Behind Blue Eyes

Thinking about this hilarious put-down by the Treasury of Salmond’s plan to persuade England and Wales to join some form of currency union with New Scotland next year, I was thinking back to when the Euro was a very new and exciting thing.

I went to Ireland and Scotland a couple of times either side of the point when Euro notes and coins came in. In England William Hague and others led a populist campaign to ensure that Blair’s plan to sell British economic independence in return for some EU sinecure after his retirement failed. So for most Brits, the idea of joining the Euro was anathema. And yet in Scotland shops had big signs up saying they accepted Euros. It is, of course, sound business sense to accept payment in many currencies because a sale is a sale but the signs were not for visiting Irish, Dutch or German visitors. The Scots saw themselves as more modern, more pro-European, more forward-looking than the English. The consensus view seemed to be that the English were holding back Scotland’s ambitions of being a model poster-boy pro-EU small country, like Ireland.

How times change very very quickly.

If Scotland does leave the EU by default (which is a very interesting question in its own right!) and re-joins, it will be committed to joining the Euro as are all new member countries (only Britain, Denmark and Sweden are allowed to choose for themselves). But would New Scotland meet the Maastricht criteria? Well the UK as a whole certainly does not these days. 3% or smaller deficit? 40% or less government debt to GDP? You’re havin’ a laugh! New Scotland would have to take on less than half its share of the UK’s debt and suddenly find some way of reducing its massive structural deficit. I can’t imagine Scotland would be in the Euro for several years.

Lunchtime addition:

Another thing I’ve been thinking about is the assertion by Salmond that the English would quite like to have the oil industry’s foreign exchange earnings. Put aside for a moment whether New Scotland would get 100% of the oil money. There are plenty of people who think that mineral wealth can actually be quite harmful to an advanced economy because the effect on the exchange rate makes other tradeable goods and services more expensive for the rest of the world. The argument goes that if we hadn’t had North Sea oil Britain might have retained more of its large manufacturing base. If England did lose a substantial proportion of its foreign earnings virtually overnight it could be pretty painful in the short term, but might it actually encourage investment in modern industrial developments in the longer term? You might have to ask Tony Blair for advice on that one.

Update 29th April:

I read somewhere else (sorry, no credit because I can’t remember!) that to join the Euro a country has to have its own currency to abandon. So if (and it’s a large “if”) Scotland does want to join the Euro at some stage, setting up this weird Sterling single currency zone rather stuffs the possibility of Scotland joining the Euro later.

It feels like it’s been a long week this week!

One of the most surprising comments I read today was along the lines of “why the outpouring?”. It’s a good question. What would be different had she not risen to or sustained her position of power?

The world does not stand still. New industries will always happen somewhere, and a key role of modern government is to ensure that citizens have the opportunity on their doorstep. The British government was one of the first to realise this, in the seventeenth century. Thatcher realised that people need opportunities. If you have talent or skills you will move to where those opportunities arise, and the way for those skills and talents and opportunities to benefit the wider economy is to have those activities taking place in your part of the world.

Thatcher saw that for people in Britain to be able to take advantage of a rapidly-changing world they would need an environment where the new industries could flourish.

It’s easy to assume that the changes Thatcher brought in were inevitable but she didn’t copy an existing model. Many people at the time didn’t even understand what she was doing. Yes, she made mistakes, yes her style was bold. Thank God she had the stamina to see her reforms through.

It is no overstatement to say that she restored Parliamentary democracy to Britain, taking control back from the economic terrorism of the trade unions and other vested interests.

She re-wrote the future of millions. I for one will be raising a glass for her this evening. Thank you Mrs T.

“Confidence in freedom, confidence in enterprise and that is what divides conservatives and socialists.”

1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.

2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon the public approval of police actions.

3. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observation of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.

4. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.

5. Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.

6. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient.

7. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

8. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions, and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.

9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I have recently resigned from my role as a Metropolitan Special Constable after four and a bit years.

Being a police officer can be really fun. I’ve done things that I would never have done otherwise. I’ve rushed to urgent calls, I’ve sprinted through central London to assist colleagues who’ve got into sticky situations, I’ve policed large events such as the marathon and Royal ceremonies, I’ve learned to negotiate flights of steps on a bicycle, I’ve taken drunk drivers off the street.

Even the relatively mundane stuff can be pretty satisfying: being first to arrive at a house that has been burgled and helping the victim move on from the initial shock of what’s happened; calming down a first-time visitor to London while colleagues search a bar for the people who stole her bag; patrolling a high street after the London riots and being thanked by all and sundry for being there (eventually).

So if I’ve enjoyed it so much why have I quit?

Put simply, the [Metropolitan] police service is broken. We see politicians trading blows over whether police numbers are up or down, but what we don’t hear about is how few of those actually leave their offices from year to year. When the riots kicked off in 2011 no police officer was surprised how few there were ready to respond: the number on duty at night and at the weekend is tiny. Senior police officers have become politicians, presumably having long since become bored of actually walking around preventing and detecting crime.

Number 7 on the list looks good, doesn’t it? Except the Metropolitan police service is not staffed by people who live in London. For various reasons, good and bad, police officers tend not to live anywhere near where they police. Many see London as a place to be fought rather than as their home. As someone who lives on the edge of central London I was regarded as rather an oddity. Why do you live in that shit-hole I was often asked. It almost seemed to be a competition amongst officers to see how far away they could live and still get to work on time.

Number 9, or rather its complete abandonment, is the killer. It’s quite difficult to accurately measure the level of crime on either a hyper-local scale or across the city as a whole. We all know this from the media/political discussion that surrounds the publication of the crime stats each year. So instead of trying to work out whether a good service is being provided, police managers measure how much work is being done. Every station will have a notice-board covered in charts showing how much work various teams have done. Emails will circulate about this week’s figures being worse than last week’s. Whole teams are created and destroyed in order to serve the needs of the “work return” gods.

