The scum wot won it

The election starting gun has sounded and the race to be the most popular something or other has commenced. Theresa May says the election has been called to provide stability and security during the Brexit period, despite a total lack of instability and insecurity thus far. Still, witches can famously foretell the future, so who are we humans to argue? The run-up to this totally unexpected election will, of course, provide a period of stability and security for MPs, although the subsequent investigations into election fraud and expenses may render their subsequent existences less blissful. Mrs May has refused to condemn media coverage of the election announcement, including the Daily Mail’s front page, which referred to “crushing saboteurs” (aka remoaning MPs). She looks set to receive overwhelming support from the even less scrupulous media enterprises, such as Liverpool’s favourite (not) journal The Sun, which attempted to make out that officers taking their lunch break at a public cafe were “eating bacon sandwiches, drinking tea and having a chinwag, while on shift”. This august publication has been trying to outdo itself on a daily basis, earning an increasing disrespect for its style of coverage from officers up and down the country. The only way in which it can recover any respect now is to provide us with packed lunches as our HQ canteen only gets in fresh sandwiches once a fortnight, and our officers look at their prisoners’ meals with envy. The force has in desperation directed that officers no longer have to return to their stations for refreshments, as we have few officers, fewer stations and fewer again sandwiches. This initiative creates a delicate balance between savings in fuel consumption and increases in calories, as officers munch on cakes and bacon sandwiches while engaging the public in merry badinage. Constables will soon find it difficult to squeeze into their cars, response times will plummet, and achieving Bleep Test targets will become a miracle. We can expect the level of debate about policing over the next seven weeks to be about increasing both numbers of police officers and targets for deporting foreign criminals, as politicians vie with each other for the most sensational headlines. The process of fiddling statistics has already begun, with the Home Office ignoring increases in violent crime, which are caused by people getting injured, and lauding decreases in drugs-related crime, which are created by drugs dealers and growers not getting arrested. As electoral bedlam increases, police officers will be tempted to comment on the wild and varied claims made by Theresa on behalf of the Tories, Jeremy on behalf of Labour and What’s ’Is Name on behalf of whoever the other ones are, but we must maintain a dignified silence. No one else will. Yours, Stitch