The White Man's Struggle

So I'm going to leave the heavyweight political stuff for a moment - and on a day of such political importance too! I know, I hear you ask "surely you can't be passing up the chance to write about the election of the year?" And I am. Because I couldn't give a fuck. In fact, worse than that, I don't want to vote. No, scratch that; I don't want there to be a vote on sodding police commissioners.

I think it is a shit idea. I don't think accountability is a shit idea. I think politicising the role is a shit idea. A really shit one. What they are really saying is the police service, like other public services is not accountable enough. Once you get high enough, it's hard to get booted out. You have to work really hard at it - you know, start shooting innocent civilians - that sort of thing. But their fix is not to look at the way that the public sector (civil service, police, military et al) promotes, demotes, apportions credit or blame, but instead to put a political figurehead at the helm and get people to vote them in and out.

Now I have no idea for what reason people are going to vote either way today. Some will know of the candidate and like the cut of his jib. Not many I would wager. Others will perhaps vote based on what little propaganda there has been about - and what similar claptrap it all has been. Who was going to put out a leaflet saying they would like to be lenient on crime, on the causes of crime, would like to increase red tape and make the community a less safe place? All total cock. Identical, total cock. No, most likely the Tory supporters will vote for the Tory candidate, the Labour supporters for the Labour candidate and presumably the Lib Dems just think we should all just get along in the shangri-la that exists only in their heads so probably don't need a police force let alone put forward a police commissioner candidate. So the result will have sod all to do with policing, though will have an impact upon it, and everything to do with current political sentiment. Which is pretty stupid if you ask me.

But that's not what I want to talk about today, because it's not really worth the internet paper upon which I have already written it. Nope, today I am gong to bang on for a good paragraph or two about the struggle of the white man - or more specifically the white bread man - against the sandwich Nazis…

I like sandwiches. I like toast. So, it seems do many people. My academic research for this post has been running for a decade or so. As such, it is the most deeply researched topic I have ever written about in this blog by pretty much ten years.

If you were to glance about in the supermarket on your weekly shop (by which I mean the proper, edge-of-town-high-street-murdering-uber-market supermarket that we are all up in arms about but shop at anyway because it's convenient and cheap), you would see almost an entire aisle of bread, I would wager. If you were to take an approximate calculation at the ratio of white to brown bread you would see in the pre-sliced 'Hovis/Kingsmill cuboid of bread in a colourful plastic bag' area, it's about 50:50. By 'brown' I also include granary et al - essentially a nice Nick Griffin-style definition of 'everything not perfectly white and pure'. In the 'fresh out of the in-house bakery' area it's probably 80:20 to the whites (oh, how Mitt Romney would love to see those stats).

I've been doing this for years. The ratios are pretty steady. Brown (or non-white) has been on the rise in the last decade or so as we try to eat more healthily, but it has plateaued. So, it logically follows that demand is about 50:50 at best (for the brown supporters).

Fine. Have your bread any colour you like - very much a personal choice. In a restaurant my wife will always choose the nuts, sun-dried tomatoes, capers and sawdust bread roll on offer (which surely barely makes it bread under advertising standards rules?) whilst I rootle around in the basket looking for something a child would put Dairylee on at lunch break. I have no objection to the healthy stuff. I just think it tastes like old shoes (though new shoes are not on my delicacy list either). I want the one pumped full of sugar and bleached to within an inch of its life. It's like the Coke/Diet Coke idea. If you're going to cheat, cheat big. What's the point of fannying about with Diet Coke? It's still not good for you, but the added bonus is it doesn't even taste good. They do create an amusing line in television advertisements though. Either way, it's pretty clear half the people who want bread want white bread, and half brown.

So why are all the fucking pre-made sandwiches in the world made with brown bread?

Do people who buy white bread only make breadcrumbs or croutons with it? Or toast it and add butter? Or feed it to the ducks? Are only brown bread purchasers turning these bread slices into sandwiches? Surely I cannot be the only person who likes white bread and can't be bothered to make his own sandwiches? Who did this definitive market research? It must be out there, because you can't get a white sandwich for love nor money. Everyone buys into it; supermarkets, petrol stations, newsagents, the lot. Half an aisle of white bread. Half an aisle of brown bread. Brown sandwiches. Bastards. The lot of them.

