I was listening to 'The News Quiz' on friday and one of the questions concerned the two police women who were told by OFSTED that they coouldn't look after each others children on a recipricol relationship because they would be 'benefitting' from it.
But for once I'm not going to bang on about OFSTED but instead the reactions of the panellists to an item about the police.
Mark Steel proceeded to launch into a tirade about the police which seemed interminable, though probably lasted only a minute and a half and included the word useless at least twelve times. Apparently nowhere else are there such useless public servants with such a low success rate, though perhaps Mark is missing the point here as criminals don't want to get caught making them substantially different to you and I when we go to the Doctors with the symptoms of Swine Flu.
Taking on the baton from Mark was Sue Perkins who referred 'hilariously' to the two women police officers as 'Filthesses'(Female version of filth Tee Hee). Now Sue clearly considers herself to be edgy and dangerous for making such a comment but to me she was playing to the prejudices of her audience in a way that Tarby and Bruce would have been proud of back in the Nineteen Seventies but sadly she is, if that's possible, even less funny than they were.

And I wondered if it would be possible to refer to any other public servant and compare them literally to dirt? Personally, if I had been a copper on duty at Broadcasting House that night I would have let the local criminal underworld know that the car park would be fair game for the next half hour and turn a very blind eye and deaf ear to the cries for help from the braying multitude who considered me and my colleagues so useless.

Does Mark Steel really consider that the police are so useless. For me the Left in this country consider them rather as the public treats the Tommies in the Kipling poem

And it's Tommy this and Tommy that and chuck him out the brute,
but it's saviour of this country when the guns begin to shoot.

Now I am not naive enough to believe that the police are all noble and utterly public spirited but I do believe that they do an incredibly tough job that I would not wish to do and an entirely necessary one as this quote from Steven Pinker reveals.

As a young teenager in proudly peacable Canada during the romantic 1960's, i was a true believer in Bakunin's anarchism. I laughed off my parent's argument that if the government ever laid down its arms all hell would break loose. Our competing predictions were put to the test at 8.00 a.m on October 17, 1969, when the Montreal Police went on strike. By 11.20 a.m the first bank was robbed. By noon most downtown stores had closed because of looting .... By the end of the day six banks had been robbed, a hundred shops had been looted, twelve fires had been set, forty car loads of store front glass had been broken and three million dollars in property damage has been inflicted before city authorities had to call in the army and , of course, the Mounties to restore order.This decisive empirical test left my politics in tatters