Lawgasm

When an embattled and incompetent minister (viz. a minister) wishes to avoid being heckled, kettled and tasered by a hostile audience, the usual course of action nowadays is to make a headline-grabbing, endorphin-squirting policy announcement and then allow lesser mortals to worry about little things like legality and implementation. For her annual comedy turn at the Police Federation, Daveybloke's mad old cat lady has done just that, proclaiming that the lives of police officers are worth more than those of other people and that the police, rather than liberty, law or civilisation, represent the "fundamental basis of our society". Most, if not all, Home Secretaries over the past couple of decades have been police-state enthusiasts of one stripe or another; but it is still comparatively rare for the tendency to be pronounced aloud, although the pleonastic redundancy of the redundant pleonasm has a nostalgic whiff of New Labour. Daveybloke's mad old cat lady wants people who kill police officers to be sentenced in the same way as terrorists, serial murderers and other symptoms of the welfare state; which means they must die in prison assuming the victim's professional colleagues have not exercised their inalienable prerogative and pre-empted the matter on the streets or in police custody before any trial, or indeed any crime, has taken place.