Stella Rimington, the Judi Dench of the twilight world, has acted as a conduit for intel’s view on ID cards. They will not work.
Asked at a further education conference whether she thought ID cards would make the country safer, Dame Stella Rimington replied: “No is the very simple answer, although ID cards have possibly some purpose.
“But I don’t think anybody in the intelligence services – not in my former service – will be pressing for ID cards.”
On the same day, Sir Ian Blair gave the Dimblebore Lecture, trying to disguise his support for a single police force a la NuLab, behind honeyed words of opening debate and acquiring responsibility.
First, we want a single police service, not a multiplicity of them. By, that I do not necessarily mean a single national police force but one holistic service to cover the whole of the mission.
Despite calling for a debate which involved the public, Blair betrayed his liberal-left roots, praising the welfare state (namechecking Beveridge) and decrying local constabularies as islands of lower middle class conservatism. He painted a bleak picture of high crime, violence and anti-social behaviour that required the police to act as the moral arbiters of society, All as part of the debate. The conclusion boils down to “We have lost your respect, That is your fault and you must do something about it by having a debate led by us.”
Sir Ian Blair’s support for Labour’s policies of a national police force, obscured by totems of accountability and transparency, ran through this speech. Perhaps he genuinely welcomes a debate, but only if the conclusions are correct. The invocation of the 7th July as ‘the event’ around which all police work should be organised was another hint at the paramilitary policing which would provide moral comfort to state defined communities. ID cards never got a look-in just to avoid the appearance of bias.
You see, the British never really got to grips with policing because the lack of a written constitution demonstrates our lack of forethought in these and, no doubt, so many other matters:
And here I come to the second question, which is ‘who is to decide?’ and I return to my story about running back that far.
Despite my whole professional lifetime in policing, I believe it should be you, not me, who decides what kind of police we want. I’ll return to the third question – about how – later on.
For nearly two centuries, the British have not considered any of these questions very thoroughly. That is fairly typical.
We are one of the few countries in the world without a written constitution.
We have none of the exact distinctions between the executive and the legislature of the United States or between the roles of central and local government in France; we operate through gradual compromise and evolution.
But, even in that context, the police have a disadvantage.
We have been a service which has always been separate and silent, which successive governments – until recently – and all of you, your parents and your grandparents, have broadly left alone to get on with the job that you have given it.
Two answers: remove gun control and elect chief constables for each county or borough. Easy, isn’t it!
Philip Chaston writes:
“Two answers: remove gun control and elect chief constables for each county or borough. Easy, isn’t it!”
Hear hear!
Equally, the idea being kicked around by some Tories, of having a locally elected sheriff in charge of regional policing policy would, also, be a significant step in the right direction.
“First, we want a single police service, not a multiplicity of them. By, that I do not necessarily mean a single national police force but one holistic service to cover the whole of the mission.”
So that is how he got the job a bullshit out reach worker.this should keep the Brazilians off the streets.
“not national police force but one holistic service” WTF? Is that like “holistic medicine”? Are they going to drink camomile tea with honey in it while filing their reports with Yani playing softly in the background? Typing finger acupuncture? Ayurvedic scalp massages for tired brains?
Please, someone – what is a holistic police force?
maybe its like dirk gentleys “holistic detective agency” ?
Philip – For “Stella Rimington, the Judi Dench of the twilight world” – much thanks. That cannot be improved upon.
Verity,
For Brazilians it is “hole in the head istic”. The more I hear of this tosh the more I begin to believe he IS related to that other blithering idiot.
Or perhaps they empty the whole magazine.
Perhaps they have Holio Iglesias in to sing for their office party.
Verity writes:
“Philip – For “Stella Rimington, the Judi Dench of the twilight world” – much thanks. That cannot be improved upon.”
Mmm.. that really was very good, wasn’t it?
Of course Judi Dench would probably have done a better job…
Verity,
I’m not sure,the Blairs are notoriously tone deaf.
Never mind what he said. What is he doing saying it to a public audience? This man should have been fired at least two months ago.
A holistic police force takes consideration of a whole range of factors when dealing with crime.
Thus, instead of say 20 officers pounding the beat looking for criminal activity and hitting it with big sticks ( how laughably old fashioned ), you have 20 assorted outreach, liason, policy, etc deskbound officers filling in forms.
___Off topic___
you have a spam filter!
will it reject old-f4shioned?
what spam has -f4shion in it ?
