Fair Cops?

According to Saturday's Daily Mail, "up to eight people believed to have links with extremists including al Qaida are reported to be working for British police forces. "

Well, that's perhaps no big surprise. After all, if we let alleged terrorists work as doctors, where they have power over our very lives, why shouldn't they work as mere enforcers of law and order? There isn't very much of it around to enforce these days, anyway.

And yes, for the hard of thinking, the previous paragraph constitutes sarcasm, brought on by sheer, mind buggering disbelief that we could be so stupid as to allow this to happen. But it gets better. Having identified these Bolshie Bobbies, it turns out that we can't actually sack them from the police forces that employ them because the forces don't "have the legal power to do so."

If you listen carefully, you can probably hear muffled thuds as various world leaders drop dead of exhaustion, having laughed themselves into extinction while reading this story. What other country in the world would allow terrorist sympathisers to work in their police forces? That's not to say that the police forces in other countries aren't similarly compromised, but, having discovered the infiltrators, how many would allow them to keep their jobs, rather than, say, allowing them to fall down the steps on the way to the cells?

Even here, a convicted terrorist working as a traffic warden was instantly suspended by NCP Services when his background came to light. Exactly how Mustapha Boutarfa, who was jailed for his involvement in a 1995 bomb attack on the Paris Metro, came to be back in the UK and working as a traffic warden remains unclear, but at least he's not doing it any more.

Unfortunately, this kind of common sense isn't allowed to apply to the police force, much as I am sure they would like it to. Ah well, at least they can't be accused of lacking cultural diversity, and I'm sure that, as and when the identified extremist sympathisers get around to helping the extremists with whom they sympathise to blow us all to hell, their victims will die happy in that knowledge.

In the meantime, I can't help wondering how many more official bodies, in greater or lesser positions of authority, might have their own fifth columns of extremist sympathisers. The General Medical Council, who STILL haven't moved to suspend Bilal Abdulla or most of the other suspected terrorist doctors, strikes me as one distinct possibility, although the GMC's behaviour is routinely so bizarre and capricious that it's hard to tell one way or the other - are they bad, or just barking mad?

No doubt there are many other candidates, but I think the point is made - if the Daily Mail's story is even partially correct, the UK and its lawmakers have finally, once and for all, lost the plot.

Billy Seggars.