Crash Bang Wallace
Libertarian political blog from Mark Wallace; political opinion, breaking news and exclusivesCrime mapping – power to the people
Posted on February 03, 2011Finally – after years of arguments, promises and u-turns on the part of both Labour and the Conservatives – the Government has introduced crime mapping right across the country at www.police.uk.
Anyone who doubted that there was an interest among the public in finding out what crimes are committed in their neighbourhoods was immediately given a firm slap round the chops by the fact that the site received so much traffic it has at times struggled to deal with it all. At its peak it was getting 18 million hits an hour – a remarkable number.
Obviously, the Guardian chose to lead on the fact it crashed without reflecting on the fact that this proved what huge demand there is out there for this kind of transparency.
I’m personally delighted about crime mapping coming to the UK because it has been a massive hobby horse of mine in recent years. I first wrote about it for the TPA almost 3 years ago and since then I’ve met ministers, spoken at the Police Federation conference, addressed the Association of Chief Police Officers and generally banged the drum for this idea endlessly – not always making myself popular, it must be said.
This is a genuinely exciting reform. For the first time, everyone has the right to know what the real picture is of reported crime in a given area. That helps people moving house, scrutinising police performance and communicating with their MP.
It’s still just the start of the transparency and accountability revolution, though.
Giving people this information is a great start, but there’s plenty more to give. Other police forces are apparently experimenting with ways to provide even more data in greater accuracy and more informative formats. Yvette Cooper has called for full transparency on police numbers, which I can’t see a problem with. Ideally in my view each crime on the map would also be updated when it is either solved and prosecuted or shelved into a cold file. The possibilities are myriad.
Once you’ve given people information, you should also give them the power to do something with it, too. Now people are being given some data about how effective or ineffective their local police are, it is high time they were given the right to elect, scrutinise and – if necessary – sack the people in charge of the force.
The internet makes it possible for us to be given access to all that state data which our public employees compile about all of us in our name and at our expense. The digital revolution, if properly applied, can be a real revolution – handing power from hidden officials in back offices to the people. Crime mapping is an early and crucial step on that road to empowerment.
Time for elected police commissioners
Posted on December 01, 2010Today sees a rare political beast emerge – a Home Secretary who is giving power away.
The publication of the Government’s proposals to replace the unaccountable, unelected and failed police authorities with elected commissioners is a really exciting moment.
Finally, the people – those who fund policing and suffer the direct effects when policing fails – are going to have a say over this most crucial of state functions.
This is a relief to those of us who have pressed for this policy for a long time. I wasn’t alone in fearing that the proposal may be diluted under the blanket excuse of coalition.
But we can’t afford to slacken off now – the forces of vested interest are already working hard to undermine the idea.
The arguments they put forward are as easily rebutted as they are misguided. Here’s a brief run-down of the main attempts at criticism.
1) “This will politicise policing.” This is a nonsense – policing is already a highly politicised issue. There are few issues which have consistently exercised the public in recent decades, and law and order is rightly a big issue at General Electios. The Home Secretary already has and uses many powers of centralised meddling. Why is one-size-fits-all political control from Whitehall better than localised democratic control, unmuddled by wider political concerns and appropriate to the local situation?
2) “This will introduce populist policing.” This is a traditional political smear, and rests on a fallacy. In politics, populist is simply a dirty word for popular. Those police chiefs and politicians who For whatever reason dislike the public’s enthusiasm for catching and punishing criminals bandy it around all the time. I’d suggest a system where anyone who uses this term in public debate should have the word “Idiot” branded on their forehead, but I’m sure they’d label me populist for doing so.
3) “Extremists could get elected.” No more so than in any other election. Would this argument be valid for suspending parliamentary elections? The whole point of elections is that the people are allowed to choose which policies and candidate they want – if the main parties are really worried that the BNP have better candidates or policies than them then they need to up their game, not reject democracy.
4) “The police oppose it.” I’ve yet to see any actual data to prove this. For sure, many members of ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers) aren’t keen – but that’s because they dislike the idea of being held to account. Many existing members of police authorities are opposed, but that is because they are about to lose power to the people (and their generous allowances). When I spoke in favour of elected commissioners at the Police Federation national conference this summer, I found a lot of the rank and file are in fact open to the idea. Most ordinary bobbies’ views on law and order have more in common with the public than with Westminster politicians, Whitehall officials or members of ACPO.
Localism and direct democracy are about a simple transaction – handing power from the state to the people. The sooner the better.
No need for speed (cameras)
Posted on August 13, 2010The Coalition Government would want history to remember them for all sorts of things – for laying waste to the database State, for tackling the budget deficit, maybe even for building the Big Society.
But could, as Roger Helmer suggests, the scrapping of speed cameras actually become their most memorable legacy?
The impact of an aggressive policy of cameras and automated fines should not be underestimated. It has cost millions of motorists a huge amount of money. It has made many more worryingly resentful as they see the forces of law and order used to raise cash, not deliver justice. As the TPA’s recent report shows, just about the only thing it hasn’t done is hasten the improvement in safety on our roads.
Now that the Government has stopped pushing, and funding, that policy it is down to local councils to choose whether to keep the cameras snapping and the fines flying through the post. Isn’t it strange that as soon as the decision is made by people who are locally accountable to voters, rather than apparatchiks in Whitehall, speed cameras suddenly start being turned off?
Already the draconian speed lobby are swinging into action, with a remarkably revealing story on the BBC News website from Oxfordshire. It’s the usual scare stuff, blaring out that speeding had increased by 88% since the switch-off – although the research is based on studying a tiny sample of roads for a handful of days.
