Policing as it should be done

It was great, for the young foreign couple in Valencia, to see an ad on a local website for a second-hand kitchen island. It was exactly what they’d been looking for. All they had to do was pay the money and collect the piece of furniture.

Alas, that turned out to be less easy than they’d imagined. The thing had been firmly glued together. There was no way to take it apart without breaking it. So they couldn’t carry down the five flights of stairs in disassembled pieces. It would have to be carried down bodily, as a whole

They tried the lift. But it didn’t matter which way they turned the piece of furniture. It was two centimetres too big. The lift doors wouldn’t close.

So they started on the massive job of manhandling it down the stairs.

Unfortunately, their progress wasn’t unobserved. A neighbour decided they must be burglars, stealing the prized possessions of the family on the fifth floor. No sooner had he had the thought than he acted on it. The police were summoned.

They arrived as the couple had finally reached the second floor. She was done in. She couldn’t have carried the colossal piece of furniture down another floor if her life had depended on it. When the police arrived, she made no attempt at all to resist what was coming next.

What was coming, however, surprised her. The police took a look at her, exhausted on the landing, and her husband, drenched in sweat and gasping to get his breath back, and decided no one less like a pair of burglars could possibly be imagined.

“Wait here,” they said, an injunction which, in their weary state, they had no trouble at all obeying.

The police climbed up the stairs to the apartment of the man who’d phoned them.

“What on earth do you mean by wasting police time in this way?” they asked him when he opened the door.

With a few neatly constructed sentences they expressed to him the extent of their displeasure at being summoned to deal with people who were clearly not engaged in any kind of criminal endeavour, but carrying out an entirely legal and understandable task. Then they returned to the second floor.

There they metaphorically rolled up their sleeves and helped the couple get the kitchen island down to the ground floor and loaded into their car.

Local police in Valencia
They can be tough but they can also be helpful

Our own experience in Madrid a few weeks ago was similar. Danielle had her purse filched from the backpack. We flagged down a police car to report the theft and, not only did they take a note of the event, they offered us a lift to a police station where the city has someone on duty to help tourists make their statements about crimes they’d suffered.

This contrasted to an experience I had as a student when I was stopped while heading home from a film-showing in college. I was carrying the three canisters of film for, if I remember, The Battleship Potemkin.

It was midnight. The cops had seen a young man with a heavy rucksack. There had been a lot of breakins recently. They were clearly just doing their job when they stopped me and I didn’t resent it at all.

What I did resent, on the other hand, is that once they’d established my bona fides, including my address – another ten minutes’ walk up the street where they’d stopped me and were interrogating me in the back of their van – they asked me to get out and drove off – straight past my front door.

To this day, I’ve never understood why they didn’t at least run me up the road in the van. What skin would it have been off their noses? And they knew how heavy my bag was.

Two styles of policing. And I know which I prefer.

Polish residents, Polish police, in Britain

It’s curious to read that two Polish police are being deployed in each of London and Harlow, the latter the scene of a recent fatal attack on a Polish resident which also injured another.

Polish police join an English colleague on patrol in Harlow

The Poles have become the biggest single group of foreign-born residents in Britain. In the atmosphere of heightened xenophobia, which I assume was present but pent-up before the Brexit vote but has been released by it, Poles have become the major target of the increased wave of hate violence.

On a couple of occasions recently I’ve been accused of displaying insufficient pride in my country. I’d have no difficulty pleading guilty to the offence if I thought it was one. I have a hard time, however, thinking of patriotism, notoriously described by Samuel Johnson as the last refuge of the scoundrel, as a virtue.

What, after all, am I supposed to feel proud about? I take pleasure in the great results won by British athletes at the Paralympics, feeling a bond with my compatriots. But pride? I didn’t contribute to their success except indirectly and at tiny scale through taxes. The achievement was theirs, not mine; to take pride in it feels terribly like claiming undeserved credit.

In any case, it’s not as though my country’s only achievements are matters of pleasure. Am I supposed also to feel pride over our forces’ involvement in Iraq? Our role in the badly-judged and ill-fated intervention in Libya? Or, looking at other areas, in Maggie Thatcher’s attempt to ban literature about homosexuality from our classrooms? David Cameron’s sustained assault on the miserly support we provide to the poor and ill? The aversion towards foreigners that inspired Brexit and the murder in Harlow?

