Austerity

Rich Divorce Lawyer Chastises British Public For Envying The Wealthy

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

SPS_canary_wharf_tower_hamlets

 

Wealthy people contribute a tremendous amount to Britain, filling the Treasury’s coffers and bestowing no end of positive good on society. The unsung heroes of the economic recovery, the fact that their actions are ever criticised and their worthiness questioned is an intolerable affront towards those fine people whose labours benefit us all.

And who is better placed to lecture us on this topic than Ayesha Vardag, the ‘Diva of Divorce’ and Britain’s top divorce lawyer, herself the midwife to so many acts of social good?

The Guardian chronicles the Divorce Diva’s long list of grievances against the poor and the dispossessed:

Miss Vardag said: “There’s a strange, underdog culture in Britain whereby the rich and successful are bashed repeatedly.  It’s the antithesis of America, where hard work and success are celebrated. 

“We revile the successful and forget that they pay taxes and generate employment, but at the same time we complain about a culture of failure and layabouts living off the state. 

“You don’t get the prosperity and economic success that funds a world-class welfare state by sending all the rich people abroad.”

A few observations are in order here. Where to begin?

A world-class welfare state? Seriously? Has Ayesha Vardag seen or experienced the British welfare state? Of course she hasn’t. Nobody who has could call it ‘world class’ and keep a straight face. But we can discern her point – if it were not for people like her and the clients that she represents, us poor serfs would not have our self-perpetuating, callously undifferentiating, woefully inefficient and ruinously expensive safety net.

But the crux of Vardag’s argument rests on the assumption firstly that the wealthy are under some new and unprecedented attack (supposedly by the covetous forces of the greedy working classes), and secondly that these beleaguered people are all engaged in work that greatly contributes to the nation and for which we should be grateful. Neither of these assumptions is true.

The truth is that many of the super-rich, while perhaps not being worthy of envy and hatred, are also not worthy of praise, respect and a free ride in the press. It is quite possible to become very rich by doing and contributing nothing at all, while it is equally possible to contribute an enormous amount – to the community, to people in need, to any area or aspect of life where the market fails to assign the correct (or any) monetary value – and be incredibly poorly remunerated. Vardag offers no recognition of this basic fact.

You don’t have to be a foaming-at-the-mouth socialist to realise and acknowledge that there is rich variety within the ranks of the “rich and successful”, not all of them the modern-day job creating heroes that Ayesha Vardag would have us believe.

This blog is the very last place that would ever advocate taking any portion of person’s wealth out of envy, or as a punishment for hard work and success – Labour and the Liberal Democrats can squabble between themselves for that honour. But unlike Ayesha Vardag, who makes her own money profiting from a definite societal ill, neither does this blog believe that the wealthy should be immune from questioning that may sometimes be sceptical and vaguely hostile. That’s the nature of democratic free speech.

The nascent Organisation of Aggrieved Moguls , now firmly embedded in the United States of America, seems to have established a franchise in the United Kingdom. If it follows the trajectory of its US parent, we can soon expect to read newspaper columns penned by the likes of Alan Sugar, Philip Green, James Dyson and the Duke of Westminster in which they bleat about being persecuted like Jewish people on Kristallnacht:

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent … This is a very dangerous drift in our American thinking. Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendant “progressive” radicalism unthinkable now?

This ludicrious utterance by Tom Perkins in the letters page of the Wall Street Journal was just one of several recent pronouncements by paranoid rich guys in which they see in fairly mainstream Democratic party policies and public opinion the genesis of some terrible coming pogrom.

But Perkins, Vardag and the lot of them do the general public – in both Britain and America – a huge disservice. We may sigh ruefully when a senior neurosurgeon rolls past in her expensive car. We may daydream when walking past a solid, beautifully built house in Hampstead or on the Upper West Side. And we almost certainly gulp when we learn exactly how much Wayne Rooney will earn every week under the terms of his new contract with Manchester United. But we can do all of this within the context of understanding that rare and highly demanded skills fetch a high price in the labour market.