Every now and again you find a solitary white sandwich in there, probably with a crap filling, like egg and onion. Who is asking for onion in sandwiches? Or salads for that matter, but I digress…?

It upsets me. As you can no doubt tell. We are being discriminated against. We, the proud, unhealthy, white bread eaters of this world. We 50%. Our demographic is being under-represented in the sandwich industry. We need to stand up for our right to a proper pre-made sandwich selection, before it's too late.  I think I know how the suffragettes felt now...

London's Burning (Well It Was...)

And so I'm back, from outer space (not technically, but I have been away getting married and stuff like that). Sorry for the absence, but apparently spewing forth my bilious feelings about the world whilst sitting on a beach with my brand new wife (not that I have another, older version) wouldn't necessarily be in harmony with the loving feel-good feelings I was reliably informed were to be present on the honeymoon. So the laptop stayed at home. You may now be thinking that writing a non-commercial blog for three men and a tortoise called Alan must be a better business model than it appears if I've been on honeymoon for the best part of two months. Alas, I merely got out of the swing after a normal length retreat and have spent many days since thinking how I must blog, but simply couldn't be bothered.

Perhaps I became apathetic, or maybe there was too much to get into. So I've picked a couple of things that irked me and split them down into a couple of posts. First off, I watched London burn and then watched the police come in for more "damned if they do and damned if they don't" abuse. Yes the riots lasted a while, but we rely on policing by co-operation not by force. We have shown in war zones the world around that escalation is rarely the answer to violence. Rolling armoured vehicles down Oxford Street sends out a message that violence is expected and the ante has been upped - you bring a bigger gun, so will I. No fool would rob a convenience store in America without a gun because all the shopkeepers have them and all the police have them. Therefore all criminals have guns - it is self-defeating. Look at Northern Ireland, look at Iraq. Policing those situations is about damage limitation, restrained policing and intelligent and targeted use of force. I thought they did alright.

I then watched as "human rights groups" (read: mindless morons with no better idea than to jump on the latest fools' bandwagon) and friends of the lawless complained at the 'unduly harsh' sentences passed down on rioters. I watched them castigate judges who sentenced within the law - there are guideline sentences with discretion for increasing or decreasing sentences towards the upper and lower limits according to aggravating or mitigating factors. It's pretty simple: When say, someone causes actual bodily harm in a scuffle and is of otherwise good character and was severely provoked and shows contrition, this mitigates and so the average sentence is lowered. If someone commits the same crime but with malice aforethought and shows no remorse and rather considers this to be jolly good sport, this aggravates the circumstance, so the average sentence increases. All within the limits set in law.

Why people couldn't understand the aggravating nature of the backdrop of joining in with rioting, looting, thuggery, arson etc and doing one's best to disturb the peace, eludes me. But so does much about what people like this think. I imagine some of the sentences will be decreased on appeal, but I thought it showed how our justice system is meant to work. It was too large an incident to be prevented by police (the optimum result), so it was contained, recorded and those responsible as far as could be discerned felt the full force of the law. They weren't indiscriminately battered or shot with baton rounds. The police didn't Tiananmen Square their asses. They committed a crime, they were apprehended, they were sentenced. Like the law says is meant to happen. Next.

PC PC

This week the Murdochs and Rebekah Brooks have been running the gauntlet of the Commons Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport. Our upstanding Members of Parliament (my, how short our and their memories are?) have been busy lobbing stones through the empty frames that make up what used to be their moral glass houses. Now they have all been grilled to the same extent. The MPs didn't go easy on Rupert just because he's an octogenarian. They even didn't go easy on Rebekah because she had ginger hair. Or because she was a girl. Now it's a good thing it's our non-PC MPs carrying out this investigation because left to Greater Manchester Police it may not have gone quite the same.

Nope, it appears Greater Manchester Police may well have just roasted James, but would probably have stopped short with the old fella and the girl. You see they've just had their fingers burned by the PC Police.  A couple of weeks back it was reported that Inspector Diane Bamber, 51, had taken Greater Manchester Police to an employment tribunal and won after she failed a fitness-based selection (here).

