Total Policing

Since the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club was one of the three main embarrassees in the phone-hacking scandal, and since the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club has already failed once to investigate the phone-hacking scandal properly, and since their fellow embarrassee Daveybloke believes in second chances for Murdoch employees, it is only natural that the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club should be allowed to make due amends by investigating its own previous failure to investigate, and thus ensure that the truth comes out. Accordingly, the Metropolitan Firearms and Headbangers' Club has turned its laser-like moral focus upon the main culprits in the case, namely the journalists and sources whose lapse into investigative reporting has caused all this trouble. The Met is using an obscure clause in the Official Secrets Act, which was no doubt discreetly pointed out to the new Commissioner when Daveybloke gave him his prefect's badge, as the basis for a demand that the Guardian reveal its sources so that appropriate expressions of gratitude can be made. As usual, the excuse is that the investigation will be impeded unless it is given due privacy: one only has to look at the way public confidence has been eroded by the mean-spirited publication of evidence undermining the Met's press releases about the humanitarian interventions at Stockwell and Forest Gate and the anarchists who hindered the saving of Ian Tomlinson.