A friend went to Tripoli recently and stayed in Libya's most luxurious Hotels. This was the Welcome card and Guest questionnaire: I especially like the "policy to Prepare Amicable friendly good atmosphere" and the promise to "render Brilliant service distinguished with courtesy, cleverness and respect".

On the other hand, I think that the self-description as one of "social security hotels" doesn't quite capture the spirit of luxury and security which I think was the aim.

I think that a Kind guest would point this out in the Questionnaire "overload".

I would like to congratulate the Gentleman (for I assume it to be so) who found this blog using the search term "Girls Playing with Turds"* for the Niche nature of his tastes.

Well done.

*Page 7

To my regular readers. I have been uninspired of late having lost my muse, though I am sure you can cope. There is just so much in these juicy stories about Labour taking aim at their feet and pulling the trigger that I just don't know where to begin. Plus everyone else has been dealing with the issues so much better than me.

Needless to say, I think everyone in the cabinet should go forthwith. Scandal will do, but just being grasping socialist cunts is reason enough for their immediate resignation and suicide.

What will make me return to my incisive best? Well Harperson, or her gutless husband getting it in the neck would cheer me up no end.

The British Army strength has fallen under 100,000, which is the NATO definition of "Army", so perhaps it should correctly be termed the British Militia?

The left-wing defence is that this disaster is not Alistair Darling's fault. I agree, with one important caveat: It is not his fault except insofar as he supports big government. The problem is that everything government does is both malign and incompetent. The spending investment on civil servants is inversely proportional to the organisations competence.

This is because large organisations are harder to manage and have more of the kind of idiot who thinks it acceptable to send unencrypted bank details of 25 million people through the post, unregestered. Twice. (read that again). The bigger the state is, the more data such people collect process and disseminate so the more of it there is to go missing. So the likes of Chris Dillow are right. Such lapses are inevitable, and it isn't directly the fault of Ministers, but a function of the Big, intrusive state. Indeed many other gross lapses of data security are coming to light on a daily basis, now the media's ears have pricked up.

At Britain's imperial zenith, let's say 1880, the Civil service numbered less than 10,000 and administered one quarter of the world's population. It had also successfully managed a 50% rise in real GDP per capita despite a doubling of the UK population in the preceding century, mainly by leaving people alone. By the start of Margaret Thatcher's Government 100 years later, following the disastrous post-war experiment in industrial planning, and state munificence, the civil service had mushroomed to just under 800,000. By 1994 it had fallen below half a million reaching a low in (guess...) 1996-7 of 458,370. It started rising steeply in 2000, when Labour abandoned Tory spending plans and stood in 2006 at 554,000 staff, an increase of over 20%. One Quarter are employed managing the benefits system. (source).

During the 10.5 years of this evil, grasping government, disposable income per capita has not grown as fast as in previous decades and in recent years has actually started to fall. The cost in the price of fuel, (80% tax) Council taxes, income taxes and housing costs are all increasing faster than peoples' earnings. People are getting poorer because Central and Local government now takes so much of the national pie - approaching 45% from a low of 38% in (you guessed it) 1997.

The joy of this lost disc fiasco is that Government, all of them, are hopelessly incompetent especially Labour ones, few of whom, if any, have any meaningful managerial experience. This has now been made clear to the electorate. What the right needs to do now is to get the population of this country to make the small intellectual step from "Government is incompetent" to "therefore Government is not my friend" to "therefore we need to shrink the Government by cutting taxes and firing civil servants". The only party with a track record of shrinking the state is the Tory Party, as I've outlined above.

The fact is Government is useless, whoever is in charge. Under the Tories, some of whom actually have managerial experience, you have less of it. What little there is, is run better, and it costs you less. Labour makes you poor, runs things badly and taxes you to penury funding a grossly wasteful client state. Really, this is a simple party political issue. The Tories are not libertarians, but they'll do for the time being in the absence of a credible alternative. What Libertarians need to do is get the Tories to have the courage of their convictions and make the argument for the much smaller state.

