Thirty police in riot gear went into the store to drag out protesters but others scaled the building and chalked “Tax the rich” and “Tory scum” on its walls. One played…a clarinet on the roof

So, thirty police did this, but others did that, is that the sense of it?  The only thing I am unsure about is whether the police who scaled the walls were wearing riot gear or whether that was only for those who went into the store. I reckon that shinning up walls, writing things and playing musical instruments is probably impossible in riot gear, so I conclude that the qualifying description “in riot gear” applies only to those who went into the store.What were the protesters doing meanwhile?

Let’s bring back Latin in schools, to make sure that serious newspapers keep their subjects distinct from their objects.

It was later rumoured on Twitter that a group of tweed-clad Old Etonians had trashed the Slough branch of Lidl in a reprisal raid.

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The participants in this one are three writers on legal technology. Charles Christian is a barrister turned legal technology journalist who edits the Legal Technology Insider and the Orange Rag blog. He is also, by his own description, a “sometime poet and fantasy and science fiction writer” with a site called Shared Cultural References serving for him much the same purpose as this site serves for me . Joanna Goodman is a well-known freelance writer, specialising in technology, legal and professional services, knowledge management and corporate communications as well as wider subjects. I write on the management of electronic documents in litigation (“edisclosure” in England & Wales, “ediscovery” everywhere else) and, if given, say, 10 days in a week, would write on other things as well. Like many people who work for themselves, we all keep strange hours. Random Twitter conversations with a wide range of people throughout the day and night give one the social aspects of the workplace without the downsides like commuting and office politics.

Yesterday’s conversation began with Charles reporting that he had fallen asleep at his keyboard. The ensuing sequence is shown below:

It is not out of the question that one might produce great art by such random means – I was in the New York Museum of Modern Art earlier this week, and much admired works by Jackson Pollock, created by the painter’s equivalent of a writer leaning on his keyboard. I am reminded also of the experiment reported by the American comedian Bob Newhart which posits the idea that an infinite number of monkeys with typewriters could produce all the world’s great books. This collision of infinity, probability and time recurs in popular culture – see the WikiPedia article here. Newhart’s monkeys nearly got there with the line: “To be, or not to be, that is the gesondenplatz…”, which must have something going for it if I can remember it 40 years after I last heard it.

Charles should, I think, have taken care to rest his sleeping head three characters to the left. A 100 page novel created in his sleep and consisting solely of Zzzzzzs would have had a post-modern cachet which multiple Vs lack.

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Most of the comment, in fact, has been about the photograph with which the Times illustrated its article, showing Smith in a rather louche leather coat standing in a Soho Street, like a Madame on her way to inspect a new batch of recruits for her brothel. What caught my eye was the headline in the iPad version of the article. Where the print version was headed “I never knew the Internet was so full of porn, admits Jacqui Smith” the iPad version read “I never realised how much porn was on the Internet, admits Jacqui Smith”. The ambiguity in this subtly different version brings with it a clear reminder of that previous occasion when the cost of porn escaped her notice. Was the sub-editor having a laugh at her expense, I wonder.

For myself, I do not particularly blame Smith for not noticing that entry on her domestic Internet bill. She was a busy woman and, as with Baroness Scotland’s unfortunate oversight in respect of her illegal immigrant cleaner, it is something easily done. They share a collective responsibility in that they were members of a government which was particularly unforgiving of our daily oversights, burdening businesses and individuals with a mass of petty compliance obligations and hordes of petty little runts-in-office to catch us out and punish us. Indeed, one of the best results of the Parliamentary expenses scandal in which Smith was the star turn has been that MPs now know what it feels like to be caught out for every trivial infringement of the rules.

In any event, Smith’s claim for the videos (and her petty claim for an 88 pence bath plug) were dwarfed by her £116,000 claim for second home expenses when she in fact had only one home. She was, of course, entitled to second home expenses as a provincial MP, but instead stayed with her sister in London and described her only home as her second home for the purposes of expenses claims. It may well be true, as she claims, that she disclosed the position fully to the pen-pushers responsible for approving expenses. It is also correct to say that that Parliament was a stew of corruption – Tony Blair may have set the tone with his interesting assertion that anything is right if you think it so, but MPs of all parties had their snouts in the trough, despite clear rules linking expenses to the better performance of Parliamentary duties.

That argument does not run in any other area of life, however. Burglars don’t claim justification because all their neighbours burgle as well, and you will not get off a speeding fine because everyone else was driving too fast. However undeservedly, Smith held one of the great offices of state, and one expects more of the Home Secretary than of some nobody on the back benches.