Perhaps a small anecdote will explain why I don’t go along with these feelings.

For our first two years where we currently live, we were cursed with a neighbour from hell. She would hold all night parties five or six times a month, apparently drug-fuelled events which would run from midnight until midday, where festivities followed a constantly repeated pattern: raucous laughter and merry shouting, followed by karaoke singing at volume, followed by tearful recriminations and fighting interspersed with cursing and the noise of breaking crockery; after a brief pause, the cycle would start again with the laughter and shouting.

The police, starved of resources, would not assist. That’s in spite of one police employee telling me down the phone, one night at 2:00 am, “Oh, my God! I can hear her from here!”

It took two years to get her out of the place, but we and the neighbours on the other side eventually managed it by dint of constant complaints and phone calls to the landlord and the agent. In the meantime, she’d broken some of our belongings and stolen others, but we felt that was a small price to pay.

Since then, we’ve had a new family next door who never disturb us, for whom we accept packages and who accept packages for us, with whom we exchange friendly greetings when we meet. An extraordinary relief. A way of re-establishing our belief in the inherent decency of people.

The new neighbours are Polish. The old one was English.

Does that illustrate why I don’t go along with appeals to patriotism? And above all reject popular prejudice against Poles?

There may be a new hope for all of us in the arrival of Polish police in Britain. Just as it was a blessing to replace a foul English neighbour by likeable Polish ones, maybe we could benefit from more Polish policemen too – replacing the hopeless English ones who wouldn’t come out when we needed support against the ghastly Englishwoman next door.

In the meantime, anything that helps stop the kind of xenophobic violence that led to the Harlow murder has to be welcome.

Even if, as I suspect, the Polish police presence is just a gimmick for the moment.

Oh, the bikes, the bikes... and the bikers

Our little bit of middle England, South Bedfordshire, is facing a new scourge.

I should relativise that complaint. Like most inhabitants of the wealthy countries, we enjoy levels of comfort and protection far beyond anything we deserve. For us, soldiers are more likely to mean a parade than a terrifying threat of rape, murder and mayhem. The weather turning cold doesn’t mean freezing in a refugee camp or among the rubble of a destroyed city. The sea is a summer pleasure, rather than a menace of terrible suffering and potential death while crossing it in winter.

No, what I’m talking about is a fairly small fly in a relatively large pot of ointment. Even so, we’d like the fly removed. And it’s galling that our government’s commitment to austerity means reducing the amount of ointment and failing lamentably to remove the fly.

The scourge involves young men, some of them little more than boys, performing thrill-rich stunts on well-powered motorbikes, along our narrow streets or in our public parks. The drivers tend to be wearing balaclavas to hide their identities, but no helmets, and the bikes are often unregistered: they have no plates. I can’t confirm that they’re uninsured, but it seems likely, and they may well be stolen.

Nuisance bikers, making the parks – and the streets – a lot less safe

The drivers push their antics to rather beyond their level of skill, often losing control. As well as parks, they like to buzz around schools as the kids come out, for the sheer joy of spreading panic among parents, children and teachers. So far, they’ve neither killed nor injured anyone, though they have killed a cat and one of the riders has managed to injure himself, breaking an arm in a crash. There is, however, a generalised feeling that it could be only a matter of time before they cause serious injury somewhere, especially as the pastime is spreading: all the urban centres of the region, and now increasingly the countryside too.

So we attended a Community Meeting in Luton, where we live, earlier this week. It allowed the audience to express concerns to two police representatives – one a superintendent, so relatively senior – as well as two local councillors and a journalist from a local radio station.

It was a curious experience.

The most striking aspect of the meeting was that the more articulate complainants found it necessary to speak at inordinate length about their grievances, and to do so repeatedly. They were, unsurprisingly, mostly men though one or two women also felt the need to share their thoughts in uncomfortable detail.

Most of these interventions added nothing to the discussion. No one was disagreeing with them. What was going on wasn’t communication, it was venting.

The specific issue that vexed speakers most was that the police do not give chase to unhelmeted motorcyclists when they see them. The superintendent explained several times that pursuing such riders is likely to make a dangerous situation still worse: they will escape by driving faster still, making it more likely that they will lose control of their bikes and cause a serious accident.

