Inside police efforts to crack down on violent and knife crime in Manchester

Published

5 months ago

May 1, 2025

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“I’d say the last two years people are just – they just don’t care anymore, they are using knives and doing all sorts.”

PC Maguire, 28, speaks with the authority of experience: experience that comes from working in Greater Manchester’s most high-crime areas.

“I remember when I was a teenager,” she says, “you’d never really hear of people carrying a knife or anything. But now it’s the normal thing to do.”

“It’s mad,” she adds.

PC Maguire is part of Operation Venture, an elite policing unit within Greater Manchester Police set up to tackle serious violence and knife crime.

Over the past two months, we’ve been given exclusive access to watch them work.

Moped chase

We’re on a Friday afternoon vehicle patrol in south Manchester with another member of the Venture team, Sgt Mohammed Waqas, when his radio, and that of fellow officer PC Hodge, who’s driving, starts pinging.

Their plain clothes team has spotted two youths in balaclavas, on a moped, weaving in and out of traffic.

“We suspect they are involved in some sort of knife-point robberies,” Sgt Waqas says.

The moped has also had its registration plates pulled off – officers suspect it’s been stolen.

The team starts searching the streets and is flagged down by a passing driver who says he’s just had to swerve to avoid hitting a moped.

“They’re little idiots, up there!” the driver says, visibly angry. “There are kids around.

“I swear to god I felt like f*****g chasing them down, and kicking them up the arse.”

Meanwhile, the unit’s covert officers are waiting where the moped has been previously spotted.

When it returns, a short while later, there are three youths onboard.

The team detain one, a 16-year-old who is known to them, but the two other youths get away.

Sgt Waqas and PC Hodge take up the chase, following the moped at speed as it runs red lights.

Incredibly, we see one of the moped riders filming it all on their mobile phone.

Later, the officers tell us: “They’ll probably post it online.”

But right now, they are focused on trying to catch them, which, in rush hour traffic, proves impossible.

They lose them – “yeah, total loss”, Sgt Waqas reports via his radio to the comms operator.

“Just to log as well,” he adds, “two males, white males, both got balaclavas on.”

“One of them has possibly got something in his jacket. Can’t tell what it is, just the way that he was holding himself.”

It’s extremely frustrating for the team.

A baby buggy, a knife and £50,000 cash

A few hours later, during a patrol in Salford, we see the sorts of weapons they are up against.

We’re with PC Maguire again, on vehicle patrol, when a police camera flags a car with links to suspected drug supply.

Along with another of the unit’s patrol cars, PC Maguire works to get into a formation to box in the suspect’s vehicle.

“XR2, show me as Car two,” PC Maguire tells a radio operator, having quickly made ground to get the vehicle in her sights.

“You want to get a stop on, before they have an opportunity to get away,” she explains.

But, after a brief pursuit through the dark streets, the car they are following pulls over of its own accord.

The driver, who’s in his 20s, is searched – as is his vehicle.

Inside, along with baby buggies and car seats, officers find a knife in the glovebox and a shoebox full of cash.

Officers estimate there’s about £50,000 in there.

After brief questioning on site, the man tells officers that he’s been staying at a house nearby and admits there’s another weapon in there.

A few minutes later, PC Ben Cartledge – another Operation Venture officer – comes out holding what looks like a huge knife.

“It’s a machete,” he says, “it was in the bedroom.”

It’s extremely heavy and looks terrifying.

“I’m not going to lie to you, mate, it’s for protection only,” the arrested man says, when PC Cartledge arrests him on a further offence of having an offensive weapon in a private place.

It’s a line officers have heard before.

“There’s that social media side of it,” a senior officers says.

“Sometimes they’ll film themselves doing the robbery and sharing it around, and that becomes the normality.

“So then people will sometimes carry weapons to protect themselves.”

The unit uses a combination of proactive stop and search, intelligence-led policing and undercover tactics.

It’s why we can name officers but sometimes not show faces.

