Monday, November 09, 2009

Britain edging closer to a banana republic

The recent incident of a mother being followed home by an off-duty police officer who saw the mother chastise her children in a shop, a follow up visit by other on-duty officers to question the mother about the incident and the subsequent letter from the local council informing the mother that her brush with the law has now been recorded on council records where it will remain for the next fourteen years serves as a reminder of what a sorry state our police force is now in.

Just for a moment, try - if you can - and remember the police force how they used to be. For those of you under the age of fortyish, our police were once a tremendously well-respected organisation both at home and abroad. We used to take pride in our police force and how they were the "envy of the world". As a people we could rely on the police force to use common sense and discretion and to be on the side of the public at all times. Criminals feared the police and the public loved them for it.

Forty years of remorseless progressive liberalism later and the modern "police service" is a discredited and disliked organisation held in contempt by both criminals and the public alike. The police are ineffectual in dealing with criminal behaviour and, as a consequence of their own recognition that they are so ineffectual, the police take that out on the soft targets of the law-abiding public. The police despise the public and the public despise the police.

The sort of behaviour we now see from our police "services" is similar to that we once used to sneer at in banana republics which always seemed to be on the verge of revolution. We used to think "that could never happen here".

Well it could and it has.

4 comments:

dickiebo said...

RS; Any chance of my putting this article on mine, please? It would, of course, be cross-referenced here and named as your article.

Stan said...

Help yourself, dickiebo.

Anonymous said...

Not so much a banana republic, Stan, as the former East Germany. The Berlin wall may have come down but all that happened was that it was moved to encompass the EU.

Stan said...

That's probably closer to the truth, Henry - and what with the Berlin Wall anniversary yesterday I should probably have made reference to the Stasi and East Germany, but I have been saying for some time that we're heading towards that sort of regime. Even though it is obvious, most people refuse to believe it.

The main reason I used the "banana republic" reference is that when I was a kid in the sixties I seem to recall frequent comparisons of our police to theirs with comments along the lines of "how lucky we are to have such a wonderful police force". Luck had nothing to do with it - our police force were like that because that was what our socially and morally conservative people wanted.