The test comprised a 500m course, wearing full riot gear and carrying a 17lb riot shield. Known as the "shield run" this is the base level fitness standard required to join a public order unit and must be completed in under 2 mins 45 secs. And she failed it. Because she's not fit enough. So she sued them. And won. Apparently she felt "humiliated" after failing the test. The tribunal ruled that she had been discriminated against because of her sex and age.

Now here is a little test to see if you've been reading my blog - what do I think about this?

a) Now that seems perfectly sensible, why would we possibly want riot police to be physically fit? As long as they're nice people, I'm sure the rioters won't go for the fat wheezy policeman who can't keep up with the rest of the riot shield wall. I imagine weak links are positively encouraged as the key to effective shield-based combat - the Romans probably had it wrong. Now I think of it, it's unfair to rule out the elderly or the infirm, they're people too. And let's get the morbidly obese in there as well. Everyone deserves a go as a riot policeman. That's what equal opportunities means.

b) Jesus Titty-Fucking Christ.

Yes, it was a toss-up, but I went with b). If you didn't you can probably stop reading here and go play with the traffic or continue interfering with an animal. Over the years it is an understatement to say there have been incredible miscarriages of justice with totally unjustified age discrimination, sexual discrimination, racial discrimination and more. We have, though, moved on and I'd say we are much of the way there. However, we are threatened with losing the good (and ongoing) work at the expense of ridiculous rulings like this where half-wits mis-interpret the law to their hearts' content and in so doing create terribly dangerous precedents.

Now you've perhaps read my thoughts on discrimination before (here, but most particularly here). In essence I think it's all about motivation - and I'm right, obviously - not about just choosing, which is all discriminating is. For example, fireman need to be strong enough to carry unconscious fat people to safety from their burning sofas after their discarded fag butts have ignited the stacked copies of NOTW forming a shrine to investigative journalism in the corner of their 13th floor apartment. Or rescue people from middle class fires. Or the Queen from whichever palace in which she currently resides.

Now some women will have failed the fireman test - or whatever slightly more official-sounding name they have for it. And some men. They will have been the people who couldn't hack it physically. And we're all the safer for the fire service that has produced - except when they're on strike for more pay. The average 7st woman is always going to find it much harder than the average 13st man to lift a 15st body or whatever the test is. Likewise the average 62 year old is going to find it harder than the average 25 year old. Fat wheezy kids will probably fail as will those with a build akin to the chap from the Mr Muscle adverts.

They aren't, however, being unfairly discriminated against. They just failed an objective test. There is a need for an objective test because you can't do the job if you can't carry a deadweight person. The unconscious victim doesn't weigh less if the fireman is over 50, or female. He or she weighs what she weighs. Some people will be more genetically predisposed to success than others, but that's life. For some things, many things in fact, maybe even most, there has to be one level for all. Equal opportunities means everyone from every 'category' (old, young, male, female, big fish, little fish, red fish, blue fish) gets the same shot at trying for a job or whatever. It does not mean we massage the test to get an equal number of everyone from every 'category' to pass.

Now Inspector Bamber doesn't want to be a fireman, but the physical levels required to join a public order unit are correctly imposed in a direct parallel. There's no humiliation in failing an assessment designed to test even the hardiest of our youths. Likewise you probably shouldn't hang your head in shame for failing selection for the SAS or the Parachute Regiment. Or not getting past youth trials at Arsenal. Or not getting the place at the top university you were after. You see they are all objective tests - are you strong enough to be a riot policeman, a good enough footballer for the Premier League, or a clever enough boffin to study astrophysics at Harvard?

Maybe not - and in all cases it will be a mixture of latent talent and hard work which decides if you make the grade. That is the wonder of objective tests - by their very definition they are neutral, non-subjective, impervious to bias or malevolent discrimination as long as the pass requirements are justified by what they are testing for. Sometimes the effort will not be enough to overcome the genetic disadvantages you start with. That may be because you are a short girl, or a thick boy, or born with the proverbial two left feet. The test takes no account of that though - only your performance. It is not shameful to fail trying. It is shameful to hide your failure, however, behind spurious lawsuits relying on the ongoing spinelessness of the judiciary when anyone whispers "discrimination" in their general direction. Especially if you're a sodding police Inspector.