I received an in interesting comment from bendygirl at BenefitScoungingScum on my recent post on work and benefits, which I think is worth a more considered "front page" response rather than a cursory comment.

Her comment here can be paraphrased thus: the assumption that benefit fraud is being perpetrated on a huge scale, disability in particular, is wrong. She suggests that this is a right-wing campaign to vilify people like her, and cites her experience in claiming to support her. Given that she is not a recipient of disability benefit, yet thinks she should be (she's on income support), I feel she may either be being let down by the system (if she's really too ill to work), or a demonstration that the system is working (if she is a workshy layabout). I know too little to make a judgement either way. She follows it up with a post on her blog here:All this talk of getting the benefit scroungers back to work is making her extremely nervous.

The taxpayer is footing the bill for a benefit with a tight correlation to regional economic performance, and the big variations are in disability claims for things like "stress" and "Bad Backs" which are essentially medically unprovable. The government is colluding in this because people are being moved off the politically sensitive headline claimant count and onto others, which don't cost governments their reputation for economic competence. One suspects overworked doctors in northern post-industrial towns sign off people as sick in order to get them off their backs. In prosperous areas, people find it easier and more profitable to get a job than to get a doctor to sign them off sick, and take that route. Certainly Theodore Darymple cites open intimidation to secure the sick note, and widespread failures for the deserving.

Bureaucracy is incompetent, unsympathetic, and callous which is why I would eschew means tested benefits altogether. The exception I have always made is incapacity benefit. If, through no fault of your own, cannot work, then it is the duty of the state to support you. I suggest that "cannot work" be defined extremely tightly. I also accept the need for some form of help, for example to improve the home should mobility become an issue. However suitable work must where possible be sought. Arthritis in the knee is not going to prevent you typing though it may prevent your becoming a golf professional. If you deal with the abuse, the genuinely disabled could be provided with a better living.

I've met below-the-knee amputees who've run marathons, played rugby with a guy with one arm and one leg (and bloody lost, more's the shame). So disability is, in part, a state of mind. Your condition means, I understand that you cannot kneel or bend and your joints are not very strong and prone to dislocate.

Whilst I am sympathetic to the plight of those less robust than I, there is no doubt in my mind that many people currently in receipt of benefits of all kinds (perhaps even a majority) could work if they were so minded, and are not so minded presently because thay can exist on the munificence of the state without the chore of work. The available work may not be glamourous, rewarding or exciting, but neither is that of most people. Shelf-stacking, Data entry, McJobs or (when I was a student) strimming dog-shit for the council do provide dignity that a weekly welfare cheque does not.

There'll be another northerner on the dole in a few hours...

(tip of the hat to he knows who he is)

1. A junior civil servant gained access to the entire child benefit database and downloaded it onto discs, three times; in which case data security is woeful in HMRC, indicating top to bottom failures of procedure, management and leadership, in which case Brown (the architect) and Darling (the man on whose watch it happened) should resign.... or
2. A senior civil servant is responsible and is being protected, in which case Brown and Darling have lied to parliament, and should resign.

Any other possibilities?

At least the Child benefit database fiasco has killed public support for the ID cards proposed by Zanu Labour. The Sun is running a campaign to keep Cyclops away from Wembley this evening and the Tories are a gnat's chuff away from a working majority in the polls. Gordon's performance on PMQs was laughable and there are rumours of backbench disaffection in Labour ranks being aired on the BBC. It looks like we'll get Jacqui Smith's and Alastair Darling's scalps soon enough....

Oh! the joy of watching your enemy's front implode.

According to the Zimbabwe Deputy Information Minister Bright Matonga, Britain is planning an invasion of Zimbabwe. This is in order to "assassinate the leaders of the country" or something, and demonstrated that the economic disaster was due to "Western sabotage".

Riiiiight.

Nothing to do with price controls, something which is also causing food shortages in oil-rich Venezuela, massive widespread corruption, police intimidation, state expropriation of the most productive farms and total economic mismanagement on a scale not seen since the British Labour "government" of 1974-79?

Apparently the Zimbabwean Army is on High Alert (oooooh... Scared), following Lord Charles Guthrie's comments regarding the propensity of Blair's regime to enquire about the feasibility of invading Zimbabwe. His advice was consistent: "Don't".

