Police commissioners: spoil the vote
Thursday 15 November 2012
 Newspapers are clearly catching that mood, the loss-making Guardian thus telling us that "apathy is the expected response from 40 million voters". Actually, you can always trust the Guardian to get it wrong. This is not so much "apathy" as indifference – a slightly different thing. Elected police commissioners are not the answer to whatever problems are besetting the police, and simply reflect politicians' love affair with elections and their misplaced belief that they necessarily impart democracy. Speaking of my own force in West Yorkshire, I am not convinced that any amount of tinkering is going to improve an operation which is required to service 2.2 million people spread over nearly 800 square miles, headquartered in Wakefield, a city nearly twenty miles away from us by road. In this context, Bradford once had its own local police force, whence policing priorities were determined by the people of Bradford, represented by their councillors, and it was the local people who paid the bills. Supposedly local policing from a bunker near the city centre, with priorities dictated an elected commissioner, isn't going to make the slightest bit of difference to us. What we actually need is much smaller police forces, on the back of a two-tier structure. Very few countries have a one-tier operation, and for very good reason. They don't work very well. We need our own city police, with a national police force to deal with serious crime, security and the like – and to keep an eye on the locals, rooting out the all too prevalent corruption. That itself would be a major improvement because the biggest failing is the lack of an independent complaints system. If you complain about the police, unless it is a major issue, they investigate the complaint themselves. If you don't accept the findings, you are entitled to a review, which is carried out by the same officers who investigated the original complaint. When all else fails – which it does most times – you can then go to the independent Police Complaints Commission, which will ask the local police force to investigate itself. In effect, there is no point in complaining. The force knows it can get away with rubbish service because there is no outsider looking in. All I can see of this current idea is more of the same, with still more useless mouths to feed, a ridiculously wasteful exercise that will achieve nothing at all at best and, possibly, make things considerably worse. Hence, later today I will wander down to the polling station and spoil my vote. It is the only sensible thing to do for something I didn't ask for, don't want and resent having to pay for. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 15/11/2012 |
EU politics: a budget crisis
Wednesday 14 November 2012
 From memory, I think this has only happened three times before, and one of those times was in 1980. It is a huge blow to a political construct which prides itself on its negotiation skills and its ability to divine a consensus. More seriously, it means that the Commission does not have the funding to meet existing commitments and, since it is not permitted to borrow and is required to balance its budget, this is rather a serious crisis. What is, therefore, rather remarkable is the paucity of reporting in the British media, and a certain amount of confusion with the multi-annual budget negotiations, which are a separate issue. But then, with a media that has never understood the difference between a "summit" and a European Council, it is unsurprising that it has failed to register what is going on. Talk about "conciliation procedure" to the average hack and you are likely to get a blank stare. However, not even the German press, or EurActiv seems to be giving this the weight the event deserves, which makes you wonder what is really going on. I think, actually, the media have not understood what has happened, and have confused themselves by conflating the two separate sets of budget talks, one annual and the other multi-annual. This is certainly the impression I get from the error-strewn Mail story. But you also get the impression that the EU is downplaying the issue, the EU parliament offering only minimal comment in the hope that the media won't make a meal of it. Meanwhile, the media news of the day on the Europe front is a wave of strikes which is, at least, something tangible that the hacks can understand. Workers are coordinating their actions in Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, with Belgium chipping in with a 24-hour rail strike, giving plenty of picture opportunities and scope for lurid commentary. Under the noses of the legacy media, however, a far greater institutional crisis is building, and so far they don't seem to have noticed. Clearly, no one has told them what to think, and they're all adrift. They have a crisis on their hands and they don't know how to report it. COMMENT THREAD Richard North 14/11/2012 |
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