It's the End of the (News of the) World As We Know It

Well I thought up this not that imaginative title on the drive home from work today and was so pleased with myself decided I had to use it, even though what I really wanted to talk about wasn't the NOTW. Nope, I actually wanted to moan about some claptrap I read in the paper yesterday. Having conjured up such a terrible play on words I thought of canning the job and applying to the NOTW themselves for a job, but then remembered they aren't hiring. Ever again.

Today saw the end of the paper's 168 year history of low-end investigative journalism. I'm not going to miss it, but lots of people will. Why? Because we are a snoopy lot who live our vicarious lives of iniquity, perversion and nefarious activities from the comfort of our judgemental breakfast table on a Sunday morning. The only thing we Brits love more than a feel-good story or the building up of a hero is some good old fashioned scandal and watching someone be torn down. Bad news sells in this country and the press know it.

You might say the NOTW broke the golden rule - they got caught. Not that they didn't try to hide it. Totally false submissions to Parliament, imprisoned employees hung out to dry as scapegoats and the mystery of a full police investigation that yielded no evidence of wrongdoing from a press room that looked as guilty as a puppy sitting next to a pile of poo, to borrow a phrase. One wonders if the subsequent 6 or so full-public-judge-led-inquries (still obsessed with these I see) that are being demanded will find any link between the apparent inability of the plod to find any naughtiness at the NOTW and the fact that the same paper has illegally paid the police more for information for stories than Parliament could conjure up expenses for in a whole year.

Not only did they get caught though, more importantly they got caught meddling in lives of the little people. This is where they fatally misjudged the public. We like to see rich people fall, famous people fall. If someone finds out Max Moseley likes peculiar officially-not-Nazi-but-still-definitely-dodgy sex, NOTW readers lap it up, and those who purchase the Sun, the Mirror and any other red top. In fact, lots of the broadsheet readers probably are more interested than they'd care to admit. They don't desperately care that it came via not the most upright of methods. When they find out which footballer is cheating on his wife because of a phone tap, again they just enjoy the scandal.

However this week it emerged they fucked with "our boys" - the military - their mourning families and other families who suffered newsworthy loss. Sainsbury, O2 et al did not pull their advertising (making the NOTW economically unviable overnight) when it became obvious in 2008 that NOTW were engaging in illicit activities, notably phone hacking. Why? Because the people concerned were considered newsworthy - the means justified the end - the people's desire to hear gossip about Sienna Miller etc easily outranked any qualms they had over the illegal means by which said gossip was garnered. But this time advertisers fled like rats from a sinking ship when the NOTW got caught messing with the little people.

It is perhaps our saving grace as a nation. We are not total misanthropes. What motivated us to search for ill in those whose lives are better than ours is simple envy, not an innate desire to see all mankind suffer. It appears we draw the line on a relative scale. Breaking the law isn't cool in the eyes of the British when it hurts those whom they consider worse off than themselves.  Not a ringing endorsement, but maybe the court of public opinion finally came out with a correct judgement. Maybe people power shut down NOTW. It's a nice thought, even if it is far more likely it was just political posturing to salvage the multi-billion pound BSKYB deal...

"The Public Sector: Wasting Your Money So You Don't Have To"

I hinted yesterday that I might one day post on the topic of public sector slogans. That day has come. Hooray. Yes, today we shall look at one of the most overt displays of contempt for taxpayers which the public sector manages to pull off every day. The embodiment of all that is wasteful, pointless and unaccountable about so much in our public sector are the ridiculous slogans, or tag lines that accompany their titles.

Let's see what we're dealing with here by looking at some examples. From Police forces various:
"Serving our communities, protecting them from harm"; "Protecting our communities by reducing crime and antisocial behaviour"; "Keeping our communities safe and reassured". Specifically from Northumbria Police: "Total Policing". From Kent Police: "Protecting and serving the people of Kent".

Let's look outside the police, major culprits though they are, they are not alone. My local authority, South Oxford District Council: "Listening, Learning, Leading". Wandsworth Council: "The brighter borough, number one for service and value". Department for Transport: "Working to deliver a transport system which balances the needs of the economy, the environment and society."

