The proposal to reduce the forty-three police forces in England and Wales to twelve large regional bodies is a classic socialist move. It assumes that large organisations are more efficient than small ones and that a top-down centralised approach is best. Local sensitivities and priorities must be sublimated to the overall effort of the collective.
Yet the evidence is that bigger is not always best, as the Metropolitan Police and Police Scotland both show. The creation of Police Scotland in 2013 is a case study of what not to do. The merge of eight forces into one has been beset with problems, including the closure of police stations and a significant loss of special constables, who are such an important community link. As so often with government projects, IT systems have failed, and the costs of creating the merged force took away much of the anticipated savings.
This is a regular occurrence. The savings from a reorganisation are theoretical, but the cost of carrying out the restructuring are paid out in cash. Spend to save often turns out to be simply spend.
The Metropolitan Police, by far the biggest force in the United Kingdom, is also one that seems to suffer from serial failure. Commissioners come and go, but the concerns over two-tier policing remain, morale is poor, and scandals break out with monotonous regularity. That is not to say that small constabularies do not have their problems, but they are more manageable because of their smaller scale.
Large forces also destroy accountability. This has been true since the mergers of the 1960s, which were again done in the name of efficiency. City, town and county constabularies were merged into much larger groupings, but were then effectively accountable to no one. Police and Crime Commissioners did not solve this problem, and it raises the question of what is accountability and how can it be achieved?
Democracy requires a ‘demos’, that is to say a group of people who share concerns and feel a sense of community. This is where socialists fail. They create structures on the basis of what people ought to think, not what they actually believe.
A ‘demos’ is not created overnight. It takes generations to build and needs a degree of stability to grow. It can be of variable size, a few hundreds to many millions, but it is an organic structure, not one of central control.
In the United Kingdom, there are layers to the structure, each one of which has its own ‘demos’. In London, there is a feeling of loyalty towards the borough, people say they live in Westminster or Islington, to the city itself, people boast of being Londoners, they even sing songs about being a Londoner, and then to the country.
In England more generally, this is complicated by a view, that annoys the Scots particularly, that England and Britain are synonymous. In a rural area, such as Somerset, the ‘demos’ will look to a village or town, the county, and then the country. This can make local accountability work, but the structures of administration do not go with the grain of local loyalties or the ‘demos’.
For instance, I live in the village of West Harptree, which has a parish council, but that body has no real power to do anything and is simply an irritating charge added to the council tax. It has no effective say over village life, as anything important is done by the local council.
This is a unitary authority covering Bath and North East Somerset, which is a designation to which no one owes any loyalty to or has much interest in. People in Bath are proud of their city and have a marginal interest in Somerset, the county, but none in a fragment of the Shire.
People in North East Somerset do not care two hoots for a modern administrative area, except that it is better than Avon, as they look back to the historic county as a focus of loyalty and interest. Participation by voters in elections increases when they think it is important and relates to them. Random bureaucratic structures do not create this interest, so people stay at home.
This was part of the problem with Police and Crime Commissioners, no one cares about Avon and Somerset as an area, it relates to no other administration or association. People in Somerset are much more concerned about rural crime than the criminal gangs in Bristol. Thus, there is no sense of shared enterprise as there is for the country at large or for a specific local area.
If this is true for a small region, how much more true would it be for a larger one? If there were no concern for Avon and Somerset, there is even less for the south-west region. This goes from Cornwall to Gloucestershire, and is an entirely fake creation by bureaucrats. It is not even connected to historic Wessex, which did not include Gloucestershire, which was in Mercia, and did include Hampshire, which is randomly in the south-east region. Police forces on this scale will be wholly unanswerable to electors who simply will not care about the region.
This will be just as true if Labour goes ahead with its rumoured reorganisation of the whole of English government. A supposed answer to the West Lothian question to give devolution to England, but England does not want devolution.
Balfour set this out in the debate over Home Rule at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century. He pointed out that England was too big to have Home Rule on its own, for it would swamp the rest of the United Kingdom. It is proportionally bigger now in terms of population than it was then, but the fact remains that it is unreasonable to chop England up when the other nations are allowed to exist as single entities according to their ancient, historic boundaries.
England is a unitary state, it has not been anything else since the 10th century, and it does not want to be cut up. It is content as the largest part of the United Kingdom and has accepted the cost this brings with good grace, and little real concern until recently. Chopping it up into smaller units would go against a thousand years of history and is alien to the spirit of the nation. Trying to impose it by stealth through the introduction of mega police forces would be cheating the people.
Local policing is so much better, it has knowledge that relates to the area it covers, and its resources will be focused on the needs of a particular community rather than an amorphous collective. People will feel safer, as they are more likely to see a local policeman than one who is part of a vast, sprawling, unaccountable bureaucracy housed in an office dozens of miles away. They are accountable, as people are interested in the genuinely local.
Thus the proposal for super forces is a bad one and it will cost more millions to set up than it will ever save. It is an even worse idea if it is the preliminary to regional devolution for England. That idea was rejected when it was proposed by Tony Blair. No one wants or needs an extra layer of administration, or, heaven forfend, more politicians; we have enough already. It would have no validity because there would be no ‘demos’, so it would be itself unaccountable rather than a body that could hold people to account.
Governmental structures need to go with the grain of popular loyalties; these are villages, town, city, county, country and finally kingdom. They are not bureaucratic lines on a map. Proper localism, that existed prior to 1974, should be restored. Phony regions must be eschewed.
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