MPs' snouts in the trough

On a day when the news includes Mugabe's terror thugs breaking a baby's legs, it's almost obscene to write about anything else. But what new is there to say about that bloodstained despot and his regime? It seems only the appeaser Mbeki can bring him down.

A quick gallop, then, through the storm which is quite rightly brewing about MPs' expenses. The Mail picks up the resignation of Scottish Labour MP John Marshall, suggesting it is not entirely due to health worries "after rumours swept Westminster that he was about to be engulfed in a row over expenses payments to family members". In one of the poorest constituencies in the country this will not play well.

Caroline Spellman's crafted image of a puzzled parliamentary novice trying to understand the expenses rules gets flakier and flakier. She fired Georgina Perry and Sally Hammond after spectacular fallouts. Surely it is time for her to be resigned, to devote herself to combating the allegations. She adds no visible value. A bad choice by Cameron.

Meanwhile, the Mail points out that what is an MP's second home for expenses purposes can be their first home for tax purposes, so when the MP sells it the profit is free of capital gains tax. The proposed reforms don't address this. Nick Harvey, a member of the committee which is proposing the new expenses system, confirmed the existence of the loophole and admitted that the proposed changes would not close it. But he feebly denied it was a major problem, saying: 'It is very unlikely that it happens on a widespread basis.' Which is hardly the point.

MPs should not be able to keep any profit on their second home.

When all MPs' expenses are published later this year, we shall no doubt see some filth in our public life. Which is probably why MPs want to get the new system in place before they have to face the public's revulsion.

Bring on the accountable transparency. That money belongs to the people.

Get away with it in Scotland

Hard on the heels of Louise Casey's survey telling us the public feels cut off from the justice system, The Herald reports from Scotland that serious and violent criminals have avoided court and a criminal record under a new Scottish Government initiative introduced to deal with low-level offences.

Thousands of offences, including serious assaults, have been diverted from court and treated with fiscal fines under reforms to the summary justice system that began in March. Scores of other crimes, including sex offences against children, have been downgraded to summary complaints which carry a lesser sentence.

Cases downgraded to be heard under summary complaint carry a maximum prison sentence of 12 months, which would in practice be three.

A list of these cases seen by The Herald at Airdrie Sheriff court alone, includes: l lewd and libidinous conduct against an 11-year-old girl; l assault to severe injury and permanent disfigurement; l lewd and libidinous conduct against a victim with cerebral palsy; l lewd and libidinous conduct against a 12-year-old girl.

Whatever happened to public justice in open court?

Bad news at The Observer

Oh dear, most Britons are "still" not convinced that climate change is caused by humans, and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to a poll for The Observer.

That "still" is from the opening line of the paper's report, by the way, so we're hardly looking at a piece of straight news. Any report of a poll should include tables reporting the questions and answers so that we can see the unadorned facts for ourselves, but there is none of that here. The paper's environmental editor, one Juliette Jowit, in fact launches straight into the reactions of "shocked campaigners"

who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Yes, get that in early, Juliette.

Her analysis is frankly dipsy.

The poll ... found widespread contradictions, with some people saying politicians were not doing enough to tackle the problem, even though they were cynical about government attempts to impose regulations or raise taxes.

Just maybe there is no contradiction here? Just maybe some people believe government is using eco-hype as a means to their own ends? Just maybe she should have let us see the answers for ourselves. But we're so short of space on the web, aren't we.

"Those most worried were more likely to have a degree, be in social classes A or B, have a higher income." Now if we take a few outlets, the FT and The Guardian believe in man-made global warming, whereas The Sun's Trevor Kavanagh doesn't and The Express has just published an anti-warming article by Ann Widdecombe.

And Newsnight is a believer, but (?James Whale) on Talk Sport is not, and Jeremy Vine's Radio 2 programme is balanced, and has from time to time featured Philip Stott. He's also appeared on Richard & Judy.

Now stop the sniggering at the back. This random sampling isn't scientific, but maybe it tells us something about media coverage.

However, some environmentalists blame the lower orders' doubts on a Channel 4 documentary and recent books, including the one by Lord Lawson (it's excellent, by the way). Oh please!

In response to these results (which we're not allowed to see in full) "the Department for the Environment" (would that be DEFRA by any chance?) nailed its colours to the IPCC mast. Oh dear, don't they know science doesn't work by counting votes? Did Newton, Galileo or Einstein believe in consensus in science?

