Monday 22 September 2008

"Community 'army' to back police"

This sort of knee-jerk nonsense is either laughable, pathetic, deeply depressing or terrifying.

Update: Obnoxio has taken the trouble to explain in detail exactly how shit this all is.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You forgot: 're-occupation of traditional Tory Laura Norder ground which worked so well from 1993 onwards'.

Obviously it won't work in practice for many reasons, but the political rhetoric is faultless and suggests that Ali Campbell and Blair are doing background scripting via the mysterious Home Office letter; the strange case of The Leaked Letter Which Was Never Sent.

"He also outlined Labour's plans to increase police numbers to record levels, reduce red tape, encourage harsher sentencing and introduce local police teams to each community in England."

What is interesting is that if you imagine Gordon's voice trotting that out, you - well, I - want to throttle him. Do exactly the same in a pleasant BBC newslady voice, or even Blair's, and suddenly you - well, I - find my head nodding imperceptibly and the unbidden thought steals in: "good, good, that's alright, yes, safe".

Mark Wadsworth said...

There are already 11% more police officers than there were in 1997. Problem is, they're not doing anything (apart from filling in Nulab-inspired forms), and when they do nick somebody, offenders get let off with a caution.

And Nulab had this crazy idea about merging all the small police forces, which is the opposite of 'local police teams.

I must admit I nearly Googled 'Laura Norder' to work out who she was ...

Anonymous said...

Laura Norder is best friends with Rosie Scenario.