Three degrees of falsehood, and ten degrees of the Eighth Circle

Last summer, from the web-site of the University of York’s Department of Mathematics (of all unlikely places to find any lit.crit), there was an exhaustive history of who and how the cliché originated about “lies, damn lies and statistics”. The conclusion, if somewhat fuzzy, declared the begetter was Sir Charles Dilke, but deriving it from many earlier variants.

Somewhat conveniently, if only for regional pride, was:

A query in Notes and Queries (7th Ser. xii) (1891 Oct. 10), p. 288, reads as follows:

DEGREES OF FALSEHOOD. – Who was it who said, “There are three degrees of falsehood: the first is a fib, the second is a lie, and then come statistics”?      ST. SWITHIN

According to Folklore 41 (3) (1930), 301 and 63 (1) (1952), 4–5, “St. Swithin” was a pseudonym used by Mrs Eliza Gutch (1840–1931), of Holgate Lodge, York.

They’re still at it!

The most blackened liar is the politician who twists a statistic to support a point. Here, from the letters page of this week’s Ham&High in front of Malcolm, we have a prime specimen:

Stephen Greenhalgh, London’s deputy mayor for policing and crime, writes:

Crime has fallen, but we want to boost public confidence and make London safer. [etc., etc.]

A Google search suggests Greenhalgh issues, and re-issues press releases on this line, regurgitates similar statements on public occasions, quite indefatigably. There’ll probably be another one along in the morning. That’s why the grateful citizens of London pay him something around £100,000 a year, plus expenses and pension rights.

Let him who is without sin …

Meanwhile, Greenhalgh is himself not above suspicion, and Dave Hill has him in his sights:

As the police watchdog considers whether to investigate Boris Johnson’s policing deputy Stephen Greenhalgh over alleged illegal conduct by public officers of Hammersmith and Fulham council when he was its leader, it is instructive to consider the passion with which Greenhalgh supported the ambitious redevelopment scheme at the heart of the affair – the Earls Court project.

And then, lest we forget, there was the City Hall groping:

Boris Johnson‘s deputy mayor for policing has apologised “unreservedly” following an allegation that he molested a female member of staff in a city hall lift.

Stephen Greenhalgh, the former Tory leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council, who now holds day-to-day responsibility in the mayor’s office for policing and crime, allegedly patted a female member of staff on the bottom while in a lift last month.

Last seen above Lenin’s tomb

Put Greenhalgh into an ill-cut Soviet era suit, and one instantly lines him up alongside the Bulganins,  Malenkovs and Berias for a Red Square May Day parade:

So, for the occasion, let’s adapt a Stalinite apothegm:

It’s not the crimes that count, it’s how, and by whom they are counted.

In the exact case of crime statistics, the Guardian‘s Datablog, Facts are sacred, ran the slide-rule over the official numbers a while ago. It noted all kinds of jiggery-pokery:

• A concurrent but separate ONS publication shows that the rate of police recorded crime has fallen more quickly than the rate of reported crime found in the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW).
• It’s important to bear in mind that today’s release focuses on police recorded crimes. These are provided to the Home Office by police authorities and forces, not all of whom collect data with the same precision according to a 2007 audit. This is problematic because it means that a higher number in a given area may indicate an improvement in reporting by police rather than a rise in criminality.
• … crimes recorded by police are unlikely to represent the total number of crimes that take place. To understand this better, it’s useful to also consider the CSEW which asks people face-to-face about their experiences of, attitudes about and perceptions of a range of crimes.
• The gap between police-recorded and survey-reported crime has always been significant, but the distance between the two has widened. In 2004/05, there was an effective recording rate of 52.8%, while in the latest statistical release, this figure has dropped to 42.4%

And even this:

• Another of the more interesting figures is that of the perception of crime. The CSEW asks people whether they think crime is getting worse where they live and nationally. So, people think crime is getting worse – but not where they live. It’s the gap between what we know is going on and what we think is going on.

That last one, where Malcolm is sitting, means that the propaganda of stooges like Greenhalgh may be working.

Put the whole shebang together, and the only reasonable conclusion is:

Crime figures aren’t worth the ink used to print them.

Conjugation: I’m usually a law-abiding citizen, you’re a bit dodgy: that bloke ought to go down for a long stretch.

Meanwhile the really big crimes — Harry-the-Horse and  the multinationals who don’t pay taxes, the fraudsters who exploit concessions for charity to rip us all off — are officially not crimes at all.