So much for some shortcomings in the paper's reporting. As for the wider issue itself, you can do no better than read Philip Stott's fiercely libertarian debunking of the bien pensant philosopher kings, including the statement that

People with even a modicum of commonsense about science recognise that the very idea of managing climate by fiddling about at the margins with just one politically-selected factor is starking-raving lunacy.

Which - judging by the voting on the recent Climate Bill - excludes all but three of our MPs. "People with even a modicum of commonsense about science" are disenfranchised.

Master Cameron and government ministers should be required to commit Philip Stott's ringing cry to memory.

Here we are witnessing the true political danger, what I call the ‘Sin of Saruman’ writ large - “But we must have power, power to order all things as we will, for that good which only the Wise can see.”

Hm! Always beware ‘the Wise’! What the political classes and media ‘environmentalists’ have yet to learn is that ordinary farmers are too aware that they have been battling with, and adapting to, climate change for over 7,000 years; that people with even a modicum of commonsense about science recognise that the very idea of managing climate by fiddling about at the margins with just one politically-selected factor is starking-raving lunacy; that people are not fooled by the attempts of the ‘wise’ to control every aspect of their lives; and, that the only way to deal with constant environmental change, whatever its direction, is to maintain strong, flexible economies, while aiding and assisting the poor.

‘The Wise’ - for which read our more dirigiste commentariat and political classes - are always seeking power and control over people’s lives - for the people’s own good, of course, and to erase false consciousness. As I write on the side bar of the ‘Home Page’: “‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty and human choices.”

It's not as if 'The Wise' are short of problems. Security of energy supplies, anyone?

Gabbling McNulty

The latest proposals by ACPO for foundation police forces have left police minister Tony McNulty gabbling.

ACPO's president proposes that

For the issues that bother people like me and you, in our street, that should be down to us frankly to sit down with our local team, to do a deal with them about what it is they think is important and then for us collectively to monitor how that's done.

We ought to trust the public and neighbourhoods [to] direct their priorities, but I would insist that to guard against a free-for-all there has to be a standard approach to many other things, for example, the way we handle intelligence - organised crime and counterterrorism.

Note the point is that the Home Office will be out of the loop.

McNulty's response is that

We're determined to cut red tape and ensure police officers are best placed to make decisions about local policing.

That's why we've already transformed how we measure them - slashing the number of central targets and freeing them to respond to local priorities.

Chief constables already determine how they spend their resources and we are also working on a pilot project with four forces about further measures to cut bureaucracy.

His statement that "we [are] determined to ... ensure police officers are best placed to make decisions about local policing" makes no sense. It is nonsense to suggest that "we" can ensure police officers are best placed to make local decisions. That is how it is - whatever "we" do to get in the way.

Then he claims that "we have transformed how we measure them". Not much of a "transformation" if people in a position to know are calling for more.

Then the contradictory claims that "Chief constables already determine how they spend their resources" and in the same breath "we" [again] are looking at further measures to cut bureaucracy. In other words Chief Constables can't actually decide how they use their resources, because of the bureaucratic constraints "we" impose.

No acknowledgement that the thrust of the proposal is that "we" should get out of the loop altogether because local communities may actually be better at telling local police what they want in their local areas and holding local police to local account.

This has the feel of a despairing rearguard action - ducking the main issue, no attempt to explain why it's better that "we" should continue to set the rules.

In this debate Louise Casey's recommendations are merely irrelevant, accepting as she does the present top down command arrangement. Contrast several of the police quoted by Harriet Sergeant (see previous post), who also want local accountability, and the views of "Spent Copper" in a comment on the previous post. I don't support all he says, but this is where the debate is heading.

I am an ex-policeman who spent 10 yrs in the Force during which time I was a PC, PS and authorised firearms officer. Can I make some suggestions? I think that we should consider the following:

1. Scrap the current 43 Force structure for England and Wales and base each police Force on the local County or City (or town with > 250,000 residents ) it serves, so that Policing becomes locally based rather than Government mandated.

2. Appoint a democratically elected Sheriff with responsibility to the County or City who would:
a. Appoint Chief Officers of Police.
b. Run the Prisons within their area responsibility, transferring these away from the Home Office.
c. Appoint the Probation Officers and set policy for the local Probation Service.
d. Look after the resourcing and administration of the Courts in their area of responsibility.

