I intervene briefly to congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Stanbrook) on his choice of subject and on the admirable and comprehensive way in which he has dealt with it. I am sure that the Minister will want seriously to consider the many important points that my hon. Friend has raised. I wish to raise just two.

Like my hon. Friend, I believe that we are in the presence of a concerted campaign on the fringes of politics, in the media and occasionally in this House, to denigrate the police service. There have been attempts to depict the police as brutal beaters-up and even killers of persons in custody, as Cossacks deployed by the Government to beat back honest trade unions, as racialists, as corrupters and as Fascists. No organ of opinion in this country has done more to disseminate and endorse these mendacities than the BBC. I want to put it on record that the police resent this mischief from the broadcasting authorities and that the police record in purging themselves of biased and dishonourable police officers is vastly better than the purging conducted by the broadcasting authorities.

This campaign has recently surfaced in some quite specific demands. I list some of them. One is the abolition of the special patrol group. Nearly 100 hon. Members put their signatures to a motion suggesting something like that. Others are to repeal the anti-terrorist Act, clip the wings of MI5, reduce and cut the Special Branch and disband the SAS. All those demands have been made in recent months, and we have recently seen in Princes Gate that if any one of them had been carried through it would have been impossible to have conducted the relief of that siege as effectively and as famously as was done.

Secondly, it is now the fashion to say let us get back to community policing and, of course, we all want that. But with the sheer volume of crime, with the arrival in our midst of other people's problems that spill over into terror, with the massive demonstrations and occasional racial clashes that happen, it is, regrettably, impossible any longer to keep the peace solely by community policing. There needs to be an availability of mobile forces and of specialists, whether the Fraud Squad or the Diplomatic Protection Squad.

While I totally endorse the proposition that as far as possible we should get officers back on the beat so that they are in close, initimate contact with the citizen and, therefore, able to benefit from his intelligence and his support, I believe that there is no longer any effective way of managing public order and crime without effective, mobile, well-trained and professional squads of police officers, available to be deployed when they are needed.