Genuine Conservatism is fairly easily defined as whatever US republicans espouse when they find themselves out of office, usually after 4/8 years of doing the exact opposite.

If we had more than half a dozen Conservative MP’s with a spine, Clarke would likely be PM.

yes: that’s why they covered their numbers, and their faces, and indeed (reportedly) switched numbers with officers posted on other pickets specifically to create plausible deniability and reasonable doubt.

The issue with the way police deliberately obfuscated their own (legally required) identification numbers is one of the best pieces of evidence that at a fairly high level, orders had been given that meant officers were going to break the law.

Chavscum @38:

#15 Nobody has defended the unprovoked attack on Ian Thomlinson.

But this is simply not true. Lots of people have, including you for precisely as long as you thought he was a protester.

The attitude of yourself, and various fellow travellers on here, has consistantly been that firstly had he been a protester he’d have bloody well deserved it and secondly, since he may have had a drink he was clearly antagonising the police. By wearing plain clothes. … whatever that means.

For this reason the Police have lost the respect of many ordinary working/middle class people.

Isn’t it interesting how the middle-class are ok as long as they putatively agree with you? Otherwise they’re just ‘trustafarians’…

Matt Wardman @43:

Distribution of autonomy from the core of the network to the edge. Absolutely! Hear, hear.

Matt GB @45:

No; take the example of London where I live in a different borough from where I work. It’s still a lottery; in order to live next to work I might have to move to a much less pleasant borough to live in. As it happens, I’ve got the opposite problem: I can’t move nearer to work because someone on my salary can’t afford to live in the area where I work. The area I live in is considerably shoddier. The government may think it’s reasonable to expect people to commute for 1.5 hrs a day, but it isn’t when they frequently finish work at 2am and have to be back in by 10 the next day. So, yes, it is still a lottery; people don’t live in one parish their whole lives any more, and if the basic necessities of life are determined entirely locally, without any sense of communal standard, then there are too many ways that a normal (i.e. not rich) person is just going to get screwed.

FreethinkerUK @48:

We’ve been hanging on a pendulum swinging across that line since the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. Regarding the Met, particularly: the modern issues with policing of dissent specifically grew out of the discovery by Thatcher in the 1980s that as long as you pick your targets you can win by direct violence in British politics and the rest won’t care. Trustafarians are the group currently being slated, so you can fuck them up with impunity but as soon as it’s a “real” person, you have to have an inquiry… etc.

Regardless of all the McBride of Satan stuff, the agenda we need to be back on – Left, Right and Three-DImensional, is picking up the Modern Liberty agenda and applying it to the coming elections. We don’t want to lose momentum.

We are begining to see a lot of chinks in the door – on the policing and teh terrorists, but also on databases, surveillance, ID cards and other areas. And also on the “Open Politics” agenda – MP Expenses (is the Paul Flynn change of view sigificant?) and “sunlight on the spin doctors” (which I think is a strategic favour to the Reform of Labour movement, but I don’t expect anyone to admit it).

It’s taken a couple of years and more of trench-warfare to have even this impact, even all working on parallel tracks.

Is it perhaps tIme to put the shoulder back to the wheel on these common agendas, even if other disagreements continue. We are probably going to start looking at the downside of “Safeguarding” and link it in.

Could we start with the Freedom Bill or whatever we are going to call it, again?

Matt

Take – as one highly emotive area – the Amnesty campaign about “inconsistent service provision for sexual assault victims”. Every time something like that wins a national standard, local autonomy loses.

Agreed, but one of the things that we’d need to do is get people, and MPs, out of the “write to your MP” attitude—national targets get set because MPs are the only people with any real influence over the real decision makers.

If the budgetary decisions were genuinely made locally then national politicians would have to bat such things on to local politicians instead, and it could be written into codes of conduct in the same way that they’re already required to pass on issues of non-constituents.

So campaigns such as the Amnesty one would still happen, but they’d concentrate more on getting people to put pressure on their local Cllrs—who’re likely to be more responsive anyway, as they’ve got electorates and majorities in the 1000s/100s instead of nearly 100K electorats, etc.

As an example of centralised budgeting—I recently had to go through my LAs budget, approx £450million. Of which, about £70million is from council tax, the rest through centrally provided methods in some way or other, and most of their budget is mandated from the centre, they’ve only got about £10million of discretionary spend total, to cover a massive amount of provision. Utterly farcicle.

Change that, and while the media culture might take awhile to catch up, it’ll make a difference.

Hmm. If police are citizens, shouldn’t they have the same rights to film people in public, as non-citizens? I’ve elaborated.

It depends on the use to which it will be put.

If their action disproportionately interferes with our freedoms and rights* then they should not act in that way.

* it seems to me a national database of protestors (and journalists who attend protests) violates the European Convention on Human Rights.

“The police, particularly in London, appear to have forgotten that they police only with our consent. They are not the armed wing of the state.”

I think that line has been crossed but not so far that they couldn’t be brought back to it. Time is short though!

