You're Having A Laugh

The news that one in three Britons think that Peter Griffin is the head of the BNP is truly depressing, if only for the fact it shows how few people actually watch the show, if they did then they would have noticed PG's friend Cleveland Brown and his perpetually pregnant wife Loretta are not exactly white. Or perhaps they thought that with its new open door policy on membership Cleveland was head of membership recruitment.

And whilst we are talking of things that really 'grind me gears', on PM tonight it was claimed that the INLA (which is decommissioning its weapons) was responsible for 100 deaths in Northern Ireland including that of Airey Neave. Now call me a sad old pedant but Mrs Thatcher's friend was killed at the Palace of Westminster, it's just sloppy editorial management. This was quickly followed by the sad news that 255 British troops have now been killed in Afghanistan which is more than were killed during the Falklands War. The Guardian online page has the same statistic, now given that the Falklands War lasted less than a summer and we've been in Afghanistan since 2001 isn't this one of those 'slap your brow' moments. Surely more troops over a longer period of time fighting an army not largely made up of young conscripts is going to suffer, unfortunately, more casualties?

This is a photograph of a man who has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that power corrupts those who possess it. Metropolitan Police Commander Ali Dizaei has been sentenced to four years for assaulting and falsely arresting a man in a dispute over £600 and quite frankly I'm disgusted that a man who had risen so high and so quickly up the chain of command of the Met has got off so lightly.

It also begs the obvious question, do we really need foreign born nationals in our police force, particularly in such positions of authority. When what is now referred to in almost pejorative terms as 'political correctness' became part of the mainstream I was all in favour of it. After all I believed that judging somebody by their skin colour, sexual preference of religious beliefs was wrong and still do, the problem is that we have now bent over backwards so far we are kissing our own arses to satisfy even the tiniest grievance ethnic minorities have. This man was an accident waiting to happen, if Norman Stanley Fletcher regarded prison as an occupational hazard then this man regarded telling the truth to be the verbal equivalent of treading in dog shit. He has set back race relations in the Met years, a police force that almost handcuffed its self respect on the railings of Scotland Yard in response to the Macpherson report now finds that among its own number was a man who couldn't help lying. A person who was willing to perjure himself in a feeble attempt to gain revenge over a member of the public. You can't help wondering if the old 'I want to be judged my a jury of my peers' line was taken literally what would have happened, I imagine some of his former colleagues would have happily taken him out and given him a good kicking.

Mr Justice Simon said the sentence, two years in prison and two on licence, included a deterrent element "to send a clear message that police officers of whatever rank are not above the law". No it doesn't, it shows that once again the law is an ass if the Commander of the Met can get off with just two years! These people are in positions of trust, they are in positions of authority which they hold because of public consent, we don't elect our police chiefs they are supposed to get there on merit. This man was, and clearly still is, a sadly deluded individual, he gives immigrants a bad name, the police a bad name and anything connected with political correctness a bad name.