UK

Britain’s winter blackout risk the lowest in six years – but ‘tight’ days expected

Published

11 hours ago

October 9, 2025

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Britain's winter blackout risk the lowest in six years - but 'tight' days expected

Britain is at the lowest risk of a winter power blackout than at any point in the last six years, the national electricity grid operator has said.

Not since the pre-pandemic winter of 2019-2020 has the risk been so low, the National Energy System Operator (NESO) said.

It’s thanks to increased battery capacity to store and deploy excess power from the likes of windfarms, and a new subsea electricity cable to Ireland that came on stream in April.

The margins between expected demand and supply are now roughly three gas power stations greater than last year, the NESO said.

It also comes as Britain and the world reached new records for green power.

For the first time, renewable energy produced more of the world’s electricity than coal in the first half of 2025, while in Britain, a record 54.5% of power came from renewables like solar and wind energy in the three months to June.

More renewable power can mean lower bills, as there’s less reliance on volatile oil and gas markets, which have remained elevated after the invasion of Ukraine and the Western attempt to wean off Russian fossil fuels.

“Renewables are lowering wholesale electricity prices by up to a quarter”, said Jess Ralston, an energy analyst at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) thinktank.

In a recent winter, British coal plants were fired up to meet capacity constraints when cold weather increased demand, but still weather conditions meant lower supply, as the wind didn’t blow.

Those plants have since been decommissioned.

But it may not be all plain sailing…

There will, however, be some “tight” days, the NESO said.

On such occasions, the NESO will tell electricity suppliers to up their output.

The times Britain is most likely to experience supply constraints are in early December or mid-January, the grid operator said.

The NESO had been owned by National Grid, a public company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, but was acquired by the government for £630m in 2023.

UK

‘Why are you doing this to me?’ Woman accused of stalking the McCanns has outburst in court

Published

17 hours ago

October 8, 2025

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'Why are you doing this to me?' Woman accused of stalking the McCanns has outburst in court

A woman accused of stalking Madeleine McCann’s parents shouted: “Why are you doing this to me?” and was led away in tears by officers, during her trial.

Giving evidence against 24-year-old Julia Wandelt, Mrs McCann said her first contact with the Polish woman happened “about three years ago”.

Wandelt insisted that she was Madeleine, who went missing in Portugal in 2007, while stalking the missing girl’s parents by sending emails, calling them and turning up at their address, prosecutors allege.

Follow the latest updates from the trial

Wandelt is accused of one count of stalking causing serious alarm and distress to Mrs McCann and Gerry McCann between June 2022 and February this year. She denies stalking.

She is on trial with 61-year-old Karen Spragg, from Cardiff, who is accused of the same offence and also denies the offence.

Speaking from behind a blue curtain screening her from the dock at Leicester Crown Court, Mrs McCann spoke about the defendants visiting her home address in Leicestershire on 7 December last year.

Mrs McCann told the court that Wandelt had been “pleading” with her, asking why she wouldn’t agree to do a DNA test.

Spragg, who accompanied Wandelt, was “slightly more aggressive”, asking her whether she didn’t want to find her daughter, Mrs McCann added.

“I told them to leave. I told them I was distressed,” she told the court.

Asked how the incident had made her feel, Mrs McCann added: “I felt quite distressed to be honest. I think I had been on edge anyway because of the recent communications from her.”

After Mrs McCann had given her first round of evidence, Wandelt was led away from the dock after sobbing loudly and shouting: “Why are you doing this to me?”.

Mrs McCann told the jury that Wandelt had been “incessant” with her messages, which left her with a “little niggle” about doing a DNA test.

She said part of her brain was “saying ‘what if'” because of Wandelt’s frequent messages, but added: “Having seen a photo of her, she’s Polish … it doesn’t make sense.”

“I can’t say what Madeleine looks like now, but if I saw a photo of her, I would recognise her,” she said.

