The View from my Barrel

[steepholm]

Okay, maybe this is cynical, but I can't help feeling that if it had been a black unemployed man on crack randomly firing a shotgun from the window of a run-down block of flats, rather than a white barrister on alcohol randomly firing from the window of a smart Chelsea maisonette, we wouldn't have had over two years of high-profile scrutiny of police tactics. The case of Mark Saunders seems to appeal to the 'there but for the grace of God' side of middle England in a way that's curiously reminiscent of Maddy McCann.

On other matters, I actually agree with John Hutton that final-salary pension schemes are unfair to the majority of contributors. But of course, they're not going to redistribute the money saved to the less well paid: they're going to siphon it off to the Treasury. Given that, his argument seems pretty disingenuous.

Comments

[sheenaghpugh]

I was quite baffled by the reporters' comments - "was it necessary to use so much force against someone who was drunk and had mental problems?" Well, pardon me if I think a man with a gun is all the more likely to be dangerous if he's drunk and addled in the head. And frankly anyone who points a gun in the general direction of armed police is asking for trouble. As you say, if he hadn't been a posh barrister there'd have been none of this fuss.