If All Politics Are Local . . .

There was an election in my small neck of the southern backwoods the other day. It is a purplish area that leans mildly to the right. We have perennially had Democrats on our county commission, and the occasional Democrat mayor. And the Democrats on our Commission have not done a bad job. I have been generally pleased with the local government.

Usually, in local elections, once when gets elected to the commission, its is a virtual certainty that they will retain the seat for a long time, at least unless they do something stupid and end up on the scandal sheet in the local dinosaur media. Even in tough times, incumbents have a very strong advantage.

Not this year. Republicans just swept the field. They won the mayor's spot and unseated the three Democrat incumbents on the county commission. One of those unseated was in my very small District, where we elected a black Republican to unseat a multi-term Democratic incumbent.

The people in my county are on the warpath. They are hunting anyone with a D next to their name. There is no doubt in my mind that this was not so much a local election as it was a referendum on our national political leadership. This of course does not mean anything for the rest of America, but I will be surprised if this does not play out similarly on a nation-wide scale come November. The Dems have every right to be scared.

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Labour Calls For Local Election Of Police Chiefs In The UK

Hell may well be freezing over. Just as I wrote on the decline in law and order in Britain due to a perfect socialist storm, the Labour Party up and publishes a proposal to devolve power to localities to elect their own police leadership. That's the equivallent in the U.S. of Nancy Pelosi coming out for offshore drilling and Harry Reid endorsing free trade agreements.

At any rate, in addition, Labour plans to end most national policing targets and cut the mountains of red tape that currently ham-string local policing. While this still leaves the insidious problem of a breakdown in courts and punishment, it may well work a sea change to policing in Britain. Amazingly, though, many "conservatives," among them Mellanie Phillips, opposed this change.
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The proposals are contained in a Home Office document, the Policing Green Paper. It is long and dense, taking four times the words to say what is needed. That said, it actually appears to be a coherent plan that oculd work. Coming from the Labour Party - you could knock me other with a stick.

The plan calls for the locality to elect its police leadership who then must work within the regulatory framework set up by the Home Office and under the authority of the Home Office. This may or may not be problematic, depending on how steep a regulatory burden the Home Office retains and how much control they still try to wield, neither of which were clearly answered in the Green Paper.

An interesting point of the plan is to require regular, published inspections of the local police by a national Inspector General. This would provide information to the locals from a neutral third party and would provide a strong motivation to maintain standards. The plan also provides for the Home Office, at its discretion, to remove elected police officials if it becomes apparent that there is corruption or deeply substandard performace in any locality.

Interestingly enough, opposition to the plan is coming not only from Labour, but also from some well-known Conservatives. Mellanie Phillips commented on the proposed changes approximately a week ago in her blog, arguing strenuously against these changes. Her initial criticism was that allowing local elections of police would present a "very real danger of extremists and single issue pressure groups targeting these elections for their own ends."

The fundamental purpose of democracy is to give people a say in how they are governed at every level. It means trusting people to make their own decisions - a bedrock priniciple of conservativism - and locals are certainly in the best position to adjudge who they wish to run their local policing. If they make a mistake, well, that is why there are elections. It will, in the long run, mean policing that is far more responsive to the local communities.

That said, Britain does have a real problem with extremism. It is the problem of "two Britains" where there are areas in Britain that appear to have been directly transplanted from the rural hinterlands of Pakistan. Allowing elections in areas that have come to be dominated by radical Islamists is a double edge sword. Nonetheless, that is not a reason to deny local elections, nor is it a reason to assume even in these areas that the person elected by secret ballot would be problematic. Besides, the plan set forth in the Green Paper strikes the appropriate balance, maintaining the right of the government to step in if their is a corrupt police administration.

Beyond this particular objection by Ms. Phillips, whom I assume is indicative of those conservatives who likewise object, her further objections are simply non-sensical.

The independence of the police is crucial to maintaining Britain’s dispassionate tradition of law and order. The fact that that independence has been catastrophically eroded through control by central government does not mean that the remedy is to replace such control by other kinds of political interference.

. . . But it is a mistake to think that the danger of politicisation resides only in Whitehall. Elections offer the means for any number of obsessives, ideologues or fanatics to seize the reins of power. That’s bad enough when it comes to elected bodies themselves but when applied to the police it is a potential disaster.

