Policing up the area

You may or may not care that today they’re burying Margaret Thatcher, who died earlier this month, aged 87.

I’m interested because she was a piece of work and I sometimes wonder what the UK would be like if she hadn’t had a death-grip on its society for 11 years.

But I’m also interested because the Brits know how to throw a funeral and there’s been a tremendous fracas over the details of Thatcher’s. The party in power—the Tories—has basically planned for a state funeral in everything but name; everyone else is bitching about both the intent and the cost.

(They’re also silencing the bells in Big Ben and the Great Clock at Westminster for the duration of the proceedings; but since that’s free there’s only a continuo of grumbling. Something to the effect that not even the Luftwaffe silenced Big Ben. But, of course, there are those who hold that the Iron Lady could have whupped Hermann Goering’s ass with just her handbag.)

So the planners are tut-tutting that it’s not going to cost all that much, really. But what’s interesting is that they’re, ah, fudging the figures—pulling out the costs of the military and police participating. Francis Maude, Minister for the Cabinet Office and Paymaster General (and I swear I’m not making that up) announced on BBC Radio 4 that, you can’t count those salaries of “people doing their ordinary jobs”. These are “costs which are being borne in any event. We have not hired more soldiers, we haven't hired more police. There is no one who has been hired who would not be doing their ordinary jobs which they would not be doing in any event. We are not hiring more police.”

(By way of reference, the last state funeral was for the Queen Mother, in 2002, and about half the £8M price-tag was for police.)

Well, no—not hiring more police; but if all the coppers are performing crowd-control duties or mounting an anti-terrorism watch for half the day, then they aren’t out actually, you know, policing. This would be a prime time to knock over a liquor store or take out that annoying neighbor of yours, because the cops aren’t doing their ordinary jobs.

You know—the ones they’re actually paid to do.