Orde was chief constable of the Northern Ireland Police Service (or "NIPS" -- which is why the Government decided to call them the Police Service of Northern Ireland) where apparently he did a perfectly decent job, but then he left to become boss of a shadowy organisation called ACPO -- the Association of Chief Police Officers. This is the coordinating body for all Britain's police forces (which are meant to be totally independent of each other and controlled (mostly) by county-level supervisory structures based in local government).
Orde was unhappy with one aspect of his new job at ACPO, which was the fact that all the chief constables he worked with could swank around in their shiny uniforms while he, of course, didn't have one (what with being the chief executive of a private company). So he had a "pretend" chief constable's uniform made and he dresses-up in that -- here it is, with "ACPO" in the cap badge:
Do we really want to trust the top job in policing to someone with such an apparently fragile sense of self-esteem that they have to play at such absurd dressing-up before they feel confident going out into the world?
Meanwhile, news from Scotland that all that country's police services will be merged into one because the government has decided that that's more "efficient". FFS...
Can no-one up there remember the debacle of the regional councils? Those mega-bodies replaced counties, apparently because they offered economies of scale.
To take one example, the poetically-named "Central Regional Council": when accountants were brought in to do a study of whether it would be more efficient to replace both them and the district councils with a single layer of unitary councils, it turned out that Central already had a higher administrative cost than the model predicted would be required by a unitary council. The district, meanwhile, was much cheaper than the model.
This didn't stop politicians bleating on about "efficiency" and "economies of scale" though, fortunately, Central was abolished in that restructure.
Why does no-one ever seem to learn anything from our previous cock-ups?
2 comments:
The ludicrously dressed Orde needs reminding of who pays his no doubt generous wages.
It is marvelous rants like this that demonstrate why it would be such a tragedy if you gave up blogging.
BTW - I thought you would like cock-ups, as it were :)
Your biggest fan.
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