Q. How Do You Know a Government's Lying?

A. It's Lips Are Moving.

Sorry to go on about this suspended TSG sergeant but the mainstream reporting of the story has been appalling. First up was the BBC who repeatedly showed a taped interview with a former police trainer. This public order specialist said that we shouldn't judge the Sergeant's actions because the video doesn't show context and he may have been acting out of fear for his safety. This is a nonsense because the full five minute video shows the Sergeant's actions in full context. It shows the crowd to be peaceful and largely quiet until a man asks a police officer to explain why he can't leave the crowd. The police officer, being a bit short on wit and repartee, continues this discussion by picking the man up by the throat and throwing him to the floor. This causes the sergeant to go charging over to the incident colliding with the woman in the process. The woman then shouts at the sergeant "What are you doing hitting a fucking woman?!" The sergeant responds by backhanding her across the face before stepping back and drawing his baton. If that's the sort of situation that puts the sergeant in fear of his life then he's clearly in the wrong job.

Next up is Kit Malthouse, deputy chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority and deputy Mayor of London on pretty much every news outlet. In his interview Mr Malthouse defended the Metropolitan Police by saying they deal with dozens of protests every year without any problems and cited the recent Tamil demonstrations as an example. This is exactly true because the Tamil protests saw ten people arrested and several hospitalised with police inflicted injuries. These include a three year old toddler who's leg was broken in a police baton strike.

Finally the BBC, again, spent most of the day interviewing John O'Conner a former Commander with the Metropolitan Police on various programs. In one of these live interviews Mr O'Conner said, with a straight face, that the sergeant had not removed his numbers, they were merely being covered up by the tabard he was wearing. That was just a bare-faced lie because the video and photographs show that the silver epaulets where the sergeant should be displaying his numbers end before the tabard begins. Mr O'Conner went on to claim the sergeant isn't a ranking officers. Again this is a complete lie because the silver epaulets show the sergeant is a silver commander. In public order situations this is an equivalent rank to an Inspector and meant that the sergeant had direct control over the two dozen Met officers you can see in the video.

The BBC are also making much of an issue out of the fact the woman in the video has employed a publicist. There is nothing sinister about that because the woman has already received request for interview from around 150 news agencies so she clearly already has the publicity she just needs someone to help her manage it. Besides, as the Hillsborough relatives will testify, if you're going to go up against the police then the first thing that will happen is that your reputation will get trashed.

Oh and the Crown Prosecution Service have decided they are not going too charge Damian Green, MP with any offence. This is no great surprise because the MP was arrested in a blaze up publicity just before the State Opening of Parliament. The whole thing was just a bit of theatre set up to divert attention from the fact the Queens speech had to be hastily re-written after the Queen vetoed plans to set up a national identity database.