3. Scrap ACPO and Bramshill Police College. Reform Police training to recognise that the nature of Policing is that is a practical job requiring personal qualities rather than an academic mindset.

4. Dispense with the notion that only someone who has been a career Police Officer can be a Chief Constable. Actively recruit individuals of proven Leadership ability and give them the power to hire and fire any of their employees, uniform or civilian, whom they see fit to.

5. Go through our legal data base with a fine tooth comb and scrap all those laws which are not essential. Ie, move towards the principle of having few laws, which are rigorously enforced.

6. Dispense with the notion that the application of our Laws should take into account the background of offenders and enforce the principle of equality before the law. Repeal the so called 'Hate' Crimes.

7. If someone who has come into this country as an immigrant commits an Arrestable Offence (ie for an adult on first conviction the maximum punishable is 10 years imprisonment or more) then automatic deportation for non-UK nationals should follow.

8. Abrogation of the concept of Human Rights in English Law.

Tactically it seems to me a bad move to bring 5-8 into the police reform debate. Keep it tight, focus on the core local accountability issue, and don't oblige your opponents by offering them unnecessary targets.

9. Apart from the broadest guidelines, there should be no interference in sentencing by courts. Do away with automatic early release for offenders. End the almost automatic presumption of bail and acknowledge that it is for the Custody Sargent to decide whether or not bail is granted - subject to the right to appeal.

10. Return to the concept of Unit Beat Policing with, as far as possible, Police Officers required to live in the areas which they police and be required to perform their duties on foot. Note however, the very important stipulation that adequate mobile back up is available on the hurry up if required. Return to the villages and small Country towns we have abandoned.

As an aside, I know that Polly Toynbee has sneeringly referred to this a waste of police resources with officers perhaps encountering a crime in progress once every 5000 years, but I can tell you from my experience that there really is no better way to get to know an area and the people who live and work in it.

That is the direction where the debate is headed, while junior ministers try to hold the line with tired prevarication.

The public and the police

This is the title of a new pamphlet from Civitas by Harriet Sergeant, which concludes that the Home Office needs to get out of policing. "Local taxpayers lack any power to question ever higher policing costs.... They are unable to insist on even the basics of a good service."

A local tax to pay for the Basic Command Unit and a BCU Commander who is selected and answerable to taxpayers, whether through local government or even direct elections, would give the public that power.

Safer Neighbourhood Policing, she says, has shown how effectively the police and local councils can work together to combat anti-social and criminal behaviour. "The next step is to build on this success and give it substance with local funding and accountability."

Police numbers in England and Wales are historically high, but compared with other developed countries they are low. In 2003 there were 264 police officers in England and Wales per 100,000 of the population, compared to a European average of 357. New York has 457, Chicago 467. Yet crime rates in England and Wales "are among the highest in the developed world", so officers' workload is "unmanageably large" even without the deluge of paperwork.

Sergeant never explains the contrast between these numbers and her claim that "police funding is ... the highest amongst the OECD countries".

The UK spent 2.5 per cent of GDP on public order and safety in 2004, well ahead of the US, Spain, Germany and France.

All decisions are taken by politicians and their appointees. This is the same command system that we suffer in the NHS. National decisions are taken from the top down with minimal public input. We need accountability at the local level - "subsidiarity", if you like.

It's not as if the centre takes good decisions. In their primitive central planning mindset, people and organisations react to targets mechanistically. But in reality, if you target them to detect more crimes, the organisations will force their people to find larger numbers of easy crimes to report - even though that does nothing for public safety or relations between police and public. Sergeant points out one of the early Nine Principles of Policing

To recognise always that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them

And she quotes one Borough Commander

"There are some wards", he said gloomily, "where my men are doing such a marvellous job that they are not arresting anyone. And I simply cannot afford to have 150 policemen making no arrests."

And new initiatives are taken without working out the effect on police forces of having to provide staff and resources for them. There are fewer and fewer response officers to respond to calls from the public, and call centres are targeted to pass on calls quickly rather than to screen them.

In the case of the police, the general thrust of a solution is clear. This is less true for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). Among other things the CPS is judged by the volume and proportion of successful prosecutions. So they prefer easy prosecutions to cases which may be more important but contested. Of course. And that biases them towards exhaustive documentation for simple cases. No problem for them - it's the police who get the unnecessary extra work. Certainly we also need more democratic accountability from the CPS.

