WHAT does it take to make a member of Clan Blair resign from public office? After the political equivalent of a Russian deathbed scene that was the slow demise of the Great Charlatan himself - Tony the Legacy - we are now enduring the spectacle of his namesake and kindred spirit, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, clinging to the furniture at New Scotland Yard after his force was found guilty over the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes.
This excessive attachment to office is a phenomenon that is universal throughout the New Labour nexus. Douglas Alexander's retention of his post after the double-whammy gaffe of turning the Scottish elections into a shambles and persuading Gordon Bro
wn to tease the public with a prospective general election is only the most recent example.
Sir Ian Blair is the most discredited public servant in Britain. His blunders have been not only egregious, but lethal. It took an Old Bailey jury just four hours to convict the Metropolitan Police of breach of health and safety laws, for which the judge fined the force £175,000 and ordered it to pay costs of £385,000. This travesty added insult to injury in the Menezes case and reflected appallingly upon the state of justice in Britain today.
An innocent man is shot dead in the London Tube - summarily executed by having seven dum-dum bullets fired into his brain - and this is classed as a 'health and safety' offence. It is utterly demeaning to the victim's memory. It is as if the police had been caught fly-tipping. It reflects the total incoherence of our current legal system. What must the rest of the world think of this grotesque charade? The punishment is equally absurd: the total penalty of £560,000 imposed on the Metropolitan Police will be paid by the taxpayer.
Not a penny of it will come out of the pockets of Sir Ian Blair, Commander Cressida Dick or the two SO19 officers who executed Jean Charles de Menezes. It is purely a ledger transaction involving the transfer of £0.56m from one part of the public accounts to another. Only the taxpayers are being penalised.
The two officers, after a 12-month suspension, are fully operational again. One of them shot dead a robber - legitimately on this occasion, in a firefight - three months after returning to work; but common sense dictates they should have been taken off firearms duties for the rest of their careers. They were not cross-examined at the Old Bailey trial, on the grounds that their presence would have been a "distraction". Some of the officers involved in the Menezes incident have already been told they will not even face disciplinary charges.
Commander Cressida Dick, who on the fatal day presided over a control room described as "chaotic", was promoted earlier this year to the £130,000 post of deputy assistant commissioner. Like Blair, she has built her career on political correctness, working on "diversity" issues in the wake of the Macpherson Report, the document that emasculated the Metropolitan Police and turned it from a crime-fighting force into an agency of social engineering, under graduate officers such as Blair and Dick.
Blair himself is the epitome of everything that is wrong with British policing today. When it comes to PC idiocy, Blair has previous. As deputy commissioner, in 2002, he proposed removing the crown from the Metropolitan force's badge, to avoid offending non-Christian officers. As commissioner he instituted PC verbiage and logos throughout his force and lobbied for 90-day detention of terror suspects and introduction of identity cards.
As his namesake Tony's poodle, at the 2005 general election he allowed police Range Rovers escorting Blair to display 'Vote Labour' posters. Even after the death of Menezes, he was still putting out self-exculpatory statements and seemed to have little idea what was happening, during a farrago of incompetence by his force that demonstrated the inadvisability of decommissioning the Bow Street Runners.
In 2006 he expressed bafflement that the Soham murders had become "the biggest story in Britain" and was exposed as having secretly recorded telephone conversations with the Attorney General and three police supervisory officials. Last month he was allegedly resentful that his deputy, Paul Stephenson, by his example, had "bounced" him into rejecting a £25,000 'performance' bonus, in deference to the Menezes incident. What a buffoon.
Blair's immediate reaction to last week's verdict was to insist he would not resign. To do so would make it difficult for his Labour masters to send him to the House of Lords, his next natural destination. He was instantly backed by Gordon Brown and the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith. If Blair is not forced out, then Britain is a police state. It is as simple as that. Last week it was revealed the Metropolitan Police "give up" on half the cases referred to them. No wonder they had leisure to visit, interrogate and intimidate author Lynette Burrows about a possible 'hate crime' after she expressed her opposition to adoption by homosexuals on BBC Radio Five Live.
That is what MetroPlod is now for: enforcing political correctness. Burglars, rapists, muggers, murderers - nothing to do with us, guv. Nor is this mentality restricted to that force. Remember how Strathclyde Police abandoned Operation Gadher, designed to break Asian gang culture in Glasgow, on the grounds it was politically incorrect. Six months later Kriss Donald was murdered.
Things have turned out well for almost everybody involved in the Stockwell Tube execution. Blair continues to enjoy the confidence of his political masters, Cressida Dick has been promoted and the SO19 gunslingers are back on the job. The exceptions, of course, are the unfortunate Brazilian electrician and his bereaved family; but few of the buck-passers on the public payroll will lose sleep over them. The challenge to the British public is: do we have the decency and the will to insist that justice is done and the complacent, apparently unassailable, members of the nomenklatura are held to account?
The full article contains 1014 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
