 The numerous failings of the Metropolitan Police in the run-up to Sarah Everards murder and the woeful response of the force since has led some to call for Met Commissioner Cressida Dick to resign. Those calling for her to go include Labour MP Harriet Harman. Well, women must be able to trust the police. They must not fear them. They must be confident that the police are there to help them and to make them safe, not to harm them. Therefore, there needs to be fundamental changes in order that women can be certain and can have that confidence. And I've written to Pretty Patel today, setting out 10 points of action which need to be taken immediately. But I've also written to the Metropolitan Commissioner Cressida Dick saying that I believe she should resign because she cannot be the Metropolitan Commissioner that takes these changes forward. That was Harriet Harman when Pretty Patel, the Home Secretary, was asked whether Dick should resign. She said the following. Well, I think first of all, there are important questions and questions that I've been asking and challenges. We have to be honest about this, in particular to this case, but also the conduct of that serving officer and conduct of policing more broadly. So I will continue to work with the Metropolitan Police and the Commissioner to hold them to account as everybody would expect me to do and I will continue to do that. That was Pretty Patel saying she will continue to work with the Metropolitan Police and the Commissioner to hold them to account. The government have made clear Dick is safe in her position, but it was not an especially positive statement from the Home Secretary. Support from the leader of the opposition, however, has been more forthcoming. Very quickly though, Doreen Lawrence introduced you yesterday at conference. She has been part of the petition to say that Cressida Dick's time shouldn't be extended by another two years in charge of the Met Police. Is Cressida Dick fit to continue? Would you want her out now too? No, Cressida Dick is fit to continue. I've worked with Cressida over many years in relation to some very serious operations when I was Director of Public Prosecutions and I was pleased that her contract was extended and I support her. That was Keir Starmer speaking in glowing terms about Cressida Dick, Aaron. I assume because Dick has a support of the government, the leader of the opposition and as of today, the London Mayor, Sadiq Khan has come out and says she has his support. She will presumably stay in her role unless I suppose the media could keep this story going for a while and the pressure will increase. What do you make of this though? Would it make a difference if she goes? Should she resign or would that just distract from the fact that this is a deep and institutional problem? Well, I think she should resign. The question of whether that would change anything is obviously an open one. During the first couple of years of the 21st century, we had there was a period where basically every commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service was resigning. It's not that new, but things didn't fundamentally change. I think Starmer calling her not to resign and basically eulogising her as a person, isn't that surprising when you consider he was Director of Public Prosecutions when the John de Menezes case was reviewed and he decided as DPP that there wasn't really a case there to prosecute. Now the original Director of Public Prosecutions was to say it wasn't Keir Starmer, it was somebody else. Now how does that relate to Crestedick? She was the one in the control room when those decisions were made. Incredibly suspicious circumstances when John de Menezes was killed. Claims made by the police which at the time weren't really true. Evidence which subsequently disappeared and Starmer as Director of Public Prosecutions played a part in that. It's important to say a few years later and I think when you look at Starmer, you look at C. Cumbura, Shunson, Pretty Patel, you have to understand that these are all effectively, these are people who are just administrators of the state. They are integral parts of the state apparatus and one of the things you do when you're a part of the state apparatus is not to attack another part of the state apparatus. That can be the monarchy, it can be the armed forces, it can be the police, it can be several other institutions. Now one of the big problems when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the opposition was that that informal system stopped working because all of a sudden you had a leader of the opposition who will say actually war in Iraq was bad or this particular senior figure within the policing establishment should resign or this person related to the Bank of England shouldn't be in that job. The final one was a speculative hypothetical instance. My point is normally people in the privy council, people at the kind of highest executive and legislative sort of echelons of this country occupying those parts of this country's public life, they don't say things like the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service should resign. Now Harriet Harman did and that's quite interesting, why? Well we like to criticise and lambast feminists on the viral media and I don't like to criticise liberal feminists because I'm a man, I don't think that's necessarily the right thing to do, but we have colleagues and comrades who lambast women colleagues and comrades who lambast and mock liberal feminists, but what you have to say about Harriet Harman here Michael is that she's a principled liberal feminist who believes in the rule of law and thinks that this is unacceptable and I think that does mark her in this other context of a kind of effect to be a feudal British state, right? You occupy some of these roles that you cannot break the line, you're a part of the regime apparatus. I think that does mark her up as actually quite different and quite principled and I don't agree with Harriet Harman on a bunch of things, but I think that clearly shows you actually how deeply illiberal and undemocratic power is in this country and somebody like Harriet Harman looks like and that's because she is a courageous truth teller. Michael Four on the Super Chat says, Black people have been telling you all for decades that the police are rotten, R.I.P. Sarah, obviously I think that's an incredibly important comment. I think probably one of the reasons why the police themselves are considering this such a crisis is because the mirage has been shattered, people who thought, oh the police, they must be upstanding, people there might be a few bad apples, but ultimately they must be good. I think this has shown, the extreme circumstances of this means it's impossible to deny that there is something seriously, seriously wrong going on and that's not just because of the actions of Wayne Cousins, but it's the actions of the police which let him do what he has done. The fact that 72 hours before he kidnapped and murdered someone, there was a report to the police that someone had flashed people, you know a sexual assault in a McDonald's in South London, they would have, you know unless they're completely incompetent, they would have identified that that was his car because you can do that very easily with the number plate and he remained an officer. He remained an officer, he remained free and then he used that privileged position as a police officer to do the most heinous crime imaginable. How anyone can see that sequence of events and not think there is something fundamentally rotten here, I mean it's impossible not to and that is why it does, it does seem slightly odd to have someone like Keir Starmer just, you know, you know, creating this sort of protective ring around the person who leads that organization.