Decent Immigrants

After several days of nerve-jangled waffle, Daveybloke and the present occupants of his Cuddly Coulson's shoes have finally worked out a sort of response thingy to the corruption and incompetence brought to light by the phone-hacking scandal. As far as the media are concerned, Daveybloke no doubt intends to ensure a level playing field for chums such as Richard Desmond and Paul Dacre, while continuing to permit his other chums in News Corporation to get away with as much as can be got away with. Daveybloke's response to the corruption in the police force constitutes much the same kind of double back-flip: first, avoiding the problem by broadening the issue; and second, using the scandal as a source of propaganda for his party's programme of socioclastic lunacy, or "radical reform" as it is smirkingly known among the architects of the Big Society.

Since the phone-hacking scandal resulted partly from giving a foreign corporation too much control over Britain's infotainment, Daveybloke has decided to fight police corruption by handing over the police to foreign managers. "At the moment," Daveybloke burbled, "the police system is too closed," apparently because it is full of police. "Why shouldn't someone with a different skill-set be able to join the police force in a senior role?" Perhaps because, outside the House of Commons, the banking sector and the Bullingdon Club, having a different skill-set to that required for the job is known as incompetence, and is generally considered undesirable even today. However, Daveybloke's New Labour loathing for immigrants in general is matched only by his New Labour love for all things American, except of course for such antiquated aberrations as the written constitution, the Bill of Rights and the abolition of slavery; so it seems he may find it within himself to let American officers deprive hard-working British bobbies of their perks. Possibly Daveybloke believes that an American police chief would be just the thing to teach the foot-soldiers about the necessity for pay cuts and redundancies, much as the half-caste Ian MacGregor did for the miners a quarter of a century ago. Then again, given his endorsement of Cressida Dick, who was in charge of the operation which led to the responsibility-free demise of Jean Charles de Menezes, perhaps it is just that Daveybloke and his Cuddly Conservatives find an irresistible charm in the idea of people being shot.