Grok explains Adam Brooks' output and engagement:

How did Reform UK vetting miss this... was there any vetting at all? 😂

🚨 Who patrols Britain’s high streets, and who do they answer to? The question is usually asked about the self-appointed anti-migrant “patrols” that have appeared in some towns, their members often dressed in black and masked by balaclavas, with no public mandate and no meaningful oversight. This piece is about something quieter and more official: a Reform-led council paying a private firm to patrol public space in response to concerns about asylum seekers. For almost two centuries the main answer has been the police, a public service answerable, through law and elected oversight, to the public. In Essex, that answer is being rewritten. Since 14 September, private security guards hired by Reform-run Essex County Council have patrolled Braintree, Chelmsford and Colchester under the name Operation Vanguard (no relation to Merseyside Police’s operation of the same name). On a visit to Chelmsford on 15 October, Nigel Farage told the BBC he wanted the scheme “rolled out much more widely”. Farage presents this as a rescue. The police, he claims, “do not fulfil the job, sadly, that they used to”, and Reform councils are right to start “filling that gap”. He has distanced himself from the masked groups: after the masked protests in Dover and Portsmouth in September, he said “Turning up in balaclavas is not the way to do it.” Vanguard is the version he does endorse. His claim about the police deserves testing against the evidence. It is also a policy proposal, and Essex is showing us what it looks like in practice. The patrols are run by My Local Bobby, a private security firm founded in 2016 by former Metropolitan Police officers. It sells subscription “beats”, foot patrols paid for by residents or business districts, largely in affluent parts of London, and its guards are known as “Bobbies”. Its founder and chief executive, David McKelvey, a former Metropolitan Police detective chief inspector, is also chief operating officer of TM Eye, a linked firm that describes itself as the UK’s “leading private prosecutor”. My Local Bobby’s latest accounts show its average number of employees rising from 80 to 140 in the year to November 2025. It is a growing business in a growing market. As a small company, it publishes no profit and loss account, so whether Vanguard makes it money cannot be seen from its public filings. I first wrote about My Local Bobby in May 2018, when it announced plans to go nationwide after patrolling Belgravia, Mayfair and Kensington for subscribers paying up to £200 a month. McKelvey said then that the firm was taking things back to “Dixon of Dock Green-style policing”. I argued at the time that it amounted to a private police force for the “deserving” rich, while the “undeserving” poor could look out for themselves. Eight years on, the model has changed shape. In Essex, the buyer is a council, the money is public, and the patrols were introduced in response to concerns about asylum seekers. Essex gave it the Vanguard contract without competition. The official procurement notice records it as a “below threshold - without competition” award, worth £141,523.20 including VAT, and the council says a cabinet member decision “provided a waiver to enable a direct award”: its usual rules were set aside to hand the contract straight to one firm. It was signed on 11 September, three days before patrols began. There is no suggestion this was unlawful. But it meant a private firm was patrolling three town centres within months of Reform taking control of the county, with no competing bids. The contract says the guards are there partly to “collect evidence if any incident occurs”, yet the only published report of their work records no figure for detentions and nothing on Wethersfield residents. Colchester’s crime and disorder committee has since asked how the firm was procured, and called for the local Community Safety Partnership to be properly involved before any extension. Farage’s case rests on his claim that the police have “given up” on catching shoplifters. The BBC reported that Essex Police officers had secured more than 4,000 shop theft charges over the past year. In September, the force told Byline Times that all three centres “are safe places” with less crime than three years ago, and pointedly added that the most effective approach was a “joined-up” one with partners. The gap Vanguard was bought to fill was, by the council’s own launch report, one of feeling: the question, it said, was “not whether individual people represent a risk” but whether residents feared crime. The national picture does not match Reform’s “Britain is broken” framing either. The Office for National Statistics bulletin published on 22 October found no statistically significant change in overall crime measured by the Crime Survey for England and Wales over the past year, and put it 14% lower than in 2017. Violence is 79% below its 1995 peak, and theft 77% below. Police recorded homicides, knife crime and firearms offences all fell in the year to June 2026, and recorded shoplifting fell 2% after a period of increases. Not everything is improving: fraud rose 11%, and the share of people who said they had experienced or witnessed antisocial behaviour rose from 36.7% to 41.4%. The ONS thinks most of that rise is genuine, though a change in how the question was asked inflated it. Concern about antisocial behaviour is real. But it does not follow that the police have “given up”, still less that private patrols are the answer. Politicians who tell people Britain is broken, and certain news media that amplify that framing, help create the very fear that private patrols are then sold to soothe. Then there is the distance between what residents were promised and what they got. The council’s guidance told the public the guards would have “no enforcement powers and no ability to arrest people”, and that they “cannot act on crimes themselves”. That wording was misleading. The guards have no special power of arrest, but like any member of the public they can make an arrest in the limited circumstances the law allows. Just three days into the trial, two of them did exactly