Then there’s the little stuff:

It’s illegal to ride a motorcycle or drive using hand-held phones or similar devices.

The rules are the same if you’re stopped at traffic lights or queuing in traffic.

It’s also illegal to use a hand-held phone or similar device when supervising a learner driver or rider.

Malcolm would give fair odds that at least the second of those requirements is not known to the average driver. Yet — note — all are “illegal”, which means “against the law”. And Malcolm, waiting for a few minutes at bus-stops in north London, counts five, six or more drivers quite blatantly disregarding the law, frequently in full view of that CCTV camera that collect fines if you pause for thirty seconds to allow a passenger to get out (£50 free and for nothing to the local authority).

Here’s a writ that goes unenforced on a daily basis:

Bernard Hogan-Howe [the Met's Commissioner] indicated that he believed the current punishment of three penalty points and a £60 fine was not a strong enough deterrent for drivers.

By increasing the punishment to six points, drivers would be banned from the road if they were caught twice for the offence within three years.

Writing on the Met’s website, the commissioner said this would make drivers take the law on driving while on the phone more seriously and improve road safety.

That interprets as we don’t bother to enforce the law. We expect you, the potential offenders to understand and obey the law. But if we’re forced to apply the law, we expect it to have teeth. If only because it makes us look as though we’re doing our job. And, if the offence was significantly up-graded, we’d have more motivation, and look even better. Oh, and by the way, if you’re phoning and driving, don’t mow down that child, because — if you do — we have to check your phone records, which is a real fag.

That makes all the more remarkable the coincidence, nay the the assiduity of the Met Police, in catching (and so banning) Chris Huhne for driving the Old Kent Road while phoning. And that, by coincidence, within weeks of him avoiding a ban for speeding by having his wife take the points.

Where does this place the Office of National Statistics, Deputy Mayor Greenhalge, and others? —

Destination: Malebolge

The Pert Young Piece snaps …

Today’s helicopter crash-site in Vauxhall is adjacent to the rail line used daily by said PYP.

She sends an iPhone snatched shot of not very much — the drama is over. Except the proximity of the Virgin Atlantic poster seems in bad taste:

Flying in the face of ordinary

Meanwhile, The Big Issue (also there, if you look) was raised by the local MP at PMQs:

12:18 – Kate Hoey, the Vauxhall MP, raises the helicopter crash in her constituency. She’s asking rather a long question, but gets lots of attention as she demands a closer look at how helicopters fly through the centre of London. Cameron says the “terrifying pictures” on the TV underline the points she makes. “I’m sure they will be looked at,” he says.

Since Redfellow Hovel is directly below one of the Met Police helicopter’s main routes, Malcolm feels keenly interested.

Afterthought:

Kate Hoey, interviewed on BBC TV News, has it that the Met Police had grounded their helicopter(s) because of the weather conditions — that is the fog which had closed London City Airport.

That raises the serious question: if it wasn’t safe for the Met (who must know London as intimately as anyone) to fly, why was a commercial pilot at liberty to flit around using only the issue 1.0 human eyeball?

Succession planning

There now follows a Malcolmian gripe.

The BBC website has this:

The number of young police officers in England and Wales has fallen by nearly 50% in two years.

There were 9,088 officers aged under 26 in 2009-10 but only 4,758 in 2011-12, figures obtained by the BBC show.

In Cleveland, North Wales and Staffordshire the fall in the number of officers aged under 26 was more than 70% over the period.

Overall police numbers hit a nine-year low in 2012, due to tighter budget constraints slowing recruitment.

But this data, obtained in a Freedom of Information request by BBC Radio 4′s The World This Weekend, shows how much of that fall has been among younger officers.

That is disturbing for any number of reasons, including:

• the tighter budget constraints, which may or may not be a “good idea” when pressures in society are reaching new levels of tension;
• the growing imbalance in the police service, limiting recruitment and promotion;
• that it required yet another of those FoI requests to extract information from officialdom: if the Home Office have the figures — and clearly they did and do — they should be up front, available and in the public domain. How else can equal opportunities be assured?

Malcolm makes two reliable predictions:

• Sooner or later an intelligent sociologist (such creatures do exist) will unearth the information that the heralded drop in crime is only a drop in reported crime. If police stations are closed, if there are fewer boots on the ground, if contacting the police involves being bounced around from call-centre to clerical officer and — with luck — eventually to a real, live copper in the same county, then there will be fewer reported crimes. Surely it cannot be true that, on some nights, the whole county of Norfolk , all two thousand square miles, is “policed” by just four or five cars?
• In the not too distant future officialdom will suddenly wake up to a yawning age-gap in the personnel of the police service. This is not a trivial matter.

