Only himself to blame...

Andrew Mitchell's complaints are the whine of a man who, having raised a pit bull and trained it to terrorise the neighbours, sniffles and moans when it turns round and nips his finger.

Mitchell was a minister in the Thatcher and Major governments of the '80s and '90s that pumped police aggression and arrogance.

The force is there to defend property and order, so it has always tended to serve the rich and powerful - they have most of the former and need lots of the latter to keep it.

But as the Tories cranked up the class war and cracked down in Northern Ireland, they needed to make their guard dogs fiercer.

The Tories began pressing the police to crack down on strikers and protesters in support of their pals during the printers' strike at Eddie Shah's Messenger newspaper in Warrington in 1983.

Tory home secretary Leon Brittan told Cheshire's chief constable that it was in "the national interest" to beat pickets and warned him that the government "would not then be able to support the chief constable publicly" if he failed.

After the Tories persuaded Cheshire's cops to whack pickets on the head in 1983, they went on to get the boys in blue to bash strikers battling Rupert Murdoch at Wapping, to take on the miners, poll tax protesters and everyone else who resisted Mitchell's friends as they tried to remake Britain into a friendlier place for the rich, and an unfriendlier place for the rest of us.

The Tories backed the police against any criticism, even as campaigners explained the arithmetic of injustice.

Mitchell said nothing about the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four or the Cardiff Three, but now he wants us to worry about his incident at the Downing Street gates.

Those men were sent to prison for murders they did not commit thanks to fake police evidence.

They lost years of their lives in grim desperation, and were only freed by their own strength of will and the brave hearts and tough minds of their supporters.

Mitchell is only arguing about exactly what swear words he used against coppers who got in the way of him and his bike.

Yet Mitchell gets to write a 4,574-word article in the Sunday Times whining that he said "fucking" to the cops, but not "plebs."

In fact, Mitchell did worse than nothing about the injustices of the '90s.

In 1990 Mitchell voted for the return of the death penalty for those found guilty of murdering police officers.

In 1991 Britain's most famous "cop-killers," the Tottenham Three, were released because they hadn't killed PC Blakelock after all.

Mitchell would have sent innocent men to their death on fake police evidence. There was a vocal public campaign for their freedom, but Mitchell's ears were deaf to it.

He preferred waving around a hangman's noose to believing that coppers could "stitch up" men for murder. 

Now he whimpers about rough treatment from the rozzers.

"By day four, I could not sleep. I also stopped eating. Weight dropped off me. I lost more than a stone in the first three weeks," Mitchell writes of his ordeal. 

"On several days I simply could not get out of bed. I would sit for hours with my BlackBerry in one hand and my ancient mobile in the other."

It would take a heart of stone not to laugh. Even the details of the Mitchell stitch-up are of Conservative Party design.

The police have only had wide-ranging powers to arrest people for swearing since the Tories 1986 Public Order Act, a law mostly designed to squeeze pickets and strikers. Last year the Metropolitan Police told officers to stop arresting people for swearing because judges were throwing their cases out of court, saying they were big boys and girls who wouldn't be "alarmed" or "distressed" by rude words.

Since then, the police often mention "passers by" worried by swear words, rather than just themselves.

As far as Mitchell has been stitched up - and he is, after all, only arguing about exactly how insulting he was to the police - he was stitched up on a pattern tailored by his own party.

The good news is that the police v Mitchell battle is one that both sides can lose. The argument will weaken some of the links between authoritarian police and the Conservative Party, which is a good thing.

Mitchell has been forced to admit that police misbehaviour is mostly aimed at plebs, not pleb-haters.

He said that "if this can happen to a senior government minister, then what chance does a youth in Brixton or Handsworth have? For me, this has all been a salutary lesson." Frankly, I doubt that the man who wanted to hang the Tottenham Three will remember this lesson. But even after he forgets it, Mitchell's moaning makes it easier for the rest of us to point to real injustices. 

At the same time, if Mitchell does win his campaign and get a few constables sacked for exaggerating how sweary he is, the former chief whip being able to say "I used the F-word not the P-word at coppers" is hardly going to restore his authority with Tories in the home counties.

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George Osborne pretends the deficit is forcing him to cut public spending. But the Inland Revenue's recent admission that it has a £10.2 billion backlog of 41,000 tax avoidance cases suggests other ways to balance the books.

Osborne is cutting services because he wants to reshape government's role, making it leaner and definitely much meaner.

If "balancing the books" was his only motive, Osborne would be trying to cut tax avoidance.

According to the Financial Times, the latest European bailout for Greece includes demands for "setting up tax courts … to accelerate rulings in disputed claims, which at present are delayed for years because of a huge backlog of cases, and allow delinquent taxpayers to be jailed rather than receive suspended sentences."

That might be one Greek lesson Osborne should learn.

• Follow Solomon Hughes on Twitter @SolHughesWriter