Policing the police

Public officials, even retired ones, should not as a general rule attempt to undermine democracy. Imagine if, for example, a permanent secretary in the Home Office took to the airwaves to persuade the public to sit on their hands in a general election, in the hope that a low turnout would remove legitimacy from the process and let civil servants get on with their jobs without bothersome interference from ministers.

That is pretty much what Lord Blair, former commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, is now doing. Earlier this week, he said that he hoped people would not bother to vote in the first police commissioner elections on 15 November — in the hope that mass abstention would fatally undermine the process. His argument against the elections is disingenuous: he claims that the constituencies are too big, and that it is impossible for one person to represent Slough as well as Oxfordshire.