Police Alert: Nick Clegg for Wasting Time

And so the Police & Crime Commissioners elections roar into the record books: as the ones with the lowest turnout in modern British history. With less than 15% of the electorate voting - and one polling station in Wales having a remarkable turnout of precisely zero - the validity of the entire process has fallen into question. Record numbers of spolit papers - many deliberately so - have turned up as the citizens of England and Wales give, in effect, a decisive thumbs down to the whole farcical process.

Over £100 million of taxpayers' money has been wasted on holding this exercise in the middle of November - totally out of time with the normal voting cycle in early winter, in the dark. An additional £25 million was wasted on moving it from the original plan of coinciding with the local elections in May.

So who is responsible for this mess? Who has wasted taxpayers money and a lot of people's time? And left us with the policing system in a total mess with Commissioners formally elected but without any mandate or legitimacy at all?

Step forward our old friend, Deputy Prime Minister and Chancer in Chief Nick Clegg.

Yes, that one - whose Lib Dem Party sunk into fifth place behind UKIP and the English Democrats in Nick's own home territory of South Yorkshire, only just keeping their deposit. As brazen as ever, the Lib Dems pushed and pushed for these elections to be held in mid-November rather than the previously agreed time of May when their costs could have been reduced and (whatever your view about the posts themselves) more voters would have participated.

Why?

Quite simply, though laughably, they thought this would help them hold seats at the council elections As the BBC trailed a year ago, Lib Dem high command thought that if the police elections were held in May, they would both distract Lib Dem efforts to hold onto council seats contested at the same time and buoy up the Tory vote by creating a focus on law and order.

So, after confronting David Cameron with threats to vote down the Police & Social Responsibility Bill if he did not concede on the timetable, the Lib Dems achieved the change and, in spite of the additional £25 millions in  costs, the vote was moved to yesterday. At the time, they claimed it was an altruistic move to depoliticise the elections, but a BBC investigation found otherwise - and unlike the recent Newsnight farago, no one denied this one's findings. And besides, the refusal to provide a freepost facility as normal with this level of election effectively removed the chance for independents to seriously participate unless they were wealthy - leading in fact to very highly politicised elections.

It is therefore touchingly and wonderfully ironic that the Lib Dems' results have been relentlessly pisspoor - not only did they fail to field candidates in half the country, but where they did they were frequently beaten out of sight. With most results in, their national vote total barely reaches 7% and they have been overtaken by UKIP even although that party was also only standing in half the contests.

Clegg and his party have a lot to answer for - and a big bill to pay.

Umm..err...umm..oh, gosh.....it wasn't me, officer!

Positively Spoiling - Police Commissioner Ballot Today

So the most low key election in British history apparently takes place today as 41 Police & Crime Commissioners are elected for the first time across England and Wales. In an election that has cost £100 millions of taxpayers' money to hold in the dark of early winter, with little or no publicity, a combination of near-total voter lack of awareness combined with disillusion with the whole idea is likely to drive turnout down - one survey suggesting a turnout of just 15% may yet be over-optimistic.

No one asked for these posts, and only the Lib Dem wing of the Coalition wanted them at this time - apparently banking on the idea they could mobilise proportionately more supporters at this time of year than Tory or Labour. This is a strategy that has manifestly backfired as they now lack any significant support - recent polls have them hovering at 8%, often in fourth place and sometimes with the Greens withing spitting distance of driving them into fifth.

So we have elections no one wants for posts no one wants and candidates no one knows anything about. But 41 of them will be the lucky winners of annual salaries of £100,000 - nearly 50% more than MPs get and 9 times what local authority councillors receive for working 30 hours per week. As blogged before, they represent an unwelcome centralisation of scrutiny of the police in the hands of one person rather than the cross section of councillors, experts and community representatives in the current Police Authorities. This could lead at one extreme to an overly cosy relationship with the local Chief Constable through to populist grandstanding on complex issues that could compromise the police and divide communities.

What to do then? One group is advocating that rather than voting for any of the would-be Commissioners, voters opposed to the idea should not stay at home but rather should turn up at polling stations and spoil their ballot papers. They are recommending writing a statement along the lines of "No to Police Commissioners, Yes to Democracy" or something similar that makes clear it is a deliberate spoiling of the paper to make a point rather than a simple mistake. The group was established on Facebook by Greens and others following a debate in Leeds. It has a Facebook Page, Spoil Your Ballot Papers for the Police Elections, and a Twitter hashtag of #spoilpoliceballot. It's not too late to join up or comment.

Spoilt papers are separated and counted - often, they are shared with the election candidates and their agents and typically include mistakes like people voting for all the candidates or signing their names on the paper. Some put comments like "None of the above" or often more, shall we say, colourful statements of their views on the process. Spoiled ballots are not counted towards turnout however, so taking part will not increase the figures for the elections' turnout.

Some countries, like Australia, allow this option as a right, while other countries, such as Russia, require minimum turnouts of 50% before a candidate can be elected. Sadly Britain does neither, but it is perfectly legal to go and spoil your ballot paper and make a point. It shows you care enough to turnout and show your opposition - and its better than daytime TV.

Go on, take a walk, and spoil your ballot paper - you know it makes sense!

To Serve and Protect...?

Just two weeks from now, England and Wales get the rather unwanted opportunity to elect Police & Crime Commissioners in 41 districts. These new roles, as covered in an earlier post, replace the somewhat more inclusive and democratic committees that have had oversight of the police service until now. The Home Office and the Coalition Government apparently believe that having a single "personality" in charge will somehow "restore trust" in the police system, according to its website.