. . . What’s broken in Britain is the culture and trade-craft of policing. It’s that culture which has to be repaired and restored. For sure, the first step must be to remove the means of political control from Whitehall. But then the police have to be taught, persuaded, cajoled, shamed -- whatever -- into rediscovering their lost professional ethic. And for that to happen their independence is vital. . . . But that’s what has to be done. Delivering the police from the Whitehall frying-pan to the fire of local extremists or other obsessives is most certainly not the answer

Ms. Phillips seems to be confused. There is always going to be some political entity in ultimate authority over the police in a democratic society. The only question is who will be that authority. There is no real option other than central control or local elections that will, directly or indirectly result in the choice of police leadership. There is a vast spectrum in between those two points where the government still sets the boundaries and mainatins some regulatory control. That is what is set out in the Green Paper. Britain has had the experiment in central contol now for decades - and it is failing, not catastrophically yet, but as I articluated here, the system is clearly broken. A significant change is needed.

Ms. Phillips also shows a troubling and fundamental distrust in democracy - a trait that shows up with uncomfortable regularity in many "conservatives" across the pond. That said, what I have read in the Green Paper suggests that Labour may actually have developed a workable plan that will be good for Britain. I would suggest to those conservatives who think otherwise that they actually sit down and read the Green Paper before criticizing it on the grounds that it provides too much democracy.

My hats off to Labour. If they are able to keep their statist tendencies at bay, they may have found at least a partial solution to Britain's policing problem. Now they need to work on the punishment side of the house.

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Might Britain Survive After All

Over the last decade, the socialist/marxist policies of the Labour government and the European Union combined in a horrendous synergism to drag down the economy of Britain and quite literally war against anglo-saxon culture and history. On Thursday, the British people seemingly stirred a bit from their stupor. In local elections, they handed Labour their worst electoral defeat in a half century. And that was just the beginning of the good news.

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When the votes were totaled, the Tories – ostensibly Britain’s conservative party, though they would be seen as well to the left of center in the U.S. political continuum – picked up the lion’s shared of the vote at 44%. The Liberal Democrat Party, a relatively new party that is trying to mark out the mid point between the Tories and the Labour party, came in second with 25% of the vote while the ruling Labour Party was in third with 24% of the vote. Both the UK Independence Party - the true home of conservatives in the UK - and the British National Party increased their margins.

What all that means is a royal drubbing for Labour in the local councils. Labour lost 331 Councilors and control of 12 Local Councils. The Tories picked up 256 Councilors, which gives them now a huge lead at the local level over Labour. This bodes ill indeed for the Labour Party, who are searching today for any message in the election results that they can latch onto and perhaps salavage their party before the next general election. As several commentators, the most colorful of which was The Times' Matthew Parris, have noted, there are no life preservers in the electoral sea in which Labour now finds itself adrift:

It's over. There was nothing constructive in the voters' message. These elections were not an invitation to change. They were a big two-fingered salute [the Brit equivalent of the middle finger salute on this side of the pond], a raspberry, a pressing of the de-trousered national buttocks to the window of the polling station. The voters are bored, tired, disillusioned and out of love. The affair [with Labour], which in 1997 was (for the British people) uncharacteristically intense, is over, and the falling out is correspondingly bitter. Such flames are not rekindled - and certainly not by Mr Brown, whose personal stamp characterises this administration.

Read the entire article. Not everyone agrees, of course. At least one ardent leftist, John Kampfner - not surprisingly a BBC personality, writing at the Guardian has suggested that Labour can win by taking an even harder turn to left, apparently readopting the marxian economic ideas of large scale income redistribution and nationalization of major businesses jettisoned from the Labour plank only a bit over a decade ago by Tony Blair. Good luck with that.

The most important part of the local election was the race for Mayor of London, a post held for the past eight years by the odious Ken Livingstone – better known as Red Ken – a true enemy of Western civilization. Red Ken has thankfully been handed his walking papers by London's voters who gave victory to the Tory candidate, Boris Johnson, by a wide margin.

This is all good news, though only a small first step, really. In the end, the most important question will be whether Britain is consumed by the EU in a transfer of sovereignty with no referendum of the Brtish electorate. And thus the big news of the week may well be the little noted court approval given to a case brought by Stuart Wheeler to force the UK government to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. More on that court decision here.

