YOUR Comment today (this must be a matter for the police) is quite correct but we must, sadly, consider that the police ‘service’ is a very different beast from the police ‘force’, and it’s not just a question of semantics.

The police today have their hands tied by bureaucracy, political correctness and a ‘softly, softly’ attitude meaning that the initiative has, unfortunately and too often, passed to the wrongdoer.

People like Mr Tomlin are not threatening to take the law into their own hands, not because they want to , but because the official services of law and order can no longer cope effectively.

I believe that we need a government prepared to scrap much of the form-filling bureaucratic red tape with which our police are increasingly lumbered, scrap political correctness, increase prison sentences and return our police to being a publicly accountable force again.

I believe that the time is right so that, if Mr Tomlin or anyone else, has to defend their property then the law backs him, that a zero tolerance approach to policing is well overdue and that the criminal, not the innocent, should walk in fear.

I believe too that prisons should be places of punishment for crimes, not a cheap hotel with barred windows and that sentences should more reflect the severity of the offence.

If you agree with what I have just written then you have just agreed with the bulk of the UKIP’s policy on law and order.

GREG HEATHCLIFFE (Press Officer, UKIP Swindon branch) Okus Road Swindon