I agree, but national charities and campaigns wouldn’t. How to handle, e.g., different standards of provision in adjacent areas. Take – as one highly emotive area – the Amnesty campaign about “inconsistent service provision for sexual assault victims”. Every time something like that wins a national standard, local autonomy loses.

I did more thinking here:

http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2008/10/10/subsidiarity-autonomy-and-occams-razor-applied-to-government/

and here:

http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/2008/10/18/off-with-their-heads-time-for-a-significant-real-devolution-of-power-devolving-england-vi/

It was part of a cross-party series of 8 articles. 2nd PDF down:

http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/publications/

Matt

The downside of a major decentralisation is that we have to take “postcode lotteries” on the chin.

If they’re locally elected and locally accountable, then it’s no longer a lottery; you voted for the decision making, it’s your postcode that’s affected.

It’s absolutely right that areas like, for example, Torbay, where I’m from, spend more money on care for the elderly, and have, for example, little to no local provision for sickle cell anaemia, as the demographics require it. But they’d also have to be able to get services in if needed. Local accountable control removes the lottery.

Would that be acceptable? What would all the politicians campaign about

Local politicians would have to campaign on two points—firstly what they’d do differently with the budget (you know how little control LAs have on their budgets currently, it’s farcicle), and second they’d campaign on comparitors—”Lib Dem controlled Anytown has much better provision of X and Y and at lower cost” etc etc.

You’re so right, Chavscum. God forbid that they change police tactics, thus making it easier to protest without having one’s face sprayed across a policeman’s rod. What a blow to our democracy that would be…

>Oh, you mean councils aren’t trusted by a lot of people either? Why not fix that problem instead of inventing another power grab likely to be won by populists that have no real accountability on budget or other issues?

I go for that. Devolve enough power down the line – including reducing central funding from ~75% to a lot less – to make local councils be taken seriously.

I’d also make them smaller first, though.

The downside of a major decentralisation is that we have to take “postcode lotteries” on the chin. Would that be acceptable? What would all the politicians campaign about

Matt

Far far better to devolve the responsibility to Primary Local Authorities and give them both real budgetary accountability and freedom of decision making—making them properly democratic would also assist.

My answer to such examples is that it should then spur all right-minded people to also then get involved and next time ensure that someone like Barnbrook wouldn’t be elected. I don’t believe is not trusting the public. If bad decisions get made then people learn from them, unless there’s some inherent fault in the system.

Borough commanders should be answerable to a directly elected borough police “sherriff” and be sackable by that elected representative.

How is this “sheriff” to be elected? How is this single, lone person to be able to represent the diverse spread of opinion and community within a typical London borough? How are they to be accountable?

I have a deep distrust of directly elected executive officials—they are accountable only to the electorate, and only at election time, and then only if there’s a voting system that actually works (as opposed to the BSVS that Hennessey concocted for English mayoral elections), and then only if the electorate get involved and actually care.

What happens when the police start being nasty to groups opposed by the elected “sheriff”, say, for example, the electoral situation in Barking and Dagenham gets worse and a loon like Barnbrook gets elected?

Given that London boroughs, and indeed most other areas, already have elected people who are theoretically in charge of supervising their area, why not give such clear powers to them, through a police oversight committee elected from Council and meeting regularly and publicly?

Oh, you mean councils aren’t trusted by a lot of people either? Why not fix that problem instead of inventing another power grab likely to be won by populists that have no real accountability on budget or other issues?

Elected sheriffs are a Tory policy proposed as a sop to localist feelings, just as elected mayors are a sop created by Labour. Give real actual powers to councils, and make them properly democratic by following the Scottish example and fixing the voting method instead.

Other than that, yes, a nice little sensible list.

http://gawragbag.blogspot.com/2009/04/new-answer-to-old-question.html

#15 Nobody has defended the unprovoked attack on Ian Thomlinson. I want to see the copper prosecuted. However, I have no sympathy with leftie agitators who seek to provoke/attack the Police and should fuck-off back to their coastal towns and leave the Met to get on with catching crooks like the scumbags who recently burgled and trashed my in-laws house, not dealing with pathetic, self-righteous and attention seeking protesters.

All this protester/ police hype is immaterial to everyone bar the usual lefties and the London media elite. If you know anyone outiside of your leftie bubble, just ask them. They are concerned about crime and the inability of Police to target the criminals, the justice system to prosecute and rehabilitate the offenders and the pc nonsense that has made the Police so ineffectual. For this reason the Police have lost the respect of many ordinary working/middle class people. However, the coverage of recent events has been great for the Police, as it pulls such people back on their side. The aim of the militant left is to undermine policing and authority so that they can increase their protesting and disruption unabated. The impending energy crisis, climate change and recession have given the militants an opportunity. They know the Tories will not stand for their shit and they are generally hated by the public, so a slash and burn and imploding Labour administration may give into them.

Regardless, all ought to have to display them on demonstrations.

Not as excruciating as watching the man who wrote this:

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/03/24/tories-and-inheritence-tax/#comment-39102

Pissing and moaning about ‘trustafarians’.