The British policeman’s greatest fear: a bare bottom
We have a highly partisan and politicised police force, who will brook no insult and who selectively applies the increasingly misled law of the land.
This whole Covid business hasn’t had many positives, but you can find a few if you look hard enough.
Handwashing is probably more common than it was. No bad thing – I am always alarmed at how many blokes go to the gents’ without washing their digits afterwards. Dirty swines.
Another one (maybe it’s not a positive – it all depends on your point of view) is the hammer-blow the last twenty months-or-so has taken to the carefully constructed image we have of ourselves as a nation.
The constant refrain to our innate love of liberty (not like those ghastly continentals) and claims to the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon parliaments has been met with some harsh truths. As it has turned out, the first time these things were put to any significant test, they shattered into a thousand pieces, like stained glass against an iconoclast’s hammer.
One common, happy self-delusion is that all the nasty isms of the past could not have taken root on this happy isle. Far too sceptical of authority and liable to laugh in the face of chaps in silly uniforms, any nascent brown or red ideologies would remain on the sidelines, shunned by the common sense of your average plucky Tommy.
Many months of luxuriantly bathing in orders, mask mandates and – most lately - compulsory vaccination laws, should hopefully put paid to such easily stated but difficult to back up assertions.
Part of this supposed societal resilience involved the participation of the other half of the equation, namely the forces of law and order. Your average, local, thoroughly decent copper wouldn’t overstep the mark, always fully aware of the need to police with the consent of community around him.
This, again, is a somewhat quaint and romantic notion that has gradually been put paid to as well, accelerated by pandemic-fuelled pandemonium.
A few recent events have brought this into sharp focus. I have a friend who lives in a large university town. He lives in a new-build development. Recently, someone drove a car at high speed into his neighbour’s living room and fled the scene. It was lucky nobody was killed.
When the constabulary arrived, they effectively said that they were not able to do anything before having started investigating anything whatsoever. Told which direction the driver had fled, they showed zero interest in pursuing the trail. A crime number – necessary for any insurance claim – was all the poor homeowner got for their troubles. No prizes for guessing whether the perpetrator will be effectively deterred by this feeble display of ‘law and order’.
Elsewhere, it was reported that a man, recently diagnosed with a terminal illness, took it upon himself to moon a police speed camera. It was, he later claimed, on his bucket list of things to do.
I am not a die-hard advocate on the right to moon. As far as things go it should probably be discouraged. But what is the proper response? A visit from a police officer with a kind request to refrain from such actions should just about do it.
Instead, twenty minutes after mooning the mobile speed camera van, six police officers turned up at his house, kicked in the door to his garden and had him on the floor and under arrest quicker than you could say ‘bare butt-cheeks borne at the crack of dawn’.
It’s amazing in what strength the police can be deployed when they feel like it. Send a hurty tweet or show your gluteus maximus to the rozzer and the boys in blue will be round pronto, truncheons held aloft. Have someone drive a car square into your living room and you’ll get a delayed, half-hearted visit at some point; presumably sometime after they visit someone for commenting on a Facebook post that ‘only women have cervixes’.
The rise of two-tier policing in our country has become too glaring for most to ignore. The response of the police is, in most cases, strongly correlated to the wokeness of the cause. The boring bread and butter of policing – ‘petty’ crime, burglaries – just does not have the postmodern cachet.
What this bottom-bearing story brought home most, however, was how much the police hate being laughed at. It touches on that now-extinguished notion of Britons being free through their virtue of guffawing at authority. It is not clear that the Old Bill tolerate such insubordination any longer.
Increasingly we are no longer governed by consent. Instead, we have a highly partisan and politicised police force, who will brook no insult and who selectively applies the increasingly misled law of the land.
It’s a development which even the cosiest of self-deceits – once harboured unthinkingly by many of us – will be unable to check.
