Self Regulation: The dangers

As the worst kept secret in British Political life squirms its way out in to the public domain, we are surely now at the point of no return for self regulation. I refer of course to the news that the three police officers at the centre of the row which cost Andrew Mitchell his job, have had their honesty queried. That to me sounds like a euphemism: they were dishonest, they lied, they covered up, they fabricated. You can dress it up how you like but their behaviour has been a scandal. It is an even bigger scandal that they have been allowed to hide away for as long as this while their organisation sat on its hands and waited in vain for the story to blow away. That they were not even disciplined tells me all I need to know about the way the police force operates in the UK. Same as it ever was....

With revelations concerning the awful Hillsborough tragedy still creeping slowly out of the woodwork all these years later, the time has surely come to put an end to the police regulating and investigating itself. It is clearly not capable of impartiality. The IPCC has said that the police was wrong to say that the three officers had no case to answer. Understatement. In a typically succinct statement, the Police Federation has said it is "shocked" by the findings. We are not told why which is perhaps just as well. I observe that Andrew Mitchell remains out of a job while these officers have been allowed to carry on in the meantime. Shocking. This would not be tolerated in the private sector. This is yet more proof of how public sector power has well and truly gone to its head. They don't see themselves as being accountable to anybody and therefore do and say as they please. In this instance, they just made it up as they went along.

These are the services for which we pay our taxes. It is about time we started to examine the value of that. Aside from their honesty having brought in to question, worse still is the fact that serving police officers have lost their integrity. This always used to be the starting point for such a career. Things aren't what they used to be...To throw mud is easy enough. To accept the consequences is less so. Let's just hope that they are dealt with in the manner that Andrew Mitchell would have been had they had their twisted way.