When Malcolm became a teacher in the mid-’60s, he entered a staff-room where the generational divide was all too obvious. There were the post-war entrants to the profession, highly experienced, excellent teachers, military-brusque, but many already reaching and anticipating retirement. Thanks to the poor pay for entrants (it was about the same as the lowest professional grades of the Post Office, and far less than the Hong Kong or Rhodesian police), recruitment under the 13 years of Tory rule (1951-1964) had been slow and unreliable. To that we may lay ome — by no means all — the washy-washiness of state education in the 1970s.

Somewhere in there the teaching profession became, for better or worse, the exclusive province of female teachers in primary schools, and an obvious and attractive social advance for ethnic groups in all levels  — and thereby unrepresentative of the wider society.

Further down that BBC report we find:

Olly Martins, the PCC for Bedfordshire, which saw a 58% fall, said the implications of this trend were very worrying.

“To secure policing by consent, and thereby be as effective as possible, forces need to look like the communities they serve.

“This is particularly true when it comes to the need to engage with younger people, who are disproportionately represented both as victims of crime and among its perpetrators.”

In the side bar, Martin Rosenbaum, “Freedom of information specialist”, repeats that:

It raises questions about how representative the police force is, especially given the issues about relations between the police and young people in some areas. And it also can’t help with the concerns about the level of physical fitness among the police.

Society will be paying for this extended recession — and by no means just in monetary terms, and far, far beyond the politics of policing — well into the next generation.

A ‘minor’ study in relativity

From the running strap-line, across the BBC News website:

LATEST:

Nine police officers were injured and 18 people were arrested during minor rioting in Belfast last night

Now, if it had been in Brixton, or Tottenham …

How to distort “news”

The Daily Mail is a low-down, dishonest, corrupting Tory rag — and needs constantly to be exposed for that. Fortunately, the Mail itself does so on a daily basis. Its whole existence is predicated to the Big Lie:

… the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Malcolm deliberately disguises the source of that quotation, lest it fall foul of Godwin’s Law.

Today’s front page is a magnificent example of the Big Lie:

The essence of the Mail piece is:

Prescott loses police commissioner poll in his own back yard of Hull to a TORY

Except the election wasn’t just for Hull: it was for the whole Humberside Constabulary area. Here is the difference:

The political complexion, as of 2010, of the parliamentary constituencies of Humberside looks very skewed:

Ten constituencies, five Tory, five Labour, which might seem an even balance. The County seats all Tory: the Borough seats tending Labour, as one might expect. A closer look at the numbers suggests the Humberside area is safe Tory country: David Davis’s Haltemprice and Howden is regarded as the second safest Tory constituency in Britain, and has never deviated from that loyalty since 1837.

Add up the 2010 results and we have 40.8% Tory, 34.2% Labour and 25% Lib Dem:

Now consider Thursday’s results of the Police and Crime Commissioner election (though Malcolm never did get the hang of how to ‘commission’ crime):

Accepting that Prescott lost on the Second Round (39,933 to 42,164 or a 48.6/51.4% two-party split), on that first count:

• Prescott caned the Tory — it is, in crude terms, a four or five per cent swing (and it has to be accepted that the “county” types turned out far, far better than the urbanites);
• the Tory vote went AWOL, barely squeaking in ahead of the independent — even the egregious Godfrey Bloom (surely one of the more disreputable and bizarre UKIP types, which itself is saying something) splitting off a sixth of the total poll;
• the Tory candidate was only rescued — just — on that second round by rolling up the odds-and-sods vote: those 19,375 who did express a second preference split for the Tory 2:1;
• the Lib Dems were totally creamed: even proportionately, more than a third of their vote evaporated.

For the record, Paul Davison — who ran that close third —  is an ex-Police Superintendent, and probably the best qualified of all the candidates.

The real determinant was tthe total failure of second preference transfers (which, as every aficionado of Irish politics knows, is key to the whole operation). Only 27% of the odds-and-sods ballots bothered to make a second preference. That is either a failure of voter education or a clear statement by a majority to vote “neither of the above”. 51,665 second preferences did not go for either the Labour or the Tory in the final run-off — which amounts to an absolute majority of those who turned out. We should not forget the “alternative vote” was the preferred option in the Great Constitutional Débâcle of 5th May 2011. If we needed concrete evidence that AV is a sham, and no substitute for proper proportional representation, here is the concrete evidence.