The fact is that Smith should never have been promoted in the first place. There was a rumour that Gordon Brown was actually seeking to appoint a secretary for his office at home and thought that Jacqui Smith was one of the applicants; she misunderstood the question “would you be my home secretary?” and Brown was too embarrassed to retract the offer when he realised what he had done. That is probably not what happened, but the appointment was undoubtedly a mistake nevertheless.

Smith’s unforgivable defect as Home Secretary was to ignore civil liberties when confronting terrorism. No one doubts the importance of the war against terror, but a solution which tramples on ancient liberties is a solution which is worse than the problem. She made us all feel that we were the enemy, and empowered junior policeman, minor officials and even runty little creatures in local councils to trample on our rights. That was unforgivable and has not been forgiven.

Smith has not helped herself since her disgrace. Her resignation speech was perfunctory and self-exculpatory and, again like Baroness Scotland, she managed to convey that complying with the rules is something for the little people. It did not help either that she claimed that she was picked on over her expenses because she was a woman – everyone went for her, she said, because “I should have been at home looking after my husband and children”. That answer just betrays women – her expenses were picked on because she held high office.

There was a nice coda to the story following Smith’s ejection from her seat at the general election. The position of vice chairman of the BBC Trust fell vacant, and Jacqui Smith was rumoured to have applied for the job. The BBC Trust has had its own problems over expenses claims, and was unlikely to see Smith as part of the solution. If we wanted evidence that the woman has no judgment, an application which bracketed her name in the headlines with the word “trust” gives it.

The BBC has, in fact, played a (probably unconscious) role in reminding us of Jacqui Smith’s past. I am not amongst those who think that Smith should have been charged for her own activities (her claims may have been wrong, but they were not fraudulent since she declared them), but two of her former colleagues have gone to prison for expenses fraud. By strange coincidence, Jacqui Smith appeared on Question Time on the very days that the cell doors clanged behind the fraudsters. If her appearances on Question Time were aimed at her rehabilitation, then fate (or a cruel joke on the part the BBC’s panel selectors) achieved the opposite.

Time has a curious way of rehabilitating old politicians – even Harold Wilson is thought of fondly, and the swivel-eyed Tony Benn has become a national treasure. That will happen to Tony Blair, despite Iraq and despite the corrosive effect of his deliberate dishonesty on politics. Gordon Brown and Ed Balls will buck that trend, I think – their bullying style and personal unpleasantness will always be uppermost when their names come up. It would be a pity, in a way, if Jacqui Smith is remembered only for her expenses claims. She was a useless Home Secretary and a dangerous one; her successors need her picture on their desks to remind them of what happens to ministers who tamper with our liberties. Instead, if she is remembered at all, it will be for porrn and bath-plugs.

The blue plaque and caption came from The Week of 17 October 2009

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I think this is unlikely for various reasons. Employment law is weighted heavily in favour of employees and is unlikely to appreciate the distinction between being an official and being officious. Very few public servants are actually dismissed, for incompetence or anything else. Besides, unless Bristol city council is very different from other local authorities, it is probable that the senior staff share the general bureaucrats’ view that theirs is the earth and everything in it. They may call us “customers” and describe themselves as “public servants”, but the reality is the rather paradoxical one that they have come to think of themselves as our masters. The contradictions inherent in this reach their apogee with signs erected by highways officers telling us to “think”. They don’t see themselves as others see them, which is probably as well for their self-esteem.

I suspect that Bristol’s apology was inspired by a quick-witted PR person. Bristol did not apologise because anyone thought that the officers’ heavy-handed conduct was wrong, but because someone rather brighter than the general run of council officers spotted a PR disaster looming. Another of Matthew Parris’s long-time battles is with people who cannot say “sorry”; it does not matter what inspired Bristol’s apology, they did at least make one.

Their apology was not accompanied by the usual empty assertions that “lessons have been learnt”. Perhaps the PR person was clever enough to realise that this phrase has been discredited with over-use by officials whose capacity to learn anything is pretty slim.

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In most stories where a victim of crime takes on his or her tormentors, they have been driven to it because the police prefer to stay in their warm police stations ignoring calls for help. The Telegraph article Women arrested for swearing at yobs, tells of an occasion when PC Plank was actually present, and made an arrest.  You must have someone to drag off to the cells if you are going to get your bonus points, and the small female victim will do if you lack the guts to take on the perpetrators.

A brick was thrown through Miss Harrop’s window, and her boyfriend “left the house to confront six youths standing outside, but a patrolling police officer witnessed him being chased away by the group, who later returned to the street outside the property”. The policeman just “witnessed” this did he? Perhaps some Health & Safety regulation barred him from doing anything to help. Perhaps he was just too cowardly.

