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isn't Brian a senior plod? well he should fit in just fine with a party that surrendered all self respect and penalised the poor and needy instead of the bankers who are rich and greedy....

Have many, or any, police officers reached the peerage before?

Re not on peers list, Might find him on the end of a peer though?

Paddick obviously just didn't have enough money!

it seems clear that the new condem homophobic tendancies of the liberals, (not sticking up for David Laws) now means they cannot make another openly gay candiate a peer. It is great to see how well the influence of the libdems is really making a difference to the coalitions decisions.

I don't agree with nick!!

Buffalo_Bison, actually there are eight peers with policing experience according to the Constitution Unit, including the last four Met Commissioners (Lords Imbert, Condon, Stevens of Kirkwhelpington and Blair of Boughton) and several other senior officers around the country (Lords Mackenzie of Framwellgate, Dear and Knights). I'm unsure of the others' identities.

I should hope Paddick isn't on the peerage list - what has he ever done? He was a policeman and a failed Mayoral candidate. Surely you have to do more than that to be a Peer. Hang on I have just remembered Lord Sugar and Lord Mandelson so clearly you don't have to be much good at anything!!

I'm so proud of my step-son. He serves in the Metropolitan Police and works hours that to me sound incomprehensibly long. For myself I would be happy to see him continue to be remunerated at the same level he is now for some time to come, although I have to say one of his colleagues was bitten by an alcoholic Polish arrival and had to have an AIDS test.

'Police' to me is not a dirty word. Through my step-son I have realised that the Met is an exemplary organization with some really brilliant people at the helm.

It's like the feeling I got listening to Radio 4 this morning when once again the word 'poor' was used to describe I don't know what. There are no poor in the UK, go to India and Africa if you want to talk about the poor. There are no 'poor' in this country. How can there be poor when they have free housing, free health care, free education, and free university education for their issue, and government money to allow them to keep living their meaningless and purposeless lives..

Socialists live in a dream world that exists within the borders of the UK, fighting battles that belong to another age. Capitalism is so clearly the default mode for tribal human primate behaviour. It was ever thus!

You talk about human ascendancy (puke). I would say that the rise of superstition, via brainwashing of children, leading to acts of obscene cruelty is regression not progress. I irremediably hate my own species so give me the cockroaches every time(though the earwig with it's two penises may well have the upper hand(or clasper)!

It is now clear that the great triumph of European Utopian socialism is that that everything in the world that is manufactured will be made in China as it was once in Britain. Two questions. Going forward, who outside China will be able to afford what they're making when unemployment outside China has gone exponential, and why, didn't we take our sick man of Europe status and be inspired by it to forward the cause of our continuing competitiveness on the global labour markets???

Truth is you couldn't write it. Nobody would believe it. But yet......