Verity:
For Brazilians it is “hole in the head istic”.
Indeed. A very large hole, it turns out. Police used ‘dum dum’ bullets to kill de Menezes reported the Telegraph yesterday.
They were out to kill somebody. That’s not a defensive decision.
“Holistic” is not just fluffy language. “Holistic” is more dangerous than “single” because it implies not explicit authority and openly defined rules, but a collective exercise in pseudo-consultation and executing the “general will” of the public. Yet more lawless prerogative populism, in other words.
Yeah…well…frankly Philip, what did you expect from Sir/Herr Ian and his gang of trigger-merry Met thugs?
BLIAR N°2’s “liberal” consumption of banned ammos, and his copious use of Soviet-style technocratic metaphors to describe “substantial advances in cross-departmental law enforcement coordination” and the ensuing “optimization of shoot-to-kill operational procedures” should come as no surprise: after all the guy was a radical Trotskyite activist when he read European literature at Oxford in the early 1970’s…
This “scientific” socialist rearing undoubtedly made him perfect (im)moral material for a “Neocon”/Nouveau Labour epiphany in the late 1980s!
His past-pinko partners in crime at the White House underwent similar “transformational conversions” when they met Ronald Reagan/Jesus Krist/Irving Kristol/Yahweh/General Sharon/blah blah blah…
If anything, I’m surprised we haven’t (yet?) sprayed Bradford with phosphorus-based “efficient urban pacification vectors”…would allow us to reach our “annual urban tranquility targets” much faster…remind me to send a detailed memo to McKinsey and Downing Street.
We simply can’t let dark-skinned Mohammedan and Latin American thugs working for Jacques Chirac and Saddam Hussein destroy our way of life with their poisonous Gallic Gaullist soufflés and other radioactive “yellow cakes” cum hummus sauce cooked in the dirty Baathist/terrorist/Islamo-fascist kitchens of Damascus and Tickrit.
Long live Liberty!
Long live Tony Blair!
Long live Shariaa-based Islamic Law and the institutionalized persecution of second-class citizen such as women and Christians in “grand” Ayatollah Sistani’s “free Iraq”!
Ian Blair is a toady. He still has not properly explained what the f**k happened in the shooting of an innocent man in Stockwell tube station in July. Will there be a full enquiry? Nope.
This awful man Ian Blair is a bigger slime ball than Tony Blair and Mandelson rolled into one. Everything about the man just oozes NuLab, PC speak, and smugness.
Does anybody think this guy is in the least bit interested in giving the great unwashed masses the policing they desire? As an aside, if Ian Blair needs a public debate to discover that the public want more effective, more visible policing targeting criminals and not just motorists, then the guy would have to be an idiot which I suspect he isn’t. So what exactly is he up to? Perhaps muddying the waters a bit, taking us further into a centralised police state, and then holding up his hands and saying, “Well, we had a consultation, and this is what some of you wanted.”
As so often, what we are battling is political exhaustion: the Blairs of this world bet on us not taking them at their word. In this case, local authorities shouldn’t wait for a statutory go-ahead, they should organise elections for a tribune-style public representative to oversee police policy and management, and then challenge the police to respond to expressed public wishes. I live in N Yorkshire, which is one of only two police authorities which have not (yet) embraced the speed-camera tax. A publicly-elected representative arguing the case may not have statutory power, but has a democratic accountability which is difficult to stand against, even for the Blairs of this world.
National parties claiming to have a concern for civil liberties and/or democracy shouldn’t wait for Whitehall, they should just get on with it. Anyone out there realliy ready for a debate?
And by extension, Samizdata readers and contributors should stand for election (as independents if necessary) at a local level, and get this sort of democratic reform on the agenda. If we wait for Whitehall to give us our freedoms back, we’ll wait for ever.
On another level, Police Blair has an inkling: he’s clearly right that the only way to combat our homegrown terrorism is to foster genuinely self-governing communities. Does he realise that this is diametrically opposed to the direction which the govt is rushing via it’s idiotic and oppressive national database?
Does anybody think this guy is in the least bit interested in giving the great unwashed masses the policing they desire?
Nor is this Guy. Torture, presumption of guilt, lynching on street corners, zealous prosecution of victimless crimes against “a decent way of life”? No, thank you.
“Two answers: remove gun control and elect chief constables for each county or borough. Easy, isn’t it!”
