A man who hit a police officer has been given a suspended prison sentence. The comments-board beneath the report is awash with the views of fine upholders of the law, who think this absurd.

Hitting a police officer is not like hitting any ordinary person, they shriek. The fact that this is a police officer is an aggravation of the crime. They’re correct, of course. But it also works the other way. When a police officer hits somebody else, that too is far more serious than one ordinary person hitting another ordinary person. The fact that he is a police officer – and it generally is a he – makes the crime worse.

Yet I have noticed the sort of people who object, on the internet, to drunken police officers beating up French students who have photographed them drinking in uniform with the bar-owners they are supposed to police, are very different people, using very different language, to those who object when it is policemen who are assaulted. The latter sound like totalitarian right-wingers who would have been all for the arguments employed by Sir Oswald Moseley in the 1930s. You are left with the feeling that, to them, upholding the law is an end in itself, and not the means to an end.

Those who object to the police beating up students (and others) are different. You can sense by the way they argue, however semi-literately, that they have an intrinsic suspicion of police authority and feel revulsion for the mere thought of its being abused. The strangest thing, I find – or perhaps not – is that the same people who are usually out in force rooting on the internet for Progressive Joseph and his Labour Party are the very ones who raise hell when somebody hits a policeman, but who stay silent when three policemen hit a French student in his 20s.

The Labour Party might not think of itself as right-wing and negatively conservative (political conservatism is generally a good thing), but the bulk of its supporters are generally just that. Isn’t it peculiar?

Double Jeopardy

I had been thoroughly pleased to hear that the police fully intended to prosecute, once again and this time using the correct information on the charge sheet, the three police officers and their bouncer friend for beating up that poor student. I wrote about this in my column last Thursday.

Now I read, to my great dismay, that this might well be impossible, after all, because the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights does not permit such a thing. Given a great deal more thought than I gave the matter when writing Thursday’s column, I can see now that this would be right, because it is designed to protect people from state and police abuse. Sadly, in this particular case it protects abusive police officers from being brought to justice.

It makes us furious (except, of course, for those black-shirt types who rally behind Joseph) but perhaps we just have to tell ourselves that this is the price to be paid for greater guarantees for freedom. It’s the same as with democratic elections in which we sometimes get the government that the stupid, ignorant and deliberately wilful deserve. But it’s a whole lot better than any other system yet invented.

But I have to say that in this particular situation, it’s maddening. One hopes that at least the police authorities will provide for the disciplining of these men within the force itself. And if they can be sacked on the basis of the available evidence, do please sack them. The police force is held in enough contempt as it is – except by the pseudo black-shirts (surely that ‘r’ is redundant) who support our Joseph.

Oh, but I thought we were starving

The Labour Party does its best to convince us that we’re starving, but now the European Commission has said that Malta’s economy is expected to perform much better than the eurozone average. I know who I’m best prepared to believe.