We Can Shoot Our Own Plebs, Thank You

In our present political climate, where a policy isn't a policy unless it involves kicking someone in the teeth, a choice between two mutually exclusive modes of tough must be an exquisite dilemma. An American martial arts instructor, Tim Larkin, has imposed just such a cruelty on Daveybloke's mad old cat lady, by forcing her to choose between two of the Conservative Party's most treasured totems: the British guard dog which keeps foreigners at bay, and the British attack dog which likes to do the Big Society thingy and make up for cuts in the police force by potting a burglar now and then. Larkin was banned from the country last year, on the urging of a Labour MP who claimed that his teaching amounted to inciting people to vigilantism. It is a little hard to see what problem the party of Chris Graybeing and Liam Fox may have had with this; but the Ministry of Deportation claimed that Larkin advocates a "kill or be killed" form of self-defence, and a Home Office flunkey was duly dispatched to Las Vegas to show him the true meaning of tough. Larkin himself claims to have taught the British police, whose most famous recent killings qualify as self-defence in much the same way as Labour's enforcement of international law in Iraq.