Actually, just one answer: abolish the police. They are a subsidised state monopoly and no more worthy of preservation than any other subsidised state monopoly.
I am not convinced that electing the police would do anything to improve their job performance, if you think Commisioner Blair spouts a lot of nonsense, just wait till a proffesional politician is doing the job. Whilst Ian Blair is bad, he does seem to be uniquely bad, and perhaps we well never see his likes of him again when he gets fired shortly after the other Blair gets thrown out of office (hopefully not too long now).
he’s clearly right that the only way to combat our homegrown terrorism is to foster genuinely self-governing communities,
So much for all the crap about integration! After ID cards, you will need ‘internal’ passports, or travel permits.
What absolute rubbish…
There have been people saying that ID cards should be used as internal passports (although they have not used that name, they just suggested a using the ID card to control access to travel, and said we need passports to travel abroad so the precident has been set).
Are we supposed to be shocked that the Police use soft-pointed ammunition? Frankly I would be shocked if they were using the FMJ (full metal jacket) rounds mandated by military convention in their 9mm pistols and SMGs, which would overpenetrate the target and risk directly hitting or ricocheting into bystanders. Leaving aside the question of who they are shooting and why, when in public places they should be using ammunition which will dependably stop inside the target’s body, which means some kind of soft-pointed round.
Quite so. The ‘dum dum’ issue is an absurdity. It would be a scandal if the cops were NOT using expanding ammo!
Couldn’t they use a less powerful explosive in the bullet to avoid “overpenetration”, how much power do you need in a bullet when you’re going to shoot them in the head from a few inches away whilst you hold them down?
Ernest Young,
Perhaps I expressed myself badly, but I think you may have radically misunderstood the point I was making.
In dealing with home-grown terrorism, the key is obviously information – how you get it, how you use it. There are two (I believe) opposed approaches. The state ID register way is the very quintessence of a centrally-organised top-down information model, which, for reasons Hayek and others have explained very well, cannot possibly work, either in theory or in practice. One thing you can know in advance of this dreadful excercise is that it will catch no terrorists, prevent no outrages. Looks like even Stella understands that.
The alternative is a distributed information model. And in this case, I suggest it means the revivification of communities (by which I emphatically do not mean racial/religious special pleaders, but . . . well, the place you live, work, pray if that’s your thing) to a genuine civic life: something which the excessive centralising and authoritarian impulses of The Blairs discourage. That civic life would foster, indeed depend upon, widely distributed flows of information. And the building up of civic ties within your community builds up those information flows. And at the end of the day, the chances of spotting the bearded loner just back from Pakistan, and raising the right questions about him, are much greater for properly functioning communities than for a bored database cruising civil servant.
That’s the point I was trying to make. I don’t really think Police Blair would support a deepening of civic life, because it would call his bluff. But nonetheless, it’s the right way. Not only would it work, but it’d also (in my view) be worth doing anyway.
In practice, what does it involve? Well, most obviously, you’ve got to establish clarity of role between central and local govts, which can only be done on the basis of overhauling the financing arrangements. And second, a revivification of “democratic local control” over bodies such as . . . police, planning, education, health etc. And no, that doesn’t necessarily involve support for the bodies which have grown up to offer us (read, subvert) “local democratic control” within the current authoritarian and centralising structure. Oh dear, I’ve started wandering. . . .
Anyone know why “police Bliar” is still in post? As for his question, we want a police force which is accountable, at present it is not. Many years ago in my youth, Chief Constables did not come from the police ranks. The local bobby was just that, local, and knew what was happening in the area and who may cause trouble. He was around on his bicycle and could see what was happening, not tearing through a housing estate at 30 mph or more without knowing the area or anyone in it.
Guy Herbert, it was Peter who wrote “hole in the head istic”, not me. But I don’t mind responding by saying I would damn’ well hope the police would use expanding bullets in a crowded, closed situation like a tube! After advice from the Israeli security forces, who have, as we know, volumes of experienc of suicide shitholes, the police changed its policy from “shoot (in the chest) to stop”, to “shoot to kill”. Perps can still, according to Israeli advisors, detonate a bomb if they’re just shot in the chest.
BTW, I still do not think the full story of that Brazilian has come out and I think the police cannot tell us because its a part of something ongoing. I have never thought he was an innocent man, and I hope I am not doing him an injustice by saying so. But I do not think this was a mistake.