Yet the Daily Mail says it was all about Prescott, and the Daily Mail is a dishonourable rag.

And the Daily Mail says it was all about the city of Hull, and nothing to do with the other lands north and south of the estuary, and, for sure, the Daily Mail is a dishonourable lie-sheet.

When constabulary duty’s to be done, to be done …

… A policeman’s lot is not a happy one, happy one.

— William Schwenck Gilbert for The Pirates of Penzance.

• The picture (right) is the baritone Walter Passmore of the original production.
• The song was a favourite among London coppers, at least down to the mid-twentieth century. Malcolm heard it from his own (ex-PC) father’s lips.

Now that the dust settles on the dismal Plebgate business, now that Andrew Mitchell, a former UN peacemaker,  can polish his bike in peace, there’s still the odd bit of gristle to be chewed.

As we saw in yesterday’s Sindy, John Rentoul has come over all fair-minded:

I thought Cameron made a mistake in not insisting that Mitchell step down straight away. Which is not the same as saying that I thought Mitchell deserved to resign. Indeed, I thought he was more sinned against than sinning. Being told that it is “policy” to wheel your bicycle through the pedestrian gate is monstrous anti-cyclist discrimination (and jobsworthism of the highest order). Losing your temper and swearing at a police officer is a sin, obviously, but it may not be a crime. The Court of Appeal quashed a conviction last year, ruling that police officers are used to hearing the f-word, which is “rather commonplace”, and that it was unlikely to cause them “harassment, alarm or distress”. It was the police who, in breach of their rules, gave the story to The Sun.

OK … yawn … let’s move on …

Well, perhaps not. Put aside the “rather commonplace” adverbial reinforcer, and what are we still left with?

So, let’s play it again:

“You guys are supposed to [ … ] help us.”

Consider who are “you” and who are “us”

“You” are, most immediately, the security at the Downing Street gates. In Mitchell’s mind they are there mainly to open the main gates to let him pass through: that is the beginning and end of this little demonstration of why we’re “not all in this together”.

The police officers see their role a trifle differently, indeed from a more elevated level. They are there to keep the peace, to maintain security, and to protect the entire citizenry, who may include elected politicians.

Beyond the immediate police detachment, Mitchell may be claiming ownership and the dedicated aid and assistance of the entire Metropolitan Police, and by further extension of the police service nationally. At which, Malcolm mutters, “Up to a point, Lord Copper.“

We have been here before

Just how far political (i.e. Thatcherite) intervention went in the aftermath of the Hillsborough tragedy may be just about arguable. We do know that Thatcher herself was closeted with South Yorkshire police chief a day or so before 164 police statements were re-written to fit the “official” script.

And now:

A Nottinghamshire MP is to call for an inquiry into alleged manipulation of evidence by South Yorkshire Police during the miners’ strike.

John Mann, Labour MP for Bassetlaw, said claims made in a BBC Inside Out programme relating to the so-called Battle of Orgreave must be examined.

The claims, that junior officers were told what to write in their statements, were “very convincing”, said Mr Mann.

South Yorkshire Police said it would consider whether a review was needed.

What we know is that the cases against arrested miners were built on false evidence, as after Hillsborough:

… a barrister specialising in criminal trials, Mark George QC, analysed 40 police officers’ Orgreave statements, and found that many contained identical descriptions of alleged disorder by the miners. To prove the offence of riot, the prosecution has to establish a scene of general disorder within which a defendant committed a particular act, for example throwing a stone, which would otherwise carry a much lesser charge.

George found that 34 officers’ statements, supposed to have been compiled separately, used the identical phrase: “Periodically there was missile throwing from the back of the pickets.”

One paragraph, of four full sentences, was identical word for word in 22 separate statements. It described an alleged charge by miners, including the phrase: “There was however a continual barrage of missiles.”

Michael Mansfield QC, who defended three of the acquitted miners, described South Yorkshire police’s evidence then as “the biggest frame-up ever”.

