John Harris in the Grauniad today:
Quote:
Some news from the sticks: across England and Wales, 41 elections for police commissioners will take place in just over a week, but the buildup to this supposedly watershed moment is stupefyingly quiet.
I speak as a voter resident in Avon and Somerset – until now, a territory familiar only to the cops – who so far has received just two items of bumf in the post: my polling card, and an A3 flyer from the Lib Dems, who assure me that their man understands "what needs to be done to keep communities safe", and that he wants to put victims of crime "at the heart of our policing strategy".
Radical stuff, that: his Conservative, Labour and Independent opponents haven't yet deigned to put anything in the mail, but a quick check of their online profiles shows an abundance of similar bromides. "I will listen to your views and take action," says the Tory; the Labour candidate promises to "develop a long-term, strategic vision for policing in Avon and Somerset that meets the needs of the public throughout the forces [sic] area". The latter has a CBE and "over 40 years of business experience". Really, what's not to like?
The fact that elections are not happening in the capital presumably explains the national media's lack of interest. But what's remarkable is the absence of support from the Conservative politicians who dreamt up this dire wheeze in the first place. In order to cut costs, there are no free mailshots for candidates – which, given that we're still some way from the advent of true e-democracy, means most people are barely aware that anything is happening. And precious few senior Tories seem minded to do anything to whip up public interest: give or take a quick prime ministerial trip last week around Bedfordshire and Leicestershire, most front-rank Conservatives seem to have concluded that the elections were over before they'd even begun.
The whole thing will cost £75m, which would pay for a lot of schools, hospitals, social workers, and, come to think of it, police officers: strange, perhaps, that the party in such a lather about wasteful public spending has created such a surreal case study in it.
Worse still is the makeup of the candidates: 82% are men, 15 areas have no female candidates, and contrary to early claims that the elections might smoke out non-politicians who fancied overseeing the police, the vast majority of aspiring commissioners look like standard-issue political hacks: to quote the Guardian's Simon Rogers, "the majority are either former members of parliament, members of the European parliament, Welsh assembly or former councillors."
And Labour's participation gives off a very questionable whiff, as a smattering of politicians of a certain age from Westminster – John Prescott, ex-solicitor-general Vera Baird, former Parliamentary Labour party chair Tony Lloyd, and Tony Blair's Welsh secretary Alun Michael – eye up new jobs in what some people call the regions, like soviet apparatchiks hurrying off to run power stations in Tajikistan and Moldavia. The party's candidate list also includes Michael's son, Tal, who's standing in North Wales: a one-man advert for meritocracy, pledged to make sure local people and police "are working together to solve problems" (who writes this stuff?).
Such are the reasons behind predictions of turnout as low as 10%. We have the prospect of 41 hapless people taking "power" with no legitimacy. What, really, was so wrong with local police authorities? Isn't the washed-out language used by most of the candidates proof that electoral politics doesn't really belong here?
And what kind of election takes place in a complete informational vacuum? "There's no campaign here, no leaflets, no coverage," went one recent post on the Spectator's Coffee House blog. "Nothing but the ballot forms. An election with no coverage is not democracy. You can't (well, I can't) vote for someone if you don't know their history, their qualifications, their plans. It should be called off."
It should, but it won't. Thus far, the only halfway convincing argument for voting in these elections has revolved around the danger of woefully low turnout letting in such "extremists" as a co-founder of the English Defence League, and those saloon-bar rightwingers, the English Democrats. But in most places, the truth is simple and unavoidable: to register a preference for any candidate in these woeful, unnecessary, meaningless elections would be to run the risk of the government taking your vote as some kind of indication of approval (Not, incidentally, that approval or disapproval seems to count for much with this lot: the case for elected mayors may have been resoundingly defeated in the summer's referendums, but that staunch democrat David Cameron is now indicating that if he gets in next time, he'll just legislate to introduce them anyway).
With some justification, the former Met commissioner Ian Blair is advocating a boycott. But the other week, I spoke to senior Welsh politician who said she could see no other option but the spoiling of her ballot paper, which struck me as by far the most sensible option: much as one must always glumly troop to the polling station thinking of the Chartists and suffragettes, the lack of convincing options and pathetic efforts at raising awareness mean that in the case, any meaningful "x" is impossible. So, that's what I'll be doing.
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