In the absence of any intervention by the police, Miss Harrop went out and gave her undoubtedly strong views using, so the charge sheet said, “abusive words within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress”.  I cannot quite picture the sort of yob who throws bricks through windows and chases people down the street but who is likely to be distressed by a small woman shouting at him. Thick policemen I can understand, but the charge-sheet was presumably drawn up by someone notionally possessed  of a brain.

The story gets worse. PC Plank “asks” the women to go back into her house and arrests her when she declines.  Some of the comment about this story suggests that the proper answer to a policemen who makes such a request is “piss off”. I think it might be better to invite him to point to the statute which entitles him to require a citizen to leave a public street. Perhaps one of New Labour’s many new laws allows the police to impose ad hoc curfews – a rather selective one in this case, since Plank seemed happy to let the brick-throwers stay out there.

Manchester Police have form in relation to this sort of thing. There was a story a few years ago of a woman driven to desperation when the police ignored her repeated pleas to protect her home and family. She resorted to a gun, and the police moved fast enough then. Nor is it just Manchester. Leicestershire police ignored many such pleas from Fiona Pilkington who, with her daughter, was bullied at her home. Abandoned by those who are paid to protect her, she set fire to her car, killing herself, her daughter and the family rabbit in the resulting explosion.  The reaction of the senior policeman at the inquest showed that they do not get brighter as they climb the ranks.

Another stone-throwing incident, in Blackpool in October 2009, involved a 71 year-old disabled widow who prodded a yob in the chest after he threw gravel at her window (see Daily Mail story here), one incident of many which had made her life a misery. Gallant Constable Clod was quickly on the scene, and made an arrest – of the widow, bundling her into his van “like a sack of spuds”. The prosecutor apparently said this:

‘Had the defendant accepted her criminality in prodding the aggrieved in the chest there and then, this could well have been dealt with in a different way.’

“Criminality”, eh? That must have taken Mrs Bowling straight back to Communist East Germany, whence she had fled to Britain. One assumes that the Crown Prosecution Service puts its more able prosecutors on to bigger cases.

What are we to do with people like this? Most policemen just do their jobs, protecting the public, keeping the peace and preventing crime. Every so often – but only too often it seems – some thick copper gets it wrong. Sometimes the story is of neglect, as in the Leicestershire case; sometimes, as in the case of Mrs Bowling, the policeman is not bright enough to understand what policing involves. The latest Manchester story combines these – PC Plank lacked the courage to tackle the yobs, but needed an arrest to take back as a trophy.

It is hard to say what is worst out of these stories. If the police are too scared or too idle to take on street bullies even when they are on the spot, then we are descending into an anarchy in which the yobs rule the streets. When policemen purport to order people into their houses and arrest them when they decline to go, then we are heading towards a police state.  It is the worst of all worlds is it not – to the extent that a police state has any benefits, one hopes at least for public order.

The worst thing, I think, is that the Crown Prosecution Service employs lawyers who thought that it was right to prosecute Miss Harrop or Mrs Bowling. I am sure that the CPS employs many good people, just as most policemen are competent and conscientious, but it is not they who make the headlines. It is bad enough that either of these cases involved the arrest of the victim. That someone with a legal qualification should have thought it right to prosecute these women is truly alarming.

This is the same CPS, of course, which recently decided not to prosecute a policeman who deliberately struck a middle-aged newspaper seller (from behind – we don’t want to risk a confrontation, do we?) at the G20 demonstration. The man died a few minutes later. Compare and contrast the circumstances – a prod from a widow driven to desperation by unchecked yobbery and a vicious, unprovoked attack from a thug in uniform. Which would you prosecute?

To the extent that David Cameron’s big society means anything, it involves ordinary people standing up for what is right and registering disapproval of what is wrong. It takes a certain courage to do that in the face of groups of youths who are already confident that they rule the streets. It seems unlikely that anyone will volunteer to get involved if they run the risk that a thick policeman will throw them into a van like a sack of spuds and that some third-rater from the CPS will prosecute them for it.

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Petty officialdom is nothing new, of course. Every culture has always had small-minded officials with powers disproportionate to their intelligence. It always used to be one of those things we mocked the French for – they guillotined their leaders in the cause of freedom and then voluntarily submitted to legions of bureaucrats and small men in uniform eager to tell them what not to do. The English have always mocked theirs – Hodges, the bossy blackout Warden in Dad’s Army, is a figure of fun who stands in for every killjoy whose job involves the enforcement of regulations; as a rough rule of thumb, the actual significance of such a person (and, one suspects, the size of his penis) is inversely proportionate to his self-importance.