that, detaining two teenage girls suspected of shoplifting in Colchester and handcuffing them. Essex Police recorded two offences of assault without injury against the guards, raised concerns with the firm, and passed “learning” to it. The firm’s chief executive says his staff will keep detaining suspected offenders where justified. Across all the company’s beats, not Vanguard alone, he says they detain between 10 and 40 people a day, a figure that cannot be independently checked. This is where privatisation stops being an abstraction. When a police officer handcuffs a teenager, a framework of accountability follows: codes of practice under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, a statutory complaints system with independent oversight by the Independent Office for Police Conduct, misconduct procedures, a chief constable, and democratic oversight of the force by an elected police and crime commissioner. A private guard is subject to the criminal law, like anyone else, and needs a licence from the Security Industry Authority. But he is not subject to the statutory complaints and misconduct framework that governs police officers, and much of the day-to-day responsibility for supervising and disciplining him rests with his employer. In Colchester, after police recorded two assaults, the Daily Gazette reports that the cases were closed under what Home Office counting rules call Outcome 20: “further action resulting from the crime report will be undertaken by another body or agency other than the police”. In practice, the “learning” went back to the firm. The council’s only published evaluation of Vanguard is a one-page report produced by that same firm and published by the council. It records activity: hours patrolled, reports filed and meetings attended. On the evidence published, it does not show whether crime fell or whether anyone feels safer. These concerns are not confined to the scheme’s political opponents. When private patrols began spreading in Essex a decade ago, the county’s then police and crime commissioner, Nick Alston, warned they had “the potential to create a two-tier policing system”. The Police Federation has described private patrols as a “slow creep” towards exactly that, in which those who can pay get protection others cannot. The chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation, while saying he would welcome extra patrols, was blunt about My Local Bobby’s staff: “They are NOT police officers and please do not ever kid yourself that they are.” In 2019 the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s lead for local policing, Simon Cole, said such firms “should not replace or supplement policing”, and that intervening when a crime is committed is a job for properly trained officers. The police complaints watchdog has previously asked for powers to investigate private contractors carrying out police work. That proposal concerned contractors given police powers. Vanguard’s guards have none. Criminologists have studied this for three decades. In 1996, David Bayley and Clifford Shearing described policing being “pluralised”, as private security moved into work once assumed to belong to the state. Ian Loader asked how plural policing could be governed democratically. Adam Crawford and Stuart Lister, studying private residential patrols, found that such patrols struggled to build the local knowledge and relationships that make policing work, and that the question of who oversees them remained unresolved. One 2004 study of a British community with a commercial patrol, known in the literature as Merryville, found residents giving tacit support to guards targeting particular groups they saw as threats to their “mental comfort”. Set that beside a scheme whose founding report made fear of crime the test, and which the Daily Mail described as guards “hired to monitor asylum seekers”. The council says its guards would not know whether someone was an asylum seeker unless it was “self-declared or self-evident from the circumstances”. What circumstances? Asylum status cannot be seen. The wording leaves open who might be treated as suspicious, and on what basis. Vanguard also matters because of where Reform wants to go nationally. The party has promised a “vast expansion” of stop and search, including “saturation policing”. It has promised a UK Deportation Command to “track down, detain and deport” people in the country illegally, which Reuters described as similar to America’s ICE. Reform’s home affairs spokesman, Zia Yusuf, insists it would not be the same, and says its officers would not be expected to carry weapons. Vanguard is nothing like that agency: its guards have no immigration powers, and a council has no role in immigration enforcement. But it does establish a model: uniformed patrols in public space, delivered by a private contractor, introduced in response to concerns about asylum seekers, and supervised largely by their employer. Whether or not Essex is testing the water, it is showing what the water feels like. None of this is new. Before 1829, London’s patchwork of policing included private thief-takers, paid by results and answerable to almost no one; the most notorious, Jonathan Wild, ran the thieves as well as catching them. The Metropolitan Police were created partly to end that arrangement, on the principle, attributed to Sir Robert Peel, that “the police are the public and the public are the police”. A public body, accountable to the public, patrolling public space. The pressures on neighbourhood policing are real, and people are right to want visible patrols. But there are accountable ways to provide them. Colchester already employs neighbourhood wardens. One of its cabinet members, Martin Goss, said £50,000 could have funded a full-time council warden, with greater legal powers than Vanguard’s guards, for a year. Essex chose instead to pay a private firm, without competition, to address public anxiety through a scheme whose published evaluation does not show whether anyone is safer, or feels it. Farage now wants that model “rolled out much more widely”. Before he does, voters might ask who those patrols answer to, how their effectiveness will be judged, and what safeguards apply when a private guard uses force.