Easy to dream up an excuse for "emergency powers" when you control the press isn't it?

Seriously, though. A message to Thabo Mbeki. You'll only be considered a grown-up regional power in Southern Africa, with all the cash, guns and boondongles that entails, when you do something other than hold hands with the lunatic from over the Limpopo.

Britain is a little busy elsewhere....

I have been having a debate with Chris Dillow about benefits. The argument of the libertarian right against the welfare state is that it provides a massive disincentive to work. He says it doesn't.

The response of the left is either to pretend it isn't a massive disincentive to enter or remain in the labour market. The "La La La... I'm not listening" approach exemplified by Polly Toynebee, when I pointed out the gross marginal tax rates that some tax-credit recipients suffer to her, She said flatly "I do not think high marginal tax rates are a disincentive to work" DK calls this the "polly conundrum". Is she stupid and believe what she says, or is she lying. Either way, why is she Britain's top columnist?

The other response is the "moral indignation" approach. This totally fails to address the substantive point that if you provide the means to exist without working, some will take that option. Chris Dillow responded to my post lamenting the demise of the work ethic in the British underclass with a raft of statistics. Basically he argued that most people are out of work for a short time (which is why I specifically referred to "long term unemployed"). But his main argument was that "I was blaming the victim"

The statistics mentioned by Chris refer to "official unemployment" the claimant count, which is a useless statistic, made up to the benefit of the government. Most long-term unemployed have been shifted to the disability register, or otherwise off the claimant count.

So let's look at some statistics from Chris' post:

1. Of the 1.67 million officially unemployed, over 1 million have been out of work for less than six months and a further 269,000 for less than a year (table 9 of this pdf). These are not idle or unemployable; they can’t be, because they were (for the large part) in work recently.
2. Of the 178,000 unemployed for over two years, only 33,000 were under 25 - the age likely to be chavs or the product of social breakdown. Almost twice as many of the long-term unemployed are over 50.

Because the long-term unemployed have moved onto other benefits.

3. Unemployment is not a “pool” but rather the difference between two quite fast-flowing rivers. In any one month, almost a quarter of the claimant count measure of unemployed leave or join the count (table 10). If they’re so idle, how come so many of the unemployed leave the register so quickly?

Yes. So What? We aren't talking about the claimant count.

4. Of the 8 million economically inactive, over half are students or home-makers (table 13). Only 199,000 - one in 40 - are men under 25 (table 14). For every one young man who’s economically inactive, there are three people who took early retirement.
The facts, then, tell a different story from the right-wing talk. They show that the majority of the unemployed are not unemployable idle young people. Instead, they are victims of low demand (not necessarily low aggregate demand), genuine losers from the creative destruction that is inevitable in a market economy, and those who have been discarded by bosses after years of work.

This Age thing is a straw man. 3.4 Million economically inactive people are not Early Retired, Home makers or students. What are they then? Describing an argument as "right wig lies" does not address the point that the benefits system is being abused on a vast scale, with the connivance of Government, who only care about the headline claimant count. I've dealt with this in detail before:

21-22% of the working age population are "economically inactive". That is some 8 million people. Of these 2.3 million are looking after home, 1.85 million are students, though many are simply doing non courses in "tourism management", or "Golf Studies" (a three year degree? I think not) to massage the unemployment figures. 591,000 are retired, 200,000 are Temporary sick, which leaves 2.1 million Long term sick and the remainder some million or so "discouraged workers". There are about a million people on the dole, so the unemployment figure, if you include the fucking lazy (did I say that, I mean "discouraged workers") is actually about twice what the government publishes as the claimant count. These people do not starve. They exist on benefits. Whilst there may not be dole - unemployment benefit - for those not looking for work, the state will see to it that you never actually need to.