The missing component, of course, is discretion, that is, the application of intelligence to any situation in order to decide what is right. You cannot expect discretion from stupid people, which is why traffic wardens, town planning officers and the like are simply given rules to apply or enforce. The word “jobsworth” derives from the curious expression “it’s more than my job’s worth”, with the implicit admission that the job is not worth very much to anybody apart from its holder.

Such people thrived under New Labour, for whom no activity was too minor to be regulated. Figures obtained by Lib Dem MP Chris Huhne before the election showed that 4,289 new criminal offences were  created between 1997 and 2009, roughly one for each day in office.  More and more officials were employed to enforce them and given ever greater powers, including the power to levy on-the-spot fines. Labour may not have executed the hereditary aristocracy, but it took away its powers, such as they had, and, in a curious parallel with the French Revolution, simultaneously empowered the little people with more authority than peers had had for generations.

We have the curse of that unqualified, unregulated thug, the “security guard”. An early sign of his power came when 82-year-old Walter Wolfgang was dragged from his seat at the Labour Party conference of 2005 for uttering a mild protest. The security guard’s actions were endorsed by a senior policeman of roughly the same intellectual calibre, who confiscated Mr Wolfgang’s conference pass and detained him under the Terrorism Act. There have also been many reported instances of private security guards interfering with the legitimate activities of passers-by in public places by, for example, preventing them from taking photographs. Private parking enforcement is another area in which Labour positively encouraged actions bordering on the criminal. Almost anyone can set themselves up as a parking enforcer (see AA article here) and can gain access to the DVLA records; there is little or no restraint on their power to clamp vehicles or tow them away, or on the fees they can charge for their release.

Nor are things any better when you look at the police, whose willingness to punish unimportant things has matched their failure to address real crime. Simon Harwood, the masked policeman in paramilitary uniform who  launched an unprovoked attack on a newspaper seller, killing him as he walked home from work, is apparently to go unpunished . At the other end of the scale, we have police constable Stuart Gray of Ayr, known as “Shiny Buttons” for his zealous approach to the job. He gave one man a fixed penalty notice for blowing his nose whilst stuck in a traffic jam with his handbrake on, and fined another for littering when a £10 note dropped from his pocket. One of this colleagues was quoted as saying “Total nonsense like this is the very opposite of good policing. This officer is known as PC Shiny Buttons for his lack of common sense approach to the job. It is supposed to be about serving and protecting the public – not embarking on some petty power trip”.

It turns out that the G20 officer has a record of using excessive force for minor offences. Perhaps you grow into this sort of thing. The Clifton family may have been lucky – give the Downs Rangers another year of unbridled power and they will be punching people for pitching a tent, whilst Shiny Buttons will be taking his AK47 to people who stop on a yellow line.

Similar stories are everywhere – fines for eating a sandwich at the wheel, for accidentally dropping a small piece of food, for letting a child feed ducks in the “wrong” part of a park. Sometimes, an alleged “offence” is no more than a point of political correctness, such as the Manchester officer who reprimanded a victim for describing a hit and run driver as “fat”.

The overall effect of this is worse than merely inconvenient. Every story like this diminishes us with the feeling that freedom is being eroded little by little. It also diminishes officials who just get on with their jobs. It is bad enough when done as a matter of state policy; it is somehow worse when attributable to the individual abuses of little people. One thick copper in Ayr can affect the whole relationship between public and police, and do so well beyond his own little patch.

So what is the proper course when a whining little runt from the council tells you to stop a harmless activity, or PC Shiny Buttons embarks on his “petty power trip”? Stay calm and polite for one thing, and if nature or education has given you a “posh” voice, use it. Ask him for his name and rank, and for the name and telephone number of his superior, and write them down, asking him to confirm that you have recorded them correctly. Do all this before you answer any of his questions – you may find that this un-nerves him, as well as making it clear that he is in for a long haul. Then ask him to define the alleged offence – which section of what statute, by-law, or regulation have you broken?  Keep writing – every question and every answer should be recorded and if, as is possible, he says something you would like to see quoted in the newspapers or at his disciplinary hearing, read it back to him with “Can I be sure that I correctly recorded what you said?”.

There is a trade-off here, because you are stuck there too when it might be easier and quicker to do what he says. There is always the risk that he will thump you, as policemen seem to do these days without sanction.

There are multiple purposes behind this. As I say, you may make him nervous enough to bail out before things get too far, as he contemplates a starring role in tomorrow’s Daily Mirror and an interview with his boss. He may just get bored – there will be easier prey to annoy round the corner. The written record will help if court proceedings ensue, if the Mirror wants some evidence of what you say when you offer them the story, or if you want an apology in suitably grovelling terms from his employer.

