The Wardman Wire

The coalition are greeting today’s news that crime has fallen to its lowest ever level (since records began in 1981, anyway!) not by congratulating police forces but by slamming the figures as clearly wrong.

I can understand that the headline of crime falling by 43% under Labour is an uncomfortable one for a party that tried to smear the government in the run up to the election. But to come out and rubbish these figures is truly cynical and pathetic. Even if you don’t believe the exact figures, it is clear that crime has been reduced significantly since 1997. Worth some praise, at least.

It is obvious why they have done this though. They clearly expect crime to go up again fairly soon – not least with the massive cuts they are about to introduce to policing in this country. You have to wonder what this is going to do to relations between the government and ACPO. Rubbishing what is quite clearly an impressive feat and then taking away vast amounts of police funding is going to test the traditional love in between Tories and the police.

So no doubt now we can expect the Home Office to come up with a new, convenient, Tory friendly way to record crime in the future. What better way to fight back the news that crime has gone up by blaming it on changes in the way we record crime, eh?  Nothing to do with frontline cuts at all.  No.

Partisan debate is alive and well
Watching the three main parties debate electoral reform is the perfect advert for anyone who wants to argue that politicians are all rotten. All of them claim to have the perfect answer though it just so happens that the perfect and most fair answer is also the one that benefits their own party interests as well.

The Tories claim that reducing the seats in the House of Commons by 10% is what the electorate want and is a far more fair way of doing things. Labour claim that MP’s workloads are already far too high and increasing constituency work will mean even further losses to the link between MP and constituent.

In it for themselves not the good of the electorate
Of course, cutting the seats by 10% and re-drawing the boundaries also just happens to massively benefit the Tories and have a negative effect on the Labour party. Throw in the Lib Dem influence – the party that stands to gain the most out of re-drawing boundaries and fewer parliamentary seats – and the “in it for ourselves” picture is complete. In other news, Turkeys have voted down proposal relating to Christmas celebrations.

To watch Ed Miliband go head to head with Peter Bottomley on Newsnight was just painful. Both were convinced by their arguments yet neither conceded that they believed their arguments for purely partisan reasons.

You have to ask yourself, where did the 10% reduction in seats come from? Did Cameron pick this number completely arbitrarily? – in which case it is a pretty poor basis for reform. Or did he do some more sinister calculations and pick a figure that he thought he could get away with but still do away with the advantage Labour has at the moment? Again, hardly a good advert for the New Politics.

A truly independent body
Surely the best way to sort this out is to give all responsibility to a completely independent body? And I mean completely independent. Why let the government of the day, be it Labour or Tory or whoever else, choose and gerrymander the system on which they are elected.

An independent body could then speak to constituents and MPs and find out whether increasing constituent numbers by 20 to 30 thousand will be a problem or not. They can find out what the fairest way to decide how boundaries are redrawn without pressure from the government of the day. And then when they have made their findings, the government of the day commits to implementing them – even if they don’t get any benefit from doing so.

Yes, I know the Boundary Commission is independent and committees do great work in this area too – but they still have to work within the government of the day’s framework. To have a rigid policy that states we will reduce the number of seats in Parliament by 10% is just a nonsense and partisan. To oppose it for reasons that are so clearly partisan as well and offering no coherant alternative, is just so frustrating to watch.

Voting reform
Then we have reform of the voting system. It is no surprise the biggest advocates of it are the Lib Dems. What is so surprising is that they support the introduction of a PR system and yet half their party are outraged by the number of manifesto promises the party has reneged on – it’s what PR is all about: writing manifestos after the votes have been counted.

An independent body has already given us a clear picture on electoral reform – AV+. The Tories and Labour don’t want to listen to that though because it will undermine their grip on Westminster and the Lib Dems don’t want it either because it doesn’t give them nearly as much of an advantage as they hope for.

It seems to me that it is only the turkeys are getting a say.