Over the past few days Restore Britain and Rupert Lowe have posted a string of claims about polling, membership and betting odds. Most of them don’t survive scrutiny. 1: Restore Britain’s “largest party on the right in Scotland” Take Restore’s claim to be “the largest party on the right in Scotland”. The post doesn’t say what it’s measuring. Most readers would reasonably take “largest party” to mean votes or seats, but it appears to refer to party membership. On that measure it may be true, at least based on the parties’ own figures. Lowe now claims more than 13,000 Scottish members, against Reform’s “well over 12,000”. The Scottish Conservatives had 6,941 members eligible to vote in their 2024 leadership contest, and haven’t published a figure since. But these are claimed figures, and the gap with Reform is small. Parties aren’t required to publish audited membership numbers. Of the Scottish parties, only the SNP’s figure (about 50,400) appears in filed accounts. When Lowe first said Restore had overtaken Reform, The National said it “could not independently verify” the figure. Even Reform, when it made a similar claim in August, was careful to call itself Scotland’s “largest Unionist party by reported membership”. Restore’s post gives no such qualification. On any electoral measure, the claim falls apart. At the 2026 Holyrood election Reform won 17 MSPs and 16.6% of the regional vote, and the Conservatives 11.8%. Restore has no MSPs at all. 2 and 3: Rupert Lowe’s list of 21 Scottish seats and his “Restore Britain – 21, Conservatives – 13” post Lowe’s own posts run the two claims together. They set out poll figures showing Restore leading the right in 21 Scottish seats, then sign off with “largest party on the right” and “second largest party in Scotland”, as though one proves the other. The seat figures came from the tactical voting scenario in a new Electoral Calculus and Find Out Now poll, and that model contained an error. It squeezed Reform’s vote in each seat but left Restore’s share untouched, which made Restore look far stronger than it was. In Midlothian, for example, the faulty model cut Reform from 15.62% to 8.15% while Restore stayed at 8.92%. The error was spotted on 22 October by Raheem Kassam, a former Farage adviser and no friend of the left. Electoral Calculus corrected the table the same day, with the note: “Our apologies for this error.” According to Kassam, the corrected Scottish figures are Reform 44, Conservatives 13 and Restore 0. To be fair to Lowe, his posts went out before the correction, so he appears to have been repeating the poll as first published. So “second largest party in Scotland” can only refer to membership, and that figure is unverified. 4: Rupert Lowe’s “matching the Greens on a record 8%” post Lowe also said the same poll had Restore “matching the Greens on a record 8%”. On the poll’s headline figures, Restore is on 8% and the Greens on 9%. The “matching” came from the faulty tactical voting table, which now has Restore on 6% against the Greens’ 8%. Nor is 8% a record. The previous Electoral Calculus poll, published on 16 October, also had Restore on 8%. His figure of 10% under proportional representation is accurate, but the Greens are on 11% in that scenario. And his “next aim” of getting ahead of the Lib Dems is a modest one there, as they are also on 10%. 5 and 6: Restore Britain’s “third favourite with Bet365” post and its “on the march” post Then there are the betting odds. Restore says Lowe is third favourite to be next Prime Minister. London Business News reported that his odds had been cut from 20/1 to 12/1, behind Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage. The odds shortened because Lowe attracted 57% of all bets placed that day, according to Oddschecker. Bookmakers cut prices to limit their exposure to incoming money, so a rush of bets from enthusiastic supporters can move the odds without any change in public opinion. Even the article Restore shared notes that betting odds “are not a reliable measure of electoral support”. The polling tells a very different story. To become Prime Minister, Lowe would need to lead a party that can command a majority in the Commons, which means 326 seats. The same Electoral Calculus poll he was celebrating projects Restore winning just ONE seat, Great Yarmouth, under first past the post. That holds with or without tactical voting. The poll puts Reform on 127 seats and the Conservatives on 125. Lowe’s best case is a hypothetical proportional representation scenario, which the UK doesn’t use. Even there, Restore wins just 26 seats, against 180 for Reform and 126 for the Conservatives. Together the three would have a majority, and Reform and the Tories would need Restore’s seats to get there. However, Kemi Badenoch has already ruled out “deals before or after” an election, telling Iain Dale in August that she wants “a Conservative government, not a monstrous Reform-Conservative hybrid”. In a hung parliament, she said, “you have another election”. And even if that changed, the smallest partner in a coalition doesn’t usually get to lead it. There’s also the timing. The next general election isn’t due until 2029. Before then, a change of PM would almost certainly come from within Labour. On the evidence, Lowe’s chances of becoming the next Prime Minister are very close to zero. The odds reflect the enthusiasm of the people backing him, and say very little about how voters will actually vote. Restore Britain is entitled to celebrate genuine progress, and its national polling has risen. But a party built on claims of honesty and plain speaking should at least correct the record.