Winsor and the fitness of our police

Many police officers may begin to understand what ‘economics’ means from today.  It means working for Chinese wages or being replaced (outsourced) by the likes of my Zambian trained Laotian Guard who work for a couple of bowls of rice a day and shelter.  Our police have been overpaid since the Thatcher gold-seam when they were needed to cosh miners and could pay off the mortgage through overtime.  Of course, ‘overpaid’ is a tricky term when one considers bankster bonuses or compares the Re4sponse (not a typo – you’ll be working for Group 4 soon) officer’s lot with the work done by those in suits I mix with carrying warrant cards, but somehow not doing police work.

What happened in our factories and mines is now coming to the police.  The question not asked is why this has taken so long and who is responsible for that – the answer being the ACPO ranks.  In the factory model they would be delayered and sent packing because they have failed  for so long and would not be seen fit to use the new broom.  They have also failed to do anything to press for substantial changes in administrative law and the rest of the CJS.

There is little doubt we can recruit cheap cops and people with specialist skills, because the rest of the economy is well-shafted.  Muppets have degrees these days, so increasing the qualification threshold will be easy too, though I doubt the IQ average will shift much on account of this.  And cops will now be subject to fat notices and removal if their health fails, much like Boxer in Animal Farm when his health failed.  All  long overdue – so get ready to get down to Gadget-country job centres and take the jobs the Swampees refuse in droves.  This is what you turkeys voted for a couple of Xmas back. The vibrant, private sector cavalry economy.  It would be here even if we’d voted Nulabour in droves – our votes don’t count anyway.  I didn’t bother.

Asked to cost police pay against the labour market, I came up with a £15K basic on probation, rising to about £25K at the two-year mark – the latter only for those working shifts.  I don’t mean this is what I’d want to pay – but it is the comparator I’d stick with as a manpower services consultant.  There is no competition for labour and a glut in this market.   Cops were as badly paid as this until about 1974 when the labour market was tighter.  You can get academics for around £25K.

I doubt Winsor goes far enough for Gadget’s ‘dark lady’.  She should be interested in the unit  costs of police processes and bringing these down to manufacturing levels.  I’m sick and tired of efficiency in these terms.  It’s why Apple has so much offshore money and manufactures in dangerous factories in China – even using a nerve  agent to clean its i-Phone screens because it’s quicker.  We are dumb to believe any of it – but until now cops have been so  dumb they haven’t seen it  coming their way and haven’t cared at all seeing it happen to others,

We have no politics of anything else, so if you want to do anything about it, you’ll have to threaten strike action and then do it.  The standard response in industry is to declare the strikers in breach of contract and replace them.  There is no right to strike in the UK.  Hard times to come and not just in the annual fitness tests!  My best wishes and sympathy – but we all know where that lies in the dictionary.

I’m surprised the Home Secretary hasn’t prepared better.  I’d have recruited some large lads for weekend duty by now, in order to have a black-leg backup.  If you aren’t familiar with Winsor-type plans, there is always another one to come.  This one will be the most acceptable.  Once they have cheaper recruitment under way, they will expand into getting rid of more costly workers through redundancy.  No one cares I have years of varied experience these days because they can get my subjects taught for buttons by someone with a PhD who has never seen a factory – but then, they are teaching people who will never see one either.  You will find they don’t really care about your long-honed skills either.

Police are about to be the latest victims on the war on labour.  The stupid thing is we could all get decent living wages.  I’m off abroad.  I’m too unreliable to remember to switch the lights off.

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Red tape not red ribbons are the mark of Theresa May

Our Home Secretary, who had fleeting fame as Gadget’s red-tape slicing paramour, has gone to ground.  One of the last ones fades in memory as supplier of pornography to husband on the tax-payer and routine second-home expenses thief.  Had the News of the Screws still been with us we might now have some dreadful headlines of a very politically uncorrect nature on the international love affair of the former defence secretary.

The Brodie Clark affair isn’t the sort that sells newspapers.  He just doesn’t look the sort to have blue-rinsed and had the misfortune to live next door to a murder.  Our press and sadly our own desires for scandal remain pathetic.  Apart from dire human nature, I wonder whether one of the reasons for this is the general secrecy that pervades our system – pace Heather Brookes.

Even Keith (reformed) Vaz’s parliamentary committee can’t get to see relevant documents in the Border Agency scandal and it seems some of them will be suppressed until January.  Sky News – between ‘Scumbagaloan’ adverts – is saying Brodie did breach his instructions from the Home Secretary by not doing fingerprint checks as this was not spelled out in health and safety drivel.  Far from cutting red tape, the gone to ground Home Secretary (doing the opposite of PACE in relying on not saying anything now or indeed until January if she can get away with it) is relying on it.  The first thing we have to do when queues at our major airport get restive is whip out reams of paperwork on health and safety, ensuring the means to deal with the problem are contained within?

The message, part from the dire ‘falling out’ amongst these gawps, is that you’d better forget any discretion and pay attention to the detail in page 21, paragraph x, clause y.  Or we’ll nail your career if it suit our purposes.  What can we expect such an existential mortgage-payer like Gadget to do under these pressures?