It is the welfare state that throws most of those 3.4 million economically inactive people on the scrap heap, by providing an easy way out of the labour market and the habit of work. Once ther it's very hard to get back. Only work can lift you out of relative poverty.So you bury your head in the sand Chris, and feel all smug setting up straw men, and demanding tax from the productive bit of the economy to pay for this profligacy. This reduces wages for all, making everyone poorer. Trying to reduce income inequality through the benefits system is at best impossible and at worst counter-productive, providing a perverse incentive to continue the behaviours that cause poverty in the first place.

This is Homer Simpson logic:

Benefits: the cause of, and solution to all life's problems.

I agree with the first clause. Chris, you agree with the second. The difference is, my opinion is about incentives. The study of which is called "economics" a subject with which I believe you're familiar. Yours appears based on wishful thinking about the good nature of people. That is why you self-describe as "left". That is why you're wrong.

It's mid-November, people. You do not need Christmas lights on your council house yet.

"But it's for the children"

FUCK OFF.

There is a petition to ban all Christmas shit before 5th November. That, to my mind is a month and 19 days too early. For God-Botherers, Christmas should start with the festival of Advent between the 27th November and 3rd December, and ends on the 12th night, when you should be forced, by law to remove decorations. In any sensible society, to qualify for this extended Christmas, you would have to endure many hours of spirit-crushing hypocrisy in church. This would give biddies another topic of conversation, adding to whether Easter was early or late this year. For those sane people not inclined to prostrate themselves before non-existent sky-faeries, it starts on Christmas eve and ends on the second of January, when you stagger paunchilly into work. Anyone mentioning Christmas to me outside those dates is liable to receive a gift-wrapped punch in the face.

Bah Humbug.

There is another otherwise sensible post from Chris Dillow about immigration which gives the myth of "skills" being provided by immigrants, which aren't available in the UK workforce another airing.

The "skill" in question is the willingness to turn up for work, work for a full day, then turn up again the next day, sober. This "Skill" needs to be repeated 5 times a week, 48 weeks a year. It is this "skill" that the British long-term unemployed and NEETs (or less euphemistically "Fucking bone idle chavs") lack. It is this "skill" that the kind of person who schleps across a continent in order to empty bins or wait tables has, in spades. Someone who has this "skill" can readily acquire others, usually on the job.

The idea that more Government sponsored "training" or further educational conscription 'till 18 is the answer to the underclass' shocking lifestyle, then you're an idiot (though most who think like this self-describe as "socialists", which is the same thing). The answer to inequality is not "increase benefits", but instead lies in removing the option of not working by removing them. If you give the option to people to sit on their arses watching Jeremy Kyle, whilst drinking special brew and chain smoking lambert and butler, then that is exactly what some of them will do, for the rest of their wretched lives. The Long-term unemployed and the NEET are both inevitable creatures of the welfare state.

David Cameron recently suggested that the rape conviction rate was too low, ignoring the difficulty of conviction in cases where it is one person's word against another whilst maintaining the presumption of innocence. The problem is not that the rape conviction rate is too low, it is that the CPS and the police are clearly not putting compelling cases together.

This abomination appeared in the Telegraph today: Jill Saward suggests that the wool is pulled over the jury's eyes in rape cases

When it comes to trial, the jury have to decide whether they believe the smartly dressed, well-presented professional man in the dock or the emotionally charged woman who, by all accounts, had got herself legless.

It is up to the crown to Prove beyond all reasonable doubt whether the consent was withheld in order to convict a man of one of the most serious crimes possible. In Jill's case, it was when burglars broke into her home, beat up her father and boyfriend before raping her. She is now a part-time commentator on rape. Some of her Ideas are sound: she is in favour of two classes of rape: to use a colloquialism Date-Rape and Stranger Rape, the latter being more serious. However, today she calls

for specialist jurors to be brought in to try rape cases - people who won't assume that rape only happens between strangers.

She acknowledges that there are problems:

That's not to say that I want a jury who will convict any man put before them. There are false allegations and a defendant is entitled to a fair trial. But a fair trial is one in which the rights of the victim - or society - are balanced against the rights of the defendant. A criminal justice system in which it is all but impossible to convict in one area of law is surely not a fair justice system.

