Yet It Was So

Peter Hitchens writes:

Swearing at the Police is wrong, and foolish too.

I have to say that even in my Trotskyist marching days I didn’t swear at the police. It would have struck me then, as it strikes me now, as a bad idea for all manner of reasons.  Though it wasn’t because I, then or ever, thought that police officers were tender plants who would wilt at the sound of expletives. It was just that if they didn’t like it, they were  rather better-placed than most people to make trouble for me.

But that’s a particular point. Though I don’t always succeed, I try very hard to keep from swearing at anybody, especially anybody who can’t hit back. I have a feeling – which I’ve explained here before – that swearing is a display of power, a way of letting someone know that he can’t hit back. I did also once, as an experiment, try swearing back at one of those louts who tells you to **** off when you ask him to pick up the litter he has just dropped. It was curiously unsatisfying. Perhaps my plummy voice isn’t menacing enough, but I ended up just feeling a bit soiled, worried about becoming what I had beheld. So these days I tend to riposte cheerily with ‘How unimprovably witty and trenchant!’, which at least has the virtue of baffling them.

There are many other arguments against the level of bad language in modern Britain, and I still stand by my view that our culture is much too relaxed about four-letter words. They’re there for moments of grave stress and danger, and also as a warning that the next step will be violence. Make them too common, and, like any other currency, they’ll lose their value and their power, and we’ll also lose an important safety zone between civility and blows. We’ve all heard the story about the  soldier who (as soldiers do)  used the f-word and the c-word as others would use punctuation . When one day he dropped a General Purpose Machine Gun on his foot (this hurts) he stood mouthing silently for about a minute, unable to think of anything suitable to say. He hadn’t any words in his vocabulary to cope with the occasion.

So I’m not very sympathetic to Andrew Mitchell who, as far as I know, swears rather too much.  Nor am I a friend of his. Nor do I support his party, nor seek to defend the government he helps to sustain. Nor do I care at all whether he stays in his government job or quits. I’d go further. I’d say that if he quits, the incident will have provided a useful safety valve for our unresponsive, arrogant elite, who can pretend, with such sackings that ordinary people ( or ‘plebs’?) have some say in the government of the country. They don’t, of course. Personally,  I’d rather be called a ‘pleb’, and have some influence over events,  than be smarmed by politicians and have my views utterly ignored. I’m quite proud of having my traceable origins in the Portsmouth slums and, further back, in the Wiltshire and Cornish countryside.

I didn’t write anything about Mr Mitchell’s Downing Street confrontation last week because the capital punishment issue took up so much time and space, and also because I had a nagging voice in my mind saying ‘Yes, it’s wrong to swear at the police. But isn’t it also wrong for the police to be as officious as they often are these days, and have we heard the whole story?’ Plus, as a cyclist, I’ve noticed a petty but annoying development recently, by which bicycles are banned and blocked from places where cars are allowed. How can this be right? A letter in this morning’s Guardian summed up my feeling by correctly pointing out that if Mr Mitchell had been sprawled, emperor-like, in the back of a big fat armour-plated ministerial car,  he would have been waved through by the very same officers who ordered him to get off his machine and walk through a side gate.

So why was he held up when he was riding a bike, a more democratic and far cheaper form of transport, leaving aside any contentious green and environmental considerations? Could it be because the police, like too many of us, see the car as  badge of status, and the bicycle as a sign they are dealing with a weaker, less important person, what you might call a ‘pleb’? I might add that Mr Mitchell was on his way out of Downing Street, so there was no doubt he had already established that he had permission to be there. There was no great need to check his credentials to let him out. According to the original story, he was told ‘ security rules mean they open the main gate as little as possible’. Is that so? So do they keep two or three ministerial or ambassadorial cars waiting in convoys,  inside and outside , until there are enough of them to justify opening it? And do they tell their impatient passengers that if they wish to leave sooner they must get out of their cars and walk through the pedestrian gate? Do you know, I rather doubt it.

