I note that no-one has yet anonymously accused Ian Tomlinson of an indictable offence in a national newspaper. Are our standards in truly shameful, underhand, repellent duplicity slipping?
However, a lot of Tories who were OUTRAGED about Sir Ian Blair‘s term as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police seem to be…how can I put this? frit about criticising the police now that The Chief is essentially a Tory appointee.
In fact, they seem desperate to defend Sir Paul Stephenson come what may. Observe:
Ian Tomlinson says: April 8, 2009 at 10:32 am. I fought the law and the law won
Post title: Guess What Happened Next. Stay classy, Paul.
I suspect that informing a group of people that someone has died at the hands of the police is an effective field diagnostic test of psychological authoritarianism. But even so, it’s more than telling to look at some of those links and see the degree of fake concern about Jean Charles de Menezes that gets switched off like a tap with the change of partisan allegiance, to be replaced by a horrible victim-bashing rhetoric full of class-symbols (Millwall! Too many kids! Booze!).
de Menezes and Tomlinson are hardly equivalent events so it is maybe unwise to get carried away with a comparison like this. In one case, a quite deliberate public execution authorised by top brass and command centre. In the other, a random bully in uniform hits someone once with no oversight – would his superiors have condoned it?
No doubt the boss cops that told the police to cover their faces and badge numbers and so on will get off free and the hitter will carry the can. One main difference with Tomlinson is that everything is much more deniable for them.
I don’t really give a shit about labour or tories, being an SNP voter, so maybe this is why I’m not in either camp.
Is the corollary true – do the people who defended the de Menezes incident have a sudden concern for Tomlinson?