So we have the police, various local government bodies and even central government. Now what do all of these august institutions have in common? They don't sell. Anything. And yet they advertise using our money. If you get mugged, the police who turn up will be the ones (if they bother) who have responsibility for the area you are in. You don't get to call in your preferred police force; the ones with the best crime detection rate or the prettiest police officers. If you buy a house you will pay non-negotiable tax to the council in whose district you find yourself. You can't ask the neighbouring council to collect your bins because they collect them weekly as opposed to fortnightly. Likewise, whilst you may choose the airline or train company you use, the DFT is all-encompassing. You can't opt out, they have a say over all the roads, all the railways etc.

So why on God's green earth are they trying to sell themselves? Why advertise when you have nothing to gain from it? I get why Nokia are "connecting people", why American Express suggest you should "never leave home without it". Advertising is, broadly speaking, there to increase your market share by increase in product or brand awareness in a competitive market. It's not just business that advertise though - the armed forces all have tag lines because they're competing to sign up people from the same target audience. UK political parties have them because there is a choice there. However, if you're the only option, it's either an exercise in futility (as the police/local council examples are), or part of a wider brainwashing program (Hitler or Pol Pot campaigning and advertising whilst representing the only legal parties).

So let us have an end to this expensive, pointless rubbish (not all of local government, tempted though I am - just the advertising part). Let the police have just that on their cars and letterheads. We know what they're meant to do, they're the police; if anything they aren't helping themselves with these slogans by pointing out jobs they often fail to do. Again, as with all these waste issues, when the strikes come around or complaints at budget cuts, remember where they choose to spend our money first. You can bet your bottom dollar all you will hear is "there will have to be cuts to front line services". What price the announcement "we might have to get rid of our stupid slogan, or at least stop changing it every 3 years"? Thought not...

Moving Swiftly On...

You must forgive my absence from the keyboard; I am 'travelling'. A most enlightening experience it is too. Not in the 'gap yah' sense of the word, but with work. My next few posts will be from abroad as I struggle with the somehow ludicrous expense of wishing to access the World Wide Web from, well, the wide world. You might think that this post will focus on the profiteering telecoms companies who charge eleventy million pounds to call, text or access data abroad. There might well be such a post in the future, because as you know I am not one who likes the general populace to be taken for a ride, but today is not that day. Today, we will discuss (I will speak, no-one will listen), speed cameras and the police.

More specifically, I suppose we are discussing the role of both of them in society. That is, their duties to their employers (us - John and Jane Q. Taxpayer), and the reasoning behind the way they discharge their duties. Yes, after a couple of days of sweating on planes, trains and automobiles (actually no trains, but you see what I did there), I have arrived with a desire to blog about something totally disparate to my current situation, but one that came up in conversation down route.

Now I was spurred on to finally blog about a subject, with which I have bored many of my friends, by a recent news article. Being a generally 3-7 times a week blogger I will generally be a little behind most stories. As it is I am still prioritising the venting of my ire at some New Year idiocy, but I figured this one should jump the queue a little. I speak today of the conviction of 64 year old Michael Thompson for obstructing a police officer. How? Did he block the path of a bobby chasing a fleeing felon, stolen handbag in tow? Or perhaps lie to send said bobby up the wrong street in pursuit of aforementioned criminal? Nope, flashed his lights at an oncoming car to warn of a police speed trap.

So we have a police service and crown prosecution service petty enough, and a Grimsby Magistrate stupid enough to think a crime has been committed here. Not just a crime, but a crime worth the costs of the prosecution. Taxes paid for the salaries of every fool involved in this. They paid for every expense said fools incurred whilst on this case. They paid for the court room. They paid for the PR officer desperately trying to make it not look as pathetic and wrong as it is. Yup, we paid for all this crap. The way we throw around money that isn't ours (the public sector), you'd think we had a surplus not a deficit.

So let's look into the two main parts of this farce I wish to discuss. Firstly, speed cameras, and secondly the police.

