A plague of locusts
With all the cuts that the government is planning it seems that Chief Superintendent Derek Barnett is urging the Home Secretary not to touch the police budget or they'll see "unrest".
This reminds me of a Dilbert strip in which both Dilbert and Wally's budgets were being reviewed. Each had to submit why their budget shouldn't be cut. One stated that the result would be a "plague of locusts" the other that "the world would stop turning". She cut them both in the hopes that when the world stopped it would fling the locusts into space.
And there's the point. Every single department is going to state that they need their budget, that they can't do without the funding and that to cut it would result in disaster. This isn't to say that it might not be true, but the default response is never "Oo yes please take money away from us" and so has to be backed up with a little more than say-so.
[Update - I had considered adding a more sarcastic note - that police cuts would mean more crime, NHS cuts would lead to more ill people, Fire service cuts to more fires, and Diversity workshop cuts to more... um. And then the Daily Mash beat me to it]
2 comments:
The police comment is pretty sinister really. It's reminding the government that with less police funding they'll be less able to control (beat the living daylights out of) those demonstrating against the cuts. I'm not one to say "police state" but this sort of thing does make you wonder.
One way I saw it was "Cut our budget and watch the crime rate soar. It'll be all your fault because we warned you it would happen. Try winning a second term with that".
It's tabloid 'persuasion' - give us what we want or we'll turn against you.
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