The debate about front line policing doesn't matter

Inspector Gadget brings a new dimension to this debate.

All this argument about whether budget cuts will affect the so-called police front line completely misses the point. Even if the front line was a million strong, with the piss-poor sentencing we currently have, it would make no difference.

And he gives an example. Today we can read of a drug dealer caught with a haul worth £50,000 who has been spared jail by Judge Stephen Holt.

Where is the democratic influence on the policy of inadequate sentencing - recognised as so even by some judges?

Why buy today's Telegraph?

According to the Telegraph's front page, these articles are its selling points.

• Hollywood betrays Miss Marple (Alison Pearson, so you wouldn't have wanted to read it anyway)
• Secret of a perfect Bloody Mary
• Back-to-work incentives will test Cameron's strength
• How Henry VIII was dressed to kill (no, I didn't make that up)
• Speed of the internet leaves me in the slow lane (Bryony Gordon, who is stuck there for ever).

So why do I buy it?

Silly old judge

Richard North picks up the recent comments of Lord Chief Justice Judge, who seems to think we shouldn't criticise judges too much. After all, they're only following sentencing guidelines.

It's frightfully gracious of his majesty to permit the media an occasional discreetly raised eyebrow. But of course they mustn't do it too often, or the populace may begin to wonder whether judges are not lofty and all-wise.

Which raises at least three questions.

1. A question of fact. Do the judiciary always do what parliament says? Notoriously, sentences for carrying a knife tend to be lighter than parliament intended.
   
   
2. Where is the democratic input to the sentencing guidelines anyway? Where the accountability? This looks like a coterie of senior judges making their own value judgements. Who judges the judges?
   
   
3. Is respect for the judiciary weakened when judges themselves criticise the sentencing guidelines?

Seems to me the self-selecting senior judiciary are having rather too cosy an existence.

Today's Telegraph come-ons

Judging by The Telegraph's front page today, it thinks these are the main reasons you to buy the paper:

• Carroll shines in Wembley thriller
• Kate's hair dilemma on her big day

And below the fold the come-on's are:

• The truth about your supermarket loaf
• Why World Cup cricket knocks Ashes for six
• Wizard writer whose life was far from magical
• Killing Bono: how I came face to face with myself

If the paper thinks these are its highlights, would you want to spend money on it?

The EU? Nothing to do with it. Really

Much huffing and puffing about did Mr Darling agree that the UK would contribute to EU bailouts of euro countries or not. This Tory tactic diverts attention from the real issue - Qualified Majority Voting.

As Richard North points out:

Nothing, therefore, affects the central point – that agreement required QMV and we could not stop this bail-out fund going ahead (apart from the fact that it may well have been in breach of EU law ... but that's another story).

Politically it's preferable to get into a ruckus with Labour which will bore 99.9% of the country in a day or two - and then the issue will go away.

Much better than admitting that there was nothing any UK government could have done about it anyway.

That would be a bald admission of powerlessness which could certainly make a public impression.

But you can't hide an elephant for ever.

The Commission's next task is to stop the risk of poor election results for the German government from blowing euro-rescues off course. Green participants in a new German government would applaud Commission proposals to ban petrol-driven cars from cities, but how would they feel about more subsidies for Greece and Portugal ... assuming that they understood the issues and the implications?

How much better if EU policy could be divorced from those pesky elections. Then politicians in the subject nations could tell their subjects that the EU was nothing to do with them. Really.

Dealing with an illegal immigrant

A British woman, who failed to return home since arriving in Jamaica in November 2009, is to be deported for breaches of the Immigration Act, reports Go Jamaica.

The accused, Suzan Margaret Featherstone of Nottingham, England, was ordered deported when she appeared in the Spanish Town Resident Magistrates Court on Friday. She was also fined $10,000 or face 30 days at hard labour in prison.

Ms. Featherstone was arrested in Russell Pen, Linstead in St. Catherine on March 19 by the Linstead Fugitive Apprehension Team after she failed to depart in early March.

Ms. Featherstone allegedly grew locks to disguise herself. She also told investigators that she is married to a Jamaican. However, police checks revealed no marriage took place.

htp Dave

A cracking proposal from George Osborne

There are ludicrous suggestions about that George Osborne might in time succeed David Cameron. But Osborne has absolutely no detectable personal warmth.

However, the suggestion of merging Income Tax and National Insurance is a cracking idea.

Let's show plainly on people's pay slips how much tax they are paying on their income. Having one highly visible combined rate of tax is absolutely the right thing to do, and it's also absolutely right that it has to be done now.

Labour will HATE it, so it HAS to be a good idea.

Next task: get Cable actually to start doing his job and cutting business red tape.

A just war

Several very clever bloggers are pointing to inconsistencies in UK foreign policy. Of course there are.

If they doubt that foreign intervention is just, let them listen to



The motives do not have to be pure for the war to be just.

And shame on the hypocritical Amr Moussa for being ready to abandon his neighbouring country to the mad murderer.

Essential help for poorer families?

A senior social worker filled her home with thousands of pounds worth of appliances, toys, games and clothes after fraudulently claiming for the goods on behalf of needy people in North-east Scotland.

