Use the force
Sir: The problem with Alasdair Palmer’s argument against police reform (‘The coalition’s police reforms will fail’, 21 August) is that it merely echoed Gordon Brown’s mantra for the last ten years. According to this view, what matters most is how much money is spent on public services. The more we spend on our police, schools, etc, the better they are bound to be. Some of us questioned this idea from the beginning. Others began to have doubts when services failed to improve in proportion to the substantial resources pumped in. Most people finally rejected the age of big spending when the country went bust.
Actually — and quite contrary to Palmer’s assertion — the steepest recent falls in crime pre-dated the rise in police numbers. A better line of enquiry might be: why, when we have one of the most expensive criminal justice systems in the world, do we still have such high crime compared to our peer group countries? Why, when we have a record number of police officers — over 140,000 — are only a tenth of them visible and available to the public at any one time? (The answer, in a word, is bureaucracy.)
Palmer asserts that spending restraint must mean fewer police. I’ve no idea where he gets his numbers from when he says that 20,000 officers will go, and neither does he, because the budget hasn’t been set yet. But I do know that last month a report by the robustly independent Inspectorate of Constabulary said that, by working more efficiently, forces could save over £1 billion a year — 12 per cent of their funding from central government — without it impacting on frontline services.
The founder of modern policing, Sir Robert Peel, knew the real measure of success. ‘The test of police efficiency,’ he stated, ‘is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.’ Our reforms will reclaim policing for the people: and the people know very well that what matters is not how much money you spend, but how wisely you spend it.
Rt Hon Nick Herbert MP
Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice, London SW1
Sir: Alasdair Palmer’s suggestion there are huge numbers of ill-disciplined police officers sitting around in police stations too afraid to go out is obviously not quite accurate. There are rubbish people in the police force as in any profession, but they are a minority. But he is right in stating that reducing the number of police officers and prison places will very definitely cause an increase in crime. Why would anyone want this?
Nick Hubbard
Nottingham
MAD men
Sir: As well as forgetting the reasons why he is a monarchist and for the existence of God, Perry Worsthorne (Diary, 14 August) also seems to have forgotten the first principle of nuclear strategy, which is deterrence. Far from Niall Ferguson and I ‘envisaging a murderous martial future’, the primary reason for retaining nuclear missiles is precisely so that we do not have to envisage any such thing. Possession of nuclear weapons has kept Britain safer over the last six decades than Perry’s new-found pacifism would have.
Andrew Roberts
New York
PCC Plod
Sir: Mr Abell comments that I failed to note that the complaints against me were rejected by the PCC on the grounds that I was deemed to be exercising my right to offer ‘robust opinion’ (Letters, 21 August). He goes on to suggest that the PCC protects free expression.
While I am, I need hardly say, hugely grateful to the PCC for allowing me my opinions, Mr Abell appears to miss the bigger point. I had to spend a substantial portion of time in batting away frivolous complaints. Unlike public bodies, journalists do not have limitless spare time, and the process of responding to the PCC is a punishment in itself, testing patience, wallets and humour.
All sorts of actual offences, libels and defamations occur in the British press. Of course a body should exist to patrol breaches of the law. But the PCC does not always seem to do this, and currently embodies Anacharsis’s definition of bad law: strong enough to detain the weak, but too weak to detain the strong.
Douglas Murray
London SW1
Cat flap
Sir: Though the article about Eric, the rescue cat with the prosthetic limb, was very funny, I also found it very troubling (‘I want to kill my cat’, 21 August). Battersea obviously put Eric in the wrong home, but it is really difficult to predict how cats in rescue shelters will behave when they get into different circumstances. That said, why doesn’t Theo Morgan get help for Eric’s behaviour? Either Battersea or the vet should be able to put him in touch with a cat behaviourist — or take him back to Battersea. I know of a cat, doubly incontinent, who nevertheless found devoted owners. There’s a good home for every cat — but it’s not necessarily the one they are in!
Celia Haddon
Cat behaviourist, Witney, Oxon
No real autonomy
Sir: Contrary to Brendan O’Neill’s assertions (Tibet Notebook, 24 July), Free Tibet does not oppose the ‘modernising’ of Tibet per se. Free Tibet campaigns for the right of Tibetans to shape the growth and development of their own country.
In the Tibetan Autonomous Region a massive injection of Chinese government subsidies has funded building and infrastructure, doubling the economy in the first half of the decade. However, most of the investment has been awarded to Chinese state-owned companies so that although money is going into Tibet, it goes straight back out again.
To participate in the ‘economic revolution in Tibet’, one must be fluent in Chinese, which the majority of Tibetans are not, and Chinese work cultures exclude the vast majority of Tibetans. A lack of investment in education, and illiteracy levels up to eight times those across China as a whole, also contribute to the marginalisation of Tibetans in their own country.
Stephanie Brigden
Director, Free Tibet, London N1
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