One case, against Bryan Moreland, spectacularly collapsed when a Home Office graphologist went on oath to declare the police officer’s signature was a fabrication. Moreover:

[Chief Constable] Wright did not accept any fault at all in the Orgreave operation and prosecutions. But he acknowledged unapologetically that there was a deliberate effort to convict miners of riot and unlawful assembly, which carried potentially long, even life, prison sentences. In a report to the police committee dated 25 September 1985, Wright set out the details of the operation to deal, he said, with escalating violence in picketing at the Orgreave coking plant, which miners have always argued was exaggerated.

“The chief constable decided that the usual charge of disorderly conduct, contrary to the Public Order Act, was inadequate and that, where appropriate, charges of unlawful assembly and riot should be preferred,” Wright wrote in his report.

We’ll be back to continue that in a moment. So far, the bottom line seems to be: in Thatcher’s day, the police — at least those of the South Yorkshire force — were  supposed to [ … ] help us. We have that on the authority of the Baroness herself:

There are those who are using violence and intimidation to impose their will on others who do not want it. They are failing because of two things.

First, because of the magnificent police force well trained for carrying out their duties bravely and impartially (loud cheers).

And secondly, because the overwhelming majority of people in this country are honourable, decent and law abiding and want the law to be upheld and will not be intimidated, and I pay tribute to the courage of those who have gone into work through these picket lines, to the courage of those at Ravenscraig and Scunthorpe for not going to be intimidated out of their jobs and out of their future. Ladies and Gentlemen we need the support of everyone in this battle which goes to the very heart of our society. The rule of law must prevail over the rule of the mob.

Which should all be read with implicit and emphatic first-person pronouns: My impartiality. My police. My intimidation. My law. My rules. To get her cheering audience, Thatcher had to make that speech at Banbury Cattle Market, in one of the safest Tory seats in the country.

Any blame for all this politicising of the police goes right (far right) to the top. The poor bloody constabulary were told, even ordered to submit their notebooks for editing by Chekisty and commissars. That is no obscene exaggeration: it was the way things were done in South Yorkshire under Chief Constable Wright (and so we continue from that earlier quotation):

He set up a dedicated unit to target the miners: “A chief superintendent well experienced in CID work was appointed and directed by the chief constable to organise the collection and collation of evidence, and the preparation of prosecution files whenever the scale and nature of events at Orgreave so required.”

On 18 June 1984, the day of the most notorious confrontation, when police were filmed attacking miners then claimed they were attacked first, Wright recorded: “The evidence-gathering team comprised one detective inspector, one detective sergeant, and four detective constables.” It has never been revealed who these officers or the more senior commanding officers were, nor if any were then involved in what has been labelled the black propaganda unit which conducted the campaign to falsely blame the Liverpool supporters for the Hillsborough disaster.

For the record, at that time young Andrew Mitchell was girding his loins and polishing his bicycle clips to become a devoutly Thatcherite Tory MP for the Gedling constituency of Greater Nottingham, not a million miles from the core territory of the strike-breakers.

And now for “us”

If  ’You guys are supposed to [ … ] help us’, let us consider the precise definition of us in this context.

At first sight it might be the us of the government. Yet that doesn’t quite comprehend Mitchell’s position. After all, the Chief Whip  is the one senior occupant of Downing Street who is there primarily as the Gauleiter of the majority parliamentary party. Cue wikipedia:

In British politics, the Chief Whip of the governing party in the House of Commons is usually appointed as Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury so that the incumbent, who represents the whips in general, has a seat and a voice in the Cabinet. By virtue of holding the office of Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, the Government Chief Whip has an official residence at 12 Downing Street. However, the Chief Whip’s office is currently located at 9 Downing Street.

To be clear, we do not have a ‘governing party’ in this parliament. We are saddled with a coalition. There are two Deputy Chief Whips, of whom one is Alistair Carmichael of the LibDems, who does not have bicycling access to Downing Street. When the Chief Whip speaks in the Commons (and, by tradition, such occasions are few and far between), it is specifically in a party-political context.

So Chief Whip Mitchell (as was) was a Conservative Party official demanding obedience from his subservient lesser-beings. Whether the term he used was “plebs” or “plods”, he was claiming l’état, c’est moi.

That is far, far more damaging than any fucking adverb.

Just Kidding

Today the Lady in Malcolm’s Life and the Pert Young Piece headed off to risk their credit cards against London’s mercantile finest. This is what gets called “retail therapy”.

Malcolm was left, bereft, solitary, and told to have a meal ready by seven p.m.

What’s to do?

