No Tax Rises Without Trust

Simon Jenkins recently speculated in the Guardian that the Green’s proposal to hold a referendum on the budget might “strike a blow for democracy”. He suggested the Greens  might lead resistance to Coalition attacks on local government. 

 

I fear not. Much as I like the idea of a brave radical council turning to its people in the fight to defend services, I don’t think this council can deliver. 

 

Labour councils throughout the country bottled it under Thatcher’s onslaught in the late 1980s – and so will the Greens. To do otherwise would require imagination, courage, discipline, and competence – and a extraordinary capacity to build alliances – and I don’t see much of that around. 

 

The more I look at the proposal for a referendum, the more it seems to reveal wishful thinking on the part of some good-hearted souls and pure cynicism on the part of others. The bulk of the Council’s proposed cuts are to adult services and will put elderly people and those with disabilities at particular risk. Therefore, I’m deeply suspicious that Jason Kitkat has linked recent proposals for a referendum specifically to the need to defend elderly services. When the people of Brighton vote ‘no’, as they surely will, will he, like Pontius Pilate, wash his hands and pretend the consequences are our responsibility?

 

I’m sure there are principled Green councillors who genuinely believe they can go to the voters and seek their support. The difficulty is that that process of getting alongside the people should have started on day one of the administration. Instead, the Green council, which started with so much promise, has been officer-led and as bureaucratic and elitist as any other council. Lacking a Whip, it’s also been divided against itself. 

 

Rather than attending to ordinary people, the administration has listened to its relatively privileged supporters and taken guidance from highly-paid council officers, many of whom have a vested interest in keeping things pretty much as they are. The Council hasn’t trusted the people, so the people will not now trust the Council.

 

In order to vote for the tax rise, I for one would need to be sure councillors would spend the funds on maintaining key services. That’s the only basis on which anyone should raise taxes for people struggling to make ends meet. But how can anyone be sure of councillors whose proposed budget puts frail elders in the frame for cuts, after 3 years of underfunding and mismanaging core services, while at the same time failing to check a growing and expensive bureaucracy.

 

There was a time when local council duties were clear: to provide and manage housing for people on low income; run schools; maintain libraries, parks, museums and art galleries; collect refuse; oversee planning and licensing decisions; and safeguard children and vulnerable adults. Council officers did the work while elected councillors provided strategic direction and scrutiny and oversaw grants to the voluntary sector. 

 

Over the years, as a result of the Tories’ disastrous drive to privatisation of council services and Labour’s obsession with raising the status and salaries of public sector managers, there are now too few workers on the ground providing the basic services we need – and far too many overpaid bureaucrats appointed to commission, liaise, develop, consult, scrutinise, co-ordinate, publicise and report upon services which, in many cases, have been cut to the bone.  Elected councillors may be better resourced than they once were, but their power has greatly diminished and with it the influence of those who elected them. 

 

Over the past two decades, competitive tendering and successive governments’ focus on inter-agency and community ‘involvement’ has provided a rich seam for the city’s paid bureaucrats. Now it seems that for every external agency and function, the council needs teams of officers who don’t serve the public, but instead develop ‘3 year strategies’ and development plans, convene forums and meetings, liaising with interest groups and external agencies. They may claim to ‘co-ordinate’, but in fact do little more than comment on, and sometimes fund, other agencies’ services. Statutory agencies tolerate them. A few ‘community representatives’ thrive on them. Charities have no choice, for their grants depend upon them.

Now, turkeys don’t vote for Christmas – especially in a climate of potential cuts. Senior bureaucrats who have built substantial fiefdoms will fight tooth and nail to keep their staff. Their inflated salaries and status rely upon it. And these bureaucrats are in the privileged position  of influencing budgets in a way that low-paid service deliverers never can – except indirectly through their unions, by which time cuts are usually already on the table. 

 Care staff and cleaners don’t tend to socialise with elected councillors, use their first names, exchange banter on twitter or pleasantries at meetings or Festival events. As a consequence, when cuts are in the air it’ll be service deliverers not bureaucrats whose jobs are most at risk. 

 

So I’d be happy to pay more tax to maintain services, provided the Council comes clean about what its bureaucrats do – and what they cost – and commits to an honest debate about whether the city actually needs or can afford them. 

 

DPG Police – No Charges on Possession of “Extreme” Pornography

The Crown Prosecution Service has announced that Metropolitan police officers arrested following allegations they exchanged “extreme” pornography will not face criminal charges. The three constables were arrested on 19th December 2013 on suspicion of being involved in the possession and distribution of obscene images via mobile phones, contrary to the Obscene Publications Act 1959 and the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008. A fourth officer was also interviewed, but not arrested. 

The images were described as “of an extreme sexual nature” not involving children. This raises the possibility that the images in question involved rape, sexual or other assault, torture or killing of adults. Certainly, the reference to the 2008 Act, which criminalised such images, would tend to suggest this.

The officers are from the Diplomatic Protection Group (DPG), which guards sensitive sites such as foreign embassies and controls access to New Scotland Yard and Downing Street. Many of its 700 officers are armed. The information came to light following investigation of the incident in which MP Andrew Mitchell was accused of calling Downing Street police officers “plebs”.  

A DPG police officer has recently been sentenced to 12 months in prison for lying about that incident. After the trial, Deborah Glass of the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), said: “The patchwork of evidence from emails, text messages and telephone calls does not suggest an organised conspiracy to bring down a Cabinet Minister. But there was clearly collusion between certain officers to, as they saw it, blow the whistle on bad behaviour toward one of their own, which ultimately had the same effect.”

Despite this recent evidence of lies and collusion within the DPG and of a closed self-protective culture, the IPCC decided that the images in question could safely be investigated locally by professional standards officers – an extraordinary decision given the national importance of the DPG, the sensitivity of some of the sites it guards and the fact that one of the officers who had been questioned about the pornography was already on restricted duties due to the ‘plebgate’ investigation. 

Though they will not face criminal charges, the officers remain subject to investigation into allegations of misconduct. However, according to the Times, the focus of that investigation will be whether the alleged conduct took place while the officers were on or off duty. This will provide little comfort to the public. 

We have been reassured the images did not involve children. However, we know nothing about the nature of the adult images, in particular whether they involved images of sexual violence and, as is so often the case, the degradation of women – and occasionally gay men. The key issue is not where and when pornography was exchanged, but whether serving police officers possessed and exchanged for pleasure or entertainment, adult images that may possibly depict rape, sexual abuse and  degradation, torture or worse. If they did, these men are surely not fit to act as police officers. 

We need to be able to trust police to investigate incidents of rape and sexual and domestic violence with sympathy, discretion and rigour. Yet we know there remain serious concerns about widespread ‘no-criming’ of rape reports in many forces and the discriminatory attitudes of some officers to victims of sexual and domestic crimes, including homicide. 

If we are to have a police service fit for the 21st century, we must be prepared to confront sexism within it – and to investigate and, if necessary, dismiss those who are unfit to serve.