Commisioner Blair:
“This is a tragedy,” Ian Blair told Sky News. “The Metropolitan Police accepts full responsibility for this. To the family I can only express my deep regrets.”
Tony Blair:
British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he was ‘desperately sorry’ that an innocent man was shot by the police on the tube last week,
—
They tried to cast mud in his general direction initially but gave up when nobody was buying it.
Della – We will see.
BTW, electing police chiefs works a treat in the US. You get police chiefs directly answerable to the public, which is why crime in the US is much lower than it is in Britain. Judges are also elected and they also do the will of the public, which is bang criminals away. Every public official should be elected in a democracy. In the US, fire chiefs are also elected. So is the local school board. Every single last one of them is answerable to the voters, not some government apparachik.
The most troubling part of last night’s speach for me was Blair’s comment that 90% of London’s police officers are unarmed, that’s like saying somthing is 90% fat free – only an idiot won’t notice that 1 in 10 of London’s bobbies is toting a firearm.
By the way with regards to Philip’s comment
WTF are you all gun-toting loonies? What’s so great about everyone carrying guns?
Put down the guns and keep up the good work.
David has obviously never lived in a free country.
What do you want a personal apology from Tony Blair to you in person?
To the contrary, apparently it is becoming more and more uncommon in the states due to police chiefs abusing thier position to hurt their political enemies. If you look to your North to Texas there are only 5 small towns with elected police-chiefs, the largest having 88,000 people. Here’s another election this time in California where they went from elected to appointed:
‘”It’s too easy for police chiefs to maintain the tyranny of the majority in order to get elected,” said Fyfe, a 16-year New York Police Department veteran ‘
Off the top of my head:
(1) Keeps crime down (criminals are more afraid of you than you are of them – but only if they know you have a gun and are willing to use it!).
(2) Protects individual rights (self-defense is an aboslute right – and it’s ever so much easier to exercise when you have the tools…)
(3) Keeps the government on its toes (no Holocaust when your Jews are armed to the teeth!).
Off the top of my head:
1. Cultural, social and economic factors are generally more important. The argument that it keeps down crime is culture-specific and may not apply in other countries.
2. Hasn’t prevented the US government eroding individual rights to the extent it is often lambasted hereabouts for.
3. Doesn’t work in the armed to the teeth Middle East.
EG
I disagree slightly with Joshua. He says guns are only a deterrent if the criminal/assailant knows you have one and are prepared to use it.
Not necessarily so. In states which not only allow private ownership of guns, but also allow carrying concealed, the criminal is in the position of not knowing whether you have a gun or not. This encourages caution.
The posting is a very good one.
For example: What business is it of Sir Ian Blair if Britian has a written constitution or not?
The job of a policeman is to catch criminals – if he wishes to talk about politics Sir Ian should resign from the police and stand for election as an M.P.
The last time that security chiefs lectured the British public on political matters was under the Major Generals in the mid 17th century.
I’m certainly not a champion of Blair, but did he were his remarks about a written constitution in the context of arresting terrorists?
Just as a coda to the post.
Sir Ian Blair’s speech was, in some aspects, worse than commentators have realised. Michael Taylor hit the nail on the head with his argument that distributed systems provide better security than centralised control.
Blair’s rhetoric attempts to undermine the arguments of liberals and libertarians by stating that the answer to the erosion of civil society is greater state control and a national police force:
Moreover, these events coincide with another development, the increasing sense that anti-social behaviour, as the opposite face of a civil society, is also threatening our ability to lead free lives.
Three trends have coincided.
First, the agencies of community cohesion, the churches, the trade unions, the housing associations, the voluntary clubs have declined in influence.
Secondly, the agents of social enforcement, such as park keepers, caretakers and bus conductors, have disappeared.
The third was the laudable but under-funded and imperfectly implemented decision to close so many long-stay psychiatric institutions.
This has left many people looking – in the absence of anyone else – to the police service for answers to the degradation of communal life – for answers to the neighbours from hell, the smashed bus stop, the lift shaft littered with needles and condoms, the open drugs market, the angry, the aggressive and the obviously disturbed.
Off the top of my head – I’m having serious deja vu. I’m pretty sure we’ve been though this before, so briefly:
Yes, you’re right about this. At least as regards cultural factors. I won’t pursue this one – except to say that it seems to keep crime down in the Anglosphere.
Right again – but the US is hardly a police state. Even with scaled-back rights, it remains one of the freest nations on Earth – and culturally speaking probably is the freest nation on Earth. You would have to take that into account in order to pursue this line of argument.
