It's good to know that if there's one thing you can rely on in this crazy mixed up world we call... er... London, it's that the Met will always do their best. Like the slow kids on the special table at school it's not important that they eat the modeling clay it's that they do it with gusto:
There is very little new under the sun, particularly when it comes to intelligence blunders by the Metropolitan Police... A Home Office file from 1983 released yesterday under the Freedom of Information Act shows how Special Branch seriously underestimated support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament...
Now you may think that the coppers of the 1980s and CND have little to do with what's going on today, but carry on reading and you find what the police were worried about:
They included an interest in the songs preferred by peace campaigners, the number of "coloured" people taking part in protests, and guidance on how to identify an anarchist.
Makes you wonder if the current guidelines on TERRORISTS aren't just badly photocopied copies of the same guidelines with the ANARCH bit tipexed out.
The article goes on to describe how easy it is to work out the HO's attempt at censoring the documents and how rather than admit how far they failed to pick up on the public mood the Met fell back to that traditional British move of blaming the weather.
Good job none of those coppers have spent the last 20 years rising in the ranks and giving the new blood the benefits of their years of experience... if that was the case we'd be shooting "coloured" people, detaining people for listening to London Calling and ... oh never mind.