It’s also possible that a bike rider pushed to drive too fast, without a helmet, might cause himself serious or even fatal injury. That was when the mood of the meeting turned a little ugly: there was a substantial portion of the audience, though perhaps not a majority, that felt this would be a perfectly satisfactory outcome. “They would have brought it on themselves,” seemed to be the line.

I feel that we should perhaps stop short of making vandalistic bike riding a capital offence. Responding with police behaviour liable to cause death is a tad over the top. I was glad that the police seemed to share that view.

It would make much more sense to catch these lads and take their bikes. That’s the police aim. The problem is that achieving it means being there when they venture out onto the roads, and in a place where space is too constricted, and there are too few exits, for them to get away.

And that’s the central dilemma. Catching these characters would require significant numbers of police, backed by the right equipment: cars, bikes, surveillance systems, and more.

The police superintendent was quick to point out that he had no intention of talking about “resources” – code for the impact of Conservative austerity policies on services, including the police. Even so, throughout the meeting, he had to point out repeatedly that they would invest all they could to deal with the problem, though there were many other calls on their time too.

In other words, they don’t have the resources to deal with the issue. But they’re going to try with what they have.

This bike riding is just the kind of law and order problem the Tories love to denounce as unacceptable. So it’s interesting that it’s made all the more difficult to solve by the Tory government's own austerity policies. Something for which it’s time David Cameron’s government was called to account.

In the meantime, I wish the police well in their endeavours. We’re not, as I say, facing the same hardships as Syrian refugees at risk of drowning in freezing Mediterranean waters. But we are up against an irritation that could turn lethal. I’d like to think that a wealthy nation could afford to resource the police sufficiently to deal with the problem before it turns nastier.

Perhaps we could, if we spent less on prestige projects like nuclear missiles, or pointless ones like ineffective airstrikes in Syria…

Tory U-turns: a matter of relief, but with questions of responsibility and irresponsibility.

George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Britain’s Tory government, produced a spending review on 25 November that does a complete U-turn on two heavily trailed and highly unpopular measures.

On his way to making those announcements, he repeated the claim he’s advanced frequently in the past, that any difficulties the economy is facing are the fault of the previous Labour government. As his opposite number, the Labour spokesman on Finance, John McDonnell, pointed out, there comes a time when you have to stop blaming your predecessors and take responsibility yourself. Osborne has, after all, been in office for five and a half years. Back in 2010, he set targets by which to judge him, in particular eliminating the structural deficit in government spending by 2015, which he spectacularly failed to hit.

At the 2015 election, he persuaded a large number of voters to give him another chance to hit his targets by 2020, though it again looks as though he won’t make it. Indeed, I believe one prediction we can make about 2020 with some confidence, is that the Tories’ woes will not have been vanquished, and they’ll still be blaming them on Labour. Osborne, it seems, is never responsible.

Part of his irresponsibility will be continued austerity policies. And that’s despite the two U-turns he has just announced.

The first U-turn concerned cutting tax credits, vitally necessary to a great many people for whom the Tories claim to speak – the striving working poor. The Opposition parties and others had mounted a major campaign against the cuts. It’s a measure of the opponents’ success that they were able to convince a great many voters of their case, and a further measure of that success that Osborne, wily politician with well-tuned antennae, simply abandoned his proposal.

Osborne: a wily politician but not so hot on responsibility

Secondly, he has dropped plans for further cuts to the police, a position made deeply unpopular by the Paris terror attacks.

Smart moves by a clever operator. And most welcome: I supported the opposition to both cuts, and it’s with sincere relief that I greet their abandonment. But there’s no reason to reduce the pressure on Osborne, all the same. For two reasons.

Firstly, it would be deeply foolish to think that he isn’t going to sneak them back in. That’s already happening with tax credits. That particular support is being phased out to be replaced by the new system of Universal Credit – which Osborne has already cut. So as people are moved over to the new arrangements, many will face cuts of £2000 a year and more – around 10% of their earned income – that we were complaining about before.

So the opposition has to continue. Otherwise all we’ll have bought is a little time.

And secondly, there’s the justification Osborne has used for his U-turns. The Office for Budget Responsibility has revised its forecasts of future government revenue. It is on the strength of those forecasts that the government felt it could afford to reverse its cuts. But the Guardian was absolutely right to quote the comment by the great American economist, J K Galbraith, on the subject:

The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.

