'Ello, 'ello, 'ello...

I've never spoiled a ballot paper before. Indeed, I don't think that I've ever failed to vote, as I have too much respect for the men and women who fought and died to bring us universal suffrage in the first place and, later, to protect it from totalitarianism. But with the forthcoming elections for the police and crime commissioners I've made an exception.

If the government had a problem with the police authorities, why didn't it just change their powers? Why spend £75 million on a shambles of an election which is strongly predicted to have the lowest ever participation rate? Why spend up to £100,000 on salaries for each of these 41 posts? At a time when the government is supposed to be cutting publicly funded posts, when public employees from nurses to binmen have had their pay frozen for the last 5 years, do you honestly think that this is a good use of tax-payers' money? It will do nothing to improve accountability but will simply impose another expensive level of bureaucracy onto the system.

Why, Mr Cameron, have you stacked the dice against the independents who used to sit on the police authorities? You seem to have designed a system that will specifically lead to someone from a political party being elected. Do we really want our police run by political parties? Is the politicisation of the police really a good thing? The fact that Boris is the PCC for London should tell you all you need to know about the role's impartiality. The PCC will be able to hire and fire the chief constable, so what is there to stop a PCC of one political stripe hiring a chief constable who agrees with him – oh and it is going to be a 'him' because there are very few women standing for election. It's also very likely to be an ex-police or military person (or, God help us, a 'counter terrorism specialist' in our area) too given the large number of them who are standing – how 'independent' are they going to be? By contrast with the old police authorities, the police and crime panels what replace them will have limited powers of scrutiny: no more will we see the likes of the redoutable Gabrielle Cox who stood up to James Anderton during his worst excesses in Manchester - she'd now have to fight the PCC as well as the chief constable. At a time when boundary changes are leading to fewer MPs, are you trying to give a sop to them by creating another post that they can apply for? With a generous expenses system and pension package perhaps? Oh, hush my mouth for the cynical old tart that I am... Do you think that perhaps this massive case of 'jobs for the boys' could be seen as a kick in the face for the electorate who are already struggling with your austerity measures? (And lets not forget that the crash was caused by your mates in the global banking industry whose salaries have increased by 37% in the last 4 years – contrast to that pay freeze for us mere mortals mentioned above – but I digress...).

The government itself doesn't seem to want to take the elections seriously as, instead of offering candidates the free mailout to voters that is normal in real elections, it claims that it wants to save taxpayers' money (the mailout would have added £35m to the bill). Well, I think that the vessel named 'The Good Ship Waste of Money' has already sailed, don't you chaps? If you really believed that you were extending democracy you'd have had the courage of your convictions and taken the time to explain to people what they were voting for. Instead the government has just given us those bloody averts showing 'thugs' which are downright scary. Is that a valid electoral tactic these days, to terrify the vulnerable into voting in an election they don't understand? The adverts are also misleading by implying that voting for the PCC will make criminals think again. It won't. In theory, the PCC will have no role in day to day policing or 'operational decisions'.

Even the method of voting irritates me. The big parties despise electoral reform do they? They say that proportional representation isn't good enough for 'proper' elections but they're happy enough to use it in their tin-pot elections for mayors (set up by the Labour government) and the PCCs (set up by the Tories).

Will a voter turnout of under 20% really give any of the elected commissioners the legitimacy to hold the police to account? Home Secretary Teresa May thinks so, but that wasn't what the government were saying earlier in the year when Home Office staff voted to strike on a 20% turnout. Home Office Minister Damian Green blames us, the voters, in advance, just in case it all goes horribly wrong, and the gist of his comments are: 'if you don't go out and vote then the nutters will get in and you'll only have yourselves to blame'. But Mr Green, you've declined to inform the electroate about PCCs by refusing to sending them any information on the changes and making the boundaries so large that independents can't afford to canvass in them. Anyway why the fuck are we having these bloody elections in the first place? Because, Mr Cameron, in case you don't recall, it may have been a Conservative manifesto commitment but NOBODY VOTED FOR YOU. You're only in power 'cos Nick Clegg (and quite a few of the PLP) despised Gordon Brown more than you and Labour MPs were physically sick at the thought of having to cosy up to the SNP to make their coalition work.

So, that's why I spoiled my ballot paper. It won't make any difference to the outcome but it made me feel a little better and it's a while since I've had a jolly good rant. But in my darker moments I remember the Peter Cook film The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer where, once he has become Prime Minister, the eponymous villain subjects the nation to constant ballots and referenda until the exausted voters willingly agree to him abolishing democracy and becoming dictator. You have been warned...

Some sources:
FT, 'Bankers’ salaries up 37% in four years', May 2012
Guardian, 'Police and crime commissioner elections: who, what and why – Q&A', Nov 2012
BBC, 'Home Office staff to strike on eve of Games', Jul 2012

A post about post and a rant

This is the standard of post we've been getting into the office for the last 3 weeks. What gets me is that the Royal Mail can deliver this to her home and training base, but on a daily basis they can't get our properly addressed and stamped post to its destination. Actually, this is quite well addressed in comparison to many as it has a surname on it - many have just had a first name and town.


The organisation that I work for isn't the one that won gold recently, but we our relationship with them is pretty incestuous. The golden girl tried our sport many years ago and is still friends with some of our athletes, whom she invited onto the bus for her 'homecoming'. Jon and I did get invited to the homecoming party and the up-coming black tie do, but it really isn't our sort of thing, and also on the evening of the homecoming party there was a free lecture on the archaeology of the Bronze Age Aegean at the uni - so, no contest really!