If anyone watched the gate all day, I think they’d find it was opening and shutting the whole time, and opening it for Mr Mitchell (or anyone else)  on his bike really didn’t make much difference to the daily tally. Short of shutting it the whole time, and building a tunnel for the occupants, it’s going to have to be opened quite a lot.  So why not for a cyclist?   I wonder how many cyclists pass through each day, and how many cars and vans? After all, here’s a conundrum. It’s illegal to ride a bike on the pavement, but legal to ride it on the road,  because it’s a vehicle. So why must it stop being a vehicle when it comes to opening a gate designed for vehicles? Again, it seems to come back to the second-class status of bikes and their riders. So Mr Mitchell, despite his unpleasant foul-mouthed outburst, might have a sort of case.

Then other doubts come trickling in. How did this story reach the Sun newspaper, exactly? Who told The Sun, and on what terms? We’re told that tourists and members of the public were said to have been ‘visibly shocked’. Have any come forward to say so? Did these outraged individuals tell The Sun about the incident? Or did someone else? If so, who? Were the outraged members of the public interviewed as potential witnesses by the outraged police officers? There are enough of them (police officers I mean, not outraged ones necessarily) around there, on both sides of the gate, to do this if necessary.

I’m faintly concerned about this because the tourists who hang around Downing Street are mostly from abroad and wouldn’t have known who Mr Mitchell was (most British people wouldn’t have done, then, either) . They might not even have known he was swearing, foreign swearing being a completely different thing from ours.   And it’s a noisy location. The last time I bicycled past it, which may have been last Wednesday, as it happened, there was a very noisy demonstration on the other side of Whitehall, which seemed to be something to do with legal protection for prostitutes, or ‘sex workers’ as they are now termed. The word ‘SLUT!’ was being used quite vigorously, if I remember rightly, cutting through the mighty roar of London’s traffic. Though not ‘Pleb!’ or ‘****!’.

Since then we seem to have learned a bit about the police officers involved. One was a woman. A connection, which seems to me to be pretty tenuous, was made with the murder of two policewomen in Manchester. This is a horrible event, but it doesn’t actually have much to do with this much less important moment in our national life. They considered arresting him under the Public Order Act, or so we are told.  Well, why didn’t they if they were so appalled?  Chief Whips are not above the law. The evidence against him could then have been tested, first by the CPS and then on oath in a court of law. This, increasingly,  seems to me to be the most satisfactory ending. It’s been suggested that if Mr Mitchell disputes what has been said,  he should either sue the officers or quit, but I think a criminal court would be a better place.

There’s also a sad thing to add, about how police officers in general (some nobly resist, and I know it) have been transformed from a fairly genial bunch of public servants, generally ready to do a bit of give-and-take with anybody, into grim-jawed and humourless robocops, festooned with machine-pistols, tasers, handcuffs and big clubs, and got up like soldiers in some future fantasy of hunger and chaos. When, long ago, I worked at the House of Commons, the coppers who guarded the building were of the genial type, big, often bearded, wise, infinitely experienced, discreet and humorous, and boy, did they work at knowing who all the MPs were. The moment the election results were in, they got hold of the leaflets and made picture directories. Within a week or two of the new Parliament assembling they could greet every member by name. Significantly, they still wore the old uniform of tunic and helmet, and I am quite sure this made them behave more like sworn citizens in the office of constable,  and less like cops (the unlovely word The Sun likes to use to describe British policemen and policewomen these days).

This was fantastic security, of course, better than any computer, because they also knew instantly if they saw people in parts of the building who shouldn’t have been there. In those days, there were just a few crowd barriers at the entrance to Downing Street. And the coppers on duty were the old sort. The ludicrous, hideous Ceausescu-style gates that are now there had not yet been built, and ‘security’ wasn’t the ultimate, unanswerable excuse for shutting off politicians from the public that it has since become, though by then we had had nearly 20 years of the IRA blowing up London, a much greater material threat than the nebulous ‘Al Qaeda’ menace.

I am old enough to remember when we ‘plebs’ could walk along Downing Street just like any other street – I remember taking part in a demonstration in the street itself as Ted Heath was trying form a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe in February 1974. You could have ridden your bicycle in and out, Chief Whip or not,  and nobody would have cared.  You could probably have left it leaning against the wall, honestly.  The deeply sad thing is that this recollection should now seem  so strange and hard to believe. Yet it was so.