And while Wayne Rooney has to demonstrate his continued value by performing for his team in front of fans and television cameras every weekend, there is a great deal more opacity when it comes to the wealth of some of those working in banking or in the C-suites of many large corporations. Quite how they earn their multimillion pound or dollar bonuses is far less clear to people, particularly when they continue to be awarded regardless of whether the bank or corporation has had a bumper year or incurred a massive loss.

Policies and actions such as Gordon Brown’s punishing 50% top rate of income tax or the Liberal Democrats’ musings about a mansion tax may well be bad, counterproductive policies, but they hardly represent the dawn of a new age of wealth-bashing or concentration camps for the rich.

If Ayesha Vardag is truly curious as to why the elites (she incorrectly identifies them as only the wealthy) are mistrusted and vilified, she needs only look at the divorce proceedings case to which she is counsel and which compelled her to enter the debate in the first place. The Telegraph summarises the background quite nicely:

[The husband] is represented by Baroness Shackleton of Belgravia, a Tory peer and solicitor whose previous divorce clients have included Diana, Princess of Wales, and Sir Paul McCartney.

Pauline Chai, 68, his wife, has spent £920,000 on legal costs after starting divorce proceedings in London in February last year, and a further £92,000 in Malaysia.

She is represented by Miss Vardag, a lawyer who made her name acting for Katrin Radmacher, a German heiress, in a landmark Supreme Court case on pre-nuptial agreements.

A serving House of Lords peer taking time out from legislating to go head-to-head with Vardag,another lawyer who made her career fighting a case for a German heiress. The sums of money involved are only secondary – what is most striking is the complete detachment from the normal issues and travails of life experienced by most people.

Rather than sneering at the little people for being envious of their betters in the City of London or Wall Street, the Ayesha Vardags and Tom Perkins of the world – and particularly those working in banking, since it is this industry above all that generates the vast majority of public ire – would be better off explaining and educating why their high salaries and bonuses are at their current levels, so that there is finally some public understanding of the inputs which lead to such astronomical outputs. Many people may be keen to hear Vardag’s own personal justification.

Then we can have a real debate, not based on green-eyed envy from below or sneering class warfare from above, but on the facts.

 

The Church vs Welfare Reform

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

The Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal-designate Vincent Nichols, has inserted the Catholic church squarely into the centre of the debate about welfare reform and deficit reduction.

The accusations that he makes are serious, and are directed squarely at the current Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government – namely, that the social safety net has been ripped up in the period following the 2010 general election:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuAx2ykQSWY

 

The Telegraph reports on their interview with the Archbishop which launched the story into the news cycle:

Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric has accused the Coalition of leaving increasing numbers of people facing “hunger and destitution”.

Cardinal-designate Vincent Nichols, the Archbishop of Westminster, said that while the need to reduce spending on benefits is widely accepted, the Government’s reforms have now destroyed even the “basic safety net”.

Archbishop Nichols, the leader of the Catholic Church in England and Wales, said the welfare system had also become increasingly “punitive”, often leaving people with nothing for days on end if they fail even to fill a form in correctly.

He said it was “a disgrace” that this was possible in a country as rich as Britain.

The Guardian follows up with a report detailing the extent to which Archbishop Nichols has been ‘inundated’ with messages of support:

In his Telegraph interview, published on Saturday, Nichols accused ministers of tearing apart the safety net that protects people from hunger and destitution. He said since he made those comments he had been “inundated with accounts from people … saying there are indeed many cases where people are left without benefits, without any support, for sometimes weeks on end”.

The criticism has clearly rankled the government, and not just the Work & Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith (himself a practicing Roman Catholic). Indeed, the rebuke was such that David Cameron himself felt the need to respond to the church’s criticism. Writing in The Telegraph, Cameron made a convincing argument in support of his government’s welfare reform:

For me the moral case for welfare reform is every bit as important as making the numbers add up: building a country where people aren’t trapped in a cycle of dependency but are able to get on, stand on their own two feet and build a better life for themselves and their family.

