Liberal Vision

Herding cats… in today’s Britain

A good friend of mine was out late last night and had asked me to feed the cats for him. This I duly did and texted him once they were in and fed to say all was well. He emailed me this morning to thank me but confessed that they persuaded him they had not been fed…so he gave them some extra cat munchies when he got home. Here is my reply…..

 
“Hmm that’s how it starts……guilty parents over indulging their latch-key cats….next thing you know your cats will be hanging out on street corners on Friday nights eating catnip and causing a nuisance. Roll forward a few months and we will hear calls for increased tax on all catnip to stop the Friday night binge-eating culture amongst the younger cats …followed by a total ban on eating catnip in public. Of course you wont think it’s YOUR boys causing the trouble – always someone else’s – so you will continue to indulge them.

 
They become emboldened – (cats are like that) and think its cool to eat catnip in front of their mates. There will be organised cat-nip runs to France to avoid the tax hike and some will make a nice profit on the side in dealing. They will become the cool gang to hang out with, and goad each other on to be naughtier. Cat fights late at night, howls in the backyard. A dead squirrel is found and the cats are blamed. The council will respond – putting up CCTV all over the streets … well they have to be seen to be doing something – which wont of course work and in any event some bright spark in the council offices soon realises that if they train the cameras on the car parking spaces rather than the street corners they can easily rake in a lot of money in parking fines to cover the cost of the cameras and then some – and the public won’t be any the wiser.

 You will notice that the cats have taken to walking in a “slinky way”. Some say it’s just how cats walk – but the stronger cry is that cats are walking that way to avoid the cameras. People become agitated if they walk past a cat “looking at them in a funny way”. This sort of anti-social behavior is just not acceptable. 

 Of course running parallel to this there are already concerns about the number of cats in the country – various lobby groups have blamed the rising cat population for the demise of the house sparrow and starling (we never really liked either of those particular birds – but they were OUR birds don’t you know). Never mind that they have been keeping down the rat population that no one else wants to do. And there has been a growing cry from certain sections of society that there are too many foreign cats (the Siamese with their funny-coloured eyes, the Persians with their excess hair). Something must be done.

Police to focus strategy on winning over the Tories

An internal report released by the Metropolitan Police under Freedom of Information laws has revealed that  fewer than one crime is solved by every 1,000 closed circuit television cameras per year. Thats a lot of cameras for not very much.

And yes its a pretty shocking waste of money that could have been spent better elsewhere (or better still been in our own pockets). And yes we are way too spied upon, with 1% of the world population and 20% of all cctvs. And yes its laughable that the Home Office have defended the use of CCTV’s, saying cameras could “help communities feel safer”…… But in reality that’s old, if still troubling, news.

What worried me was the part under a section headlined “Strategic Issues”, where it said: “Potential change of Government – the Conservatives are not CCTV friendly – we need to start showing that we are targeting serious crime.”

 So if I get a knife put to my face in the street this evening – that somehow the nine cctvs on my 4 minute walk to the newsagent miss – are the police going to take it even less seriously than they did last time (and trust me that would be pretty difficult even for them)? Answer would appear to be, yes. 

Depressingly here we have another organisation that is clearly intending to spend the next 9 months focusing on ways to “meet targets” and win over politicians, rather than get on with the job of policing the streets and solving crime. Call me old-fashioned but I liked it when the BBC did good tv programmes, doctors did medicine and police did crime-prevention. I dont see how any of them have the time to do their day job if they are all going to be spending  the next nine months trying to second guess what the next Government (most likely a Tory one according to the Met police you’ll note) wants.

Tighten your seatbelts, its going to be a bumpy ride! Oh and be careful when you’re out and about on the streets – and if you do become a victim of crime, best make sure its a “serious” one if you want anything done about it.