Hard to Police

From David Blunkett through John Reid to Agent Smith and Alan Johnson, the Home Office has generally been the most obvious field where the Nasty and Stupid factions of Britain's one-party state may collide and self-fertilise in harmonious fructification; and the present incumbent, Theresa May, looks set to continue that noble tradition. May has commissioned an "independent review" of police pay and conditions which has not yet been published, but as a middle-aged lady in a hurry she has anticipated the review's conclusions and informed her own enforcers that their pay and conditions are going to be cut, as a humane alternative to simply sacking thousands of officers and expecting them to join up again as volunteer constables. May expects the review to be fair and seen to be fair, like the budgets of George the Progressively Regressive; and she also wants it to be modern and management and implemented and helpful and service and management and budgets and maximise and deployment and flexibility and management and (naturally) frontline services maintained and improved; so cutting pay and conditions was self-evidently the only possible solution, because "now, more than ever, the taxpayer needs to get a fair deal from all parts of the public sector", since the public sector does not consist of taxpayers.