MAKE WAY FOR PLODDY

PC PLOD WAS, I SEEM TO REMEMBER, the name oft used to refer to the police officer in the Noddy series of television programmes and sundry spin-offs attached to it. Mr Plod ensures Noddy's taxi keeps within the speed limit and tries to keep all the Toys out of mischief. He catches the mischief-makers on his police bicycle, by blowing his whistle and shouting "Halt, in the name of Plod!" before locking the culprits up in his jail.

 

THE TERM ‘PC’, HOWEVER, HAS COME TO TAKE ON a meaning far beyond what might have been envisaged in the days when police constables used to knock on people’s doors to ask if all was well, and were on occasion invited in by housewives for a cup of tea, leading, so I have read, to a little bit of low-key shagging in flat northern accents while the husbands of these ladies in suburban streets were away labouring at the mill on the heath or in the dale. This rather fanciful image may, of course, be fostered by my having seen the wonderful TV series Life on Mars, in which Gene Hunt, the then (fictional) DCI of the Manchester and Salford Police tells us that“Plod” is seen as the normal term for foot policemen.

 

POLITICAL CORRECTNESS NOWADAYS TELLS US that even if we think we are vastly superior in our own minds to people whom we may see as “plebs”, just as all noble Conservative party members have done ever since the beginning of the system of democratic elections that they hate so much, we should keep our mouths shut. Otherwise the Conservative Party would have no chance in these tiresome elections that keep on turning up every few years and interfering with our harvest festivals or sports days.

 

WHETHER OR NOT THE ARROGANT Andrew John Bower Mitchell MP, member for Sutton Coldfield and Chief Whip to the Conservative and Liberal Democrat Government actually thinks that people below his station are there because they deserve to be so remains to be seen, but I imagine that it is not a good idea to call policemen “plebs” because of the wider implications such a statement involves. “Morons”, however, is a term that can be applied to aristocrats, the rich, the middle classes, the ‘working’ classes, the poor and the scrounging strugglers.

 

IF ANYONE WISHES TO STUDY MORON MITCHELL’s history in parliament and government they will see that his overriding principle is that there are “classes and classes”, “races and races” and that anyone who, like he did, went to Rugby School, should be allowed to tell foul-smelling, ill-bred, lower-class police officers what to do. Mitchell will never have to feel the pain of having to work hard at something one does not enjoy, nor will he ever know what it is like to ‘go without’. One wonders whether morons like him should be running our country. Hopefully the morons in his constituency will give him the heave-ho if the equally out of touch David Cameron doesn't do so before push comes to shove.