To its credit, that is what Bristol City Council did promptly.  If we are to turn the tide, and put petty authority back in its box, we need more stories with endings like that. We do actually need park rangers and policemen, and they do, by and large, get on with their jobs without making tits of themselves or beating people up. The Con Dem Coalition will earn itself much goodwill, and at little expense, if it can restore common sense to the exercise of authority.

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A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: ‘Aron Shelton’s case is under review and we recognise his brave service to his country.

‘Under the current system we ask customers to supply us with the relevant information and, unless further information is requested, our staff will make a decision based on this. Eligibility to DLA, like all benefits, is set out in legislation and is not discretionary.

I wonder what degree of urgency is being given to this review and how long it takes to decide that the decision is wrong. How many civil servants have to read the file? How many tiers of management must it go through, do you think, before it reaches somebody is sufficiently senior to decide that a brave man who gave his leg for his country should have a car to get about in? And in what sense is the soldier a “customer”?

You might like to focus particularly on the phrases “our staff will make a decision based on this” and “Eligibility to DLA…. is set out in legislation and is not discretionary”. There is an inconsistency here, is there not? Eligibility is not discretionary, and yet someone will make a decision. If the legislation says that a man who lost a limb in the service of his country should lose his benefits once he can struggle for 400 metres, then there is nothing to make a decision about, is there? The reality, of course, is that some comfortable little civil servant did indeed make the decision to stop the benefits.

Let us just picture him or her going to work – I think it is a man, for some reason. He lives in a nice house in the suburbs with his wife and two children. The alarm goes off and he leaps out of bed and into the shower. Dressing quickly, he runs downstairs for breakfast and runs back up again to clean his teeth. Down the stairs. Oops, forgot the car keys. Up and down the stairs he runs again. Time for a quick kick-about with the kids as he crosses the garden to the Toyota, then it’s off to the station. He is a little late, so he runs from the car park. He is a bit afraid of that little dog, so he skirts round it as he scampers through the ticket barrier, just catching the train. At Victoria he takes care to avoid those two youths who look a bit threatening – he is quite nervous out in the streets away from his safe suburb.

Once in his office with all the other civil servants, however, he feels in charge and he shouts at his secretary when she is slow bringing today’s pile of files. At lunchtime he will go to the subsidised gym and run on the treadmill for a while. Tonight there is a kick-about in the park with the boys to look forward to.  He is enjoying all this exercise, though, and feeling fitter every week.

He turns to the pile of files. The first one is about a soldier whose Land Rover was blown up in Afghanistan and who has had a leg amputated. The government has been giving him the use of an adapted Vauxhall in lieu of disability living allowance. The latest report says that the soldier has been determined to walk and, despite the pain, has managed to struggle for 400 metres. “Bloody malingerer”, he says, and puts a tick in the box which will cause a peremptory demand to be sent to the soldier demanding the return of the car. On to the next file.

Along the corridor, one of his colleagues is dealing with housing benefit files. Here is a family, husband, wife and three adult children, none of whom has ever worked. Between them, they draw £32,000 in benefits each year. A quick skim of the file and the colleague ticks the box which ensures that the benefits will continue for another year.

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The day job involves electronic disclosure or e-Disclosure of documents (electronic discovery, or e-discovery in every common law jurisdiction save England & Wales). My role is to educate and inform judges, lawyers, clients and suppliers about the law, the practice and the technology involved in e-discovery, and in marketing the ideas and services to others. The primary medium for this is a blog for the e-Disclosure Information Project, whose 250 or so posts in 2009 sometimes generated several thousand words per week. There is more than enough to write about on that subject, and optional things fell by the wayside. In addition to work in the UK, I spend about a month each year at conferences abroad. These trips simultaneously gave me a wider range of subjects to write about and less time to do so. It seems worth having a go at reviving the non-work blogs.

The subjects which I used to air in them – dishonest politicians, the creeping power of civil servants, the expensive stupidity of local government officers and the incompetence of railway companies – have worked their way into my e-Disclosure writing. This is not a drawback – I like comparisons and parallels, and my readers seem to appreciate the leavening of the rather dry legal and technical subject-matter with examples pulled from other areas of everyday life. There is, nevertheless, plenty to write about which cannot be turned to didactic purposes in my work blog and, besides, it is refreshing for the brain to cover other things from time to time.

