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Police on screen.


My evening's entertainment is watching the concluding part of the Swedish cop thriller in the Arne Dahl written Bad Blood.  A bit gory but very enthralling. The disparate personalities of the team members are well explored in the scripting and the acting is excellent.

There is a hint of self-deprecating humour and in it all a conscious artfulness.

The first part of Bad Blood contained many hysterical moments relating to the team members getting their end away in various situations both tragic and comic.

I just wish we could come up with a comparable series here in Scotland.  It will be interesting to see how drama and literature catches up with the reorganisation of the Scottish Police Force.

How would Ian Rankin's Rebus have dealt with a national force?

What saddened me most in the whole public discourse (one could not call it a debate) was that no-one seemed to be raising the civil liberties implications.  I couldn't care less how much money is saved.   I do not want one police chief for the whole of Scotland.

Far less would I want that police chief to be the former head of the biggest existing force, Strathclyde.  Nonetheless that is what happened.

Personal experience and history never endeared Strathclyde's finest to me.  On various occasions I was beaten, falsely arrested and imprisoned, threatened, offered inducements to make false statements and had my front door demolished at their hands.

So no, I am not overly enamoured with the appointment of anyone connected with that force to a position of national authority.  It is only fair to say that none of my travails with the Glasgow cops occurred during Stephen House's tenure.

National policing in Scotland is a bad idea.  Loss of local oversight is a great loss indeed. It will be interesting to see what the future holds for the deployment of resources across local areas.

When policing stops being about consent and starts being about maintaining public order more dangers arise.  As my Grandfather was fond of saying, "It's their law to keep us in order!"  I just hope we don't live to regret this policy.

How will a "national" force react to a YES vote?  Who do they swear an oath to?  The Crown? The State? A single Chief Constable in the land creates a power that will create for itself the need to exercise that power. A power that was divided is now unified and multiplied by a factor of eight.   Eight was the number of police forces we had.  We now have one.

This is a subject I intend to return to.  What are the possibilities of the British State actually allowing us to become independent without at the very least pulling some dirty tricks of the "Tartan Terror" variety?  Is the apparatus of the British State so unified and monolithic that there will not at the very least be some faction or another willing to pursue repression, false flags and dirty tricks?

In a political life associated with Scottish Republicanism I have been approached on several occasions to join paramilitary organisations or to take part in armed struggle operations.

Almost without exception those people were either State provocateurs or the dupes of provocateurs.  History tells us about "perfidious Albion".  Let's not fool ourselves. The Leopard has not changed its spots.

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