Spare me the sight of Tories demanding more law and order

[Joanne98]

The spectacle of seething Tories demanding lots more law and order is as enlightening now as ever. The year's final mayor's question time at London's City Hall took me back to the day I had to leave a Thatcher-era party conference because the hang 'em-flog 'em speeches were inflicting too much pain. It wasn't what people were saying that brought on nausea and a powerful urge to flee, but the sheer, crushing tedium of it. Watching paint dry or stools float would have been more diverting. More importantly, I'd been subjected to enough proof of a peculiarly Conservative inability to address such issues intelligently. On Wednesday some of Boris Johnson's fellow party members provided a reminder of how very dim Tories can still be.

The subject was violent incidents at recent student demos in the capital. The chap who raised it was Brian Coleman, who is not only a London Assembly member but also a Barnet councillor and chair of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA). In these roles he has won fame for, respectively, claiming £8,000 in taxi expenses, being censured for sending an abusive email to a blogger-resident and, most recently, publicly describing leaders of the Fire Brigades Union with which LFEPA is in dispute as "thoroughly unpleasant" and "thick". Such is his flair for moderation and subtlety.

Coleman asked Johnson, rhetorically, if he thought it necessary for people who go on demos to wear masks. Shouldn't the rules be tightened to prevent this? Surely, he continued, the bad stuff that went on would be repeated endlessly unless police took what he called "firm and dramatic action" on behalf of "Mrs and Mrs Average Londoner".

What did he have in mind? Coleman's response to footage of Nicola Fisher being whacked on the leg by Sergeant Delroy Smellie of the Territorial Support Group at a vigil for Ian Tomlinson last year was to say that people who take part in protests should expect that sort of thing. Perhaps he'd like to see the principle inform the conduct of every Met officer (after all, the sergeant was acquitted). He could then, perhaps, sit back and enjoy the televised spectacle of random citizens being soundly beaten in the name of the law, telling himself all the while that London was being made a better place.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/21/tories-policing-law-order-protests-violence

[mudplanet]

1. Wow. They have stupid redneck a**holes in London, too.

I thought it was a Southern phenomena.