the Role of the Police in Modern Britain

The police, to add a metaphor, are dogs on a lead. Since the arrival and election of New Labour, and beyond, the police have been given such autocratic powers, and whatever orders they are given by the Home Secretary, obey like Hitler’s little puppies. We are told, quite laughably, that the police up and down the country are subject to the same laws as ourselves.  It would be interesting to explore this further.  Just take one example: PC Simon Harwood.  Ian Tomlinson was a hard-working father, and a good, decent human being but he is not anymore because he is dead. The PC is seen on camera throwing Mr. Tomlinson to the ground, and later died, but how did he die? We know the answer to that question.  He died of internal bleeding.  A direct result of Harwood’s actions, but we are told otherwise by the pathologist, Freddy Patel. This man, was, at the time, employed by the Home Office; the Home Office knew some rather disturbing things about him. The doctor had, in the past, made some grave errors, in diagnosing the causes of deaths, some very scandalous cases emerged involving children. But the Home Office, under New Labour, allowed the man to conclude that Mr.Tomlinson died from a heart attack.  A heart attack? Yes, indeed.  In actual fact, the man had died from internal bleeding.  We know this because this is what further pathologists concluded.  Because of this, Harwood could not be charged with manslaughter, yet he was seen on television throwing an innocent man to the ground.  Little has been said about the other police officers that observed this. 

How many people have been charged over the News of the World hacking scandal? Very few indeed, when in reality it should be hundreds, including police officers, and many of them.  But of course like many things in Britain all that has been hidden.  In fact, during the first investigation, led by John yates, concluded nothing, and appeared to investigate nothing. Public figures such as John Prescott often complained the police did not interview him as he was only one of the many victims of phone hacking. Rupert Murdoch was the police’s greatest ally. Yates also headed the investigation into “cash for honours”; same results.  It is often said public enquiries and investigations into people in high office are a scheming practice to hoodwink the public, this is largely true.  The police batter women at protests, infiltrate environmental protest movements, and have sex with the women, which some class as rape, murdering tens of people in custody with complete immunity from criminal prosecutions.  In sooth, what are the police?  That is not such a difficult question to answer.  On a regular basis, the police use violence, manipulation, and use propaganda to argue they are “protecting the public” and doing it for the purpose of “national security interests”.  The police, are, to use an analogy, assassins, hired by the mafia to subject innocent people to horrific violence, the government being the mafia, and the police being Hitler’s little poodles.  Of course, under the pretence of democracy the police can not subject men, women and children to horrific violence, just enough for them to get away with.

Because the police often act like thugs, T.V shows are constantly being made to indoctrinate their viewers into believing the police are just, moral and decent, and all they want to do is put bad people in prison.  When the police raid homes they subject people to a terrifying ordeal, on protest movements they act with such thuggery and violence, they constantly stop, search and harass people.  It ought to be the case because the police officers’ authority and extensive powers, their punishment ought to be different to the rest of society as they are in a unique position of trust.  The parents of Stephen Lawrence will long remember the disgrace of the police, as will the Irish that were terrorised by them in the 1980s, the Guildford  Four were wrongly imprisoned, as the police were astutely aware from the outset, they also refused to apologise to Barry George who spent nine years in prison for a murder he did not commit.  Instead of apologising the police said instead they would watch him like a hawk.  Yet when a police officer is killed the country goes into a crazed moral panic.  Bring back the death penalty, they say, allow police to have guns, and so on.  Giving a police officer a gun is akin to giving a terrorist a bomb.  As for the death penalty, by the mere mention of it, It presupposes the police are more worthy victims than anybody else.  They may as well be worshipped in Olympus along with Zeus and Hera.

Police constables are far less dangerous than their superiors, for these superiors do not often go for this thing called “justice”, but something else.  They, at every opportunity, push for the maximum sentence of their victims, even when they know the individual in question is innocent of any crime. They will lie, forge witness statements, lie and oath, giving the judge the justification to give defendants outrageous prison sentences. There appears to be no moral approach. It is also true the police work on targets; a terror that could strike the individual at any given time.

Now, the police, along with the Crown Prosecution service (CPS), are charging people with what we would call “thought crimes”, or what the Bush Administration would call “pre-emptive war”, attack them before they attack us. The astonishing and revealing thing about this is they need no evidence for such violence, which has been the hallmark of American foreign policy since 1945; there is little difference between the police. There is a crime which consists of the conspiracy to do this or the conspiracy to do that, in this regard, the police act within an autocratic framework,  these are not crimes at all. In the twentieth century British citizens are living in an open-air prison, and as for people released from prison, they are reduced to a fascist framework: they are removed from society completely.  Any criticism of the treatment of “offenders” is shot down by the Government, the media and other “responsible” organisations.

Britain is fast becoming a police state. There has emerged two registers which the police oversee.  Most famously or rather notoriously, there is the Sex Offenders Register (SOR), and the lesser known Violent Offenders Register, it is also known as VISOR (Violent and Sexual Offenders Register). These “offenders”, a favourite word used by the police, are visited by them on a regular basis but it is good, the public argue, because it protects the public. No, it does not.  In fact, one could argue it puts the public in greater danger at having these stringent controls in the first place.  

Now, due to court judgements, people subject to these registers can now appeal to be taken off them. The people responsible for taking them off this dreaded thing is not a judge as one may expect, but the police, which means, in reality, few, if any will ever be taken of these registers. A crime is committed, that person goes to jail, they are released, then subject to the most barbaric controls and it is the police that, potentially, dominate every aspect of their lives; where they stay, where they live, who they associate with, who their partner may be, and so on. Orwell would be very amazed if he saw modern Britain.

