Sir Ian Blair's Resignation.

Last Thursday October 2nd the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Ian Blair resigned. Although tedious this resignation is quite important because from his position at Scotland Yard the Met police commissioner is responsible for policing of London, a city of 8 million people. He is also responsible for elements of national policing including the anti-terrorist command, National Extremism Tactical Command Unit (NECTU), special branch and the riot squad. He is also, on paper at least, in charge of those blasted helicopters.

Hard as it may be for some of you to believe I actually have quite a lot of respect for the British police, the met especially. Not all of them obviously because London has 35,000 officers alone and some of them are bound to be bastards but generally from Inspector level upwards they tend to be quite reliable. They swear allegiance to the crown regardless of who may be wearing it and enforce the laws of the land as they are written. Of course these laws are written by politicians and are often unfair, ill-conceived and some are just plain wrong but the police pursue all those who break them be they communists, fascists, politicians or spooks. If you are to have a police force that is how you want it to operate otherwise you end up with a situation like you have in Brazil where corrupt officers only enforce the laws they want and kill around 300 innocent civilians a year but more of that later. Sir Ian Blair very much encapsulated that attitude to policing as evidenced by an interview he did for Time Magazine in which he said;

"Modern policing is a lot like standing on the banks of a fast flowing river watching the bodies float past. As a policeman you can either spend all day trying to fish those bodies out or you can walk upstream to find out who's dumping those bodies in. If you do that you may find that you have to walk very far upstream."

Standing by those words one of Blair's first actions on taking up the job was to tackle the culture of institutional racism that exists in the Metropolitan Police and increase the number of officers from Black and ethnic minorities. In a force that was at the time made up of 97% white officers many of whom can only be described as something of societies problem children this sort of behaviour was never going to make the new commissioner popular.

The next very controversial event of the Blairs career was the Cash for Honours scandal. This was an investigation to see if Senior Labour MP's upto and including the then Prime Minister had seriously broken constitutional law by exchanging seats in the upper house of Parliament (House of Lords) for cash donations to the party election campaign. This very long investigation saw a number of key Labour party officials interviewed under caution and raised the possibility we would see the Prime minister leave office in handcuffs. It was around this time that Sir Ian started to encounter a run off bad luck the most well publicised of these was the shooting of Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.

Following the failed suicide bombings of July 2005 a police anti-terrorist team followed a man onto an underground train and shot him dead believing him to be one of the terrorists. As the news broke the commissioner asked the officers directly in charge of the operation what had happened. In order to cover their own backs these officers told Blair that they had killed a terrorist who was just about to carry out an attack even though they knew full well that they'd killed an innocent civilian. Blair then called a press conference and repeated this story to the media causing him much embarrassment when it was proved to be a tissue of lies. This betrayal didn't stop Blair attempting to protect his officers by fighting the ensuing health and Safety prosecution. The inquest into the death opened last month and is still on going.

The next embarrassment came when a senior Asian officer, Commander Shabir Hussain alleged that he was being held back from promotion because Ian Blair was a racist and wanted to maintain an inner circle of exclusively white officers. The unsupported racism claim was repeated by Tarique Ghaffur who considered taking the Met police and Sir Ian Blair to an employment tribunal after he was not put in charge of the security operation for the 2012 Olympics.

Sir Ian also found himself in controversy in many smaller scandals including but not limited to recording telephone conversations during the cash for honours inquiry, awarding police contracts to an IT company and a PR companies which where owned by friend of Blair's and suggesting that the British Press rate white victims of crime more highly then black ones.

The final straw came last week when the London Mayor informed Blair that he did not have his backing in the role of Police Commissioner these along with all the other pressure caused Sir Ian to utter the immortal phrase; "Sod this. I'm not getting paid enough to put up with this crap." and resigned. This resignation will take effect in December when Blair will be replaced by another commissioner who has already been moulded into the ways of the police. This means they ill hate me on principle and when I run rings round them they will hate me even more so some things never really change.

The most amusing part of the whole affair was Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith attacked Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson of engaging in a political plot to oust Sir Ian when that's exactly what she's been doing for much much longer then Boris had been in office. This display of shameless opportunism rather then ability probably explains how she managed to survive the latest cabinet re-shuffle.