Speed cameras; I am not the first, I shall not be the last. If their job is to prevent speeding (as claimed), one should rejoice if they collected no income. If nobody sped past them, we have won the 'War on Speed', which makes for better reading than the whole 'Terror' one which is on most optimistic reading, a score draw. Point being, pressure has made the police signpost fixed speed cameras and mark them with shiny yellow bits. Yes, people got annoyed at the stealth nature of a policy that if it stuck to the principles on which it was voted for, would have given us 20' high, luminous pink cameras blaring out Roberta Flack's "Fast Car". Her melancholy verse alone would have got us all slowing down and thinking about life and thus saving it. So we are warning people to slow down, so why prosecute a man for doing the same? I could go on about the nature of speed cameras, and given a dry news month, I probably will, but the argument is very simple.

Further arguments on why else this conviction was utter hoop shouldn't be required, but apparently are. First off, Thompson's defence of flashing because he wished to alert motorists to a potential threat holds much water. He stated he had previously been involved in a crash where an unseen speed trap caused the motorist in front of him to brake very sharply. He braked and stopped in time, but the chap behind did not and hit him. We've all seen it. People driving at 45 in a 50 instinctively braking on seeing a speed camera despite driving legally. They get quite close to you. I will wager if all the cars in the UK were placed on all the roads, spaced out at the correct stopping distances from each other at the relevant speeds for those roads, some of us would have to leave our cars at home. Speed traps do cause braking, which can cause accidents, and in this case Mr Thompson did what he though right. The fact is he should never have had to resort to this defence.

The second obvious flaw in the conviction is that there is no way anyone can prove he prevented the detection of a crime. The oncoming cars were not stopped for speeding. They may not have been speeding. They may have been. Doesn't matter, as previous judgements have dictated, if you don't know someone is going to commit a crime, how can anyone else be prosecuted for obstructing the police from catching someone perpetrating said imaginary future crime? All gets a little Minority Report for my liking.

On a side note, the fine Mr Thompson paid included a £15 victim surcharge. Did they just use it to buy doughnuts for the poor policemen who didn't get to catch a speeding motorist?

So we have discussed briefly that speed cameras are supposed to be there to stop speeding not to catch it. We have discussed that the police and judicial system involved in this could be better employed unemployed because they're morons. So now I move onto why the police were there in the first place.

I shall start with a case study, and a confession. I have 3 points on my licence. If you feel the need to stop reading because you feel reading and agreeing with this would be like reading Mein Kampf and nodding sagely, I understand. I am an enemy of the state. Probably not Public Enemy Number 1, but I like to think I'd make the UK Top 40, downloads and all.

I did 35 in a 30. Luckily I was stopped. By 5 policemen.

Yup, pulled over by a mobile speed trap operated by (I thought) a sole policeman, I was ushered into a side road by a second. There I saw three more, and three vehicles between them. I explained I had no particular reason for my immense speed but asked seeing as though I had no points and was only doing 35, if a warning might suffice. I was informed by the sergeant that he had no discretion available to him. After realising I was screwed anyway, I decided I may as well get my £60 worth. I asked him if he felt this was a worthwhile use of his time? No. If this was a worthwhile use of his many colleagues' time? No. If this was what he signed up to do? No. If they could all be better use to society elsewhere? Yes. I thanked the officer for his honesty, took my stupid ticket, explained why I was right to be "so embarrassing" to my better half, and drove home thinking of how to apologise to her later.

The police are trained at the UK taxpayers' expense because they are there to stop baddies doing things, or catch them once they have; an idea for a new £500,000 slogan perhaps (the subject of a post soon I feel). We are constantly bombarded with crime statistics - apparently more baddies, and fewer goodies to do the preventing/catching job. The police are up in arms and I imagine will probably march (the longest many of them will have ever spent on the streets) on Downing Street to complain at budget cuts soon enough. Yes, budget cuts = cuts to front line services. Now tell me if I'm wrong, but when asked (as a UK taxpayer) to prioritise which bad things I would like to see UK Police PLC stop, I would put traffic crime pretty low down. Certainly below murder, rape, violent crime, robbery, and pretty must the majority of crime that I can think of off the top of my head. So why are they so keen on traffic crime then?