Let’s be clear about the welfare system we inherited. It was a system where in too many cases people were paid more to be on benefits than to be in work. A system where people could claim unlimited amounts of housing benefit – in London there were people claiming truly astonishing sums of £60,000, £70,000, £80,000 a year. A system where hundreds of thousands of people were put on Incapacity Benefit and never reassessed, essentially taken off the books and forgotten about. None of these things is defensible. And it is right both economically – and morally – to change them.

The founders of our welfare system believed in the principle of responsibility – and so do we. As I said on the steps of Downing Street on my first night as Prime Minister, “those who can should, those who can’t we will always help”. Those who can’t work will be always supported, but those who can work have the responsibility to do so. The welfare system should never take that responsibility away.

In all of this, one gets the sense that the two sides are talking at cross purposes with one another. The government is eager to stress the need to work pay for the majority, while the Church is more keen to focus on any potential iniquities in marginal cases, stemming from welfare reform. And while these marginal cases often deserve full attention and consideration, there is never any real acceptance by the Church that the welfare system requires fixing of any kind in the first place. For all of the noise generated in the wake of the Archbishop’s interview we are no closer to understanding what the Church would prefer to see in place of the coalition government’s reforms.

How much stronger would Archbishop Nichols’ intervention have been if he had proposed something radical to replace Iain Duncan Smith’s incremental reforms? Some might argue that it is not the Church’s place to propose new policy, but if an organisation as large and respected as the Catholic Church disagrees with current government policy on welfare, it would only benefit the country if they made public their best thinking as to how to move forward with reform given the current economic constraints.

The Catholic Church is deeply embedded in communities throughout the entire United Kingdom. What if they were to use that proximity and understanding to propose some better reforms, rather than engaging in fruitless hand-wringing from the sidelines?

vincentnichols

 

If the Church feels that it is the right time to make a contribution to the debate about welfare spending, then this should be welcomed and taken seriously. But it becomes harder to do so when the intervention is so piecemeal and one-sided in nature, failing to look at the historical context of the welfare problem or proposing alternatives when specific policies are to be attacked. The Church has a responsibility to pay attention to the debate from the start and to at least attempt to gain an understanding for the reasoning behind government policy, and not just to repeat Labour Party talking points.

A sense of missed opportunity now pervades the coverage of the entire debate.

It is certainly the case that living on standard benefits – Jobseeker’s Allowance or Employment Support Allowance – is practically impossible in many parts of the country, particularly for those who unexpectedly fall on hard times and who are unable to trim their expenditures with the same brutal speed at which their income evaporates. This is worthy of discussion, and sensible changes could be made along lines previously suggested on this blog.

It is also true that new measures recently put in place can make benefit claimants subject to sanctions for failing to comply with what are sometimes confusing and arbitrary procedures. This too could have been discussed seriously and in detail. Nichols goes so far as to call this a ‘disgrace’:

[Archbishop Vincent Nichols] said the welfare system had also become increasingly “punitive”, often leaving people with nothing for days on end if they fail even to fill a form in correctly.

He said it was “a disgrace” that this was possible in a country as rich as Britain.

While it is true that such sanctions do exist, what is missing from Nichols’ interview is any acknowledgement of the problem that the sanctions exist to counter – the number of claimants who do (or did) not make sufficient efforts to find new employment. If it is the Church’s position that those who do not make reasonable efforts to find work should never be penalised for their inaction, this is something that should be explicitly admitted.

In short, it is all well and good to attack the impact of austerity on welfare recipients here and now in 2014, but one wonders where was the Church’s criticism when Gordon Brown and the Labour Party made so many millions more people dependent on state assistance and more vulnerable to the cuts in government spending which would always have been inevitable in the event of recession?

There is a strong sense – at least from Archbishop Nichols’ first intervention in the debate – that the strategy of the Church will be to attack the people now trying to fix the budgetary mess left by the last government, and to accuse them of cruelty and neglect, while turning a blind eye toward the misguided politics and personalities of the people who did so much to make the poorest Britons more vulnerable and dependent on the state.

It will be a shame if the Labour Party really is to get a free pass in this debate, as the Conservatives are not the only ones who stand to benefit from the guidance and prompting toward social justice potentially offered by the Catholic Church. In the past, too many from the Labour Party have been content to parade around loudly talking about how compassionate they are (and that the other side is heartless by virtue of their lack of faith in government provision by default), and so are given a free pass when their badly conceived ideas inevitably go wrong during implementation.

