Police brutality

Picture this scene: a peaceful protest, with a group made up of women and men of all ages. Two of the women - both mothers, one of a single-parent family - have cameras, because the police have been known to have taken a bit of a heavy-handed approach in the past. They are part of an organisation called FitWatch, which monitors police activity and films officers in order to have a record so that complaints can be made if police act in a way that may be unlawful.

Of which repressive and brutal police state is this a map?
Copyright-free image from Wikipedia.

When the people with the cameras arrive, the police immediately identify them as members of FitWatch. You can't help but get the impression that the officers consider them to be a nuisance, though none of them say as much. One of the women notices that one policeman isn't wearing the numbers on his shoulder which, by law, he and all officers must wear while on uniformed duty so that he or she can be accurately identified by a member of the public in case of a complaint. She approaches the officer and asks him to identify himself but he refuses, claiming wrongly that he does not have to give that information. The woman replies, saying that he does. At no time is she aggressive and what's more she's correct - when asked by a member of the public, a police officer must identify himself unless he or she is engaged in a plain-clothes operation. She asks her colleague to photograph the policeman. This is not illegal, but another officers blocks the camera.

But the policeman doesn't identify himself. Instead, he grabs her by the throat and she is roughly forced to the ground and arrested. The other woman is treated in the same way - one officer grasps her by a pressure point in her neck and drags her away. Somebody else - a police officer - is filming the incident with a video camera - the footage clearly shows that one officer has placed his full weight on the woman's ankle, which is painfully twisted on the ground. She asks him to step off her because he is hurting her - he denies that he is standing on her foot.

Both women are bundled into a police van and taken to a police station where they are charged with obstructing officers and refused bail. They are denied their right to speak to a solicitor and held for four days, three of them in prison, though all charges are later dropped.

Where do you think this happened? Iran? North Korea? Saudi Arabia?

See the video here.

It's Kent, in southern England, where campaigners have been protesting at Kingsnorth Power Station, where two new coal-fired generator units are due to be installed, massively increasing the amount of pollution emitted by the facility - a proposal that has drawn widespread criticism from a number of environmental groups including Greenpeace, the WWF and the RSPB.

A complaint has been made to the Independent Police Complaints Commission who are now looking at this video. It is to be hoped that the officers involved will be identified, sacked and prosecuted - they have shown themselves to be aggressive, violent thugs and there is no place in an organisation that is supposed to protect the public for them.

FitWatch will doubtless be pleased to receive your support.

George Osborne MP flips out over £748k

George Osborne, pictured right, bought his Cheshire farmhouse ten months prior to being elected as Conservative MP for Tatton in 2001 - a seat he has held ever since. He also owned a property purchased for £700,000 in London, where his wife and he had lived since the late '90s, which is his main residence.

Land Registry records show that by June 2000, the mortgage on the London house was £150,000. He then re-mortgaged it less than half a year later for £620,299, some of which went to pay for the Cheshire property. Then, once he was elected he swapped designations (or "flipped" them, to use the term chosen by the press) declaring the Cheshire house to be his main residence. That allowed him to claim expenses to cover mortgage interest on the London property. With us so far? We don't doubt it - we don't assume you're all idiots like UKIP do.

Two years later, he took out another mortgage on the house in Cheshire and declared that it was now his second home - which then allowed him to claim expenses covering the costs on that one. It's thought that he's had around £100,000 so far, and it also conveniently allowed him to dramatically reduce the loan on the London place to £199,875.

Good God, man. You may be a bit of a whizz with the figures what with you being Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer and all, but that's just showing off. All in all, he's come very close to the maximum permitted limit that MPs can claim for second homes; but, he claims, at no time did he break the rules and has enjoyed no personal gain as a result of the changes in designation. He also says the Commons’ Fees Office actually advised him to designate the London address as his second home.

Finally, the London house was sold in 2006, netting Osborne a tasty £748,000 profit.

However, David Cameron has banned his MPs from "flipping" homes in this way as he tries his very hardest to make his party look as though they are morally superior to Labour and says that it is not good enough for any Conservative party member to simply claim that they have followed the rules - quite rightly, he now expects them to have a little bit of common human decency too; though few of us are under any illusion that this would ever have been the case had the press not got their teeth into the expenses claims in the first place.

Mr. Osborne's actions have been "entirely reasonable as all the costs are associated with his need to have a second home in Cheshire, and his arrangements have always sought to minimise the interest costs to the taxpayer," says a spokeman for the MP. If that's the case, why didn't you choose a small, cheaper property? There's plenty of other MPs who manage perfectly well with flats instead of farmhouses. Those that don't move their whole family into them, at any rate.

Mr. Osborne is going to be facing some questions, it seems; assuming his party's leader is being sincere when he says that Tory MPs must be beyond reproach. If he can't answer them, there's only one way Mr. Cameron can prove he means what he says - Osborne will have to go.