Police need to arrest more Sikhs, says Jacob Rees-Mogg

Much as a stopped clock is right twice a day, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has received widespread praise for her handling of Henry Nowak’s murder and its aftermath, swerving Nigel Farage’s performative rage to call for calm.

Saying that “whipping people up” and “making them angry” was not the correct response, Badenoch said: “Nigel Farage is taking sides. I’m not taking sides. I’m saying enough of this. We need to stop this racialising of our society. We are multiracial yes, but we need to stop using race as a way of defining laws… let’s treat everyone equally.”

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And has this message got through to her party more widely? Perhaps not being an MP any more has prevented it from reaching former Cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has reacted by… calling for more Sikhs to be arrested.

Guesting for no discernible reason on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg at the weekend, the man who now describes his occupation as a “Somerset quail farmer” argued the solution was to arrest more Sikhs so that the crime statistics more closely represented their 0.9% of the UK population. Only 0.7% of prisoners are Sikhs.

“I think you quite rightly went through the police guidance, which calls for equality of outcome amongst different races,” he told Kuenssberg. “This actually means the police should arrest more Sikhs because the Sikhs are underrepresented in the crime and prison statistics.

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“Equality of outcome is perfectly clear – that you have to have your arrests and your prosecutions and your imprisonments according to race, and this is just crazy stuff, and it should never have been allowed.”

Rats in a Sack probably doesn’t need to explain to New World readers how police guidance does not in fact say that arrests need to reflect the demographic breakdown of Britain, but it does pose a couple of questions: firstly, why is the BBC’s flagship political programme devoting time to a man who lost his seat two years ago and hasn’t been relevant since?

And second, where next for Rees-Mogg, long rumoured to be on Nigel Farage’s transfer wish list? He missed deadline day to switch to Reform – set at May 7 by Farage – but maybe his new enthusiasm for locking up people on the basis of faith would make him a better fit for Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain…?