Specialist Juries are, however going to be under more pressure to convict, and individuals putting themselves forward will be of the type who are ... how do I put this gently... enthusiasts. This means that defendants in rape trials are going to be held to a lower standard of proof and be tried by a partial Jury. This is not fair. Rape is not a complicated crime (the reason given for ending trial by Jury in complex fraud cases): everyone understands what is meant - and can have it explained to them. 12 subjects of the crown have to decide whether the allegation that a man forced himself on a woman can be proved. If there is insufficient evidence, they acquit. How can it be any other way?

DK, and Timmy agree.

There has been a quite staggering level of Bullshit spoken on immigration by all parties recently. As Chris Dillow Points out, the UK has a long, and highly indented coastline with thousands of points of entry. This could be policed only at prohibitive cost. It is therefore impossible to count the people in or out of the country.

The numbers game, the limit to immigration so Blythely advocated by the opposition and others will fail whilst there is the pull of jobs and wealth in the UK for the same reason the war on drugs is a costly failure. Basically we provide a better environment to succeed for people from eastern Europe than their home jurisdictions. So they will come in their countless thousands. My guess is that once their economies have developed, many Poles and Lithuanians will go home, using their new language skills picked up in their few years in the UK to their advantage at home. I am sanguine about immigration from Europe. It is economic migrants from elsewhere, especially those who abuse the asylum and benefits system who cause the most distress.

Which brings us onto that conflagration of race and politics which is the "Enoch was Right" argument. Basically Enoch Powell suggested that allowing large numbers of visibly different, culturally incompatible people to settle here without the consent of the people amongst whom they settled would be a disaster. He may have been right, but I take that as an argument against multiculturalism, rather than immigration. Ergo, he argued (in the late 60's) the drawbridge should have been pulled up around the mother country and recent non-white immigrants should have been encouraged, politely to leave. Thus whatever the details of the "rivers of blood" speech, mentioning it is so controversial today: Saying "Enoch was Right" is inflammatory. It is perceived, rightly, as saying "bugger off" to brown Britons. Saying "Enoch was right" means you're probably a racist.

The Problem is not immigration. Let 'em come! The problem is the welfare state.

If immigrants come here to take jobs that natives will not, it is because of an overgenerous welfare state. The reason cleaners are Polish and Sierra Leonneian is because a Native Brit can get the same money for popping out feral sprogs, unsupported by whichever casual acquaintance's sperm happened to get lucky. Likewise bricklayers are Polish because the Brit is likely to be begetting bastards and drinking special brew. All paid for by tax-payers, from Lord Sainsbury to those Cleaners and Bricklayers who've come from the east for the privilege of work.

It is the incentives for native Britons to avoid work which provides the pull for immigrants in the form of easy to acquire jobs, and access to benefits should they play the asylum system successfully. Benefits are therefore subsidising unemployment and immigration. The people who suffer most from immigration therefore are those people who've decided to carry on in employment despite the perverse incentives - those people who chose to work despite 90% marginal tax rates for someone with a family earning the minimum wage full time. It is their wages that are held down, both by the welfare state and immigration. Those of us who enjoy eating out, and don't like emptying bins find these services rendered more affordable by the efforts of immigrants.

Imports, including those of menials improves quality of life for the majority.

We should not be unaware of the minority who suffer as a result of immigration. But as these are the principal victims of the welfare state too, the solution is obvious.

Via DK, It has been suggested that we bloggertarians do not have any concrete policies. We merely oppose. That we do, but there are policies all over the place. True, many policies involve politicians tap-dancing on air, with their wrists tied with barbed wire, but there are other, less enjoyable solutions to the country's problems. First you need to analyse what the problem is and I would sum it up thus:

Everything government does is Malign.

Let's start at the top: The EU exists to channel British and German tax-payers money to French and Spanish farmers, secure jobs for the quangocrats in Brussels and ensure (a warped, statist version of) democracy in member states, whilst practising none at the centre. Publicity and public support is secured by granting pork infrastructure grants to regions, which in few regions are worth more than the taxes paid by citizens of that region to the EU. The effect of this despite the wastefulness, is that countries and regions compete for EU money and configure their economies to acquire this ill-gotten gains. This means that inefficient farmers are favoured over efficient ones. Inefficient industry is propped up behind tariff barriers and talented people are misemployed judging, deploying and spending EU money. Above all the CAP kills Africans like AIDS.

