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The Times – Devious, dissembling, dodgy. And that’s just the police, by Theodore Dalrymple<br/> The criminal justice system is being perverted by all sides

Cases such as the one I have outlined are very common. All my doctor and lawyer friends are familiar with them. Their prevalence is part of the dialectical relationship between the degeneration of the public service, which is now a vast trough from which a large class of educated people feed, and the appalling behaviour of the public that makes the expansion of the public service necessary, or at least justifies it, in the first place. As a 16th-century German bishop put it, “the poor are a gold mine”.

Lack of integrity and straightforwardness have a corrosive effect on the entire population. The police are now institutionally devious, if I may coin a phrase. A recent book by a PC Copperfield, called Wasting Police Time, tells us how the police improve their abominably low clear-up rates by various scams, for example charging both parties to a neighbourly scuffle with a crime, and getting both parties to make statements against the other on the promise that no charges will be brought.

Hey presto, two crimes have been solved for the price of one incident, to which almost certainly the police should not have been called in the first place. As to the burglary across the road, the householder will be lucky to receive any attention from the police other than a crime number.

Surely the imperative for high clear-up rates, and the tendency of a part of the population to use the police for purely temporary and personal ends, could be solved by increasing the number of prosecutions for wasting police time, at least until the habit of wasting police time itself became less widespread.

In the meantime, comrades (to quote the late Josef Stalin in another context), life is getting ever better, ever merrier: at least for the apparatchiks and nomenklatura of that vast organism that is spreading faster than killer bugs in the hospitals under its jurisdiction, the public administration of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

Yay, the book’s still making waves!

Update:

Telegraph – World of books. By A N Wilson<br/> Why Peter Rabbit is a child at heart

Visiting the Bethnal Green Museum of Childhood,

What was scandalously lacking was any sense of the tragedy of children’s lives – the ones who suffered in this place, from degradation, poverty, and disease.

Instead, there is a special exhibition of little Miffy, a rabbit devised and drawn by someone who, as far as I know, has no connection with Bethnal Green – the Dutch artist Dick Bruna, or dick bruna as his website calls him.

Miffy is a good emblem of the modern cult of Happy Kiddie-dom. She is a two-dimensional rabbit from whom all expression and all suffering have been removed. Beatrix Potter, whose childhood was miserable, depicted rabbits who were not merely exquisitely drawn, but who suffer from the perpetual and realistic dread of death. Mr McGregor waits with his rake. No one would make Miffy into a rabbit pie. She does not taste of anything. A Blairite before her time, Miffy, in her flat primary colours, inhabits a world where evil is not admitted to exist.

Turn from Miffy to the real children in the museum. Some of toddlers squat in the hideous play areas, where safe-as-houses plastic balls in primary colours can be hurled about without injury. But most of the children are boiling with rage, or snivelling with colds, or shrieking because they have momentarily lost their mothers. Childhood is a time of everlasting anxiety and panic, which is what our greatest childhood literature captures.

I came home from Bethnal Green and began to read Jane Eyre again, with its account of a hysterical child being locked in the Red Room until she had calmed down, followed by the tortures of Mr Brocklehurst’s school, Lowood. That is the truth of life and the Miffy-Blair version will not satisfy anyone for long. Far from being reassuring, Miffy is deeply sinister. It is Miffy, not Peter Rabbit, who would become a Nazi. …

David Copperfield and Jane Eyre and Peter Rabbit are read by each generation as true depictions of childhood, with all its fears and horrors. They are art, that is true. Miffy, by contrast, is a pill offered patients to stop them beating their heads against the glass. Miffy is poison.

Wow! I can’t believe he’s already being read by generations of children! What success!