The two non-work blogs have distinct purposes. Oxford Inciter relates to the city in which I have lived for over 30 years and in which I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s. It is a beautiful place, gradually being eroded by the actions and non-actions of the useless people who run it – with a handful of exceptions, the councillors are the usual run of jumped-up nobodies whose belief that they were elected to engage in continuous activity is matched by their patent unsuitability for it. Their policies are executed by the regiments of dumb animals which you find in local government everywhere. Paper-shufflers in the planning offices recommend ghastly developments to councillors who (as I put it in one of my posts) “could not differentiate between Wren’s plans for St Paul’s and a child’s depiction of a Wendy house”. Here in Oxfordshire, if we wish to signify that someone’s intellect is not all that it might be, we use the highways officers as a yardstick. Their mission is to screw up the traffic-flow as best they can, filling every view with railings, signs and notices. Intellectually-impoverished they may be, but they have been adept throughout the recession at extracting funding for useless projects by whispering “a child might die” into the ears of impressionable councillors who are scarcely brighter than they are and whose own ambitions are met by disbursing large budgets. Our household waste is collected under the supervision of a councillor who seems keen to show that his intellectual prowess compares unfavourably with the contents of the bins for which he is responsible.

The name Oxford Inciter is explained in section About Oxford Inciter. Briefly, the purpose is equally to incite opposition to the largely destructive activities of the councillors and their pen-pushing cohorts and to incite admiration for the many fine things which survive in this city.

Oxford Agenda has a wider purpose, recognising that only Oxford residents and visitors are interested in the city and the inadequacy of those who govern it. Oxford Agenda’s purpose is recited on its face: for old liberties, against the new morality, and in the hope that my children’s generation will undo the work of this one. There is much in it representing my visceral hatred of the New Labour government which ruled us for 11 years – it’s economic and administrative incompetence, its ceaseless interference in every aspect of our lives, and the sheer unpleasantness of some of its members.

That infected every other area of life. It became clear that mass immigration was not simply a policy thought to be beneficial, nor just the result of Home Office incompetence, but a deliberate strategy aimed at angering Labour’s political opponents, as well as a way of building an army of client voters. The practical implications – shortage of space, jobs, housing and infrastructure resources – were deliberately ignored, it appears, in pursuit of this strategy and were not, as we thought, merely the result of oversight and incompetence. The ban on fox-hunting owed nothing to any goodwill towards Foxy Woxy; it consumed many more hours of Parliamentary time than any other issue, including the decisions to go to war. The decline of education, the ruin of the landscape, the failure to control crime, and the constant erosion of civil liberties all have their place in Oxford Agenda, but it is home also to any miscellaneous matters which attract my interest, save for those which more obviously belong in Oxford Insider.

There is pleasure to be derived from dancing on New Labour’s grave, but a new focus now appears – putting pressure on the coalition government to reverse or undo as much as it can of the damage done by its predecessors.  It started well with the abolition of Home Information Packs and of the General Teaching Council, but there are deeper ills to cure: the relationship between the police and those whom they exist to protect; the power of that pervasive enemy, the thick jobsworth, with clipboard, rulebook and authority far beyond his brain; bloody notices everywhere; the whole apparatus of state power which prompted one lady to write to the Times asking the last government to publish a list of things which we are still allowed to do. I was not wholly convinced that a Conservative government would have the will to tackle all this; it will be even harder with the Lib Dems hanging on to their ankles like a ball and chain. Liberal Democrats are lovely people, some of them, but they do think they know what is good for us in a way which mocks both parts of their party name.

Both Oxford Agenda and Oxford Insider were published anonymously. This was not because I was embarrassed to own my opinions (far from it) or for fear of facing those whom I upset or angered by what I said (that is pure pleasure so far as I am concerned). I kept my name out of them because I wanted to establish it (in Google as well as in real life) as primarily associated with my professional subject. That objective is now achieved and I am happy to put my name to my other sites. So far as I am aware, only one person guessed at my identity, having cleverly spotted stylistic and subject-matter similarities between posts in Oxford Inciter and the letters which I used to write to the Oxford Times.

My e-mail address is oxfordinciter@hotmail.co.uk. My Twitter name for these purposes is OxfordInciter, kept distinct from my main Twitter account (which is chrisdaleoxford) in order to spare my professional followers my non-professional ruminations.

The rules of engagement – in particular my policy on fair comment and corrections – are set out in the editorial to Oxford Insider.

I do not promise constant attention to either of these sites but I hope to make more use of them in the coming year than I have done in the recent past.

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The Government announced plans to exempt MPs from a requirement to detail their expenses. The Treasury announced that it would not be hurrying to compensate those who lost their pensions in Equitable Life. The Government said that Heathrow Airport is to be extended without Parliamentary debate. And John Mortimer, fierce fighter for individual liberty, died. I do not suppose there was in fact a connection between this last event and the other three, but it is easy to see one.

The announcement about MP’s expenses shows direct contempt for the law. The story begins with a Freedom of Information request for a detailed breakdown of the expenses claims of 14 MPs. The request was not complied with and the House of Commons clocked up £150,000 fighting to keep secret the sums which we spend on the lifestyle of those we elect to represent us. The High Court upheld the FoI request and ordered disclosure of the details, and the Commons said they would comply. They dragged their feet, complaining of the cost of compliance, and meanwhile refused further FoI requests on the basis that all details would be published by October.

