Cops Taking Bungs

Stephenson taking £24K (Telegraph) to live in as much comfort as possible is obviously wrong, even though he was ill. It’s weird because he could afford to pay and could probably excuse the Met paying.  He has a long history of turning down bonus money way in excess.  There’s an error of judgement here, but I’m not sure who’s it is.  That it’s connected with the ‘in-crowd’ Wallis stuff makes it worse.  He’s not on the take in brown envelopes here – but could favours of some kind be asked in return?  My own view is that the fact that there was no one about to say ‘no John, think of the impression this could give’ around suggests that he was left with only sycophants around him.  ACPO failed to stop chocolate dipped strawberries and champagne in a similar spree of unawareness.

More interesting in terms of what we generally hold as criminal corruption, is that the former DPP has said it only took him a few minutes to know that ScrewsNews emails were showing ‘dirty cops’.  The ‘bungs’ available to me when I started plodding were cups of tea, the odd bacon butty, curry, drops from the undertaker (£5 for the call to him from a sudden death, £10 if I helped out with the body) and vehicle recovery people and a few offered direct bribes.  I’m not sure how much I was offered in a couple of years.  Later, there were other offers that would identify people if I talked about them like this.  I was told over dinner by a modern police woman that all this is gone.  We were going Dutch, but the owner wouldn’t take the money.  All nothing to do with any police connections – it was to do with me helping him build the bar years ago when he was broke.  I am guilty of eating some bacon and drinking some tea.  And then there was VLP – visiting licensed premises – we did that by lot.  Not having that kind of drink would really have made me a raw prawn.  And I took drinks from criminals for a variety of reasons.  This was the culture and the closer to real money you got, the more opportunities.  What I took in bacon and tea wouldn’t pay from an ACPO’s individual reception bill.  There were cops on much more of a take 30 years ago and I don’t remember more than half-a-dozen dealt with.  The vast majority were more likely to stick a bribe attempt up where it hurts.

The world is much more corrupt these days and there’s more money awash in criminality.  I doubt much has changed.  This isn’t the kind of thing you can get rid of through bureaucracy, though the undertakers and vehicle rescue people have probably been sorted and VLP has gone.  Society has become more corrupt from selling pensions and mortgages to compensation culture and the rest.

There has always been another way to be corrupt.  The boys and girls who have been selling stories to ScrewsNews only service a form of economic niche that wasn’t around in my day.  There will be others.  But this isn’t what I mean.  They changed the way up the greasy pole.  GF Newman’s Terry Sneed will now rise in the lily-white form of career portfolio builder, conference attending and image management smoozing that is unarguably more corrupting in my view and certainly costs us more money as tax payers.

These people are corrupt in the way Soviet performance managers were – there is only ‘accounting’ no real market testing – they start, like bankers being able to mark assets to models and not to real market prices.  In the financial world, the losses are ‘hidden’ in myriads of transactions that will only show up if the banks are asked to fess up and are forced out of the benefit culture.  In police statistics, the losses are stacking up in antisocial behaviour and other gaming.  We might say that we should return to ‘primitive’ banking and policing.  The corrupt top not only serves no purpose but is a major drain on the real economy and real crime busting.  Politics, of course, has its hands in both sets of this corruption, as is most of our media.  Too many of us suck at its teat.

There is currently as much chance of getting anything done about the real corruption as finding the evidence of mine – though I can think of some I’d like to be looking for the remains of the bacon butties and tea!

You have to admire John Yates in all this.  The timing of his resignation was sublime – done before the awkward questions about security from terrorists that should follow from the custard-pie man!  I suggest they put Wendi Murdoch in charge.  On Newshite tonight they claimed she prevented something even worse happening.  This is pretty frightening on the quality of our journalists – she jumped on him from behind in retaliation – that’s assault.  Not that my corrupt blind eye would have noticed.  The question the press should be asking is whether the £24K bung is worse than one of my cups of tea.  It is you know, but unlike the current blighters at the top, I wouldn’t expect to investigate myself.

The whole ‘Champers’ thing of Sir Paul trying to rush his return to work against all medical, family and general expectation, as the determined soldier, falls to the rot such stuff is when it turns out we can do without him and a major deputy overnight.  Part of the corruption is beginning to believe the ‘excellence’ bullshit and how vital you are.  Shagger Todd was the bee’s knee’s and yet Peter Fahey is now admitted to have had to cope with an utter mess when he took over.  We can now ring the police in Manchester and not be told they are too busy and to stop bothering them.  All this PR and cosy crud with newspapers has more to do with telling us the chiefs are supermen – for so they are until they fall or just fade away.  I doubt one in ten is even any good – we need these image-managers and their lackeys and toadies gone.  Police news could be delivered on line very cheaply.

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Time To End Representation?

Power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.  There’s a brilliant joke on this theme in Peter Cook’s film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (a couple of quid for the DVD – it’s genius from about 1968).  Rimmer gets to the top by ruthless tricks.  He then has us all make decisions on everything, leading to sacks of work being delivered to us all by post everyday,  Appalled at the work we are all burdened with, he becomes President in order to take all this work off us.

These days we have the technology to make representation unnecessary.  All current ‘democracies’ are representative.  We thus cede administrative power to a very few and to election processes involving a few parties.  This may have been the best we could manage in history and did not prevent Hitler coming to power in what was the most cultured and scientific nation then on Earth.  It did not stop the British or American Empires either.  These may be seen as ‘holding positions’ for freedom if there is future history, though may be seen as considerably more vile than those of us bred to their propaganda currently believe.

Those in power have always been reluctant to accept that power can really be given to the people.  It’s clear we could now organise reliable referendums that involved us very directly in decision-making.  Questions around this are the ones we should be considering in our politics, not piss like AV.

Of course, power to the people on this scale can be ridiculed.  25% of our populations, even where there is education, remain functionally innumerate and illiterate.  Critical reasoning capability is in very short supply – I doubt more than 5% can really do this (in terms, say, of the current ‘A’ level) – and I doubt we can ‘educate’ people up to it in academic terms.  The resources Plato outlined for his Guardians were immense.  Trying to equip everyone for the kind of citizenship apparently needed for genuine self-rule seem daunting.

Politics everywhere is a form of dictatorship of a rendered-docile proletariat.  Rule is enforced through hierarchy of one form or another.  We still give up to an absolute much as Hobbes described.  I prefer what we do in the West to what goes on in Syria or Saudi, though this may well be ‘our doing’ too.  I don’t want to give up government to half-wits who watch soap operas.

Yet surely, we should have dialogue on what we could do with new technology and the obvious abuses of representative and judicial power.  Blair was Thatcher in drag and Cameron uses the ‘Blair touch’ as well as the war criminal himself.  We are always at war, employers can always use the threat of moving to cheap labour and tax, or move the labour in.  We are destroying the planet and … enough said.  Harwood hasn’t been arrested and the DPP, really making a decision on himself, will try to quietly not have a trial, hoping time will kill off any fuss.  We can do better than this.

That we can’t move instantly to voting on everything is obvious.  What is so sad is that we don’t understand the importance of thought experiments and what they can reveal.  We are rightly scared of countries with more or less no government where piracy and banditry prevail.  Yet we are not aware of what is really going on in our own system, or whether this is remotely the best we can manage.  In this ignorance we have moved from the potential of bildung to bulldung.  We do not know there is something very rotten in the State of Denmark.