At the national level, some regions are subsidised by other regions - this effect is greatest in Germany and The United Kingdom, where London and the South East is nearly as rich as the poorest bits of America, and Scotland has quality of life poorer than most of Eastern Europe. The poorest bits of the UK have state spending up to 70% of GDP, crowding out business and becoming ever more dependent on government spending. This means entrepreneurs cannot get access to employable people, who are all working for the state. They cannot get capital as local banks do not know how to deal with anyone not on PAYE or benefits. State subsidised organisations have favourable access to planning and infrastructure. A vicious cycle ensures that entrepreneurs move to another area of the country, shrinking the private relative to the public sectors.

At the Individual level, the benefit trap means whole communities become dependent on handouts. Currently this is something like 10-15% of the population, for whom a lifetime is spent in receipt of state benefits. They do not work, do not have the skills and have no inclination to do so even if they did. No-one they know works. It is, from the point of view of someone born into this life, normal to never have anything but the most casual employment. Even if the inclination was there, any job achieved would not pay significantly more than benefits, at least in the short term. Benefits are a massive disincentive to get onto the employment ladder, which represents the only way out of relative poverty.

Given that the direct redistribution of money from one person to another represents something like 50% of government managed expenditure, and the higher the level of government, the greater the scale of this process, all you are doing is subsidising disastrous lifestyle choices or disastrous economic management. At best you are impeding development, at worst you're destroying lives.

If at any point there is a decision to be made according to some bureaucratic process, as there is in most Pork EU development money, or means tested benefits, it should come as no surprise that people become good at playing the system. That is organising their affairs to achieve the greatest gain for the least effort thus entrenching the behaviour patterns which caused the poverty for which the benefit is meant to be a cure. Only an Idiot (who often self-describe as socialists) can't see that this is a disincentive to work. The only acceptable benefits are therefore universal. These have the advantages of being cheap to administer, difficult to defraud and do not have disincentive effects due to withdrawal on increases in earnings. The State old age pension and child benefit fall into this category. All other benefits are disincentives to work and should be scrapped and replaced by Citizen's Basic Income.

Now because almost all of Government is wasteful and incompetent, the most important thing is not to feed the beast. Taxes and spending must be cut sharply, because unless you starve the beast, it will continue to take your money and give it to people who don't deserve it. Everything that the government does is malign. Ergo bloggertarians oppose pretty much everything government does. Simple really.

Our policies can therefore be summed up as follows:

Leave people alone for a bit, see what they come up with. Then leave that alone too. We are in favour of genuine accountability in public services. That usually means a market - yes including in healthcare. Though I am comfortable with state funding (funding you fucking idiots) private provision will almost certainly generate efficiencies and increase responsiveness. Vouchers for schools. Legalise drugs and bring the police leadership much closer to those they purport to serve.

We aren't devoid of positive ideas, it is just that the current situation is so far from ideal and such a huge majority of people are happy to sleepwalk into statist disaster that its just easier to scream blue murder at the current incumbent of No 10 downing street.

But there are plenty of positive solutions, if anyone's listening

Bueller.

Bueller....

A very British Dude has received 100,000 page loads since I put the counter thingy on some time in 2005.

I'm still amazed that people read my rantings, but there you go. I hope you like what you read and keep coming back.

G.R.O.L.I.E.S

Guardian Reader of Low intelligence in Ethnic Skirt

Boys Take Note

VideoJug: How To Be The Perfect Boyfriend

This is the day we celebrate the torture, forced confession and execution, in 1605 of a religiously inspired terrorist. They did things so much more... completely back then.

In some parts of the UK, we burn the pope in effigy, but normally it is Guy Fawkes. This is considered politically incorrect now; I have seen Gordon Brown and Tony Blair on the fire in recent years. This development is to be applauded.

One of the Key indicators of a Police state is when the police become above the law.