Showing how history repeats itself if you survive as a nation for a millenium, the good folk at Brits at Their Best saw the apparent mood of an angry electorate summed up in in John of Gaunt's speech about the state of England in Shakespeare’s Richard II.

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Read the entire post. And another British blog, EU Referendum, one of the best blogs on either side of the pond, puts the election in perspective.

. . . [T]his was a catastrophe for the Labour party of some magnitude and one from which they will find it difficult to recover.

However, for the rest of us, life goes on and, let us face it, these were just local elections, which will change little and which were decided on a low turn-out as usual. In other words, for the majority of the population, even in the affected areas, they were of little concern. This will not change until there is a root-and-branch reform . . . [of local and national government].

. . . We have a new mayor, though many of us prefer not to have one at all. Nor are we all that desperate to have a London Assembly or the rest of those quangos that together make up the GLA or, more widely, “London’s government”. London does not need a government as it has managed spectacularly well without one for centuries. This supposed government is little more than a money-hungry incubus on the whole city.

On the other hand, if we do have a mayor, even temporarily, it is better not to have a power-hungry, self-centred, no-much-reformed socialist who brought in huge white elephants, thought of new ways to fleece the public and saw himself and his entourage as another foreign office. The truth of how much those trips abroad to places like Venezuela or to conferences about global warming has not yet come out.

. . . On to the new Mayor. Boris Johnson has won very handsomely. Despite the ridiculous system of three ballot papers, two preferences for the mayor and two separate votes for the assembly, which has consistently created more spoilt ballots in London than anywhere else, the victory is clear and uncontestable.

The turn-out seems to have been around 45 per cent, about ten per cent higher than last time and about 13 per cent higher than the time before. This is still not spectacularly high but by standards of local elections, not bad.

The irony here is that we were told twice by pundits of the stature of Simon Jenkins that the magical personality and popularity of Ken Livingstone would bring the voters out in far greater droves than ever before. It didn’t and neither did the media blitz on the subject. It was actually the presence of a credible rival that did the trick.

. . . David Cameron must have some ambivalent feelings. It does not take too many brain cells to work out that Boris Johnson will now have power base that is completely independent of the leader and, unlike Livingstone, he has never made the mistake of antagonizing other members of his party.

. . . Final count was 1,168,738 for Mayor Johnson and 1,028,966 for ex-Mayor Livingstone. One can but hope he will now disappear from public life and go back to spending more time with his newts.

Contrary to what the media tells us, Livingstone has not been a success in his life. Nothing but a career local politician, he actually helped Thatcher to destroy the GLC, which he had seen as his power base. Then he became an MP, only to find that as a back-bencher and a greatly disliked one at that, he had no role to play.

. . . It was time for [Red Ken] to go. Otherwise, the Conservative have not done as well as they had hoped in London. They lost one first-past-the-post seat in the Assembly and failed to gain another one they had high hopes for. They have gone down to eight constituency members with Labour having six. However, their vote across London has gone up by 6.20 per cent, so they will make the seats up, from the top-up list system. Labour’s vote went up by 3.36 per cent. A combination of higher turn-out and smaller parties being squeezed. It was rare to see any group quite as glum as the Greens were in the Great Glass Egg yesterday.

What about those top-up members? The big news is that, as expected, the BNP has passed the 5 per cent threshold and now has one member in the Assembly. Incidentally, if it is true that the main party candidates walked out of the room when the BNP mayoral candidate spoke but happily listened to the tyrant- and terrorist-supporting Lindsay Germain of the Left List, one can only marvel at their stupidity as well as bad manners. Then they wonder why people vote BNP. Richard Barnbrook, the man in question, will now be in the Assembly, so, as the song has it “ho, ho, ho, who’s laughing now”.

Having found the full list, I can say that the Conservatives have got three top-up seats, so two mayoral hopefuls, Andrew Boff and Victoria Borwick will be in the Assembly. Again, one can but wonder at their notion of what constitutes important political placing.

Labour has two top-up seats, with Nicky Gavron and Murad Qureshi back in place. That means there will be 11 Tory members and 8 Labour ones. The Lib-Dims have lost two seats and are down to three and the Greens have retained the two they had. BNP has one. What a jolly set-up that is going to be. . . .

Read the entire post.

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