If a widget manufacturer operated this way it would go bust immediately. But in the police service, careers are made by introducing the next big policy change. Mostly the big new change is a re-hash of one that was in force a couple of years ago. I was only in four years and I was on my fourth Commissioner.

The current Commissioner is a bit of a surprise. Given that he was appointed by a Mayor and coalition government that preaches localism he is a bold centraliser. He is introducing the wonderfully-named Local Policing Model. Orwell would be impressed. It is a mechanism for senior officers at New Scotland Yard to direct the day-to-day operations of everyone in the whole Met. You see, Bernard Hogan-Howe does not believe that the police service should be a local resource accountable to the people who live in that locale. He believes that a police force should be heavy artillery to be trained on whatever the hot issue of the day is. It’s the kind of New York- or LA-style aggressive policing that British people tell the media and elected representatives that they do not want. BHH is Wizard of Oz of policing.

And what happened to the Big Society? David Cameron’s pet project should have been perfectly suited to the already-impressive numbers of people who volunteer as police officers. Yet in the Met volunteering has been repeatedly and systematically attacked. First the MSC was expanded to unrealistic proportions (there are only ever going to be a certain number of people in a community who are willing and able to make such a huge commitment), then it was turned from a voluntary organisation into the only way to get a paid job as a PC. Genuine volunteers (i.e. those who haven’t signed up as interns) need something to keep up their interest. Under BHH’s leadership and with willing assistance from the MSC’s own supine senior managers volunteers are being restricted to neighbourhood duties with little or no possibility of the kind of variety that keeps people coming in weekend after weekend.

And they wonder why people don’t stick around.

What’s that old saw about journalism, that when there’s an article on a subject you know something about, it’s complete crap?

This article from The Economist fits the bill in its almost hilarious naivety.

Behind all this is a particularly persistent Conservative idea: that welfare encourages feckless men and women to have lots of children to get benefits. In 1992, Peter Lilley, the then social security secretary, denounced (while singing), “young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing queue.” He has lots of modern acolytes. In October, Iain Duncan Smith, Mr Lilley’s latest successor, suggested limiting workless families’ access to child benefit and tax credits. This morning, David Davis, a right-wing backbencher inexplicably treated as a political heavyweight, suggested taking away child benefit for all couples after the second child.

All this appeals to right-wingers who think that the benefit system encourages feckless people to “breed” (as one councillor I once encountered put it), at the expense of everyone else. They argue that people perhaps shouldn’t have children they can’t afford is a strong one, particularly when other people in work are having to delay having children. Possibly, on moral grounds, they are right.

But practically, this is one the silliest ideas to be taken seriously. The first thing is that there is not much evidence that there really is an enormous underclass of people having lots of children and living on welfare. In 2011, there were apparently just 130 families with more than 10 children claiming any out-of-work benefit. On average, people in work and out-of-work tend have similar numbers of children.

To anyone who actually has an idea of what benefits are worth, it is obvious why. They’re simply not generous enough. Universal child benefit for an additional child is just £13.40 per week. For someone out of work, child tax credit adds another £50 or so per child. So that’s £63.40 per child, per week. Housing benefit will increase to cover the fact that children need space, but of course, that all goes to the landlord.

Out of that £63.40 must come clothes, food, transport, entertainment, Christmas and birthday presents and everything else that a child costs. So only the most wicked Fagin-like parent is going to be able to extract very much money for his own enjoyment.

I have recently completed a four year stint as a Special Constable and from my experience I am depressed to say that many of the stereotypes presented by the sick extreme-right-wing media are pretty close to the truth. Nice middle class Economist journalists might not be able to understand how people can make their benefits into a lifestyle choice – because they probably have an idea of what a warm, safe, comfortable life should look like before they are ready to have kids – but I can assure you that many do.

An example of a home that I am talking about has several dirty, badly-dressed children distributed around the living room floor, the living room having no furniture whatsoever, in view of the most enormous television you have ever seen in your life. A vague whiff of cannabis permeates. I bet the floppy-haired twit who wrote the article has never heard the word “baby-father” or reported a domestic crime on the Churchill Gardens Estate.

I admit I have no idea how many people in total choose to live like this but the idea that it is in the low hundreds in the whole country must be bollocks, pure and simple. Note that the Economist article skews the stats by talking about families with ten children? Ten is an extreme, but how many women and men who have never worked are there with three or four or five children? Quite a few. They exist. It’s not good for the parents, it’s not good for the children, it’s not good for the communities.

As I said in the previous post, I don’t think that hard cases make good welfare reform. But for supposedly-intelligent newspapers to add to the debate with arguments like “nobody would use the benefits system as a lifestyle choice because the money isn’t good enough” is dangerously naive.

I don’t necessarily agree with what George Osborne suggested, although it’s worth noting he didn’t actually say that he thought that the welfare state should be torn down just because someone on benefits had killed his children. I don’t think that extreme examples are a very good basis for contemplating wholesale reform.

BUT

As a piece of political triangulation, what the Chancellor said was absolutely inspired. He’s put anyone who is against the coalition’s welfare reform programme into the loony left box, he’s put himself on the side of the huge numbers of people on medium salaries who are totally fed up of hearing about welfare families with huge houses and multiple televisions and he’s forced Ed Balls et al. to admit they don’t have an alternative welfare reform strategy.

If the amount of squealing and sharing of Bullingdon Club photos on Facebook today is anything to go by, George Osborne just showed himself to be a bit more populist than his next door neighbour.