Jennifer Stephen initially denied two charges of fraud against Aberdeenshire Council, but when she appeared in court again she admitted defrauding the local authority of nearly £9,000.

She led Aberdeenshire Council’s Social Work Department to believe that legitimate case-related expenditure was to be incurred for several items that were never supplied to clients - racking up goods which amounted to £8,885.78 between September 26, 2005 and August 15, 2008. She was suspended from her senior position in 2008 following an internal investigation.

It didn't come to court until 2011.

Over a three-year period, she induced people at the social work department at Peterhead to sign off “financial assistance” forms. These purchase orders were used to obtain goods that should have been for clients of the social work department.

Procurator fiscal, Sarah O’Gallagher, said Stephen was responsible for 35 such transactions.

Now see what purchases the social work department signed off at taxpayers' expense.

The court heard that a transaction made on October 3, 2005, related to a rowing machine purchased for a client which amounted to £783. On the financial assistance form filled out, 47-year-old Stephen stated that the piece of gym equipment was required for two girls whose mother had been murdered, and whose father had been imprisoned for her murder. She stated that the girls had suffered extreme trauma from this, manifesting itself in an eating disorder, and that some exercise would help. But it was also acknowledged on the form that a public gym would not be useful for the girls to attend, and so gym equipment at home was required.

But the client in question never received the rowing machine, and it was later discovered at Stephen’s property after a search was carried out.

On another occasion, a £199 tumble dryer was claimed - allegedly for a child who had a skin condition which was said to be difficult to control. It was stated on the expenses form that tumble drying clothes would be beneficial to the child. However, the family denied the child suffering from a skin condition altogether, and also never received the tumble dryer, the court heard.

The social worker even ordered school uniforms from Buchan Embroidery, claiming that they were for under-privileged families - but had them embroidered with the names of her own children.

Stephen also claimed for £2,100 worth of John Lewis vouchers, of which a washing machine, hand-held hoover, sofa, two double beds with mattresses, a variety of children’s toys, including an electronic scooter, and £1,300 worth of clothing, including school clothes and a football strip, was purchased.

Household goods were also among the expenses claimed, as well as a watch and a Wii Fit, and a keyboard complete with a stand.

The majority of these items have since been recovered from Stephen’s home. She was jailed for 28 months.

• Now of course she was wicked. But what is a local authority doing signing off such items in the first place?

htp: Dave

Don't tell me what to think, Mr Cameron

The BBC reports:

UK Prime Minister David Cameron says the Japanese earthquake is a "terrible reminder of the destructive power of nature. Everyone should be thinking of the country and its people, and I have asked immediately that our government look at what we can do to help."

He just has a way with words.

A terrible reminder of the destructive power of nature? Who'd have thought it?

As for "everyone should be thinking of the country and its people", do not tell us what we should be thinking.

In any case my brain is busy memorising the names of all those killed servicemen, who you tell us will never be forgotten.

Take your trite sanctimoniousness elsewhere.

And rather than "looking at what we can do to help", why not find someone who remembers that earthquake in New Zealand? Even this government should have some clues what we can and cannot offer.

Meanwhile, my thoughts are with Mr Cameron as he thinks of New Zealand Libya Japan and its people ... but this blog should be fit for family viewing.

The bankruptcy of green policy

OK, so if we sit and think about it for ... ooh, ten seconds, we know that the EU cannot make a blind bit of difference to global temperatures on its own.

And we know they have no idea what their de-industrialisation policy will cost - except that it will be hugely expensive.

And we know that none of this bothers these smug know-alls in their ivory towers.

But how foolish can a senior EU official be to go on air and be pushed into admitting it? As James Delingpole summarises

First, they ask, what the expected cost is of this grand Europe-wide scheme to reduce carbon emissions by 20 per cent by 2020. Duggan says she doesn’t have a figure. So her interviewers put to her the estimate by (non-sceptic) Richard Tol: $250 billion.

Next they ask what she hopes to achieve by spending all this money. What will be the reduction in global temperatures? Duggan again isn’t quite sure but knows that “the models show” that in order to have an even chance of lowering temperatures by 2 per cent CO2 emissions must be reduced by 50 per cent by 2050. Duggan then concedes that this will not be possible if the EU nations act unilaterally since they only contribute 14 per cent of total global carbon emissions.

Her interviewers try again. Does Duggan know what the estimated effect on global temperatures will be if Europe goes it alone in its carbon emissions reduction campaign? Her interviewers tell her 0.05 degrees C by 2100.

“You’re in charge of a massive programme to rejig an economy and you don’t know what it costs and you don’t know what it will achieve,” says Bolt.

Duggan changes tack. She claims that “a million” green jobs have been created in Germany; and that many hundreds of thousands of green jobs are going to be created in Britain. “Really?” wonders Bolt. That would seem to contradict the real world evidence which shows that, far from creating jobs, government “investment” in renewable energy is in fact destroying jobs in the real economy.

(This “economic” argument for renewables, incidentally, is the new Big Lie being promoted by the European Union – inter alia, of course, through its propaganda mouthpiece the BBC)

Finally Duggan makes one last try at digging herself out of the hole. She tries to imply that there’s something eccentric and behind-the-curve about her interviewers’ desire not to emulate the EU’s great decarbonisation programme.