Well, down to Highbury and Islington, catch the “Overground” to Wapping, and investigate a couple of boozers in Ratcliff(e) Highway. Wapping station, incidentally, is one of the most likely locations of Execution Dock, where we shall look in shortly

Malcolm’s emotional tie here is his Dear Old Dad, who was a Thames Division copper only a year or two before the picture below. That’s the River Thames police, the oldest official police force in the world. Therefore Wapping Police Station is also the oldest in the world. It’s also another possible site for Execution Dock.

In these degenerate days, it’s merely the Marine Support Unit.

Shiver me timbers, matey!

A couple of doors short of Wapping police station is the Captain Kidd.

Now, don’t get carried away here. Curb your romantic propensities. It’s a bit of contrivance. Despite its venerable appearance — and it was carved out of another of those warehouses and counting houses, the pub dates back all of a couple of decades.

It’s hardly prepossessing from the street: you even have to look for the hanging sign to locate it. You enter by an alley-way, and all is revealed. Which is worth waiting for.

For once the pub interior decorators worked with what they’ve got. The result is more than passable. Banquettes around the wall under non-memorabililia of the eponymous Kidd fore-and-aft. Other tables in the space of the room. A peninsular bar. Those fine windows and the magnificent view of the Upper Pool of London. Slip out the side doors, to the terrace, and it’s even better. It’s a Sam Smith’s house, so Old Brewery Bitter at well-below-London prices. There’s the standard pub menu, too (and, it is rumoured, a restaurant upstairs). All plus points.

The really instructive point is the mixed clientèle. Wapping hasn’t forsaken its working-class roots. The river side of the Highway has the seven-figure apartments with full river views. A bit back are the Peabody Buildings and and the local-authority flats. Both sides of the community seem comfortable here.

A very political pirate

The story of William Kidd is well known: the son of the Greenock manse who went abroad to make his fortune, served King (Billy, since you ask) and country

• and Governor Codrington against the French in the Caribbean
• and Richard Coote — the earl of Bellomont and newly designated governor of New York and the Massachusetts Bay — against the Dutch in the New York colony.

He had already made some powerful political friends (and, the obverse of that coin, similarly enemies) when he  fell in with another conniving Scot, Robert Livingstone, who owned lands and businesses in New York. Livingstone and Kidd and Coote cooked up a scheme, to get London merchant interests to finance a scheme to clean up the piracy of the Indian Ocean, and turn a pretty profit. So Livingstone, Kidd and Coote had their their names on the prospectus, but behind them covertly were the Whig grandees: the earls of Shrewsbury, Orford, and Romney and John Lord Somers.

In April 1696 Kidd left London, kitted out with the potent Adventure Galley. He sailed first to New York, where he recruited some ninety hardened pirates, and then set sail for Madagascar, which was HQ for Indian Ocean pirates. Rather than take on the pirates, Kidd then went north and raided the pilgrims in the Red Sea. he found the pilgrim convoy protected by an Indiaman, and so his scheme was flushed out into the open. Kidd then took his Adventure Galley to prey along the Indian coast. Those pirates in Kidd’s crew were less than satisfied with the results, so far, of their efforts; and Kidd seems to have been threatened with mutiny. Somehow he laid out and killed a gunner, William Moore, with a metal-banded barrel. This would have consequences.

Back in Madagascar Kidd was in full league with the local pirates. He had a bit of luck taking half a dozen ships — though only two were French, and so covered by his privateering licence. By now the East India Company, under pressure from the Mughals, wanted Kidd’s head. Influence was peddled back in London, and Kidd was an outlaw. Coote, in New York, was told to lay hands on Kidd when he showed up.

Nemesis

Kidd retraced his outward voyage, first via the Caribbean, where he discovered he was on the Most Wanted list, then along the east coast of the Americas, down-sizing his crew and depositing his considerable winnings (just where is one of the great treasure-hunting myths and legends). He retained just enough to tempt Coote into a deal. Coote knew which side his bread was buttered: he arrested Kidd, and sent him (and some remaining loot) to London. The rest of Kidd’s wealth (about £6,000) was requisitioned by Coote as “expenses”, and went to buy land in Greenwich Village.

In London Kidd was approached by the Tories, now firmly in power, to peach on his former Whig backers. He refused (presumably because he wasn’t prepared to annoy anyone at this stage). The Whig lords, who stood too close for comfort to charges of treason, quietly let Kidd go to trial. Kidd was found guilty of piracy, and the murder of William Moore. About all that was remarkable about this stitch-up of a trial is that Kidd’s privateering documents had gone missing, and were turned up only in the last century. Those documents wouldn’t have saved Kidd, but their absence goes to show that someone in authority had his card marked.

