To the British Academy (no less) to listen to Ian Blair speak on 'Policing: Continuity, consensus and controversy'. A quite enjoyable jaunt through 180 years of police accountability, with a convincing call for a new Royal Commission on Policing to sort out the mess surrounding police accountability in England and Wales. A few details on the evening can be found here.
Most striking was Blair's attack on current Tory proposals for elected 'police commissioners'. This can be found in sketched out in the Tory's 'draft manifesto' for crime, which states they will:
replace the existing, invisible and unaccountable police authorities and make the police accountable to a directly- elected individual who will set priorities for the policing of local communities.
I agree with the former Chief Constable on this one. This plan sounds appallingly ill thought out and potentially very dangerous. For one thing, it's not at all clear how this 'directly-elected' individual will fulfill their role. Blair suggested they will operate entirely through the existing chief constable, making them in effect his/her boss - an employer with only one employee! Any other arrangement would be even more bizarre, as the 'individual' would then be in the position (presumably) of being able to countermand the chief constable's orders....
But much much worse of course is who the individual is, how they are elected, and what manifesto they are elected on. It doesn't take too much imagination in an age of voter apathy and low turnouts to envisage a BNP 'commissioner', with control over setting the 'priorities' of local police. Even setting aside the shadow of the far right, the level of crass political populism which currently surrounds crime debate in this country would not bode well for the election of 'individuals' with balanced policy for crime control.
If this is representative of the quality of Tory plans for crime and justice then I think we should be very concerned.
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