While waiting for a hip replacement operation on the NHS, his arthritic hip was giving him so much trouble he felt he would soon be unable to work. What did he do? Go for ill-health retirement? Put his feet up and enjoy the long-term sick leave?No, he didn't. He paid for a private operation himself so he could get back to the job where he knows his experience counts, working on the emergency response vehicles. He then spent a frustrating period on inside duties trying to convince occupational health that he was fit to return to active duty.It makes me angry that dedicated officers around the country like PC Hughes are being branded as malingerers in Home Office briefings by people who don't know or understand the people working in the service.I certainly don't think the public is yet ready to agree that private security policing for profit is a good idea or that traffic wardens with batons are the answer to creating a more visible law-and-order presence on the streets.The relationship between law enforcement agencies and some communities in Britain is already fragile. Are we really suggesting that less trained and qualified personnel on the streets is the recipe for improving such relationships?At a dinner last week, I met a sergeant from the NYPD who was at ground zero on 11 September. He told me that he had recently been to a memorial service for one officer who died that day.

At the wake, the widow asked him what on earth drove 21 fanatics to lay down their lives for their cause. The reply was that more than 400 firefighters and policemen had been willing to lay down their lives for their cause. He explained it by saying that "Policing wasn't just a job, it was a calling."It's worth remembering in all the fancy talk about modernisation that the values we treasure in our police officers are timeless and not new.. We are good at shopping Or at least we are in quantity, if not in quality. Alone in the world, just about, the British are on a pre-Christmas spending spree We are good at shopping Or at least we are in quantity, if not in quality. The volume of retail sales here is up 6 per cent year-on-year, the biggest increase by far of any large developed country.

In most countries, retail sales are down, in Japan by nearly 3 per cent, while even our usual rivals in the retail-spending league, the Americans, are up by less than 1 per cent.In the short term, this is great, for the strength of consumption is stopping the UK economy falling into recession, unlike the US, Japan and probably the Eurozone. But it raises at least two serious questions.Why are we so different from the rest of the world? And – since a fair portion of our spending is funded by borrowing – could we be heading for a nasty fall?The "why are we different?" goes back a long way. We have, for example, had an appetite for imports for at least 150 years. In the 19th century, when Britain was dubbed the workshop of the world, there were fewer than half a dozen years when exports exceeded imports.