On this, though, the Cardinal-elect is absolutely right:

He concluded: “The moral challenge roots back to the principle that we have to regard and treat every single person with respect. That’s one of the great geniuses of Pope Francis – that he manages in his gestures to show that respect to even the most unlovely of people.”

Absolutely. And where the welfare system or the austerity programme is helping rather than hindering this effort, it is absolutely right to point it out. It is all too easy to begin reducing human lives and human suffering to statistics, to black and white numbers on a  pre-budget report or a policy paper, and if nothing else, Archbishop Nichols did service to the debate by pointing this out and giving voice to some of the unheard suffering.

But if there is a war on poor people currently underway in Britain, it has been waged just as much by those on the ‘compassionate’ left who sought to make more and more people dependent on government benefits and tax credits as it has been by the new coalition government which had the unenviable task of repairing the economic damage wrought by thirteen years of Labour rule. If the Conservatives are to be blamed for undermining the social safety net, why should Labour escape censure for vastly overfilling it in the first place, causing the weight of the full net to threaten the buoyancy of the whole ship?

One cannot help but feel that the voice of the church – a serious and valued voice in our national debate – would have a lot more credibility on the topic of if, when they spoke, they gave the slightest indication that they had been paying equal attention to the plight of welfare recipients before David Cameron entered 10 Downing Street.

Are Labour At War With Poverty Or With Success?

Samuel HooperLeave a comment

 

Well, now we have it conclusively. It has nothing to do with making the rich in our society pay their “fair share”, no matter how loosely you define (or indeed blatantly misuse) the word “fair”. Nothing to do with ensuring that essential public services are funded, either. No, Ed Ball’s announcement of the Labour Party’s intention to reinstate their punitive 50% top marginal rate of income tax has everything to do with punishing people for daring to still be rich, for having the temerity to succeed.

Daniel Hannan MEP, writing in the Telegraph, ponders the cognitive dissonance behind a proposal to raise taxes without realistic hope of increasing revenues, and wonders if Labour are right to stake their electoral hopes on the British people being motivated primarily by envy and a desire for vengeance:

Labour doesn’t actually think the 50p tax rate will make Britain more prosperous. We know this because, for all but the last few weeks of its 13 years in office, it kept the top rate at 40p. Yet it now brazenly calls a 45p rate “writing a cheque to millionaires”. On one level, this is too silly for words: even if  everyone earning £150,000 were a millionaire, on no conceivable definition does demanding less money from someone constitute “writing a cheque”. But Ed Balls has presumably calculated, as Iain Martin adroitly observes, that there are enough votes in envy to cobble together a majority under the uneven constituency boundaries.

In another column he also reflects on the results of a YouGov poll showing that an overwhelming majority of Labour supporters believe that a 50p tax band should be brought back even if it was conclusively demonstrated that doing so raised no additional revenues. The telling visual is here:

YouGovTaxpoll

 

Hannan goes on in this second piece to explain the motivations that may cause people to vote as they did in the poll, and has the humility to accept that he (and others on the opposing side of the argument, myself included) probably suffer from similar confirmation biases and reverse rationalisation on this and other matters.

But the inescapable fact is that the motivation for supporting a revenue-neutral or revenue-negative tax increase comes largely down to envy, and that ugly part in the minds of some in the Labour Party (fully accepting that the Conservative Party has other ugly parts of its own) that would rather everyone in the country be worse off and more equal than better off and more unequal:

Envy is an ugly and debilitating condition, but it seems to have an evolutionary-biological basis. The dosage varies enormously from individual to individual, but even toddlers often display a sense that, if they can’t have something, no one else should either. If they had the vocabulary, they would doubtless, like the 69 per cent of Labour supporters, explain that emotion “on moral grounds”. Few toddlers, and few Labour voters, openly admit to being actuated by vindictiveness.