Simple: It's simple (I have resisted saying 'and so are they', but only just). Yes, traffic crime is the slam dunk of all crimes, as open-shut as it gets. As soon as it is detected, it is prosecuted. You have the culprit, you don't need a motive, no investigation, no Colombo-esque "one last question" (why not ask that one first - the episodes could have been so much cheaper to make?), no wriggle room. Forgive the pun, but as quick as a flash you have the case solved. And £60.

In my mind, they are hot on this because a) it is the only crime which pays (who ever said it didn't), and b) it's the easiest stat to log. In a police world mired in red tape and prosecution or detection targets (thanks mostly but not exclusively to Labour) where stats are king, when you have a crime that takes the shutter speed to detect and an envelope and a stamp to process, it makes sense to put your men on a bridge over the A40 rather than work out who killed the person lying under it. The latter might take a while, and it's still just one conviction at the end of the day.

So, where for the police? The Tories have suggested they are planning on removing much of this red tape and get bobbies back out on the beat. Good luck to them; they will have their work cut out. I would go further though. I would not pay for someone to be taught how an entire bank worked and then get them to open the door for customers. So why would I pay for full police training for them to sit at the side of a road with a camera?

After someone finally mans up and tells us exactly why we have speed cameras and exactly their impact (not anecdotal evidence that could be attributed to a myriad of reasons), we need a new strategy. If cameras are to stay, but are deemed not enough, the British Transport Police can be expanded. They can have a traffic division. No need to teach them how to document a breaking and entering case, no need to teach them to deal with the victims of assault, just sit them at the side of a road with a fancy hairdryer. The envelope and stamp can do the rest, and then maybe the police can get on with their real jobs. If cuts to police funding means cuts to front line services, bring on the cuts because this service can happily go. The only thing front line about it is the cost to all of us.

Protest Protest

It is interesting to listen to "student leaders" today. I seem to remember there was much television watching during my years as a student. I hasten to add that I merely heard about this television watching by chance when being again forcibly ejected from the library after closing hours, so assiduous was I in pursuit of my studies. My point is that these students seem to think yesterday's peaceful demonstrations went a little like this:

Thousands of flower-wearing, peace-loving students descended upon London (having definitely all sought permission to miss their studies which they clearly deem rather important) to embark upon a peaceful protest at student fees legislation. They all kept to the rules agreed with the police, kept to the agreed route and generally behaved themselves with such delicate manners that people of London went into the streets to ask them if they'd like to come in for tea and perhaps marry their daughters. In an act of pure, unwarranted evil, the police then charged into their midst and gave them all a jolly good whopping. Vive la résistance.

They must have been in a different march, and since not managed to happen past a plasma-filled Currys shop window (they couldn't possibly own televisions, they can't even afford to pay for their education). Yesterday's protest was a disgrace - worse even than the previous attempts at peaceful protest (if indeed it was really attempted). That the police acted with such restraint is frankly laudable. The mindless violence and wanton vandalism that was perpetrated by a significant part of the march was criminal, plain and simple, and should be prosecuted accordingly. Being on a protest march, or being miffed at something are not excuses to commit crimes. They were not incited by police, they were inciting violence themselves, on a widespread and organised scale.

If any normal citizen were to act like that they would expect to be stopped with proportionate force. If my friends and I were to go around my village tonight burning cars and smashing windows, then I would expect a policeman to arrive. If I were to then attack him I'd probably expect to be hit, outnumbered and in danger as I have put him. Onlooking residents would not think that heavy-handed. Yet that is what happened many times over in London yesterday and some people have the temerity to suggest this was unfair violence visited upon the students by a vicious police force.

I shan't go so far as to say anyone deserved their injuries - the rule of law does not hand out physical punishment for the crimes that were committed - however they certainly did their best to put themselves in harm's way. The students have a point, but it will be drowned out by these hooligans. I am against the new legislation, but there is no place in modern democracy for this idiocy. The "student leaders" should realise whilst this type of protest will gain them more coverage than a peaceful protest would have done, they will alienate more support than they will gain.

Oh, and attacking the Prince of Wales, as unassociated with this legislation or supportive of future generations as you could find, beautifully typified the entire sad episode. If this is the level of intelligence displayed by those attending or aspiring to attend university, it may be as well to knock the whole of higher education on the head; we clearly need to do some more work at primary level.