September 2011 Archives

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

It's fascinating watching the Lib Dem conference in Birmingham. After taking a kicking in the polls in May, you'd think the party faithful would be calling for some sort of action.

The strategy of the leadership is to clearly big up their role in the coalition, in which Nick Clegg says the Lib Dems are punching above their weight. That's not good for democracy, and there's no proof it's actually good for the Lib Dems either.

Sometimes the attempts to appear more influential than they really are has been farcical. Take, for example, the row over the 50p top rate of tax. Nick Clegg says it is unacceptable to see it removed when most people are struggling to make ends meet. The image he paints is of the Lib Dems fighting against the worst excesses of the Tories trying to look after their mates.

However, it's a non-fight. Much the Tories may wish to knock the 50p tax rate on the head, and much as there may be lobbying from the rich for that to happen, the Tories aren't daft. They know how it will look, and how it would play politically. So it's not going to happen. For now. It's not a victory for the Lib Dems, it's the Tories being pragmatic.

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In politics, so I've been told, there is a lot of smoke and mirrors. They're clearly aware of that at the think tank Policy Exchange, where their way of getting more out of the police would be inspired, if it wasn't so utterly stupid.

In a nutshell: the Policy Exchange believe police officers should wear their uniforms on the way to work. Somehow, they work out that this would equate to an extra 1,200 police officers on the streets of London. Their working out, I guess, involved multiplying the average journey time to work by a policeman multiplied by the number of days in a week they work multiplied by the number of officers in London, divided by the number of contracted hours a police officer works each year.

Simples. But wrong.

Asking police officers to wear their uniform on the way to work doesn't create an extra 1,200 police officers. At best, for the bean counters, it potentially gives a couple of free hours of work on top of the normal shift.

But does a policeman, travelling to work on the bus, do if he or she spots a crime being committed? It's fair to assume that they won't have their radio with them, or their CS spray, or, if they have one, their taser gun. What we effectively have is a police officer being asked to do their job without the tools to do their job. That's not safe, or effective.