The real flaw in the piece is that reducing speed seems to have become an end in itself for the supporters of cameras; there is no discussion of whether those roads have actually become any more dangerous, or whether any more people have actually been injured. That blinkered obsession is exactly why speed cameras were a failure – and why they will not be missed.
You’re free to smoke in Wandsworth
Posted on August 05, 2010The London Borough of Wandsworth got some flak recently (from the TPA amongst others) for the huge amount of money they spent on enforcing the smoking ban. Despite spending £207,000, there were no fines or prosecutions at all in Wandsworth in the three years since the ban came in.
How come they spent so much but achieved so little? Are they incompetent? Is the ban just unenforceable?
I’m told by a source in Wandsworth that the true reason is much more encouraging from a libertarian point of view - “the officers working on it are essentially under instructions not to catch anyone”.
If that is so, good on Wandsworth for resisting the absurdity of a blanket smoking ban, the encroachment of the nanny state on individual liberty and the obscene redefinition of private companies like pubs and restaurants as “public spaces”.
If the idea of a society that threatens people with prosecution for smoking wasn’t evidence enough, it is surely proof of the nation’s insanity that even when ignoring a ban the council apparently either felt the need or were compelled by central government to squander £200,000 on not doing anything.
It was an appalling waste of money, but spending it on actually bullying smokers and businesses would have been even worse. It is good to know that instead of Wandsworth being “Smoke Free”, it is apparently “Free to Smoke”.
Eric Pickles rights a Thatcherite wrong
Posted on July 31, 2010As some of you will already know, and many others will probably have assumed, I’m quite a Thatcher fan. She helped to destroy the mightiest totalitarian regime the world has ever seen, she put Britain back on its feet economically and she was never ashamed to be proud of her country.
Admiring Mrs Thatcher doesn’t mean refusing to acknowledge her errors, though. One of the greatest and longest-lasting mistakes she made was to draw huge amounts of power away from local government and towards the centre – to Whitehall, to Parliament and ultimately to her.
It’s easy to see why she did it. With loony lefty councils threatening the physical and financial well-being of local people, she was able to help people by protecting them from some of the nutters in some town halls.
It was still the wrong thing to do, though. Her mistake was to assume that she would be around forever and that the situation could never be reversed.
Sure enough, in recent years the huge powers central Government has over councils have been used to force often sensible local authorities to pursue misguided, unpopular and costly policies at the expense of local voters and taxpayers. She centralised power in order to do the right thing, but forgot that in the long run centralising power is inevitably the road to collectivism and the Big State – rather like the Lord of the Rings, you may want to use bad powers for good but eventually they will consume you all the same.
It is good to see Eric Pickles starting to set right that wrong. As well ending the Whitehall insistence on speed cameras and fortnightly bin collections, he is now getting even more radical. Mrs Thatcher’s centrally set cap on council tax is to be abolished, and replaced by a threshold beyond which any tax rise must be voted on in a local referendum.
This is very bold, and very welcome. For those of us who want to see council tax cut drastically, it may be a bit scary to see the controls that prevent vast rises being relaxed. But this is not about handing power straight back to local loony lefty councillors, it is about giving power to taxpayers. It is right that it should be their choice how much tax they pay and how much their council spends.
Besides, I’m confident that the vast majority will come down on the low tax side – which will give the left-wing “men of the people” a nasty shock.
Basildon’s bad penny
Posted on July 30, 2010“The suspension is with immediate effect and he cannot act in any way to represent the party.”
With those words, Basildon Conservatives suspended, and then forced to resign, their own Association Deputy Chairman, Harry Tucker. The year was 2006, and Harry Tucker was in trouble for composing and delivering leaflets with a Conservative Party masthead that described homosexuals as people who “deviate from the accepted normal way of life”, and should therefore keep their sexuality secret.
Quite why he thought this was relevant to the Basildon local elections, goodness knows. However, it’s pretty clear why the Conservatives made him leave the Party. The guy was a liability to them and offensive to gay voters. He should, of course, be free to express his views if he wants, but it’s hardly surprising that a lot of people didn’t want him expressing them from an official Conservative election platform.
The strange thing is that despite supposedly being sent to Coventry, who should turn up on Basildon Council’s website nominating a Conservative candidate in a by-election last week? “H T Tucker”? Well I never!
What does his reappearance, like the proverbial bad penny, suggest about Basildon Conservatives? Were they just going through the motions when they promised to “put personal friendships aside” and announced Harry Tucker “cannot act in any way to represent the party“? Or could they not muster ten nomination signatures in the ward without going knocking on Mr Tucker’s door?
Charities reap the whirlwind
Posted on July 17, 2010The National Council for Voluntary Organisations are up in arms today at the prospect of charities facing cuts in the amount of taxpayers’ money they receive.
Did they seriously not see this coming? Even if all of these charities were blinkered enough to believe that public spending would never have to fall, they broke fundamental rules of good sense by becoming so reliant on the state in the first place.
Apparently, the taxpayer is now the source of a staggering 1 in 3 pounds going to charities.
That raises serious concerns about the co-opting of charities by the state - like when the NSPCC, which receives EU money, decided to back the Lisbon Treaty, for example.
Worse, this reliance on Government has poisoned the whole mindset of many charities. There’s no doubt that they are faced by a crisis, but what is the NCVA doing with today’s media exposure?
They’re complaining about the inevitable spending cuts, rather than trying to make things better by appealing for donations. As well as selling their independence, they have abandoned their initiative.
It’s time charities returned to being charities, rather than being just another arm of the state.