Police chiefs need beat experience

I'm relatively relaxed about the bulk of Damian Green's proposals to shake up the recruitment of senior police personnel.  It's clear the service suffers from a lack of external expertise and modern management.  It has very few women in senior positions and even fewer from ethnic minorities.  Its closed shop nature makes it easy for it to act as a law to itself - even trying to fit up senior ministers for political gain.

But the police's strength is that every single serving officer has spent time on the beat, dealing with community crime and misbehaviour.  It's the cornerstone of policing by consent that the police understand the neighbourhoods and people they police.  It's vital, but unglamorous, which is why community policing is increasinlgy squeezed out in the chase for resources, new kit and technology, special units, fast cars and helicopters.

It's a trend that has made the police more remote from the people, made neighbourhoods appear less safe for those who live there and, by way of response the authorities, have encouraged the use of more authoritarian policies such as extensive CCTV and databases.

And encouraging people with no experience on the beat to take over senior management positions will only speed up this process of making the police more remote and putting more barriers between them and those they are supposed to police.

The Home Office has a Lib Dem minister - Jeremy Browne - and in the unlikely event he reads this blog I hope he insists that a significant time on the beat is part of the induction process.  Otherwise comments can be made to the Home Office here.

The theory and practice of community politics revisited

David Cameron's 'Big Society' is an oft used phrase, but its meaning and policy effects remain vague - wrapped up with localism and a rolling back of the central state. Last December Nick Clegg even suggested it was the same as community politics.

Clegg is wrong about community politics - and I suspect his understanding of it is purely through its status within party circles - much like the vague understanding that Keynes or Beveridge were liberals. If he did know any of its detail he wouldn't have compared community politics to the Big Society and would have heeded its Hitchhiker's Guide like warning that 'Community Politics is not a technique for the winning of Loca1 government elections'

It prompted me to revisit the 1980 booklet 'The Theory and Practice of Community Politics' by Greaves (the other one) and Lishman. It stands up remarkably well with one of the key sections stating:

It involves working simultaneously within and outside the established political system. The fusion of the two approaches creates a strategy distinctively, new and different when allied to the ideas of community politics.

We work through the established political structures not to win and exercise power but to remodel that structure itself; to create a new generation of political institutions corresponding to the reality of the pattern of communities that exist within society; to break down the centralised power structure of our society so that no single person or group possesses disproportionate power and all people and groups share the responsibility for controlling their own affairs.

To subvert and destroy the political establishment in such a radical way requires a powerful political movement based outside the political system. We work outside the political system, not to create confrontation or to foment revolution. It is indeed a more radical process than revolution.

The aim, by promoting joint community action directly in society, is to create the very structures of community organisation which we wish to see emerge as the new political structure. We mobilise people to take control of their own affairs, to take power and to use it.

I'd say that sounds like a relevant strategy for rebuilding the party in and outside of the coalition today.

Glum councillors website is back

The Glum councillors website which features Britain's councillors and campaigners pointing at things and looking down hearted has recently started posting new material after going a bit quiet over the summer.

However one can't help noticing just how scruffy the councillors are in the more recent postings - surely the UK's elected representatives should take a bit of pride in being glum?

Liberal Democrats have become deeply conservative about public services

Not my words, but those of David Boyle and Simon Titley who have co-authored an alternative policy paper called 'Really facing the future' which has been published through the offices of Liberator magazine. It's certainly an analysis I agree with and have blogged previously about in context of the Lib Dems' response to the current NHS reforms.

I don't agree with all of it - but it poses some significant questions for Liberal Democrats (and indeed all politicians) - this one is particularly apposite:

Because there is another problem here, which lies behind the policy vacuum. It is that the whole concept of political parties is beginning to unravel as membership and commitment shrinks. A sizeable proportion of the population is actively opposed to the whole idea of politics.

It deserves a wide circulation and I hope the party leadership and policy making bureaucracy take it seriously.

The saving of the Swans...

Swansea City fans have every reason to celebrate today (and for some time hence). In a few short years they have gone from avoiding relegation out of the football league, by the skin of their teeth, to the richest (but clearly not best) league in the world.

The club suffered at the hands of appalling off field management with various owners bringing the club to its knees. But supporters of the Swans weren't prepared to lie down and let a series of rich, uninterested businessmen use the club as a cash cow. They set up the one of the first supporters trusts in 2001 with the aim of securing the future of the club and gaining supporters' representation on the board.

One of the driving forces behind the trust in its early days was a friend - Richard Lillicrap - who was also a former Lib Dem councillor in Kingston, an accountant by profession and an all round good egg by custom and practice.

Richard and the trust won their battle and secured the future of Swansea City FC, won supporter representation on the board, facilitated the club's move to the brand new Liberty Stadium and saw the team begin to climb back up the leagues. A fuller history can be found on the Swan's Trust website.

Swansea's story has been replicated up and down the country (and now the globe) by thousands of football fans with the best interests of their communities at heart. It is a little reported, but inspiring example of the type of community action that Liberals have long sought - long before the phrase 'big society' spun into the political lexicon.

Sadly, Richard died on 1 June 2007 after suffering a massive heart attack aged just 55. Although he wasn't at Wembley today to see his team's deserved triumph, I'm sure he was there in spirit - and in the spirit of all those fans who remember football is a beautiful and simple game played by and for the people.

The corruption of FIFA and the big money of the behemoths in the Premiership, won't stop the peoples' game and the achievements of people like Richard will live long after the memories of crooks like Warner and Blatter have faded.

Hopefully any Swansea fans reading this will have a drink not just for their team's victory - but for Richard. It's what I'll be doing.