Bolt and Price are unimpressed: “We’re talking about a region which has got unemployment at 10 per cent and growth forecast of 1.6 per cent. I don’t know why what we could learn from Europe actually.”

That's your money and mine they're spending, that's our children who aere being made poorer on a whim.

Of course none of us voted for this. But no major party opposes it.

Why shale gas matters

A useful conclusion to a piece on shale gas: once we get confirmed figures from a few actual producers, then:

it's goodbye to spending money on crazy things we have been told to save up for: Coal Carbon Capture and Storage, Off-shore Wind, Nuclear and pipelines like Nabucco. All this £200 BN to keep the lights on rubbish is consigned to the rubbish bin of history. We can invest some money on efficiency and using technology to supply reliable information on energy use so we use less anyway. We can have R+D investment in technology like energy storage, solar and small nuclear that holds promise to truly cut carbon affordably and quickly instead of using today's noble technology that is also very expensive or unproven or both. But the majority of that £200BN? We could spend it wisely on education or transport or medicine, but let's face it for most of us, it will be party time.

And why not? Let the people spend their own money.

Taxpayers' money doesn't matter

When the masses headed by Richard North overwhelm the present régime, there will be a group of us ready with our clipboards to save taxpayers shedloads of dosh.

Thus today we can read of a coroner slamming the 'waste' of over £1m of taxpayers' money investigating the death of baby who starved in his pram. We know how he died and we know who caused his death - his mother, an illegal immigrant, who died two days after the baby, in March 2010.

There's also an inquest going on into the death of the husband of one of Kate Middleton's bodyguards. He died - abroad - in a skiing accident in March 2009. Really, can we not do better things with taxpayers' money than spend it on this?

Andrew Gilligan shows what perpetually-Labour Haringey council is spending money on and what they want to cut - even though it and militant Manchester City Council are among the worst at collecting council tax.

While we're at it, we'll haul in the people responsible for paying this man more than minimal benefits. Jobseeker? I doubt it. Incapacitated? Too ill to work but not too ill to assault somebody. No wonder his partner's depressed (it's an easy way to get more money). And his continued shirking gets him a barrister. How nice. That would be you and me paying again.

And our EU masters are even more rotten. The European Parliament is to give the German MEP Elmar Brok immunity from prosecution for tax evasion. They're much too important to be treated like us, you see.

Indeed they are.

Getting the measure of the police

Commentators are warning (for example here and here) of the big political risks the coalition is running in seeking to curb burgeoning police perks.

The vile Yvette Cooper clearly thinks there's mileage in this. She said figures for projected job losses were the "latest nail in the coffin for the prime minister's claim that he would protect the front line at all costs". (Did he say "at all costs"?)

Chief constables are being put in an impossible position by a government that seems happy to ride roughshod over public safety and the morale of the police force.

The government is cutting too far and too fast with 20% frontloaded cuts.

The home secretary and her ministers have a blind arrogance in their dealings with the police.

Rather than working with them, they are bludgeoning police numbers, their budgets and their operational capacity.

Of course Labour is against any cuts, anywhere, wherever they are proposed.

But she and the commentators may find they are wrong this time around. There simply isn't the uncritical public support for the police that there used to be.

We know they are clunky and expensive and have priorities which too often are not ours.

We know they are effectively unaccountable.

I suspect the public will be much readier this time around to believe that the police are feather-bedded.

Hampshire's priorities

Strange days in Hampshire. It seems the locals want their county council to spend £193,000 a year on a two-year broadband project even though they've cut their budget by £55m this year, including day care for adults with learning disabilities, care of the elderly, mobile libraries and Sure Start children’s centres for the under-fives.

Well that's up to the voters. It must be what they want - or why would their council do it?

Okay, I'm being ironic. But next time Ed Miliband criticises the government over councils' decisions and calls for more budgets to be ring-fenced again, let's remember that these decisions should be taken locally - and certainly not by Labour ministers who made such a mess of areas like education.

The priorities are down to Hampshire.

Our caring NHS

From today's obituary of Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland's widow:

In latter years Susan Crosland suffered acutely from arthritis, and from MRSA contracted during one of three hip replacement operations. She was left with a right leg 4½ inches shorter than her left, and referred to the boot needed to level them up as the "Spice Girl shoe".

Having insisted on treatment by the NHS – and waited for it – she was appalled by the failure to diagnose MRSA for several years. Her final stay in hospital ended with ward staff trying to detain her after the consultant said she could leave, because they did not want to have to do the paperwork on a Friday. "People are right not to want to stay in NHS hospitals," she observed.

Offensive Telegraph

Today's front page offers an article and a comment on "Heroes who redefine the meaning of brave".

Who might they be? Underarmed Libyans opposing the madman? No ... well maybe the Egyptians in Tahrir Square. No.

Perhaps it's the even braver demonstrators in Tehran. You have to admire them.

But no.

It's Gays in sport.

Oh please. They are not heroes and they haven't redefined the meaning of brave.