States Within The State

Who needs the City of London Police?

Seriously, its distinctive brass badges and buttons, and red and white chequered sleeve bands, cap bands and cravats, should be among the peculiarities of the City retained in some way when the coming Miliband Government liberates its nine thousand residents by making their square mile a Ward of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. That they should not have to endure a directly elected Police Commissioner is a very good reason, and not the only one, why nor should any of the rest of us.

But the separate Force itself hardly seems necessary when the Met is sending out letters to people who have been acquitted or never charged, warning them not to turn up to perfectly legal public protests. Or when the Met is diverting those protests away from the City, not even, to use the argot, the Met's manor. As with the protest itself, only viewers of Press TV will have known about these things. The BBC and Sky have mysteriously failed to notice.

Putting protestors in the same category as Her Majesty the Queen, who also may not enter the City without the special permission of the head of the last great Medieval republican oligarchy in Europe, right where the United Kingdom is supposed to be, but where in fact the laws enacted by Parliament do not apply, despite the City's guaranteed representation in the House of Commons. In principle, that representation is correct, since of course the mere people living there do have to pay the same taxes as the rest of us, unlike the businesses, largely foreign, which enjoy more votes than they do to the body that body that runs the place.

Yes, that would be Rupert Murdoch's private security firm, the Metropolitan Police. The Murdoch Empire, the Met, the City: how many more or there? How many more interconnected states are there within, if meaningfully within, this State? And when is anyone going to do anything about them?