Today’s announcement severely limits the amount of information which will in fact be published and merely increases the headings under which information will be provided. The change is introduced by statutory instrument which means effectively that Parliament is changing the law to grant itself an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act, and spitting in the eye both of the judge who ordered publication and the public whose money its members pocket with such abandon.

Even while the Government was announcing that Commons pigs could keep their noses in the public trough in secrecy, the Treasury was announcing a scheme designed to ensure that many of those who lost money in Equitable Life would die before they saw any compensation for their losses. They did not put it quite like that, of course. Just as Harriet Harman had sold the expenses cover-up as greater transparency, Treasury Minister Yvette Cooper, whilst apologising for the regulatory failures (some of them anyway) and maladministration which lost Equitable policyholders their money eight years ago, outlined a compensation scheme so cumbersome that it will take years for any money to reach the victims. Even then, it will effectively be means-tested – a concept which is irrelevant to the losses which policyholders suffered.

The government has rejected most of the recommendations made by the Ombudsman – as with the High Court order about MP’s expenses, the Government simply ignores what it does not like. Twenty odd years ago, Gordon Brown fought fiercely for compensation for victims of the Barlow Clowes scandal. His famed moral compass has taken a change of direction since then.

It is ironic that the denial of money to the Equitable policyholders should have been announced by Yvette Cooper. She and her husband, the ghastly Ed Balls, were reported to Parliament’s sleaze watchdog, the Commons’ Members Estimate Committee, for apparent abuse of the perk which allows MPs to claim reimbursement of mortgages on their second home. Cooper and Balls bought a big house in London and were (and presumably still are) pocketing the mortgage costs although the house is clearly their main residence. Perhaps paying out the Equitable victims would reduce the funds available to cover this.

The Heathrow decision is plain wrong on all sorts of grounds, not least the environmental ones which the government is so full of when it comes, for example, to taxing cars – recall the budget change which imposed without notice a higher tax on owners of older vehicles. The environmental effect of those is trivial compared with the effect which the extra take-offs and landings will have in terms of noise and emissions. The plans also involve the destruction of 700 homes which does not sit well with the Government’s urgent plans to dump little boxes all over the Green Belt to meet the housing crisis.

The real issue here is not the exchange of arguments over the impact of emissions and other environmental concerns – if I assume that the Government’s estimates of adverse impact are wrong, it is because where New Labour is not actually lying, it is almost always incorrect in its assumptions. What matters more is the refusal to let Parliament debate a question which is of such magnitude and which has aroused such passions.

So why is the Government so keen to expand Heathrow? One can think of all kinds of reasons why a cash-strapped party, many of whose members face almost certain redundancy by June 2010, would be willing to cosy up to big business interests whilst it is in their power to do so. They will lose all those expenses for one thing. Perhaps some of them had their retirement funds with Equitable Life. Where you cannot see a clear public interest, keep an eye out for the private ones.

Sir John Mortimer was a champion of individual liberty and the rule of law whose lifelong support for the Labour Party was ground away by New Labour’s erosion of ancient freedoms. A Labour Government which defies a High Court ruling by legislating to keep its members’ expenses secret, which deliberately denies compensation to victims of Government neglect, and which ignores Parliament to authorise a bitterly-contested airport development, was not the Labour Party he supported for so many years.  Dying on the day that Labour did all three of these things was almost a form of protest.

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Researchers at Liverpool University have knocked Government claims that 100 lives a year are saved by speed cameras. Whilst speed cameras do reduce accidents, the numbers are exaggerated. The research shows a fall in accidents of 19% compared with the claimed 50%.

Does this matter very much, you might ask. After all, this Government belches out false statistics daily and has, indeed, devoted more energy to rigging the apparent outcomes of initiatives than it has on the initiatives themselves. It does matter, and for reasons which go beyond the actual facts behind this research and beyond motoring. Money is wasted in vast quantities on things which make little difference; things which really do matter are neglected in favour of those which yield apparently good outcomes; the police, who need all the friends they can get at the moment, are tarred with the fall-out of policies to which they do not necessarily subscribe; and any little surviving regard for government (as opposed merely to this Government) takes another pasting.

The Liverpool research recognizes what policemen and highways officers do not – that several factors contribute to an accident, including some which are entirely random. Dr Linda Mountain who led the research put it this way:

“Although some parts of the road network are undoubtedly more dangerous than others, there is also a degree of randomness in where accidents occur – driver error, bad luck etc. – which means that an accident can happen anywhere”.

