What do you call a country which is run by the police for the benefit of the police? Is that a 'police state'? Yes, I think that qualifies. Surely it does?

SENIOR police officers will call this week for the DNA of everyone in Britain to be put on a national database from the moment they are born.

They believe that this would be a vital weapon in the drive to curb crime and help to solve hundreds of murders.

[From the UK Times]

Some nerve those plods have got! Assuming that nothing has been lost in the media translation, I detect not even a hint of humility. After all, they are supposed to be public servants. And what next, I wonder? 'Police demand increase in income tax to help fight crime'? 'Police demand greater integration with the European Union to help fight crime? 'Police demand greater regulation of world trade in order to fight crime'?

What disturbs me here is not so much the idea of a national DNA database. Okay, that does disturb me but HMG hasn't got the money to fund such a grand scheme so it isn't going to happen (yet). No, the ugliness is more immediate than that; it lies in the casual assumption by police chiefs that they can simply demand such a thing and expect their will to be done without even paying lip service to the principle of democracy that most people in this country set great store by. Who died and left them boss?

The crime-solving canard has worn so thin that it is almost beyond mockery. Solving crimes is something that the UK police are not much interested in doing anymore. Population control is now their job ('Social Management' in NuSpeak). And as they now regard themselves to be a uniformed wing of the ruling elite, I suppose we're going to get much more of this kind of thing from them in future.

So now we are the servants and they are the masters. How did that happen?

Cross-posted from Samizdata.net