That is when the police can act in a heavy handed way and not endure the consequences of their actions. This small example was brought to my attention this morning (HT to Trixy). A motorist was arrested for drink driving, and called the police "Fucking twats" . The correct response is "that's not going to make me change my mind, now is it, sir?" The incorrect response is to take him into the back of the police car and spend 20 minutes beating him up. Robert Davies was not, eventually charged with drink driving despite blowing a positive.

We all overreact from time to time, and sometimes we have to face the consequences. That might be, for a non-policeman, a kicking off a bouncer or being hauled in front of a beak and a £500 fine. The police, however seem to believe that they have carte blanche to alter the story, lie under oath and generally abuse the system in order to get their members off the hook. PC Stephen Dance forgot (he laughably denies forgetting) that the car's audio recording device was still on throughout the incident.

What's not therefore contested is that Dance spent 20 minutes verbally and physically abusing a member of the public, whilst addressing Mr Jones' girlfriend as "bitch".

There are 2 possible versions of events that followed: Either The other officer, PC Paul Jones' original statement was falsified in order to get Dance off an assault, wrongful arrest followed by discharge from the force, or the second statement was falsified, which PC Dance alleges to be malicious because of a "Grievance". Either way PC Jones lied, and PC Dance is a rude, unprofessional violent arsehole. Neither should be coppers.

This is one motorist receiving a kicking for being a gobby scrote. I have some sympathy for the police in dealing with scrotes. I personally believe that the police should be allowed to dish out more kickings and fewer bits of paper. Hell I've deserved some of the kickings I've received, but that's by the by. It's the attempt by the police to lie after the fact that bothers me.

Though these officers have been disciplined, they thought they could get away with a cover up. Which brings me onto the De Menezes Stockwell shooting: The firearms officers, and those in the operations room believed de Menezes to be a suicide bomber. As such they acted correctly, heroically even. The failure was in the intelligence which led to that suspicion and even worse, the reaction to the tragic mistake.

Sir Ian Blair was either not told of the error, or lied about it for 24 hours. Therefore he presided over a system where the boss cannot be told bad news, or one in which he believed a cover-up was possible. Either way, that is a chronic failure of leadership and he has to go. Then we were told that de Menezes jumped the barriers. He didn't. Then we're told he ran at the officers. He didn't. Then we're told that he was nervous and agitated. None of the other passengers back up this version of events, nor does the toxicology back up the inference that he was high on cocaine at the time (he used it the night before, but frankly, so do lots of people). Indeed even his supposedly illegal work status was used to explain that which he didn't appear to do. It is suspicious that the CCTV footage was "lost" (#cough# Bullshit #cough#). The police clearly believe themselves to be the above the law and beyond criticism, even when they shoot an innocent man in the head. When found out, they all appear, from top to bottom, to be prepared to lie to justify their and their colleagues actions.

They are just the biggest gang in town. If you're not police, you're "little people", and they treat us as such.

Mr. De Menezes cannot respond to the lies and smears that the police attempted to use to justify their mistake. We can. We can force the police to regain our respect, and they will do so by both knowing and obeying the law themselves. No more cover ups, no more idle threats, no more petty overreactions. We can help the police by demanding "standards". A word soldiers understand, but no longer the boys in blue. That is why they must be brought directly under very local democratic control. They need to know who is the boss, whom they serve and why.

At present the whole service has become infected with a petty minded officious bureaucratic mindset, that demeans the job the police signed up to do, by being contemptable when it isn't overtly oppressive. This is caused directly by the target culture - sanction detection tractor production targets before good, honest policing, and therefore the blame for this breaking of the once great British police's reputation lies firmly at New Labour's door.

This from Samizdata sums up my opinion pretty well.

Does anyone else find the Office for National Staistics website so badly laid and opaque out that it is virtually unusable? So bad in fact that I think it is actually a conspiracy to prevent the facts coming to light. All I want is the Bill for each of the different benefits, in order that I may point out the appaling scale of the waste of the tax-payers money used in paying chavs not to work.

Just what is an ASP file and what the fuck am I supposed to do with the bastard?