If you’d like to live under a dictatorship that regularly tortures its citizens without a gun, be my guest. You’re right that guns don’t seem to have prevented dictatorship in the Middle East – but I file this under evidence for #1, which I’m not going to pursue because I think there’s something to be said for it.
I will say this: the Middle East is about the last place I’m willing to go unarmed.
And that’s the real point here. Self-defense is a right. Not subject to negotiation or micromanagement. If someone attacks me, screw “trying to flee.” If I feel a good punch isn’t enough, I’m going to cap him. You can do whatever fleeing and bending over you like.
Indeed, but another point is that the arming of the people, frequently touted as a solution to problems like this, is far too simplistic a proposal. It simply doesn’t do what it says on the tin, or at least it is by no means certain to do it – other factors are FAR more important. It is necessary to address the other factors first, given that they are more important, and THEN if you still have a problem consider general arming.
The major problem I have with general arming is that whilst it may work in the US that by absolutely no means whatsoever necessitates that it will work anywhere else. Talk of the Anglosphere in this respect is meaningless: all the Anglosphere is is a collection of countries with a common language and a legal system based more or less on the common law – and that’s it. It isn’t anything more. The cultural differences between the US, Canada, UK, Australia and New Zealand are huge and it can in no meaningful sense be said that there is a common culture in anything but the most dilute sense.
EG
I disagree – but not entirely. We have less in common than Americans generally suppose, yes. I still feel that Australia and the UK are more similar to the US, though, than France or Japan – and not just because of the language.
But in this particular case I wasn’t using “Anglosphere” in any vague cultural sense. It happened to be a convenient term – on two levels. (1) Most people who post on this site are from Anglosphere countries (modulo a few from France, Scandanavia and Eastern Europe, we’re mostly Brits, Aussies and Americans) so these are the relevant countries anyway and (2) it seems to be true for all of these countries that more guns means less crime.
And now of course I look back up at the post you were responding to and realize that from context there was no other way to take the reference to the “Anglosphere” but in the cultural sense, so my latest comment isn’t going to sound very plausible. So I should rephrase to say “Perhaps you’re right that I shouldn’t be using ‘Anglosphere’ in the cultural sense here – but in any case it’s relevant to the problem because of (fill in reasons stated in my latest post).”
Of course they are, but that does not mean there is no yawning gulf between the cultures, merely that it is narrower than in the other case.
This is at best a contentious statement. It has never been shown one way or the other in any study that has managed to survive academic mauling, not least because those who study it approach the matter with their minds already made up and seem happy enough to indulge in the most mendacious data-bending to fit the answers. The matter of crime is FAR more complex than either the pro- or anti-gun lobby pretend, and their simplistic solutions will not solve any problems.
EG
Verity, just a couple of quibbles with your comments about the States. The police and fire chiefs of major cities are almost always appointed, not elected. In many cities, the police chief may be the highest ranking officer and the police commissioner a political appointee who oversees the entire department, with the same being true of the fire department. In other cities you will find police and fire departments united in a single public safety department, which is usually run by an appointed public safety director. You will usually find elected sheriffs in rural and sometimes suburban counties; I live in a county with an elected sheriff, for example, and we have a population of about a quarter of a million people here.
Yes, judges are elected here, but this is in itself no protection from judicial abuse; judges have to pay for their election campaigns like everyone else and one of the big sources of campaign contributions is, you guessed it, trial lawyers. And in areas where one party is dominant, the dynamic may be skewed to protect the interests of that political party. It’s a well known fact that many judges in New York City got to be judges by being active in Democratic Party politics and were put on the ballot for their benches by political bosses paying off years of favors.
In a city where the Democratic primary in September is the real election, with what happens on Election Day being a mere confirmation, it’s no surprise that judges throw work in probate cases to other politically connected lawyers in the Democratic Party clubs, sometimes get caught with their hands in the public till, and sometimes do stupid things like order women and their violent boyfriends to work their problems out together (the boyfriend, in one such case, beat the woman to death and then killed himself).
As for electing school boards, well, this is common in the United States, and the fact that they are elected by the people didnt stop them from boosting my school taxes this year by 25.7%, or some $200 more than last year’s school tax bill. Democracy is a wonderful thing, but sometimes you what you really want is a cattle prod and ten minutes alone with the dolts.