Mountain used Empirical Bayes to assess the likely effect of random factors on the statistics. This approach to probability theory takes account of known facts and empirical measurements which compare the context being reviewed with other relevant contexts. The approach taken by the researchers allowed them to factor in known and estimated variables and to take account of randomness.

This is all rather different from the approach taken by the police, highways officials and others who make up the speed camera partnerships – or “safety cameras” as they like to call them to give a positive spin on implications of punishment and stealth taxation which their common name implies. The application of Bayesian Probability to road safety is not likely to cut much ice with a Plod sucking his pencil and a county highways officer scratching his bottom in a vain attempt to stimulate thought. Here in Oxfordshire, the expression “thick as a highways officer” is in general use to describe anyone who was at the back of the queue when the brains were handed out, and the police are not renowned for their intellectual skills.

The policeman is motivated by the idea of delegating part of his job to a machine. The simplistic notion that speed equals danger converts easily into the idea that if you can catch people who drive fast – an easily measurable factor – you have solved the problem and can retire to your desk to fill in forms, The biggest single element of randomness – bad driving – is no longer supervised. White van man can tail-gate, overtake on blind corners and do all the other things which cause accidents without fear that he will be caught, as long as he knows where the speed cameras are. The cameras also have the plus of raising revenue without difficult subjective decisions (all that thinking!) and contested court hearings.

The highways officer is driven by a number of factors, none of them actually based on a proper assessment of hazard and risk – these are, in fact, interchangeable terms to people who are this stupid. “Risk” has become the possibility of being blamed for something, and is defined by two things – whether an accident has happened at least once before at a particular place, and the number of people who cry that “something must be done”. A single accident, whatever its cause, is enough if it is followed by lots of shouting.

The best example of this is on Oxford’s Eastern Bypass where a woman caused a serious accident when her over-laden car crossed the central reservation and hit another. The woman was clearly negligent and was jailed for it. Speed per se played no part as a cause of the accident. Yet within days, Oxfordshire County Council agreed to spend £600,000 putting concrete barriers down the middle of the reservation and imposed a speed limit of 50 mph. No consideration of causation, probability, cost or balance against other priorities played any part in informing the decisions. An accident had occurred, people were whining about it, and the officers’ recommendation to do something – anything – was hastily rubber-stamped by the hopeless little people we elect as councillors. The difficulty here is the reluctance of elected councillors to ignore the technical people they employ, however incompetent those people turn out to be.

Highways officers are driven by other things beside fear of being blamed. They love signs; imposing restrictions gives them a power they otherwise lack – look at me, they are saying, I may only be a despised little pen-pusher with a whining voice and a clip-on tie, but I can screw up your journey for you; and they get to be responsible (at least in the narrow sense of that word) for spending a lot of money.

We need not, of course, apply this degree of thought to every highways alteration, whether by academics at a university or dim little highways officers. Speed cameras are rather different to other works in that they raise revenue and are not merely an expense. Nevertheless, it would be good to have some sort of risk/reward analysis made before money is laid out on what are often patently unnecessary works. As we head for recession, with billions in public money already pissed against the wall by low-grade local authority people, Oxfordshire’s highways officers are still tampering with road layouts with no perceptible benefit in mind, at least not one which could be described as necessary.

In that context, it is important to know that the government’s statistics on deaths prevented by speed cameras are seriously overstated. Just now, when money is short and when companies and individuals are having to make serious assessments as to what it is necessary to spend money on and what is optional, even, those high-spending but largely useless leeches who work for local authorities are going to start having to make serious judgements as to what really must be done. We don’t expect Exponential Bayes from them (the merest glimmer of intelligent thought would be a start), but elected councillors have some ammunition from the Liverpool study to begin questioning some of the highways officers’ assertions that this or that expenditure is really necessary.

The brighter policemen are beginning to get the point. Last week, Ian Johnston, President of the Police Superindents’ Association said that public confidence in the police had been “dented and bruised”, and singled out speed cameras as having erected a barrier between public and police. That has to be balanced against the recent bad news that Richard Brunstrom, the deeply stupid Chief Constable of North Wales known as the Mad Mullah of the Traffic Taliban, is not retiring this year as had been hoped. On balance, perhaps Mr Plod is beginning to learn that he needs some measure of public support and that street crime and burglary deserve at least as much of his attention as motorists going a little over the speed limit.

As for the Government, there have been occasional signs that even New Labour is wary of upsetting the large motoring lobby more than it has to and that criminalising decent people as well as soaking them in taxation is not a vote-winner. If Gordon Brown is looking for economies, he could start with the dead-heads in local authority highways offices. Perhaps he could start with Oxfordshire County Council’s highways department.