Mind How You Go

The Police are not necessarily in the best position to stir up public sympathy at the moment, since it is now clear that their knowledge of the 7/7 bomb plot was so complete that they effectively staged the thing in order to increase their own funding and extend their powers. But that was hardly all of them.

And the proposed cut in Police pay would be a breach of the arrangement whereby they voluntarily forgo their civil right to strike. The Police should not call the rest of us "civilians". They, too, are civilians, whom we pay to do what, should the need arise, we could and would all do for free. That is why, for example, they should have the right to strike. Or their long-established pay deal in lieu.

That is why that bastion of old-school trade unionism, the Police Federation, is absolutely correct in defending the entitlement of the whole community to that for which the whole community pays, namely the Police protection of each and every one of the whole community's members. All of Her Majesty's subjects are, as such, equal citizens, equally entitled to the services of Her Majesty's Constabulary.

As so often, the Crown guarantees in principle the equality defended in practice by the trade union movement.