Most policy positions are an expression of some ingrained tendency. For example, we have an instinct to care for the vulnerable, and also an instinct to value reciprocity, and our welfare system results from an interplay between the two. Similarly, the current row about deporting foreign criminals has less to do with their numbers or the nature of their crimes than with our instinct – again, a human universal – about hospitality and its abuse. We shouldn’t be surprised when people who suffer from envy elevate it into a political precept and call it “fairness”.

The concept of fairness has been much abused by politicians (generally those on the left of the political spectrum), particularly since the start of the Great Recession. The worthy desire of Labour politicians to ease the crippling, painful effects of poverty on those less fortunate in our society is not in question, but it is disconcerting when they cling to the idea that punitively high, revenue-neutral tax increases will do anything at all to help the poor other than to cheer them up with the knowledge that wealthy people are also feeling the pinch.

And while we are quibbling about wording, Ed Balls needs to be taken to task in the media for characterising George Osborne’s decision to reverse half of Gordon Brown’s 50p tax hike to a slightly more palatable 45% top rate as a “massive tax cut”. If a five-point reduction in tax rates constitutes a massive tax cut, surely the ten-point increase in income tax instituted in the dying days of the Labour government of which he was a part could only be described, using the same dramatic language, as a gargantuan, devastating, apocalyptic tax increase? And yet, come general election season 2015, it is certain that we will not see Ed Miliband or Ed Balls’ faces smiling down at us from billboards promising “massive tax increases”.

But let us return once more to the YouGov poll results. No other mainstream British political party – not even the Liberal Democrats or the supposedly crazy UKIP – has a majority of their supporters who believe in raising taxes for the rich just to teach them the lesson that hard work does not and should not pay. That distinction is reserved for the Labour Party, a party whose leadership and supporters are now – quite cheerfully, openly and stridently – acting in a dangerously irrational way.

Irrational, that is, if we take them at their word that they have the best interests of all the British people at heart.

Labour Reveal Their Priorities

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

Miss me yet?

 

It was heavily trailed, but now we know for sure – Labour, who have been feeling the heat as a result of their total lack of credibility on the economy and the fact that the Tories are finally starting to benefit from the fruits of economic recovery, have been forced into revealing some of their plans for the future. And what plans they are. They can best be summarised as “let’s return to how things were in the final days of Gordon Brown’s premiership”.

Whether this makes you want to get out or chequebook and make a huge contribution to the Labour Party or scream and and fall down on the floor in absolute incredulity depends entirely on your political leaning.

The Telegraph reports on Ed Ball’s major policy speech:

[Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls] said it was wrong for the Coalition government to have decided to cut the 50p top rate of tax to 45p from April last year.

“When the deficit is still high, when tough times are now set to last well into the next parliament, when for ordinary families their real incomes are falling and taxes have risen, it cannot be right for David Cameron and George Osborne to have chosen to give the richest people in the country a huge tax cut,” Mr Balls said.

“That’s why for the next parliament the next Labour government will reverse this government’s top rate tax cut, so we can finish the job of getting the deficit down and do it fairly.

“For the next Parliament, we will restore the 50p top rate of tax for those earning over £150,000 – reversing this unfair tax cut for the richest one per cent of people in the country and cutting the deficit in a fairer way.”

Ed Balls calls cutting the top rate of income tax from 50 to 45% a “huge tax cut”. Let us leave aside for a moment the ludicrous presumption on Balls’ part that taking a full half of the incremental pound that someone earns in income tax alone (never mind National Insurance, indirect taxes and VAT) could ever be proposed in a sentence together with the word “fair” and be taken seriously. I am more interested in what Ed Balls and the Labour Party had to say when Gordon Brown decided to raise the top rate of income tax from 40% to 50%. I’m pretty sure that they didn’t call it a “huge tax increase”. In fact, I know that they didn’t sell it to the country that way. So if increasing the top rate of income tax by ten pence in the pound is not a huge increase, how can a partial rollback of five pence be considered a huge tax cut? The answer, of course, is that it cannot.

