Firstly, can I say I welcome Kit Malthouse using Twitter more often, which is a good thing. Having said that, I’m now going to get up his nose a bit. The most recent tweet from the man Adam Bienkov refers to as:
Deputy Mayor for Policing, Chairman of the Metropolitan Police Authority, Departmental Lead Advisor for Communities and Intelligence, Director of the Association of Police Authorities, Chair of the London Hydrogen Partnership, Executive Director of Alpha Strategic Plc, Majority Shareholder of County Holding Limited and Director of two subsidiaries, County Asset Finance Ltd and County Plant and Equipment Sales Ltd, Member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, Member of the Leaders Committee of Association of London Government, Member of the Thames Estuary Airport Steering Group, Member of the Poetry Society, Sadler’s Wells, the Passage Day Centre, the Art Fund, the Old Lerpoolian Society, Occasional writer and broadcaster, and current London Assembly Member for West Central
gives some indication of the exasperation at City Hall that us low-lifes in the media and the non-media keep harping on about this little matter of 455 policemen being cut in Boris’s budget:
On LBC tomorrow at 7.05am to talk about cop numbers. Surely people are turned off by this stale argument? Isn’t productivity more important?
I’ll defer to Kit on the subject of productivity, since he manages to combine about three hundred jobs into one not-particularly-svelte body, but this isn’t a stale issue but a high-profile problem for Team Boris. As for Kit, lest we forget, he’s a bean counter and a bit of a top-down managerialist, a combination which is not necessarily the best way to run things. From bitter experience I can tell you that that type are experts in identifying waste where there isn’t any while creating plenty of their own through ill-considered ‘reforms’. His defence of the police cuts is that Joe Public should:
Trust your own eyes, Boris will make sure London has more cops on the streets
and the line being taken appears to be that that Boris is increasing police numbers while reducing them. I hope His Deputiness will forgive me for concluding that the whole thing is beginning to smell a bit like the old Tommy Cooper ‘bottle, glass’ routine or even something out of the Marx Brothers (‘who are you going to trust, the Mayor’s budget or the evidence of your own eyes?’). 10,000 Specials, sitting on a wall?
Now, we all know data is not the plural of anecdote and therefore that imploring people to trust the unreliable evidence of their own eyes should automatically make one suspicious of the implorer. Police numbers are reducing, and this will have an effect on the police. The question is, what effect? Does Kit know, or is he investing undue Dunning-Kruger type confidence in the ability of his own hand on the tiller to manage the Met to higher productivity from fewer staff? What, indeed, *is* productivity for a policeman and why is it OK to import the language of business into public service in this way? I suspect from the language alone that Kit will take a reductionist bean-counter view (hours on the beat increased, miles covered, hours of paperwork reduced) which sounds suspiciously like New Labour managerialism with a different rosette on, and we know managerialism rots professional organisations from the top down, like a fish.
So, given that they’re cutting police numbers and are clearly worried about the public relations angle, Boris and Kit have a credibility gap on crime, and given that it’s hitherto been a strength for them it must be a self-inflicted one. There’s a reason for this – like all Conservatives they’ve happily ridden the tabloid tiger line that Labour was fiddling the crime figures and there was a wave of violence and disorder in the UK caused by soft liberal attitudes and that only firm action and lots of policemen out cracking heads would solve it.
Of course, there wasn’t a wave of violence, but it got them elected, at which point it was only a matter of time before they had to get off the tiger. The point at which they did this was when the crime mapping Boris promised launched, since this instantly tied their reputation into the credibility of the crime figure collection methods introduced by New Labour and removed the ability to blame the Home Office for anything that went wrong (plus allowing opportunist Labour MPs such as Virendra Sharma there to leap unopposed on the figures as proof of their greater devotion to crime-fighting).
Then we had the sacking of Ian Blair for being left over from the previous reign, another public relations driven event designed to send a message that Kit and Boris were in charge now while giving us the clue that we were dealing with Year Zero merchants as far as the Met is concerned. Then we got the high-profile anti-knife crime initiatives, more bus police squads etc. Finally, having set up this bold public image of strong, clear-eyed men of business in charge and getting things done, it was all punctured by Boris suddenly giving up the chair of the MPA to Kit, which given the high profile of Boris’s crime policy has resulted in EDMs, Labour MPs queueing up in the House to bash Boris and Malthouse being forced onto the defensive on the radio. That this is not an ideal situation was proved by Kit agreeing with Ken Livingstone on LBC a couple of weeks ago that the figures were basically trustworthy and crime had indeed fallen. For a team used to setting the news agenda, this is an unusual situation of being caught on the back foot and means Boris and Kit have to try and find a form of words that reassures the public over ‘cuts’ at the same time as the balloon of credibility is deflating rapidly in the background.
This task is of course complicated by the national political scene, where the tabloids are still running ‘OMG Rising Crime’ stories while Chris Grayling is trying to win the General Election on the hoary old ‘New Labour violent crime figure fiddling’ crap to please the Sun. This restricts Boris’s scope for creative PR as no one’s going to listen to the truth, which is that you quite possibly can cut police numbers *if you accept that we’re a less criminal society*. It doesn’t help that the foremost voice pushing this line is Sir Ian Blair. If they do go down this road it would mean confronting the national party’s election campaign and jettisoning one of the most powerful weapons in the Conservative armoury – that the socialists will be soft on crime and give your taxes to loony left councils who take feral kids for two weeks in Bali, etc. etc. ad nauseam.
So, will Boris and Kit take that brave step, which will also mean challenging the police themselves, who are behind a lot of the bloodcurdling stories in the tabloids for power and budget reasons. Any eagle eyed economising bean-counter would have a field day if tasked with culling senior officers who have cosy relationships with tabloid hacks. Get in there, Kit. On that, if nothing else, I’ll be right there with you.
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