At Execution Dock on 23 May 1701 Kidd was swung from the gallows. The rope broke. Its replacement worked a treat.

Nicely put 3

This is definitely becoming a habit …

The whole of Matthew Norman’s Telegraph piece, Coming through … the arrogance of power, piquing the woebegone Andrew Mitchell bears reading and enjoying. And the accompanying image of Mitchell behind bars adds an extra delight.

We are all well aware that the Telegraph doesn’t have the hots for the Cameroons. As a result individual columnists are licensed to roam freely. It’s a long, long time since the old rag was the loyalist Torygraph: it and the Spectator seem increasingly to be UKIP-lite.

Malcolm heartily recommends the whole of the article. For a sampler, though:

… this has of course been a week of barely precedented horror for the British police. A more sensitive man, even when forced to dismount and wheel his bike a few yards, would have had in mind the murders of two WPcs in Manchester, and the grief felt by their colleagues. Such a man may even had been aware, within a week of the Hillsborough report’s publication, that more tragic things than an affront to monstrous arrogance have flowed from the police refusal to open a gate.

Gate-gate

Yep, we’ve got a new one here. And it’s cooking nicely.

Any Brit reader can easily skip this post. You’ll already have chortled your way into asphyxia.

So, for you benighted foreigners, the story so far…

Actually, Mark Ferguson has already done the heavy lifting, at LabourList:

On Wednesday, Chief Whip Andrew Mitchell tried to leave Downing Street via the main gates on his bike. The police told him they wouldn’t open the main gates. Mitchell lost his temper quite spectacularly. According to The Sun, this is what he said:

“Open this gate, I’m the Chief Whip. I’m telling you — I’m the Chief Whip and I’m coming through these gates.”

What a charmer. When they still refused, Mitchell allegedly responded:

“Best you learn your f***ing place. You don’t run this f***ing government.
“You’re f***ing plebs.”

Mitchell is also believed to have attacked the police as “morons”.

Sure enough, the “apology” and bowdlerisation promptly followed:

Mitchell, a keen cyclist, denied using offensive language but admitted he had behaved badly after he was barred from leaving Downing Street via his usual route through the main gates.

In a statement he said: “On Wednesday night I attempted to leave Downing Street via the main gate, something I have been allowed to do many times before.

“I was told that I was not allowed to leave that way. While I do not accept that I used any of the words that have been reported, I accept I did not treat the police with the respect they deserve.

“I have seen the supervising sergeant and apologised, and will also apologise to the police officer involved.”

A No 10 source said that Cameron was aware of the incident but was satisfied with Mitchell’s apology.

“The prime minister believes the police should always be treated with respect,” the source said.

One couldn’t expect anything less from — just get this: a former UN peacekeeper.

So Dave’s happy. All ticketty-boo?

Well, it occurs to Malcolm that the main gate to Downing Street must be one of the most CCTV-infested parts of central London — itself not short of the odd camera or dozen. So, simple solution to find whoever is telling the truth — I do not accept that I used any of the words that have been reported —

Release the tapes!

After all, we wouldn’t want a lying copper — or a lying Cabinet Minister — to go unacknowledged, unpunished. Someone’s reputation, honour, even job, is at stake here; and there are several officers coming forward to say the Sun‘s asterisked version is nearer the truth than Mitchell’s mealy-mouthed recantation.

All of that was on every front page, and deserved to be in this of all weeks. Penetrate a little bit further into the newsprint morass, and we find something like this:

The director of public prosecutions is to issue guidelines on when criminal charges should be brought against people posting abusive comments on social media networks.

Keir Starmer QC made the announcement on Thursday after revealing that a Welsh footballer who posted a homophobic message about the Olympic divers Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield on Twitter will not be prosecuted.

Starmer said he will launch a public consultation and issue guidelines on how to deal with the daily avalanche of hundreds of millions of comments – some abusive, some potentially criminal – posted on social media sites.

All fair and dandy. Throttle the oiks who abuse the privilege of the internet. Quite right, too.

But start at the top:

Conservative minister Andrew Mitchell has been urged to resign by Police Federation leaders over his outburst to an officer in Downing Street.

The body representing rank-and-file officers said Mr Mitchell’s alleged remarks were “outrageous”.