15th October, 2012

 

 

Bludgeoning the Welfare State

 

Aristotle, one of the first political theorists we know of - has as much relevance today than perhaps two-thousand three-hundred years ago. As everyone should know he was the pupil of Plato, who went on to teach Alexander the Great, the then youth, son of king Philip of Macedon. In 1998 the political thinker and linguist, Noam Chomsky, said the following about the great philosopher:

“Aristotle also made the point that if you have, in a perfect democracy, a small number of very rich people and a large number of very poor people, the poor will use their democratic rights to take property away from the rich. Aristotle regarded that as unjust, and proposed two possible solutions: reducing poverty (which is what he recommended) or reducing democracy.”

Unfortunately Britain has decided to go for the latter rather than the former, just as most societies have, but Britain is an extreme example, not as extreme as the United States but extreme enough.

In 21st century Britain, the government and shadow government, whoever they may be, and evidently change from time to time, but in name only, would prefer the welfare state to be abolished outright. The government of its day would willingly wish to see the poor and abused homeless, dying in the gutter. The welfare state is slowly being privatised to private companies, and the social and human costs are terrifying. Private companies dream about making stupendous profits each night, they do not dream about what other people dream of, these people are dysfunctional, psychopathic and amoral. They look into people’s eyes and see large pound signs, euro signs, dollar signs or whatever. Getting people jobs in the most obnoxious and shocking places of work is of no significance to them. People must slave away for profits, profits, profits! And this is the rub; if the individual refuses to work in such barbaric conditions, any money they receive is taken away from them for a large period of time, forcing the poor into petty crime and prostitution. 

The economy is structured around the free market, that is, towards, largely wealthy capitalists who enjoy using sweatshops in the third world to accrue their vast profits, then complain they pay too much tax. They further complain their well-earned money, that is paying third-world microscopic wages, is wasted on “benefit scroungers”. Such venture capitalists, as they like to call themselves, do not speak openly about such disparagement about the Royal family and politicians in the House of Commons, and members in the House of Lords, but benefit claimants of another kind. These two groups of people differ indeed.

It is generally accepted people on the welfare state do not work, or indeed, are incapable of work, which is why they are on the welfare state. The Queen and her sordid family, on the other hand, are a different matter entirely. The Queen, it maybe argued, is too old to work, so in theory, she should receive a pension instead. It is very well known this does not happen, far from it. The Government is literally robbing money from people’s bank accounts and handing it over to the imperial family. It is not £150 a week either; the Government are robbing billions of pounds from working people, and much of it is going to the imperial family. This is known as proceeds to crime. It is one of the imperial families lesser crimes; it is a crime nonetheless.

Dealing with those tiresome and thuggish politicians is a far more serious and grievous matter. For the people, if we may use that term, are working and claiming benefits. First and foremost the members of Parliament should not be paid a penny. After all, they are representatives of the people, at least that is what we are told. They ought to be paid expenses, and they should be glad of it. It is true they are representatives of something more unpleasant than the people they claim to represent, and that is corporate fascism. It is these so-called men and women who remove billions of pounds from the welfare state and give it to the rich in windfall taxes as well as other conniving schemes; tax havens; reductions in taxes for stupendously rich, supine, and avaricious individuals; the reduction in capital gains tax and corporation tax. This is following the Reaganite “reforms”. Reagan, in the 1980s, took billions of dollars out of the welfare state and put it into the Military Industry Complex. So, naturally, politicians of all types have to use a kind of a scapegoat; people to abuse in public; the downtrodden; the people nobody cares about; the people Orwell would describe as ‘unpeople’. They do not exist, they are of no significance, they do not matter. The is the attitude to the poor and needy in 21st century Britain. It is something of nightmares.

The days of Tony Benn and Barbara Castle are over. James Purnell, a former Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, toyed with the idea of having people who take out emergency loans for the unemployed pay 50% interest back. These are called crisis loans, and the name of them elucidates what they are for. They are for people, and families, who have no food, sometimes no home, no hope, many have lived tormented lives, tolerated untold abuse, experienced homelessness and whatever else they have endured. This, coming from a former Labour Minister. He also proposed jobseeker’s ought to be forced to work for nothing, or rather, for their benefits, Mr. Purnell, it was found, was “fiddling his expenses”, such a man should have been convicted in a court of law, but Mr, Purnell, so it appears, is well above the law, just as many of his former colleagues are. 

In the mainstream media, and this is not even restricted to the tabloid press, the word “benefits” always comes with a suffix: “benefits scroungers” or “ benefit cheats”, they have even taken to calling them “benefit scum”, and so on. Rupert Murdoch, that crazed lunatic, who surveilles his victims, destroys his enemies and roots out and destroys his competitors; he is the worst offender in this regard. When his newspapers talk of these “benefit scroungers”, the reason for this is very simple. It is looking away from the real criminals, like Rupert Murdoch himself. Such a man, and his newspapers do not concentrate their energy on “tax dodgers” or “tax cheats”, if he did we may read how much the British Government are losing every year through tax evasion and tax avoidance. Just to clarify the difference between the two: tax evasion is the one which is illegal and tax avoidance is the one which the state long ago made legal, that is allowing millionaires to pay less than 1% tax, but makes it compulsory for the poor, bruised and battered to pay much more. The Murdoch press leaves information like this out. 

It is not just the Murdoch press either; they are all at it. The Government have devised an ingenious tactic and it appears to be working. They have created a chasm between welfare recipients and those on the minimum wage, prostituting their bodies for an absolute pittance: is it right these scroungers ought to get this money, when you have to work hard for yours? So instead of working people being infuriated at the real criminals that run the country: bankers, lord's, company executives, business leaders who exploit their workers in countries with weak labour laws, they are venting their fury who are the very weakest in society.

20th October, 2012