As with the NHS, the top down central governance model assumes that a wise Whitehall knows far better than the rest of us. In fact it doesn't. We are not mindless ants. And they are slow, clumsy and ignorant.

Goodness, they couldn't even plan prison building properly. And serial failure jack Straw is still there.

Louise Casey has a new Cabinet Office paper on the justice system, containing 32 recommendations, not listed in full by the BBC. Her central thrust, though, seems to be to leave the present command model unchanged but run with fewer targets and more visible punishment of criminals. She rightly says that the system is seen as "distant, unaccountable and unanswerable". But tinkering at the edges - continuing to give communities what the centre thinks is good for them - won't solve that.

Politicians who grew up with centralised, "socialist" planning haven't noticed that society is changing. People are less deferential than they were and it's far easier to disseminate information widely.

But can the dogmatic centralisers let go? I doubt it.

Putting the jackboot into Ireland

Wolfgang Munchau's Financial Times piece on Europe's hardball plan B for the Lisbon treaty does at least have the virtue of being clear, and showing how namby pamby most UK comment has been so far in EU terms.

"Both Ireland and the EU should have celebrated their relationship", he announces, and the country now has exactly two alternatives (alternatives usually come in pairs).

One is a humiliating U-turn, consisting of a Yes vote in a second referendum without a material change of circumstances. The other is that Ireland could lose its full EU membership if the second referendum produces another No victory. Ireland's citizens would send the country back to the economic Dark Ages, from whence it emerged only a few decades ago.

Leave aside this economic judgement, which must be highly questionable, especially if and when an Ireland inside the EU is forced into line on corporate taxes. France and Germany have a hardball plan, he writes.

It seems to me that France and Germany have put some thought into how to drive the Irish out of the EU unless they fail to reverse their No vote.

A 26-1 ratification would increase the pressure on Ireland. Munchau considers a re-referendum with the same question unlikely.

Ireland has already opted out of everything it wanted to opt out of. It is difficult to formulate any specific concessions, since nobody knows what the Irish electorate wants.

Inconvenient, this democracy.

An alternative would be a referendum with a differently worded question, such as: "Do you want to remain in the EU on the basis of the Lisbon treaty?" Of course, this bundles two questions many people would like to answer separately. Yes, stay in the EU, No to Lisbon. But folding the two into a single question is politically more honest because it is Ireland's only real-world choice.

That'd teach them.

Otherwise he expects the EU to find ways to implement Lisbon without Ireland - which would happen for sure.

The biggest losers from this fiasco will be the Irish themselves. They brought the country to the brink in its relations with the EU at a time when the economy is facing the most severe crisis in living memory. I shudder to think how foreign investors are going to react, given how much Ireland relies on them for its prosperity.

Well, they're about to become net contributors to the EU. And if they left the eurozone, they'd be able to set their own interest rates again.

Anyway, he thinks the strategy most likely to be successful from the perspective of the rest of the EU is to play hardball. "This is plan B."

To conclude, an undergraduate question. Discuss the political model that underlies this analysis.

A more interesting by-election

It seems Kelvin Mackenzie won't be standing against David Davis after all, as the Financial Times predicted last week.

Potentially much more interesting, though, is the news in The Spectator's Coffee House blog that David Craig will be standing. He's the author of the interesting book Squandered, which has already featured on this blog here, here and here.

One wonders whether he will consider the by-election (cost £75,000?) good value for money.

Might Craig emerge as a new financial Martin Bell? It could be fascinating.

Meanwhile, it seems that David is still hanging around the Commons. Come on, Davis, have you no sense of theatre?

No, apparently not.

A green loony

Yes it's Mr Barking Cameron, who "has insisted that he will not be diverted from his environmental agenda by the economic downturn", reports the BBC. The UK needed to "wean" itself off its reliance on fossil fuels, he said. Protecting the planet was a "necessity" and not a "luxury". He even still seems to think that we can "fight" climate change.

Utter piffle, especially when Anthony Watts is suggesting that "it appears we continue to slide into a deeper than normal solar minima, one not seen in decades".

Mr Cameron is right to mention fossil fuels. However, the issue is not energy dependency but energy security, as Philip Stott points out today, highlighting again the baleful role of the EU.

Mr Barking claims he understands "why people might think fighting climate change seems a costly diversion".

He doesn't. "People" are right and he is wrong. Disappointingly, it seems he actually believes this guff. What is more than a shame is that he doesn't begin to understand it. Ludicrous.