In response to Bruce Newsome: Crime fighters should catch villains, not rattle the begging bowl,
Toby wrote:
This kind of article is one of the reasons I like TCW. You would be hard pressed to find it anywhere else – certainly not in the Oligarchy’s legacy media.
As to the NCA, there is a good expression for what it is doing: rent seeking. It doesn’t look good from what is supposed to be a professional law enforcement agency, but I am afraid it is what we should expect in a decaying system, where state entities lose interest in their ostensible roles and become focused on the competition for spoils.
Frankly, given that the Met retains some important national functions, it has never been altogether clear to me what the NCA is actually for. It is also interesting and perhaps somewhat concerning to speculate on exactly how accountable this rather shadowy organisation actually is, whose officers can assume the powers of a customs officer, an immigration officer and a constable at the same time.
All in all, it is a typical product of the Blairite impulse to create layers of new centralised government agencies, with unclear and overlapping powers and blurry lines of accountability.
So far as the Met is concerned, its recent performance rather proves Peter Hitchens’s point that the police today are simultaneously too weak and too powerful. On the one hand they are introducing sinister new technologies like facial recognition (nothing to hide, nothing to fear, citizen!) but on the other hand they signally failed to deal with a basic public order situation in London a couple of weeks back.
As Dr Newsome suggests, this is probably because some senior officers (and many in government) had at least partial sympathy with their aims; otherwise you would hardly have seen officers skateboarding and dancing with the protesters.
The plea that everything could have been swiftly dealt with but for some awful archaic laws is not terribly convincing. Just try blocking Westminster Bridge holding a banner demanding the return of the Gold Standard and I think you will see what I mean!
Tre wrote:
Lynne Owens says borders will be even more difficult to police once we leave the EU! Maybe she means: Oh no! We’ll actually have to police them . . .