So a friend of mine had this great idea on tax...
So a friend of mine had this great idea on tax…

 

In what was doubtless intended as a ringing statement designed to assure us of Labour’s new-found commitment to sensible economic management, Balls also committed to eliminating the budget deficit by the end of the next Parliament, in 2020:

Mr Balls announced what Labour said would be a binding commitment to balance the books, deliver a surplus on the current budget and get the national debt falling in the next Parliament.

Quite why we would want to exchange a government that tried and failed to manage this feat in the lifetime of the current Parliament for one that never displayed an interest in doing so until now but which suddenly claims to be able to achieve it in the next Parliament if only they are given the keys to power is never fully explained.

Neither does Balls acknowledge the fact that even when the budget deficit is eliminated, the national debt will remain intact and ominously large – he makes no proposals about running a future surplus to begin paying down this debt and lowering the nation’s interest payments. Neither, of course, does George Osborne devote much of his time to that niggling fact – but if Ed Balls really wants to seize the mantle of economic trustworthiness from Osborne he needs to aim higher and show that he has a better grasp of the longer term picture than his counterpart.

The reaction to Balls’ speech from the business community – who Labour like to malign, but are actually the ones who create the jobs and pay corporation tax and National Insurance contributions – was predictably scornful. Words and phrases such as “absurd”, “disaster”, “unmitigated disaster”, “putting our economic security at risk”, “unhelpful” and “political posturing” were often deployed.

By contrast, the Unite trade union saw Balls’ announcement as a fantastic development, and urged Labour to ever more destructive heights of foolishness and irresponsibility:

However, the Unite trade union, Labour’s biggest donor, welcomed the policy but warned it was only “a beginning”.

A Unite spokesman said: “The commitment to restore the 50p top rate of tax is a sign that a future Labour government understands the need for a fairer taxation system in this country.

“This is a beginning; we would urge Labour to also tackle the disgraceful abuse of the system by the evaders and avoiders too.

You know what would make tax avoidance really difficult, unnecessary and socially unacceptable? A flat tax. But somehow I don’t see Unite advocating for that any time in the near future. Because, though they do not like to admit it in public, high taxes are not a regrettable but necessary evil to people like Ed Balls and his cheerleaders on the left. For Ed Balls, higher taxes are a desirable end in themselves, a last line of defence to ensnare anyone who defies the odds and manages to break through Labour’s dragnet legacy of mediocre standardised education, burdensome regulations and big government and succeed in spite of themselves.

With regard to Labour’s brave new economic stance, the British electorate will cast the only verdict that matters in May of 2015. But I think David Cameron and George Osborne will be sleeping a little more easily in their beds from now on, warm in the knowledge that Ed Balls has set Labour on a firm course back to 2010.

With Water Cannon In London, The Police State Inches Closer

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

Coming soon to a demonstration near you.

 

Coming soon to a British town square near you: trigger-happy and power-corrupted police officers, newly armed with water cannon, ready to hose you down with a cooling blast of high powered icy water if the authorities do not approve of the cause or tone of your protest.

The Association of Chief Police Officers, or ACPO, is submitting a request to the Home Secretary, Theresa May, to authorise the use of water cannon in any town or city across England and Wales. They are doing this, they insist, to bolster their ability to control anticipated protests from what they call “ongoing and potential future austerity measures”.

The Guardian reports on this unprecedented move against the public:

The Association of Chief Police Officers says that the need to control continued protests “from ongoing and potential future austerity measures” justifies the introduction of water cannon across Britain for the first time.

The London mayor, Boris Johnson, has already announced a consultation on the introduction of water cannon on to the streets of London ready for use by this summer.

A new Acpo/College of Policing briefing paper makes clear that chief constables across England and Wales have also been asked to discuss water cannon with their police and crime commissioners and “it is anticipated that the home secretary will be approached in early 2014 in respect of water cannon authorisation”.

This attempt by ACPO to raise the spectre of an implausible large-scale breakdown in public order is complete and utter nonsense, a risible and transparent excuse to bring draconian tools of crowd control to the streets of a generally calm and peaceful liberal democracy.

