The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Public money used to stop public having a greater say in policing – Telegraph.

Don't ask whose money it is. Our public officials certainly don't think it's ours. Listening to "The World at One" as I drove along the M56 today, I heard Yvette Cooper, Labour's current irritant-in chief, talk about "an injection of government money into the economy." Where did she think that "government money" came from? And if it was not in the economy before, where was it, why and can we have a tour of those caves please?

To the extent the government has cash in its coffers, it belongs to that minority of people from whom it was extracted by force. If Cooper was thinking of money the government plans to print quantitatively ease, then that's a dilution of the value of the money not yet taken by force. And if she meant money the government plans to borrow in our name, it's our grandchildrens' money, as yet unearned. Whichever it is, it's not government money. The government is merely supposed to supervise its prudent application to public purposes on our behalf.

If the obnoxious Ms Cooper knew whose money it was, she would not cause offence every time she carries the bucket behind Alistair Darling's horse (while he carries the bucket behind Gordon Brown's) – to use Paxo's charming (and, of course, entirely unbiased) imagery when speaking of George Osborne and David Cameron the other evening.

As for campaigning with public money to have the public excluded from decision-making, it's a wonderful little metaphor for life under Labour. The British state now has a  beastly life all of its own and we are merely parasites in its fur. Why do Police Authorities even need an association, anyway? What benefit has the public ever derived from this particular use of its funds? If a public movement grew up to demand that the association be disbanded, would the APA listen to the public's concerns or just use our money to oppose that too? I suspect it would do the latter and with no more of a qualm than a sense of irony.