Brookes – the red hair at the centre of the trivial phone hacking scandal threatening to rid us of the Dirty Digger – has been nicked by appointment ahead of her appearance in front of the select committee. She will now plead the 5th on Tuesday, sparing the blushes of the rotten core of duck eggs in charge of the Met. Rather than being part of an enquiry that should already be conducted by an outside force, this ‘arrest’ looks more an opportunity to divert attention from smug Paul’s expensive collonic irrigation and an example of the common police practice of making sure everyone tells the same lies in evidence.
In the background to this we are being told that smug Paul and the bunch of dubious hospitality accepters he has gathered around himself are good cops and almost the only thing between us and Britain being taken over by the Taliban. Much academic analysis has been done on the bull that comes out when cops are in trouble and the media misses it all.
We’re being had. First of all, bimbos come in both sexes, but I’d name Brookes, Stephenson, Yates and the coverage as bimbo. I fear for our safety with people like this in charge. But then think of Keith Vaz and the bunch around him in committee. Some odd jerk-bimbo reporter on Sky News is now claiming Broioke’s untimely arrest is cock-up rather than conspiracy. The whole thing is conspiracy – a conspiracy of how we end up with a bunch of cock-ups running our politics and media.
These aren’t outstanding people, other than as rogues. Brown was supposed to be incredibly apt at economics – but he’s the jerk who sold off our gold reserves just as China and India had started secretly buying up the stuff. Brookes turned down the Parliamentary expenses leak. Vaz had to pay money back and is now doing the holier than thou. Cameron and Brown were so bad Clegg looked better than them. None of the cops was able to get the necessary work done on the phone hacking or bring about a ‘Ghost Squad’ investigation to nail the bent cops involved and bottom the Morgan murder and protect us from Rees and serious perversions of the course of justice. What are any of these turkeys doing in office?
My working hypothesis is that ‘office’ is the problem. It doesn’t attract the best and has means to ruin anyone holding it. My MP is a grade one tosser and in the small sample I’ve been able to contact of people who needed help from their MP, nearly 80% concur. In literature, almost all senior cops are presented as management turds like Mullet (Frost), but there is always a Dirty Harry getting the job done. The truth is much worse than this – no Frost, no Dirty Harry but plenty of ‘detectives’ cuffing, TICing, getting nods and colluding with CPS on disclosure. Trying to do things right, rather than just what is right in the bent culture, police, press, banks or politics is rarely much of a policy for even those ‘satisfied’ with low career grade. We laud managers as ‘risk takers’ – yet tell the difference between a risk-taker and a moron.
The big risk would be getting rid of all the PR, HR and damage limitation bastards – but no manager does this. Even the PM has now been found to have hired a scuzz – and he isn’t the first. The problem is that spin is a wide institution – detectives and the CPS are spinning cases, and the poor sod having her life destroyed by anti-social crime is subject to spin from the cop writing her life off in ‘evil poor’ spin just as the bosses claim to have excellent partnership relations and has to watch Louise Casey pretending to care (or some other well paid drone).
A common academic model of police culture is more or less of cops who band together to hate the public (MOPs) and supervision by Mullets and end up in a strategy of keeping their heads low (doing as little as possible) or identifying a few jobs that are safe they can present to Mullet to gain her grace and favour. All the cops in the Fiona Pilkington affair fit one or other side of this model. They should all have been sacked – none of them had been able to stand up and get anything done. These scum are ‘Gadget’s finest’, though of course she presents them as ‘heroes’. This is the spin and a shame as the ‘evil poor’ and what they get away with needs outing for what it is – the kind of stuff that drove Fiona Pilkington to kill herself and her child and the ‘heroes’ not only failed to prevent but made worse. The IPCC report never gets near the culture or the extent of the victimisation and totally fails to link the case to many more around the country.
Where is the independent enquiry into cops taking money from News International and scuzz journalism generally? You’d think they’d want to blazen this across the force to warn people off and find some scapegoats – is it so serious the Met are more interested in hiding it all. We need our cops serving the Pilkington families of our country, not feeding sleaze to crap newspapers or swanning about in Gold commands that get innocent Brazilians shot 9 times after a decent cop had hold of them, or being wined, dined and irrigated by sleazy money – not my first choice for action against terrorism or an ‘Untouchables’ image (though the Ness we know is a lie).
The latest organisation I’ve noticed puffing itself up with dubious research and performance management is the IPCC. All this happened on their watch and they seem to have been entirely ignorant. This is an organisation, along with ACPO and PSDs across all forces, that should be abolished – they don’t work. The resources could go into a publicly accountable body to actually progress complaints on service performance, capable of of investigating performance from a wider perspective than individual complaints.
Most of the people who get caught out in this current mess will think themselves hard done by – believing they were just doing what needs doing in a corrupt culture around them. Sadly, I think this is about all we will get, and given so many buy the ScrewsNews equivalents, all we deserve.