resumed services after suspending operations earlier due to an air traffic control fault, the airport said on Sunday.
“Following the earlier air traffic control technical fault, Birmingham Airport has now resolved the issue and operations have now resumed”, the airport said in a statement.
The fault was due to a failure of the electronic flight plan system, according to a statement from air traffic control agency Eurocontrol, cited by the BBC.
Flights were suspended for about two hours and operations resumed after 2000 GMT.
The airport is the seventh busiest in Britain, serving about 12 million passengers a year.
The incident follows three days of disruption at London’s Gatwick Airport after drones appeared on the site, which affected 140,000 people between Wednesday and Friday.
Royal correspondent(wp): Queen Elizabeth will say in her Christmas message that the festival’s message of peace and goodwill needs to be heeded as much as ever, and people should respect each other even when they harbour the most deeply held differences.
According to excerpts released by Buckingham Palace on Monday, the 92-year-old monarch will also speak of family and friendship following a year in which her grandson Prince Harry married U.S.-born actress Meghan Markle.
Throughout her record 66 years on the throne, the queen has avoided commenting in public on contentious international affairs or party political issues, and the excerpts make no mention of the visit in July by U.S. President Donald Trump or the turmoil over Britain’s departure from the European Union.
But speaking about the birth of Jesus, she will say: “I believe his message of peace on earth and goodwill to all is never out of date. It can be heeded by everyone; it’s needed as much as ever.”
“Even with the most deeply held differences, treating the other person with respect and as a fellow human being is always a good step towards greater understanding.”
Before leaving Britain for a summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump breached British royal protocol by publicly disclosing the details of a conversation he had with the queen about the complexities of Brexit, an issue that has divided the nation.
Trump’s trip to Britain was marked by public protests and downgraded from a full state visit that Prime Minister Theresa May had originally proposed.
However, he took tea with the queen at Windsor Castle. Trump later described the monarch, who has met 12 U.S. presidents, as an “incredible woman”, who was both “sharp” and “beautiful”.
She has shown little sign of slowing down in the last year, during which Harry and Meghan’s wedding marked another royal step towards modernity, with a ceremony that blended ancient English ritual with African American culture.
“Through the many changes I have seen over the years, faith, family and friendship have been not only a constant for me but a source of personal comfort and reassurance,” she will say.
Another grandchild, Princess Eugenie, also married this year and the queen’s sixth and seventh great grandchildren were born, while she made her debut appearance on the front row of a fashion show.
She also led British and Commonwealth tributes to the soldiers of the World War One on the centenary of the signing of the Armistice that ended it in 1918.
The queen wore a cocktail dress in ivory silk with pastel blue, white and gold lame overlay designed by Angela Kelly for the broadcast, which was recorded in the White Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace.
She is spending Christmas as usual at her Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, eastern England, where she will be joined by other members of the Royal family.
