Credible Witnesses.

The ever gullible Surrey Police seem to have reversed their much publicised ‘arrest first, investigate later’ policy; this time they investigated – then arrested their ‘credible witness’.

It was an unfortunate fact that the next letter in their alphabetical list of operation happened to be a ‘B’. Even more unfortunate that the first word beginning with ‘B’ that came to mind was ‘Bigfoot’ – the name given to a mythological humanoid that is said to terrify travellers and inhabit forests in the American Northwest.

So it was that the doughty officers from Surrey’s finest set off on ‘Operation Bigfoot’, intent on finding an individual who could be of indeterminate gender, despite their earlier tweets.

We’re searching #Redhill after reports of man taking child around 16:45. Driving black & chrome VW Transporter van. More soon Pls RT [20:30]
— Surrey Police (@SurreyPolice) August 25, 2016

Hours later:

Det Supt Edwards said there was no details about the person, including their gender.

…who had abducted a child not as yet reported missing, in a van so distinctive that Police took a mere 24 hours to track it down and ascertain that it had nothing to do with the event…

Seen a black modified VW Transporter w/ chrome sidesteps, 3 BBS alloys (front nearside missing) 02 reg sliding side door? Call 999. #Redhill
— Surrey Police (@SurreyPolice) August 25, 2016

They released a picture of the van said to be crossing a junction in the area.

Hours later:

It was confirmed on Friday morning that the van pictured was not involved in the reported abduction.

Four days later, after logging endless overtime:

reviewing hours of CCTV from across the area, carrying out house to house enquiries, talking to commuters at the railway station, checking potential vehicles matching the description and missing children databases, receiving more than 100 calls from members of the public in less than 24 hours

their ‘credible witness’ didn’t seem so credible, even by the Surrey Police standard of ‘credible witnesses’. They have just arrested him on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. They haven’t charged him as yet, and if he was a woman claiming to have witnessed a rape, they wouldn’t have gone that far.

Not worried about putting people off reporting child abductions then, lads?

If they do charge him, Ms Raccoon will be delving into his past history to see if it exhibited anything, Danny Day style, that might have given an observant policemen cause to doubt that he was ‘credible’ enough to spend 4 days and endless hours of overtime treating him as ‘credible’…

ps. Have we heard any more word of the terrorists that ‘attacked an airman’ without ever being captured on CCTV or seen by any other witnesses? No? Just asking.

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Navel Battles.

Better get on with this one before the pedants arrive to tell me that I can’t spell ‘Naval’.

To the excellent ‘Bikini : La légende’ published a matter of four weeks ago since this year is the 70th anniversary of the Bikini. Imagine that – and we have the Bikini v. Burkini debate on every front page. Incredible piece of luck that, what ho? All stemming from two incidents, one in Corsica, one in Cannes. And photographers were on hand to witness both incidents of police telling women to cover up. Truly the world is a miraculous place.

Anyway, scepticism aside, 70 years ago, 5th July 1946 if you want to be precise, Louis Réard, a mechanical engineer who spent a lot of time in his mother’s lingerie drawer for reasons best left unsaid, revealed to the world that he had nicked an idea from from a couple of months previous of designing a perilously small bathing suit. The previous designer, Jacques Heim, had called his invention the ‘Atome’ (smallest particle and all that, nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll…) Réard in a blinding flash of nuclear inspiration, called his rip off the ‘Bikini’.

It wasn’t the size of these garments that so shocked the continent – it was the fact that they revealed that eternal memorandum that we don’t appear like magic from under a gooseberry bush – but are connected to our Mothers via our navel. (I swear my mother probably bit through the umbilical cord herself in her haste to make this connection a past memory!!!)

So before you could say ‘Cor, you don’t get many of those to the pound’, the police were busy taking down the details of any young lady who dared to expose her navel.

Perhaps if the Muslim ladies could bring themselves to expose their navel, which seems to be acceptable if not obligatory these days, there wouldn’t be such a huff and puff about the rest of their costume?

IF Ms Raccoon, being thoroughly disreputable and dishonourable, had had the bright idea of writing a book celebrating 70 years of the Bikini, she would have hired actors dressed as policemen to cause mayhem on the beaches by arresting women dressed in Burkinis……but nothing like the real thing, eh?

Freddie Starr never got anywhere near MY hamster.

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Hypocritical Whingers.

If we are going to fill the airwaves with women presenters in £700 t-shirts telling us that it is a tragedy that BHS has gone bust, could they please tell us why it is a ‘tragedy’?

Given that not one of them dresses as though they ever went anywhere near the place, nor would speak to anyone who ever went anywhere near the place, I can’t understand what is so ‘tragic’ in their eyes? Obviously 11,000 people losing their jobs is tragic – that is a different matter – but BHS going bust is no more tragic than the candle snuffing industry going out of business, nor washboard makers being laid off across the country.

As for Sky TVs vendetta against Sir Phillip Green – where is that coming from? Yes, he took £400 million, actually £423 million, in dividends between 2002 and 2004. Shocking! A businessman with a business in profit, which it was then, takes his profit out of the business. This has never happened before or since…

Since neither civil servants nor tax specialists could agree on the effects of Brown’s 1997 time bomb in the pensions market, is it really realistic to lambast a business man for taking money out of a profitable business that years later fell into pension deficit?

Given that Green didn’t ‘actually’ sell BHS for a quid, but rather that one pound was the only money that physically changed hands – Green wrote off a £210m loan that the business owed him, and several valuable leases – what is the real reason for his continual portrayal as ‘the unacceptable face of capitalism’? Wasn’t Brown’s pension raid the ‘unacceptable face of Labour’?

Discuss.