Tuesday, March 12, 2013

De Mortuis Nil Nisi Bunkum

The Inspector Gadget Blog seems to have been taken down. Since everything that has ever gone on to the Interweb still sits on a disk somewhere, it will still exist, albeit without contributions from IG himself.

I did not always see eye to eye with IG, and I was disappointed when he tossed around casual insults to the judiciary and showed open loathing for some of his charmless customers. I would expect that from the canteen culture, but not from an Inspector.

I have a ranking officer in my family, and I cannot see him coming out with some of the intemperate remarks that IG has blessed us with. Still, let us see what turns out.

In this authoritarian world, I would not be in the least bit surprised to hear that the officer has been leant on. That happened to JP bloggers last year, but being unpaid we had a lot less to lose than IG.

32 comments:

  1. It's still there, but looks somehow different. The latest post is from June last year. Can't recall him changing blog providers, which would explain the old post.

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    1. He's gone. This from the blog of his book publisher:

      http://mondaybooks.wordpress.com/2013/03/11/farewell-inspector-gadget/

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    2. The link I was looking at last night: http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/ is now down.

      Even Coppersblog has gone. It seems when DC handed over control to others they turned it into a PR exercise for the service, denying any problems.

      http://ukcommentators.blogspot.co.uk/2008/06/coppersblog.html

      Maybe George Orwell was right, but just a hundred years too early.

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  2. This is indeed a shame, and I hope that he has come to a natural end rather than been silenced. If the latter I hope that it has involved bribery rather than threats.

    I think that you Bystander Team are a lttle harsh: many come to policing via a Criminology/Sociology degree. Gadget was ex-military and was therefoe all the more frustrated because he had seen what people from the troubled estates can make of themselves given the will and the determination. I think that the excuses and whining of the repeat offenders made him angry.

    Orwell's point about language applies to Political Correctness: eventually the words inform the thinking. You may consider a blog to be a bit like a newspaper - I suspect many see it more like the pub: there are things that we cannot say at work. Where this involves a conspiracy of hypocrisy, we tend to say them down the pub. If we cannot say them at all, then we ar likely to explode from the cognitive dissonance. In my own profession there appears also a politicisation of the upper echelons amounting almost to apathy which allows very bad decisions to be made by Civil Servants and Accountants. It is almost as if a habit of acquiescence is a necessity for promotion. In the days when Hitler was personally directing non-existent armies in futility, the German Army had a new nickname for its High Commnad: OKW, they said, stood for "Oben Kein Widerstand" - No Resistance at the Top.

    Gadget retained the passion of his conviction that our Police make the Country better - if he was intemperate, it was this passion bubbling over. I will miss his blog.

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    1. I think if IG had come to a "natural end" he would have put up a goodbye message and left the archive available for "future generations" - he was rather proud of some of his writings, especially "Rich Girls are Crying" which he often referenced in subsequent posts.

      So I suspect foul play. Top brass may have told him: delete the blog or lose your job.

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  3. If political correctness makes us less racist, less homophobic, less misogynistic, less bigoted in every way, I am all for it. I always take the fulminating against PC as an indication that bigotries so deep rooted as to be virtually subconscious are being challenged, so that too is useful in indicating the progress of civilisation. Blogs like IG's revealed just how far the functionaries of the state still have to go. As such it was depressing, but informative. And naturally, if he was leaned on, that was reprehensible, however much harm he might have done in legitimising prejudice.

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    1. Personally, I would consider political correctness very similar to Health and Safety in that regard. Sometimes it's overzealous and as a result ridiculous, causing problems for all concerned. That's when it gets in the papers, together with lots of wailing and snarky comments.

      But in general? Me personally, I'm a big fan of being both healthy and safe. Big fan.

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  4. I am not convinced the leaning on JP bloggers is now behind us. It would not surprise me in the least were Bystander and other magistrates who blog about the courts to face renewed pressures in the months to come. The same applies to all judicial office holders, including those recorders who comment from time to time (almost always to our greater edification) on Pink Tape and other blawgs.
    Kate Caveat

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    1. If true Kate...and I have absolutely no reason to doubt you...then that is a very worrying piece of news indeed

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  5. I must admit, over time I increasingly came to the view that IG was not a real police office - either he was an ex-officer, or a composite, but it just seemed too implausible that serving officer could have imparted the details (and run an on-line shop!) in the way he did without being found out.

    I suspect his silence is due to him being unmasked by somebody - we will probably all get to see exactly who Gadget is shortly.

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  6. We lost Dave the airline pilot last year for no reason other than he was tired of blogging. Perhaps Mrs Gadget put some pressure on him.

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  7. I did notice that there was mention of the blog being taken down in the last post by IG either yesterday or the day before (a post now lost, it seems). As usual the silly children that play the "I'm first" game failed to note the significance of the comment they were responding to (I'm amazed that some of them were, apparently, police officers - one would take most of them for 5 year olds).

    Although I grew increasing tired of reading the posts that were just regurgitations of the "I'm a jaded copper with a massive chip on my shoulder" type, he did occasionally make some very good points, and give those not inside the police service an insight into the challenges they face. Those I shall miss.

    If IG's blog was taken down by the Top Brass, then I can't say that I'm surprised. IG's blog had a reasonably high profile, so I would imagine he has been viewed as a thorn in the side of those in senior management for a fair while now, and it can't have been that difficult to track him down.

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  8. David Copperfield hied himself off to greener (in summer, anyway) pastures, and, as I read from his final posts, was much the happier for it. Possibly the same for IG?

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  9. "I have a ranking officer in my family, and I cannot see him coming out with some of the intemperate remarks that IG has blessed us with"

    must be at HQ then and not in the real world.

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    1. No, gets his hands dirty. Can't say any more.

