Police

In nominating the lawyer and former rail regulator Tom Winsor as her choice to be the next chief inspector of constabulary, the home secretary has stoked more discontent among the ranks of the Police Federation. Not only is he the first non-police officer ever to be nominated to the role, but he is also the author of a bold review of pay and conditions that made long-overdue recommendations to modernise the police workforce. For this reason alone, the Police Federation is dismayed by the nomination, and MPs on the Home Affairs Select Committee (meeting today) may yet try to block him. But the appointment is likely to be approved, and

The news that Rebekah Brooks and Charlie Brooks have been charged with perverting the course of justice means that there’ll be at least one trial involving friends of the Prime Minister before the next election. In cynical political terms, that Charlie has been charged as well as Rebekah creates an additional political problem for David Cameron. Part of Cameron’s explanation for how close he got to Rebekah Brooks has always been that she married an old school friend of his. Undoubtedly, the Charlie Brooks connection added a genuine layer of friendship to relations between Rebekah Brooks and Cameron. I suspect that if it was not for Charlie Brooks there would

Remember when Ed Miliband couldn’t be found anywhere? Now you can barely get away from him. The Labour leader has been conspicuous by his presence over the past week, whether on the airwaves or in graffiti form (see left, a photo taken on London’s South Bank yesterday). And he’s continued that hi-vis trend today, by launching Labour’s local election campaign in Birmingham. Two things stand out from the speech he gave at that event. The first was his heavy emphasis on the pledges he announced last week: capping railway fares, unfreezing the personal allowance for pensioners, etc. As I blogged at the time, it’s doubtful whether these will actually achieve

After last August’s riots the debate became quickly polarised. Were socio-economic factors like unemployment to blame, or was it all down to the individual choices of the rioters? David Cameron and other Conservative ministers knew which side of this debate they wanted to be on. They had been taken by surprise by the riots, initially failing to realise how serious things were, but when they got back from their holidays they set out a clear and confident line, brushing off most questions about links to the state of the economy or youth attitudes, and condemning the riots as ‘criminality pure and simple’. The soundbite was deliberately simplistic; Conservative ministers’ actual

The most important political changes are those that will not be reversed. I think that both directly elected mayors and police commissioners fit this mould. I can’t imagine voters choosing to cede the ability to hold power to account that these positions will give them. Tellingly, more people in London now favour independence for the capital than want to scrap the office of mayor. Police commissioners and mayors also provide the Conservatives with a massive opportunity to rebuild the party in urban Britain, as I argue in my column this week. The Conservatives have little chance of gaining overall control of the council in, say, Leeds. But they could win a mayoral

How strange — John Prescott is fast becoming the poster boy for elected police commissioners. He appeared on the Today Programme earlier to explain why he’s putting himself forward for that very job in his home of Humberside. But has he acquiesced to Tory thinking? Don’t bet on it. As he told John Humphrys, he doesn’t actually support the legislation, but he does believe that Labour should have a man in the fight: ‘The Labour Party didn’t like this legislation and I voted against it, but once there is an election the party isn’t going to stay out of it and they will want to see it doesn’t go the way they feared it

I’m presenting Radio Four’s Week in Westminster this morning, on deficit wars, London wars, welfare wars, and another set of wars which no one has really discussed yet: the directly-elected police commissioners. There will be about 40 of them elected in November, and candidates are already emerging: Nick Ross (ex-Crimewatch), Colonel Tim Collins and London mayoral hopeful Brian Paddick. I interview two names that have been thrown into the frame, both former ministers and both women: Jane Kennedy (Labour) and Ann Widdecombe (Tory). I wanted to find out just how excited we should be about these elected police commissioners. The theory is very simple: that right now, England’s constabularies report to the Home

Labour has today unveiled a panel of experts to consider the future of British policing.  The review, chaired by the former Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Stevens, will report by spring 2013. There are far-reaching changes underway to the institutional structure of the police.  The coalition government is pursuing sweeping reforms of police pay and conditions and creating a remodelled national policing architecture, with a new National Crime Agency.  The boldest reform — devolving governance to locally elected Police & Crime Commissioners (PCCs) — will have long-term implications.  In this context, and in light of budget reductions of 14 per cent over four years, any study of the fundamentals of the