English language is weird

I mean, the English as used in England.

A Telegraph headline: Police refuse to say if shooting victim Anthony Grainger was armed. This was a suspected robber. Anywhere else - including ,astonishingly, Finland, Sweden etc - the headline would speak about "suspected robber", not "shooting victim".

The victimisation culture of serious criminals is really out of hand in Britain.

The police won't say if the man was armed. That is hardly surprising. Whatever the police says, if there is a tiniest error or debatable detail, it will be used against the officers in question and in justification for just about anything (including, but not limited to, arranging a riot, burning down a section of London, or emptying an electronics store of big screen TV's.

A nomination

Every once in a while, you learn some funny things about the English. Like this one: members of the parliament cannot resign. Actually, in the history, MPs were sometimes elected against their will - presumably there were some occupational hazards and anyway it was financially not such an attractive job as nowadays.

OK, so when an MP has disgraced himself in the expenses scandal, how do the English get rid of him? They appoint him to the job of Crown Steward and Bailiff of the three Chiltern Hundreds of Stoke, Desborough and Burnham. This is a ceremonial position of profit. An MP accepting an office of profit under the Crown must give up his or her seat. An MP applies for the office to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who usually then signs a warrant appointing the now former MP. And thus the MP has effectively resigned.

Ingenious.

No, Minister!

In the UK, the founder of an anti-bullying charity and helpline, Christine Pratt, blew the whistle that there is a bullying problem at No. 10 Downing Street, and staff had called her service for help.

Now, how would you expect a British Government respond to that? I would expect the Prime Minister to issue some statement like "we are taking any bullying issues seriously and we have set up a follow-up team to review our guidelines to prevent inappropriate workplace behaviour". Bland and unexciting and politically correct, but that's what any sane employer would do.

I wouldn't expect what minister Phil Woolas did: mock the anti-bullying activist by calling her "prat of a woman".

Remarkable. If I were accused of bullying, particularly in such a sensitive and significant position as a Cabinet minister, how should I respond? Would I really want to resort to the most classic bullying tactics: calling my adversary by names, playing with her name, degrading her?

This kind of behaviour could be expected from the so-called underclass in Britain: people who abuse each other verbally, in a brutal way, because they can't read or write. People who hit you if they don't like the way you look at them or talk to them.

But a minister? I would expect a dull, bureaucratic response, or in the best case, witty, slightly sarcastic but sympathetic phrases like "this so unfortunately misguided lady who is nevertheless working for a good cause which we aspire to support".

It appears that minister Phil Woolas - immigration minister, by chance, so one could assume he is setting a behavioural example to those who are new to Britain and British culture - decided to thoroughly demonstrate how terribly right Mrs. Pratt was when saying there is a bullying problem in the British government.