But she added that the “persistance” of Wandelt’s behaviour started to “get to” her, making her “almost [want] a DNA test to put it to bed”.

Asked about the impact on her between June 2022, when Wandelt first made contact, and February this year, when the 24-year-old was arrested, Mrs McCann said: “I feel like it has escalated, the level of stress and anxiety it’s caused me has increased over that time.”

She added that she has felt “more relaxed” since Wandelt’s arrest.

Gerry McCann told the court he answered the phone to Julia Wandelt on one of the many occasions that she tried to call Kate. He said he told Wandelt: “You’re not Madeleine.”

He said: “I made it very clear these were unwanted calls. To be honest, it was a bit of a blur.”

The trial continues.

UK

Badenoch pulls off first conference speech as leader, but it is less clear if this will be her last

Published

17 hours ago

October 8, 2025

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Badenoch pulls off first conference speech as leader, but it is less clear if this will be her last

There’s no question that Kemi Badenoch’s on the ropes after a low-energy first year as leader that has seen the Conservative Party slide backwards by pretty much every metric.

But on Wednesday, the embattled leader came out swinging with a show-stopping pledge to scrap stamp duty, which left the hall delirious. “I thought you’d like that one,” she said with a laugh as party members cheered her on.

A genuine surprise announcement – many in the shadow cabinet weren’t even told – it gave the Conservatives and their leader a much-needed lift after what many have dubbed the lost year.

Politics latest: Stamp duty to be axed under Tories

Ms Badenoch tried to answer that criticism this week with a policy blitz, headlined by her promise on stamp duty.

This is a leader giving her party some red meat to try to help her party at least get a hearing from the public, with pledges on welfare, immigration, tax cuts and policing.

In all of it, a tacit admission from Ms Badenoch and her team that as politics speeds up, they have not kept pace, letting Reform UK and Nigel Farage run ahead of them and grab the microphone by getting ahead of the Conservatives on scrapping net zero targets or leaving the ECHR in order to deport illegal migrants more easily.

Ms Badenoch is now trying to answer those criticisms and act.

At the heart of her offer is £47bn of spending cuts in order to pay down the nation’s debt pile and fund tax cuts such as stamp duty.

All of it is designed to try to restore the party’s reputation for economic competence, against a Labour Party of tax rises and a growing debt burden and a Reform party peddling “fantasy economics”.

She needs to do something, and fast. A YouGov poll released on the eve of her speech put the Conservatives joint third in the polls with the Lib Dems on 17%.

That’s 10 percentage points lower than when Ms Badenoch took power just under a year ago. The crisis, mutter her colleagues, is existential. One shadow cabinet minister lamented to me this week that they thought it was “50-50” as to whether the party can survive.

Ms Badenoch had to do two things in her speech on Wednesday: the first was to try to reassert her authority over her party. The second was to get a bit of attention from the public with a set of policies that might encourage disaffected Tories to look at her party again.

On the first point, even her critics would have to agree that she had a successful conference and has given herself a bit of space from the constant chatter about her leadership with a headline-grabbing policy that could give her party some much-needed momentum.

On the second, the promise of spending control coupled with a retail offer of tax cuts does carve out a space against the Labour government and Reform.

But the memory of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-Budget, the chaos of Boris Johnson’s premiership, and the failure of Sunak to cut NHS waiting lists or tackle immigration still weigh on the Conservative brand.

Ms Badenoch might have revived the room with her speech, but whether that translates into a wider revival around the country is very hard to read.

Ms Badenoch leaves Manchester knowing she pulled off her first conference speech as party leader: what she will be less sure about is whether it will be her last.

I thought she tacitly admitted that to me when she pointedly avoided answering the question of whether she would resign if the party goes backwards further in the English council, Scottish parliament and Welsh Senedd elections next year.

“Let’s see what the election result is about,” was her reply.

That is what many in her party are saying too, because if Ms Badenoch cannot show progress after 18 months in office, she might see her party turn to someone else.