The Tory Chief Whip has denied claims he swore and called an officer a “pleb” but the officer has insisted reports of what happened are accurate.

Double standards

At the very least Mitchell has to stand accused of a public order offence. From what we know, the evidence is there.

Only his privileged position (and Dave’s support) is protecting him from following into the dock the rag-tag-and bobtail who will be picked up this same night, having drunk not wisely but too well.

Or, as Oscar pungently put the point into Algernon’s script:

Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them? They seem, as a class, to have absolutely no sense of moral responsibility.

Winnowing the war of words: “unrest”

winnowing: 

• To expose (grain or other substances) to the wind or to a current of air so that the lighter particles (as chaff or other refuse matter) are separated or blown away; to clear of refuse material by this method.
• To subject to a process likened to the winnowing of grain, in order to separate the various parts or elements, esp. the good from the bad; hence, to clear of worthless or inferior elements.

Yesterday, across the major cities of Spain, public sector workers took to the street to protest the latest round of pay cuts and tax hikes — a further €65 billions worth — imposed by the right-wing Rajoy government. Explicitly this was a reverse Robin Hood raid, rifling the pockets of the workers to pay the bankers. (and, incidentally, as a way of persuading the Germans to support a bailout).

Here is the start of the BBC report:

Spanish police have fired rubber bullets to clear demonstrators in Madrid as a day of nationwide protests against spending cuts ended in unrest.

Protesters set alight rubbish bins as riot police charged them in the city centre, near the parliament building.

Seven people were arrested and at least six injured, officials said.

Earlier, tens of thousands of people held largely peaceful protests across Spain against the latest government austerity measures.

Public sector workers crowded the streets of Madrid, Barcelona and several other cities, chanting slogans against government “robbery”.

Among those protesting were firefighters and police officers, as well as health and education workers. “We have lived through bad times, but this takes the biscuit,” fireman Francisco Vaquero, 58, told the Reuters news agency.

We’re going to be with the OED for a while, so let’s start there (as above) and separate the wheat from the chaff.

With “riot police” and “rubber bullets”, arrests and injuries.

In a word (the BBC’s one, used above and in its headline): Unrest.

A classroom exercise

When Malcolm was short of a homework for lower-school, mixed-ability classes, a last-minute stand-by was to collect as many words as possible denoting size, and put them into ascending order. So a typical list might begin somewhere below “sub-atomic” and work up to”galactic”.

Could we do the same for protests and demonstrations?

• It would presumably start, de minimis, with those Georgetown students who have cornered the market in White House placarding. You buy an hour of their time, chose your slogan, they mark it up on their boards, and parade up and down for the period of the contract.
• At the other end rumble Syrian Army tanks.

But where in that spectrum does “unrest” fit?

Let us revisit the OED:

unrest, n. Absence of rest; disturbance, turmoil, trouble.

The citations seem mainly to concern personal matters: emotional and physical. Typically “unrest” involves the fall out from love affairs, as in Chaucer:

‘Lo, nece, I trowe ye han herd al how
The king, with othere lordes, for the beste,
Hath mad eschaunge of Antenor and yow,
That cause is of this sorwe and this unrest.
But how this cas doth Troilus moleste,
That may non erthely mannes tonge seye;
For verray wo his wit is al aweye.’

And all the way through the tradition to Byron:

And Hugo is gone to his lonely bed,
To covet there another’s bride;
But she must lay her conscious head
A husband’s trusting heart beside.
But fevered in her sleep she seems,
And red her cheek with troubled dreams,
And mutters she in her unrest
A name she dare not breathe by day,
And clasps her lord unto the breast
Which pants for one away:
And he to that embrace awakes,
And, happy in the thought, mistakes
That dreaming sigh, and warm caress,
For such as he was wont to bless;
And could in very fondness weep
O’er her who loves him even in sleep.

Here’s a good one, from the 15th century Rule of Syon monastery:

In the dortour … none schal … make any noise of unreste, aboute makyng of ther beddes.

Which, no matter how one stretches the word, it seems a long way from the streets of Madrid and Barcelona.

At least wikipedia seems on the ball:

Unrest (also called disaffection) is a sociological phenomenon, for instance:

• Industrial unrest
• Labor unrest
• Rebellion
• Riot

Which seems, curiously, to have gone to the opposite extreme.

Remember: it’s all a matter of wind or a current of air. The lighter particles (as chaff or other refuse matter) are separated or blown away.

Any clear vision of “truth” is reduced to refuse material by this method.