But I still can't believe that I'm in a job where I'm coming into contact with such people. How did that happen then? Luckily, as I'm not interested in sport (unless it has an engine attached) I don't recognise them and so treat them quite normally. It's only once they've left the office and I ask my boss who that was that I've just made coffee for and he says, "Phil de Glanville", that I think, "Ooo, I'd have been more impressed had I known!".

Anyway, having said that I'm not interested in sport without engines, I'm now going to have a little rant on its behalf. I've also included at the bottom of the page a post that I wrote on another webpage during the last Olympics.

The entire BOA winter sports budget is £5.8m. We're the 4th richest country on the planet and our winter sports budget is less than the price of a posh house? Let's face it, £5m isn't even a decent lottery win these days and yet the government expects Team GB to go out and win medals in a dozen sports? Some of those sports must only be getting a share of that money that amounts to a hundred thousand pounds, which probably barely covers travel to competitions. And don't start wapping on about how there's a recession on and money could be spent on better things. The current budget will have been set long before we'd all heard of 'sub-prime mortgages'. This budget is a reflection of how poorly sport (outside of cricket, football and rugby) is viewed in Britain and the paucity of our ambitions. It fails to recognise the massive emotional lift to the country that happens when we succeed in something - witness the homecoming parades for various Olympians, as well as those for cup winning rugby and football teams. Our country's sportspeople winning medals makes us feel good about ourselves and counters the over-riding negativity that seems to be a British characteristic and comes out of our printed media on a daily basis. Success in sport also has measurable benefits to industry and the economy; from increased motivation and productivity of workers to the FTSE rising, so it's arguable that investment in sport sees returns in the country generally.

You'd be amazed at how much grass-roots work the sports do with, frankly, pathetic budgets. These sports go into schools and work with youth clubs all over the country. In some inner cities the kids' horizons may be limited to the few blocks of their local neighbourhood, but through the input of sporting bodies they can find that an activity they enjoy like riding a bike, swimming, sliding down a snowy hill on a home-made sled, could actually take them somewhere in life. What benefits does greater investment in sport have for society in general? With kids doing something other than getting into gangs and knifing each other? Or kids adopting a healthier lifestyle and not becoming a drain on the NHS through obesity?

Not funding sport properly snatches opportunity away from children. It's also a kick in the teeth to the hundreds and thousands of ordinary people who go out there week after week and volunteer to give up their time for free to support something they love. These range from all those marshalls without whom motorsport, from the lowest Saturday afternoon hillclimb to an F1 race, could not function. British marshalls are the best in the world and they risk their lives for free every weekend ensuring that races can happen safely. But also, when you watch a large athletics event, all those red-jacketed judges and officials around the track are volunteers. When we held the World Champs last year people from all over Britain used a week or a fortnight's annual leave to come and work like slaves from the early hours of the morning to late at night (actually many worked into the early hours of the next morning), without pay, to ensure a successful event. OK, we pay their travel expenses and give them accommodation and food, but we're taking hostels not the Ritz.

Doubling the money we put into sports, especially winter sports, would still barely register as a blip on Britain's economic radar but the benefits it would reap are out of all proportion with the investment. That's also why I see London winning the Olympics as a wholly good thing, no matter what it costs. If we put on a good show it will make us all feel better. And even if we don't win every medal going, we'll still be raking in the money from all those tourists and teams who'll be coming over. I do wish we could stop being a country of miserable b*stards and see the bigger picture!


****************************
Summer 2008

"I've just been pondering what Gareth Southgate (?, well, someone on Football Focus anyway) said at the weekend regarding the dodgy result mid-week, that England seemed out of love with its footballers and its footballers seemed out of love with England.

I think this week the sport-watching public found the contrast was just too great between a bunch of 'pampered, preening pillocks' (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/leagues/premierleague/manutd/2305486/Sepp-Blatter-is-this-really-slavery.html ) who are over-paid and constantly under achieve and our Olympic athletes who are just the opposite.

OK, I know that at the higher echelons of athletics, etc, athletes have fantastic sponsorship deals and are on very good earnings. But at the bottom, in those sports we've never heard of before this week (kayaking, BMX, etc), competitors fit their training in around daily life because the grant cheque from the sport funding body won't pay all the bills. They're getting up at ungodly hours to train before school and work and can expect to do the same in the evening. Often the grant cheque is late, putting mortgages/rent at risk.

I know our footballers may not deserve, as Southgate says, to be booed as they walk on, booed as they play and booed as they walk off, but fans are justifiably frustrated.

After the Olympics there will be 'inquests' into underperforming sports like judo and certain athletic events. Funding will be withdrawn and people will lose their jobs because they've failed to reach the targets they've set themselves in negotiation with the funding bodies. But let's not forget that entire sports are run in the UK on less than a single Premiership footballer's annual salary, often on less than their monthly wage. From this each sport's governing body must pay coaches and athletes, travel to world-class competitions, pay for kit, put on competitions, have some admin back up, etc, etc. For those sports to actually get one athlete to the Olympics can be seen as a major achievement, but to then win a medal...

If Premiership footballers showed the same sort of dedication and responsibility that our Olympic sportsmen/women have shown, I think they'd be on their way to winning back some of the respect they've lost over recent years. And, who knows, they may start winning on the pitch too."