This is not Ukraine or Greece. And even if we were, like Ukraine, in the grip of large-scale civil disturbances, there is every chance that the fault would rest primarily with the fictitious government and not the fictitious protesters; so why further tilt the odds even further in favour of government power to suppress dissent by arming the police with water cannon?

But the really chilling disclosure comes next:

The police envisage using their water cannon to “exert control from a distance and critically to provide a graduated and flexible application of force ranging from spray to forceful water jets. The mere presence of water cannon can have a deterrent effect and experience from Northern Ireland demonstrates that water cannon are often deployed without being employed.”

Behold the power of the deterrent effect on freedom of speech and assembly. The ACPO will make it widely known that they are purchasing some new, state-of-the-art water cannon, weapons capable of blasting 9000 litres of water into a crowd in just five minutes at potentially deadly force, and sit back and watch the anticipated protests about this or that suddenly fail to materialise – or so the theory goes. But here the enemies of civil liberties may have underestimated the level of public opposition to their scheme.

We may rarely give a second thought to the scenes of plucky, unfortunate foreign demonstrators being blasted off their feet by high power jets of water often shown in television news reports from overseas, but if such a thing were to begin happening in Trafalgar Square or in the shadow of Parliament it would be another matter entirely. The British people will not abide a bully.

Scraping the barrel for recent examples of civil disorder to justify their unprecedented request, the chief police constables produced three very weak cases:

[David Shaw, West Mercia Chief Constable] cites three occasions in the past 10 years when police commanders would have considered using water cannon on the streets of London had they been available.

He names them as the Countryside Alliance demonstration in Parliament Square in 2010, the Gaza demonstrations against the Israeli embassy in 2008-09 and “potentially” the student protests of 2010, when specific locations were targeted.

They would also have been considered during the August riots of 2011 but he concedes they would have had only limited impact on the “fast, agile disorder” seen then.

So apparently farmers and bolshy students number among the most grave threats to law and order currently on the radar of the British police. How heartening it is to know that police chiefs up and down the country are so in tune with the fears and concerns of the communities that they purportedly serve.

More ridiculous still, ACPO themselves admit that water cannon would have been entirely useless in confronting the most recent case of serious civil disturbance in Britain, the August 2011 riots, because the looting and damaging was too fleet-footed and agile. It turns out that people intent on smashing and grabbing merchandise from the windows of electronic goods stores tend not to stand still at the scene of their crime, link arms and form orderly ranks so as to be efficiently mowed down by a hastily-scrambled water cannon.

So what is this really all about? One explanation could be that ACPO are politically agitating, and trying to send a message of their disapproval of coalition austerity policies to the public and their elected representatives, essentially saying “we told you that cutting government spending would lead to chaos and disorder and we were right; now we have to take the draconian step of procuring water cannon to prevent the country from sliding into anarchy”.

This is one plausible possibility – as we have seen only too recently with the Andrew Mitchell “plebgate” scandal, there are those in the police force with very hardened agendas who would stop at nothing to discredit or cast doubt on the performance of Conservative ministers.

But in truth, a more convincing explanation is that the police just really fancy having these new toys to scare and intimidate people, that they have decided that building good community relations with the public and doing the hard work of policing large scale events just isn’t worth the effort when they can just bully the public into cowed obedience much more easily.

They likely pursued this strategy in the belief that vague and nebulous references to potential future instances of moderate civil disorder would be sufficient prompting for Theresa May to roll over and grant their wish in her desire to appear tough on the issue of law and order. The British public can only hope that she has the political courage and commitment to civil liberties to tell ACPO to back off – but based on her record, the signs are not encouraging.

Unwarranted plans to bully and intimidate by the ACPO.
Unwarranted plans to bully and intimidate by the ACPO.

 

The saving grace of this worrying affair will be the newly-created police and crime commissioners, now in place throughout many parts of the country – officials whose primary job it is to advocate for the local population, highlight their concerns and see them addressed by the police forces.

This brazen move by ACPO will be a good early test of the new commissioners. Do they have real teeth, and the strength to dig in their heels and make the police chiefs focus on local priorities rather than their own private Orwellian ambitions, or will they merely act as a fawning rubber stamp to power?

We may soon find out.