ALL the popular UK newspapers raised their collective arms recently in support of Ian Faletto, the colourful, dedicated stationmaster whose 27-year career on the railways was cut short because, in an act of apparent selflessness, he pitched an errant supermarket trolley off the track leading to his station without switching off the current.

Ergo, he had broken regulations. But his quick thinking on behalf of the travelling public cost him his livelihood.

‘Not fair’ cried the columns. In their eyes, here was an acknowledged Mr Nice Guy penalised by an overbearing employer armed with all the rules and regulations.
And you can see why it appealed, because it panders to all the instincts of supporting the little man up against the crushing wheels of bureaucracy.

I’m sure everyone still recalls the impact of that amazing picture on every front page in 1989 showing the solitary figure with the carrier bag defying a convoy of Chinese tanks after the Tiananmen Square massacre. It is a familiar theme which gifts a veritable bible of judgmental reporting.

The list has included a deputy head teacher disciplined for removing a child against his or her will from a school playground because a known sex offender was prowling outside, a farmer fined for the activities of so-called travellers who had taken up residence on his land even though he had tried all manner of legal redress to remove them, and the detention of a landowner because she had resisted the attacks by a gang on her property and possessions.

I suppose it’s an easy story to write, because the mere ‘outing’ of such outrageous institutional injustice relieves frustration and provides an antidote to the sort of unforgiving dog-eat-dog attitude promoted by TV programmes such as The Apprentice and similar talent-challenged contests.

It also explains how we carry by proxy the flag of the anti-bully-boy crusade far away from our own shores. Call it displacement activity if you like, because there’s probably very little we can actually do to prevent strong-arm repression of popular uprisings in countries like Libya, Syria, Bahrain, Burma or Iran.

But at least we ensure that the terminology fits our narrative. So ‘anti-government’ easily slips into ‘pro-democracy’, and with the minimum of background knowledge we find ourselves backing the underdogs, and rejoicing in the outcome of regime change in Egypt and Tunisia, regardless of the consequences.

Of course there is an inevitable touch of the xenophobic in all this. America, for example, has been painted a bully for continuing to insist that the UK hands over for judicial interrogation the unfortunate computer geek who strayed into its leaky Pentagon cyber system while trawling for information on UFOs, despite an acknowledged mitigating medical condition.

The repeated use by President Obama of the word ‘British’ during his invective against BP over the oil spill in the Mexican Gulf and the relentless pursuit of its chief executive when other domestic companies were at least equally culpable did him no favours on this side of the Atlantic.

And now, from my temporary observation post in France, l’affaire DSK, involving the arraignment of the now former boss of the IMF, who happens to be French, for an alleged sexual violation of a chambermaid in his New York hotel room has grabbed the headlines.

With malice of afterthought, all the force of conspiratorial suspicion has been unleashed in support of the beleaguered plaintiff. Federal insensitivity, political corruption, financial opportunism – you name it, and the bogeyman is non-cheese-eating, non-surrendering Uncle Sam.

The fact that Dominique Strauss-Kahn is hardly a ‘little man’ and can summon considerable influence has, for the moment at least, slipped the imagination. But despite universal presumption of innocence, the humiliating, heavy-handed treatment meted out by the US justice system accompanied by more relish from the American media than you’d find on a triple-burger ensure that there is little Gallic expectation of prevailing justice.

Yet despite all the pressures to conform and accept the Big Brother tendencies of faceless authority, which after all we ourselves have created, there is something uniquely satisfying in that we still instinctively identify with the rights and justice of individuals who appear to be persecuted by forces too great for them to combat – or even get a hearing from.

How often, to take the obvious anecdotal chestnut, do the police find themselves facing criticism by the generally law-abiding for obsessive attention to minor traffic infractions, while failing to pursue the ‘difficult’ law breakers.
And, yes, soft targets will always exist. Who can forget the famous instruction by Claude Rains to his subordinate in the film Casablanca: ‘Go and round up the usual suspects’? Well, it’s easy to do.

Another famous actor, one Charles Chaplin, earned a cinematic reputation from championing the little man against overbearing odds. Fortunately, in Hollywood movies, despite the trials they endure, the principles seldom get hurt – it’s a tradition transferred from the final curtain call in the theatre.

It would be too easy to get carried away in an overflow of righteous zeal. Rules do exist, signed up to and endorsed, for the protection of both the individual and the state. You can’t have people wilfully ignoring health and safety regulations and the like, but it would be a tragedy if the state were to be seen to abandon its duty of care towards inspired individuals like Mr Faletto and his ilk, who volunteer to go the extra mile, simply in order to dot the i’s and cross the t’s of an employment target sheet.

It doesn’t happen like that, of course, but it won’t prevent writer’s cramp in the bureaux of the media moralists.