Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Tightening the Police Belt

The way we have organised a police system in the U.K mainland is financially daft, with every county or city having its own dedicated and independent force to do everything. In Northern Ireland there is one police service for the whole province, which is better, though direct comparison is difficult because of special circumstances.

What is needed for England (replicated in Wales and Scotland) is three national police forces divided as follows; a Community Police Service charged with crime prevention and law enforcement, a National Detective Service to solve crimes committed, and a Traffic Police responsible for all road discipline and crime. It is idiotic for these to be organised county by county although every local authority should have a cabinet member responsible for law and order with close links to the police commanders operating locally. Just as the Army divides the country up into Military Districts, so the police can do the same while remaining, like the Army, national institutions. 

The police policy of successive governments has failed to balance local need and national priorities, preventing crime and solving crime, on the beat and in the office, hands on and paper pushing, targets and results. We have all noticed indifference to our reports of a minor theft or burglary (apart from offers of trauma counselling) yet watch a huge and immediate concentration from far and wide of both police vehicles and personnel for a moderate traffic accident.

The coalition needs to up its game here. This is not a target cancelling, money saving, tidy up, efficiency project. It is a root and branch affair or it is useless.

Spy Thriller

There is a rather surreal B movie aspect to the arrest of the Russian ‘spies’, engaged in information gathering operations in the U.S of apparently non-classified information which any savvy political commentator or  investigative journalist would have access to. False identities and information exchange in the most unsophisticated  but melodramatic circumstances, which if written as a novel would have difficulty getting published, is entertaining. Not only did the F.B.I spot these people years ago, but they even posed as their bosses issuing instructions. The whole episode makes the Russians look rather foolish. The Americans are trying to be dignified while stifling a wry smile.

This is clearly a left over from past times and shows what little understanding existed in the immediate post Soviet era of how open, except for military secrets, western society is. This does not mean that there are not powerful establishments in every western country, but they are very easy to join if you play to their rules and easy to penetrate as an outsider if you want to find out something, without resorting to high collared macs and hollow trees.

There is however a lesson in this episode. To the Russians it is time to move on, but to the Americans and their allies it is surely time to bring the Russians in from the cold and engage with them on a more equal footing. In the world approaching just around the corner, we will need Russia more than we realise.