Rob Shorrock

The Daily Mail inspired hysteria around Ross and Brand, obsecene phone calls, a burlesque dancer, her grandfather and of course, enemy number one the pinkos and perverts that run the BBC is great entertainment. As the economy collapses some good old fashioned outrage about smut captures the public consciousness better than anything and who best to whip up the frenzy than the good old Daily Mail!

The call for the heads of Ross and Brand and the consequent suspension of the pair by an increasingly cowardly BBC is ultimately meaningless. Agents for Ross and Brand will already be in talks with rival TV and radio companies and this is really the BBCs biggest dread. You can't get past the obvious - they both pull in audiences.

The Daily Mail is obviously pleased with itself but has a frothing tendency to over egg the pudding. It is now after Love Soup, a semi-surreal comedy that featured a scene where a women is apparently 'raped' by a dog. This has already been to to Ofcom and thrown out, but the Daily Mail thinks it has the BBC on the ropes and can resurrect this as an example of obscenity and falling standards of decency.

The Daily Mail and decency are odd bedfellows. This is the paper that spent a huge amount of its time promoting the quack claims that MMR jabs could cause autism which resulted in a decrease in the level of immunisation to dangerous levels. Now that is indecent.

Every so often I go over to the Comment is Free pages. I am not proud of it, but sometimes I get tempted. This often happens when reading another blog and following the link. Normblog did it this time and sent me into a whirlpool of cultural relativism and dumb analyses of 'western imperialism'. The post in question was by Michael Williams reviewing Conor Foley's book The Thin Blue Line: How Humanitarianism Went to War. 

Foley has decided that humanitarian intervention lacks neutrality and promotes a set of values which are pro-western and may not be relevant to the country or state in question. The problem with this position is that you ultimately drive yourself into the logic of doing nothing at all and defending a dualist position on human rights and values - they are OK for the west but not OK for other countries. Here are some of the examples of this nonsense which appear, to be fair,  in the comments section of the post:

'As for right and wrong, human rights, cultural rights, whatever - there are no absolute standards (unless you claim they are given by God).' 

'The left has never been so universally wrong and so gullibly co-opted by the right as in its shameful support for "humanitarian" intervention.' 

'Humanitarism is the new imperialism! Just like those bloody missionaries in Africa all those empires ago.'

And so on............

The nationalisation (or the curious hybrid of part nationalisation) of some banks demands a through look at how these banks will be governed, namely who should be on the boards. There is no doubt that the unaccoutability of boards to shareholders and their customers has been part of the problem and it should come as no surprise to these boards that the government may want to reform them.

But rather than sticking someone from the treasury on these boards the government has an opportunity to be far more radical.

Firstly, the membership of the board should reflect the capital investment that has been made from the tax payer. It therefore follows that the representation on these boards in the best tradition of radical democratic thinking should come from the public through a democratic process to elect the boards. If you believe that public services should be run by democratically elected bodies then it isn't that radical, but I can imagine the resistance that will be put up by the cliques and elites that have run our financial system into the ground.

It would be a marvellous opportunity open to everyone. Clearly, you do not need any special talents or knowledge. In fact, having a background in banking and finance is probably a hindrance.  Elections could be carried out online or via ATMs. the security systems are all in place already so no-one would be able to vote twice and it is unlikely to cost much money (not that this would be a problem anyway)

In addition it is also worth looking at the tax justice blogspot that makes the very pertinant point that these banks should not be using of shore tax havens. See http://taxjustice.blogspot.com/2008/10/we-recently-reported-curious-situation.html 

The decision of met police commissioner Ian Blair to pack it in is an understandable reaction to the position he finds himself in. He has been continually derided by the Tories, the Evening Standard and other right wing media.

 In the jaundiced eyes of these editors he may as well have pulled the trigger and shot Jean Charles Demenez himself.

Boris Johnson imposing himself as the chair of the metropolitan police authority in a quite Putinesque way has made it clear that he does not want Blair as commissioner. This declaration is merely the expression of his party (and Johnson was supposed to be a maverick independent!). Tory claims that this has nothing to do with politics are gut wrenchingly laughable - no one believes that - but there is a more sinister side to this that goes to the very dark heart of the Tory concept of policing.

Tories believe that we would be better off with a strong national police run by a commissioner appointed by the home secretary. Police Authorities and the other apparatus of community accountability have a role but  a far more advisory one. This, of course, means that their current policy vogue of directly elected police authorities is a conditional arrangement; until the political appointment of the National Chief Copper. What the Tories want is a complete reshaping and separation between local policing and national policing. It is fine to give local forces, with democratically elected police authorities the powers around neighbourhood policing, crime prevention etc but he big game stuff aka organised crime, security and anything else that need to be cherry picked by the Home Secretary for political expediency, goes to a national force.

We know this to be true. Every Tory home secretary in modern times has given credence to it. For those of us who lived through the miner's strikes of the 80's who witnessed the ability of a government to use local police forces to fight a political battle would recognise the point. Local police officers in South Wales and Nottinghamshire were asked to step aside as others alien to the community and with very little respect waded in with baton and shield.

The Tories have, by taking London, by taking the Met and Ian Blair's head set out a game plan for the future. Blair, for all his faults, was a reformer and pioneer willing to challenge inertia, complacency and worse in the force. He recognised that a committment to equality was important and that effective policing requires public engagement and consent. The Tories, for all the preaching, have a dreadful record on policing. Johnson's control of policing in London will expose the Tories rank authoritarianism as they begin to bury accountability, democracy and any sense of policing for and on behalf of the community.