Soapbox

Doc Martin wrote (see)

Dave, on your point on the delay, have you actually seen a quote saying the officer was only questioned under caution today? I only ask because rumours (which turn out to be accurate) of the results of the PM and the charge have been circulating for some days. All the IPCC said was ""Following the initial results of the second post mortem, a Metropolitan police officer has been interviewed under caution", no time period specified.

My source is also a journalist, on a broadsheet who as I said told me earlier in the week  that the officer had been questioned under charge as well as the results of the PM. Being questioned under charge is I am told is different from actually being charged so what the family's lawyers were saying is correct.(No doubt one of the legal eagles will correct me if I'm wrong).

Of course the final results of the second PM are apparently known too, I wonder how long the IPCC will take to publish them?

Another day another video of Police assault.

It's time this was taken out of the hands of the Police and IPCC who can't be trusted and a full Public Enquiry into the Police Force as a whole and the IPCC. It's becoming clear that either senior officers have no control over their staff or have authorised totally unlawful tactics on a mass scale.  The Head of the IPCC should also resign immediately for deliberately giving out false information in support of the Police and failing to retain the independence implied in their name.

You might say that Dave but I see the Police Federation are accusing the IPCC leader, Nick Hardwick, of conducting a witchhunt against those of its members 'policing' the G20 demonstrations.

Funny that. I thought (and hoped) it was a thug hunt.

Don't they realise that if they wore their identifying numbers there'd be no need for a hunt at all.

It's poor old Nick Hardwick I feel sorry for, caught as he is between a left wing libertarian action faction and bully blue boy baton bouncers. (Alliteration? It's a Welsh thing)

"We want answers!" exclaim they, and direct him to look overleaf to where they've listed the answers they'd prefer.

Not wearing numbers is nothing new, during the miners strike there were busloads of "picket busters" who wore no identification on Police uniforms and some of us at the time suspected that they weren't even police Officers since they had no tell tale "county" Gorgette's (the little badges on the lapels)

Funny how the Police brutality at that time seemed to be acceptable to the greater majority of the public. Hundreds of working men fighting for their jobs being bludgeoned indiscriminately around the head is even more extreme than those protesters of today getting a welt or two on the back of the legs. How times have changed!

To admit that today's tactics are unacceptable would mean that they would have to acknowledge the brutality used against the miners. Can you imagine them doing that?

> Funny how the Police brutality at that time seemed to be acceptable to the greater majority of the public.

Scargill hardly helped.  He may have been right about Thatcher wanting to destroy the miners and unions, but he really was an odious man.  People were fed up with the unions running the country, too; they hadn't forgotten the endless series of strikes, power cuts, mounds of rubbish, etc.

None of this justifies the politicisation of the police, or their use as front line troops, but it does give some understanding into why some sections of the public weren't entirely behind the miners.

The miners themselves weren't exactly angels, either.  Chicken and egg, perhaps, but...

There was great irony in the striking of South Wales miners seeing as 2/3 voted against it and the fact that Arthur Scargill was disliked by them almost as much as Margaret Thatcher was.  The fact is that in spite of there being no strike ballot in England, English miners were called out on strike and Welsh miners just didn't want to earn the name 'Scab'. Relationships between strikers and police in Wales were not good but they never  deteriorated to the level seen in England.

To this day in Wales, former miners really dislike non miners trying to hold forth on the Welsh dimension of the miners' strike holding the view that outsiders invariably get it wrong. Most that I have talked to, including my father, were and are of the opinion that the strike should never have happened.

At least it showed us the cynicism of Margaret Thatcher and her cohorts in their willingness to destroy a whole industry and to politicise the police at enormous economic and moral cost to the country just to attain a personal political objective. It also showed us that the impartiality and independence  of BBC reporting was a complete sham.

I have  used this knowledge to inform all my thoughts and assessments about the dealings of governments, the police and the BBC ever since.

Ian Tomlinson was unlawfully killed by a Metropolitan Police officer at the G20 protests, an inquest jury has said.