Re: h4rm0ny e: Captain Daft idiot
"......So let me instead ask you if you think the £10 million figure is misleading or made up?......" Not made up, just carefully calculated and presented in a sensationalist and misleading way. There would always have been a cost to policing the Ecuadorean consulate whether Assange was hiding in there or not. The total bill for full-time uniformed Police pay (so not including admin staff, part-timers and before overtime) for 2014/2015 for Metropolitan London is £1.7bn from a total Met budget of £4.1bn (https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/DMPCD%202014%20121%20MOPAC%20Budget%20Monitoring%20and%20Budget%20%26%20Reserves%20Movements%20-%20Period%205_2.pdf), so the cost of "guarding Assange" is trivial even if you don't consider that most of that cost would have been spent by the Diplomatic Protection Group as guarding the Ecuadorean Consulate anyway. Depending on how you want to crunch the sums, the average London copper costs £77k per year to have on the street (http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/dec/22/police-warning-job-cuts-austerity-labour-officers), so the figure over several years of £10m isn't much of a surprise to those of us that actually did our homework. It's just another soundbites for The Followers to rebleat unquestioningly.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