George Osborne has taken a gamble on the economy turning out as the forecasters have suggested it might. Not on money in the bank, but on money he hopes to see flow in later.

Now I’m very much in favour of seeing growth stimulating increased government revenue, so that the constant cuts associated with austerity can end. But it strikes me that a government that is constantly quoting little common place phrases of everyday life as though they constituted analysis of an economic policy for a nation – “the country has maxed out its credit card”, “we inherited an economy on the brink of bankruptcy”, “we’re fixing the roof while the weather’s good” – would at least admit that it’s taken to spending today, money it has at best an uncertain chance of earning tomorrow.

It’s particularly striking in this context that the Office for Budget Responsibility doesn’t have a good track record in economic forecasting. Of course, it doesn’t have to take responsibility for any budgetary decision taken by the government.

But then, it seems George Osborne doesn’t feel the need to either. And he’s taking those decisions. With cheerful irresponsibility.

An apparent disappearance reveals a salutary truth about public services

Apparent disappearance is a lovely expression, isn’t it? It embodies a paradox and, to quote Gilbert and Sullivan, I have a pretty taste for paradox. 

Still, apparent disappearance wasn’t so funny the other night when it was my mother who had apparently disappeared. There are those, after all, who’d say that to lose even one parent looks like carelessness. You’ll understand that it was particularly worrying since she’d had a fall the previous day and, as I think I can reveal without being unduly indiscreet, my mother isn’t a spring chicken. What made things worse was that I live nowhere near her and nor does my brother.

She hadn’t really disappeared, of course. In fact, she’d made every effort to get in touch and tell us where she was, but she’d been given a ‘dodgy phone’ and the message hadn’t got through.

So what does one do in those circumstances?

Well, I rang the police. And that’s the point at which my experience of the evening suddenly took a huge turn for the better.

The young policeman was polite and friendly, and quickly took down my mother’s details and my own. It turned out that a colleague of his had also got involved in the case, because before he’d even finished checking information with me, she was able to tell him that my mother had indeed been taken to hospital.

He gave me the hospital’s phone numbers; reception transferred me rapidly to the emergency admissions unit and, after no more rings than one might expect in a busy area, a member of staff answered and told me that they were expecting my mother shortly, but that for the moment she was still in the Emergency Department completing a series of scans and other tests.

Half an hour later I rang again and spoke to her. She was clearly not at all disheartened and the tests had shown up nothing worrying – she had been in pain but it seemed it was only a matter of some severe bruising. And her account of the evening was similar to mine: ‘the paramedics and the staff here have been so helpful, so friendly, so kind.’

In other words, both she and I had received exactly the kind of service we could hope for. And at no point had she been asked to produce a credit card: the much-maligned NHS had treated her superbly and efficiently and, true to its fundamental principles, at no charge.

I was, of course, delighted to have tracked down my mother and found her in no worse health than might have been expected, and indeed in far less bad condition than we might have feared. Nonetheless, I’m still troubled. Now it’s over the fact that so many people, large numbers of whom really should know better, aren’t apparently as outraged as I am at the way the British government is interfering the hell out of the public services.

Of course there are many examples of appalling behaviour by policeman, even of downright corruption. Of course there are many examples of lamentable performance by hospitals, with patients treated badly or even cruelly, to the point that some have died unnecessarily. But these events are shocking precisely because they’re rare. Overall, the police and the NHS perform superbly, as I found by personal experience when tracking down my mother.

And what’s all this stuff about efficiency savings? I couldn’t have asked for more efficient service. If only David Cameron and his colleagues could say the same about their own work, as they constantly paint themselves into corners and have to reverse their policy decisions.

It was a shame that I had my highly encouraging experience of the police and the NHS on the same day I learned about government plans to make a massive reduction in the starting pay of policemen and women. Meanwhile, a series of half-baked reforms are still reducing pay in the NHS, demoralising the staff and making changes which have no sense except in so far as they let  in ministers’ friends from the private sector to take over services.

The NHS, the police: much more impressive than government
So why not get off their backs, Cameron?

Just how long are we going to put up with this undermining of services that we need so much and which are being provided so well?