Society Offenders Who Might Well Be Underground

For all the dead-eyed warden's urge to deport first and ask questions later, in cases involving police indiscretion the wheels of British justice continue to bowl along at a rather leisurely pace. Tumbledown Tessie herself set up an inquiry into police spying during her stint as Minister for Windrush-Cleansing, and the old boy in charge has been criticised for its doddering pace of work and for refusing to publish a list of those enemies of the people who were placed under surveillance. The reasoning behind the refusal appears to be that the police did not bother to distinguish between groups that were monitored with such thoroughness that officers personally penetrated the activists, and groups that were merely mentioned here and there in the paperwork. As an afterthought, the inquiry will be looking into what Britain's leading liberal newspaper calls "monitoring of grieving families". In Standard English, this refers to attempts by the police to unearth or manufacture material for a smear campaign against the friends and family of a lynched teenager. However, the first public hearings have been postponed until next year, so the acquittal of the officers involved is not expected until approximately the middle of the next decade. Much delay has resulted from the usual fervent concern to protect the innocent, with the police applying to keep secret the identities of undercover officers. Despite the sterling success of Tumbledown Tessie, her predecessor and the Liberal Democrats at increasing child poverty, it does not appear that Britain's infantine resources are dying at a sufficient rate to supply new identities in the necessary quantity.