There can be no excuse for keeping the evidence secret whilst what’s in writing is poured over to save Ms May and vilify Brodie Clark.  I’d sack the CEO now on the basis that he wasn’t on the ground himself, given what was happening at the airports.  I believe Ms May has lied but don’t consider that much of an issue given the paucity of our politicians – I  think her mistake is in not sacking a swathe of the management for being so hapless.  Surely it can’t be that the job can’t be done because of cuts!

Arson, Looting and Violence Are Criminal – Shock Horror!

The London Riots are long overdue – Britain’s poor are very tame in comparison with our European neighbours.  Of course it’s all wrong, though so is our patronising Home Secretary for telling us.  If the knee jerk blather of such as Ms May and Herr Klegg is right, Britain must contain substantial pockets of criminality just waiting to burst out on the streets – a criminality we otherwise don’t see?  Police are in for a dire time if this is true.  I suspect, for once, that deeper sociological analysis is right and the causes of these riots are complex.  The symptoms are criminal, the ‘disease’ is not.  The revolting arrogance of well-off politicians and banksters on the austerity non-economics is a red rag to those who have been given no future and had very little.  I take a different view and have decided to leave, my country now a shameful place beyond repair due to years of nopolitics and theft by the rich.

The kids who are out smashing and burning probably have little articulation of what they are up to.  I doubt they are criminal in the normal sense of use – this is all people like this can do, much as the banbksters could not help but defraud us with useless loan insurance.  The policing involved looks bad and of the ‘arrest the survivors’.  It will be interesting to discover the full extent of whatever it is that is pent up.  To think of this as criminality is unhelpful.  To brand it as criminal is potentially highly inflammatory, along the lines of the blacking of Duggan’s character.  He now seems to have been shot in panic, though we’ll know more tomorrow.  We have not been listening to our poor and let our rich systematically steal our future.

Burning shops doesn’t seem to help, but nothing else does either.  The white collar versions have gone unnoticed, yet the thefts have returned us to 1900 and probably to the brink of war.

What we should have is answers that would prevent people being this pissed off.  Instead our turkey-government has been adding to the flames.  The answer is to replace unemployment by National Service and agree a fairer distribution of wealth and income and politics that genuinely represent across our society, rather than vie for enough votes to be in power.

There is no excuse for the riots, but the blame does not attach merely to those rioting.  Our attitude to the poor is one of my reasons for leaving.  Depression is coming and we aren’t hearing any sensible plans to help us work our way out of it.  The rich don’t want work – they can’t make enough money sitting on their idle arses from work.  We should learn from the massive bail outs and QE just how much money we could have thrown at unemployment and new investment if the scumbag rich hadn’t been running an illegal gambling game funded by tax payers.  Remember, when I’m gone, you brought this on yourselves through ignorance and callousness – you’ve been had.

We know the trashing of communities is wrong and all the rest.  But so is the massive hogging of our resources by rich interest groups who threaten to leave any country trying to produce a decent economy for all.  Police, as ever, have to stand up and be counted, which is a lot more than the rest of us have managed with the politicians who have presided over the flight of our capital.

I don’t know what these kids are doing or why they are doing it.  I’m waiting for someone to ask them.  In the meantime a curfew might have been an idea.  Soon ‘stop and search’ will be used to deflect responsibility onto policing and away from the nopolitics.  I assume, if this stuff was organised, there would have been a torch-lit march on Parliament.

These actions are criminal and should be dealt with as such.  This is obvious – so why aren’t our non-politicians asking deeper questions on why anyone would ‘support’ them by being on the streets?

In the meantime, the real story is the financial crisis and stock market collapse – all the doing of greedy rich people we don’t need and yet control our lives.  My heart goes out to the bobbies, fire staff and paramedics trying to cope.  They deserve some responsible politicians.  This isn’t about stop and search or the Duggan cock-up.  My guess is its about making so many people feel worthless.

The events are ‘simply inexcusable’ – but are we really convinced by ‘school’s out’ blather?  Those protesting elsewhere in the world have all been called criminals by horrendous governments.  It is, of course, very difficult to think of any of our rioters as political protesters – but it’s not impossible to see political reasons for some of our youth behaving like this.  We have done little for them and it looks like they finally know this.

Curfew and shooting looters might well be a fair response if we are prepared to do something about the real problems.  We won’t.

Farewell to the ASBO and Welcome to the ‘New ASBO’

The Home Secretary sounded rather good when she spoke of ‘making antisocial behaviour non-routine’.  The ZanuPFNulabour legislation was hopeless, but I find the notion that these problems can be sorted out by legislation stupid and something of a pointer that we have a ZanuPFCountrillition in place (one can drop the ‘o’ – but they do have a horsey, county-set feel).

What’s good in this legislation is that eviction has been brought in, but one wonders whether it has been in practice.  The ‘reason’ this obvious sanction was not available in the past was that it was thought people would start making false complaints just to get rid of people they didn’t like (some clown cross-party group of MPs – JUSTICE).  The real issues have never been addressed, and we continue now with statements that we should be making earlier intervention (true, but how without real resources and training) and simplifying legal processes, engaging communities and other blather that flies in the face of real practice.  What of ACPO and other high ranking local authority and other jerks who lied to us for so long that the system was improving things to satisfy political masters and their highly inflated pay?

I see nothing that addresses the real problems.