Prescott running for Police Commissioner

Yet just precisely who are some of these personalities? As the Guardian showed, most are simply serving or former local politicians, with some ex-police and servicemen. Perhaps the most prominent is the former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott who is standing in the Humberside region. Although now a member of the House of Lords, "Prezza" is still keen to make his mark in his native area. Given Labour's apparent inbuilt electoral strength there, he should be a dead cert; but with turnout likely to be the lowest in history, with predictions as low as 10 - 15% of eligible voters, any sort of upset is possible.

Facing Prescott is the UKIP candidate, one of their sitting MEPs, Godfrey Bloom. He has a checkered record in terms of his service as a Euro-MP for Yorkshire and Humberside, starting with all sorts of weird comments about women. In the police election, reducing the number of speed cameras and speed traps is one of his main concerns, in spite of their proven utility in reducing accidents and deaths.

But arguably one of the most controversial episodes for someone standing for a policing post was the film he made himself standing next to a Greenpeace boat applauding the bombing by limpet mines of the Rainbow Warrior by the French Secret Services back in 1985, a terrorist act which killed a photographer, Fernando Pereira, and sank the environmentalist ship. "Vive La France!" he intoned with a Eurosceptical smirk.

"Godders" seemed to think it was all a bit of a wheeze, though to be fair he had apparently forgotten about the fatality, which he found "extremely regrettable and indeed unacceptable" when I wrote to remind him back in early 2010. However, rather than go on to condemn the actual bombing, he wrote that

"The biggest threat to us today is not terrorism but eco fascism.  It is eco fascism closing conventional power stations, trying to stop the building of new ones that work.  Destroy whole communities with the ludicrous windmill fanaticisml Hundreds die every year of hypothermia, thousands more will join them after 2015.  Green taxes and significantly higher fuel bills will drive industry abroad and impoverish old age pensioners....." 

It seems that environmentalists ."..bear responsibilities for deaths on a much bigger scale than the IRA or Al-Quaeda, and all based on fraudulent and junk science of which ordinary people are now being made aware.

Yours sincerely

Godfrey Bloom"

So, if Bloom becomes PCC for Humberside, we may face some "interesting" new initiatives being proposed to the police in pursuit of his peculiar view of true crime. Voters beware.

And here, for the record, is Bloom's video:

Support Your Local Sheriff?

15th November sees an innovation in British law enforcement of a dubious nature. Thanks to some odd and expensive scheduling courtesy of the Liberal Democrat arm of the Coalition Government, electors across England and Wales will have the opportunity to vote for the newly created role of Police and Crime Commissioner.

This role  is charged with ensuring effective policing in its area and replaces the committees of Police Authorities. These consisted usually of 9 local councillors nominated by the councils in the Authority area, plus 8 members who were a mix of magistrates and independent appointees. These were a valuable means of oversight and governance but one where no one person was powerful enough to interfere overly with the operational activities of the police, which remained the provenance of the professional Chief Constable. Equally, having a range of views and interests represented meant that any cosy one-to-one relationship between a Chief Constable and a Police Commissioner was not possible.

The thinking behind Police Commissioners is supposedly to combine democratic control with a more directive approach to policing, just as elected mayors were once touted as the miraculous cure-all for local authorities - with decidedly mixed results (viz, Hartlepool and Doncaster). Given the choice in May this year of having more elected mayors, voters in all but two of the eleven areas voting decided against. Sadly, no such vote was ever taken on Police Commissioners and as the idea featured in the manifestos of both Coalition parties, this dreadful example of gesture politics has gone ahead.

So what do we have now that nominations have closed? Given the complete absence of any public funding for the election campaign - such as the free mailshot distribution in other elections - the only people capable of mounting a credible campaign across the large geographical areas involved will either be machine politicians or rich people with their own agenda. So we are left with a rag bag of local politicians eyeing up the significant pay packet attached to the post, along with a collection of ex-police officers possibly looking to get their own back on their former bosses and a smattering of former military people, which seems mildly worrying. Few inspire any confidence of offering any fresh start to policing. And how could they?

Effective local policing needs local input from a range of sources - community policing at its best encompasses a wide range of views and needs and while it varies in different parts of the country, there are a number of examples of good policing working well with local people and attendant reduction in crime.

None of that has involved some local would-be caped crusader offering instant salvation. Rather it has involved a lot of long-term, painstaking work by officers and communities getting to understand each other and working together in ways that defy the hot headed ranting of the likes of the Daily Mail about soft cops and ineffective courts. The result has been a steady decline in crime to its lowest level in over 30 years, but the fear of crime, thanks to the media, has grown so that the public perception is that it is worse than ever.

And this is the worry about these new posts and the election that goes with them: the candidates are just feeling their way into new campaigns for a new type of post. Most voters are unaware and quite disinterested - turnout is likely to be appallingly low (which begs the question why the Lib Dems were so keen to have them now rather than alongside other local polls in May next year). But longer term, forced to justify their tenure in office - or seeking to challenge an incumbent who will be blamed for all manner of ills - there is every likelihood of Police Commissioner votes turning into populist referenda driven by revenge-seeking stories in the press. Incumbent Commissioners will be more and more tempted to make headline-grabbing gestures, pressurizing the police into politicised agendas that can easily lead into extremely difficult territory in terms of social cohesion.

It is perhaps only because of their current organisational stasis that so few far right candidates are standing in these elections - the BNP is collapsing because of in-fighting, but the far right will not go away. There is every chance that future PC elections will become a gift-horse for their scapegoating agendas, and a Trojan Horse for those who think that this sort of vote somehow enhances democratic control of policing.

Time to stop aping America. We're not Gotham City just yet...