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    2. Exactly - not much cause to say anything intemperate when you're driving a desk.

      The comment seems to reflect the mild conceit with which many legal professionals and the judiciary seem to view the Police.
      The children playing the first game; they act like 5 year olds; the canteen culture;.....or am I being over sensitive?

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    3. CC, no. There is a similar attitude to the armed forces.

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  10. I can safely say that as a serving officer, IG's blog was required reading for me on an almost daily basis. It served as a soothing panacea because he was someone who managed to articulate the fears, frustrations and sadness that I and many coppers feel about the way the Police is managed by senior officers, abused by the government and maltreated by the media.

    I think the characterisation of him as a 'jaded copper with a massive chip on his shoulder' is disingenuous at best. Unless you have experienced 1st hand the world that Police officers are now required to operate and live in, both on and off-duty, then you are not in a position to comment.

    As an aside, I now find myself casting around to try and find another Police related blog to help pass the time between dog walking and work, but trawling through the 30 or so blogs that I had in my ‘favourites’ list, it would appear that 99% have been deleted or shut down over the last couple of years. A sad indictment of the Orwellian stranglehold that ACPO and PSD have over officers making comments publically, where criticism is universally interpreted as ‘bringing the service into disrepute’.

    THIS is the world in which we have to live and I hope that Inspector Gadget has not paid the price for the freedom of speech that everyone else online takes for granted.

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    1. To those at the top (of any organisation) speech is only truly free if it treads on no toes.

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  11. That's a pretty harsh assessment. But anyway, if you think yoy're in a safe bubble you're wrong. The dark silencing forces will come for you next....

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  12. Gadget was an excellent blog but you have to be in the police to get the humour. When you realise the constant pressure we can be under it's just a release valve. I hope he has just retired and not been found out by some ACPO arse.
    Jaded

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  13. From the monday books link above

    'Monday Books adds: Thanks for your concern, but s/he hasn’t been forced to quit. It was a decision arrived at over many months, based on having said all that could be said, over and over again.'

    Conspiracy theorists... relax!

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  14. I have to confess that I too was becoming tired of the same old same old revolving around ‘lack of managerial/political support, over zealous micro-management and political correctness, excessive benefits paid to drug fuelled wasters lightly chastised by the failing judiciary’ and ‘we’re overworked, underpaid and not respected’.

    That having been said he was right – his comments were, I believed, fuelled by his passion to do the right thing for decent people, but not always articulated using the most sensitive phrases.

    Patience fatigue must surely be responsible for some of his/her less liberal comments.

    Any long-term reader must surely have come to the same conclusion, but to a new reader who had no idea about how the police force at grass roots really functions it must have been a real eye opener.

    It must have been frustrating for him/her to try to continue to highlight the same perennial problems in some other new rehashed way.

    The blogsphere is a poorer place for his departure.

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  15. He just retired did't he?

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    1. Or the thought police finally got him.

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  16. I used to enjoy Gadget's blog back in the days when reading it was genuinely educational. I didn't agree with everything he wrote; but nor do I agree with everything written on this blog.

    Unfortunately, Gadget showed every sign of coming completely unhinged over the last couple of years, to the point where the idea of him as a serving policeman was terrifying enough, let alone the prospect that the powers that be might one day decide to arm him (a suggestion he appended to almost every post).

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  17. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/mar/13/police-blogger-quits-pressure-unofficial

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  18. Interesting to read the Grauniad's (not unsurprising) view that pressure from above was the reason for IG's blog being taken down. This seems to come at a time when the power of employers to control what their employees say publicly is gaining some media attention.

    For my entire working life I was bound (and still am) by a law that prohibits me from talking to the media or publishing anything related to my (now former) former work, or even revealing the identity of people I worked for or with. Many tens of thousands of people have accepted such restrictions as part of their employment contracts, and up until recently it hasn't seemed to cause any significant problems.

    What seems to have changed is that social media, for whatever reason, isn't viewed by many as "publishing". My understanding is that putting anything up publicly on the internet can be considered to be publishing, and is essentially the same as releasing information to the newspapers, TV or radio.

    Quite a few bloggers, tweeters and other social media users seem to be sailing very close to the wind. Leaving aside genuine whistle blowers, anyone being paid to do a job has a moral obligation to not undermine the credibility of their employer, IMHO. If an employee disagrees very strongly with their employers policies (as IG seemed to do), then morally I would have thought the right thing to do would be to stop accepting their pay cheque and go and work elsewhere.

    May be I'm a little old fashioned, but it seems to me that employees and employers owe each other a certain amount of loyalty for as long as they have a contractual relationship. Why should it be acceptable for employees to publish highly critical, close to abusive at times, comments about their employer, but unacceptable for an employer to publish even slightly critical comments about their employees?

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    1. Your contention breaks down a little when you understand that police officers have no contract. Sometime they are beginning to understand the value of.

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  19. "Your contention breaks down a little when you understand that police officers have no contract. "

    Of course they have a contract. It may not be written on a bit of paper, but it is no less a contract for that. IIRC (from the little bit of contract law I did) all you need for a legally binding contract is an offer, the acceptance of that offer and the exchange of a consideration.

    In the case of a police officer the offer is one of a job as a police officer, the acceptance of that offer is them accepting that job (they even swear an oath accepting it, I believe) and the exchange of the consideration is pay on the part of the employer and work on the part of the employee.

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  20. Hello ...I have an indirect contact with Gadget and he is OK...he has just decided to hang up his keyboard for a bit...

    You can still moan about the Police on my blog though...

    shijuronotgeorgedixon.wordpress.com

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  21. Can I recommend this as a worthy alternative:

    http://thethinkingpoliceman.blogspot.co.uk/

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