Crime-cut bollocks, Newscorp double-agents, Plebgate stings, and guilty MPs:
The usual suspects won’t be rounded up – as usual.
The main headline on the Sunday Times front page last weekend asserted, ‘Crime falls 10% despite police cuts’. This is demonstrably untrue, highly unlikely to continue, and based on a dubious definition of crime. But it is just one more piece in the disturbing jigsaw of injustice that pervades politics today: what precisely is going on here between the police and the Government?
Delve into the Newscorp/Camerlot crime-cutting claim, and it very quickly starts to fall apart. First, these figures are provisional: the full like-for-like reporting figures will not be available until next April. Second, the falls of 10% are an average, and have only occurred in under half (19 out of 43) of the police forces analysed. No explanation is given as to why the other 24 weren’t included, and no data is being released about what happened there.
Third, we have all grown to distrust police figures, which often reflect Westminster priorities….especially if ambitious police constables are in charge of them. In October 2011, Plod was accused of air-brushing out some crimes from the previous period. (A riot during which 100 looters trashed a shop, for example, had been treated as ‘one crime’).
Fourth, the weasel word ‘recorded’ is, as ever, present. Literally tens of thousands of white collar and City crimes are never detected, let alone recorded….and many are not reported because the institution itself fears it may be found just as guilty as the perpetrator.
Fifth, the nature of crime is changing radically and swifty. City and commercial espionage is a massive growth area in which the police are rarely involved, with many software security firms handling the bulk of detection and prevention. Almost none of this crime is reported. Cash-card ID fraud is also growing exponentially: the only reason muggings and burglary are falling is that they are no longer worth the risk: ID offences are easier to commit and harder to trace.
Ultimately, however, the illogic of the Government’s response to these ‘data’ is precisely the same as that put forward by Tessa Jowell five years ago when preliminary results showed that 24/7 drinking ‘reduced’ drunk & disorderly offences. Not only were the data scant (and later overturned) A&E admissions were very clearly going up. It is plain daft to suggest now that cutting police numbers reduces crime: on that basis, we might as well abolish the police and watch crime disappear.
But broader issues continue to worry me about this issue. And by ‘issue’, I mean the entire subject of what the police do, what they are very obviously ill-equipped to do, and why this odd Plebgate affair feels more and more like a sting from one side or the other. Further, once again Newscorp is in there – the only newspaper to which the figures were revealed: why?
There are three very obvious areas that the Government would like to see Plod ignore: City crime, media crime, and systemic sex abuse crime. As to the media side of things, suspicions are growing in some quarters that the Conservatives set the police up to be caught over Plebgate…with the active assistance of Murdoch. Having been double-crossed by Newscorp over first the leak about Mitchell’s Downing Street altercation and now these crime ‘fall’ figures, the Met will think twice about feeling any more Wapping collars. Equally disturbing, however, is the obvious evidence suggesting that as far as tentacular influence and prosecution immunity are concerned, it’s back to business as usual in the Murdoch empire.
Systemic sex abuse in childcare homes is an area where several senior cops feel strongly that there have been cover-ups, and the Force should’ve done more. Some of them in turn, however, claim that word has come down the line to continue focusing on ‘apparently powerful’ public figures…the more from the BBC, the better. This too plays right into Murdoch’s hands, while maintaining calm in both major Parties that it will distract from endemic Westminster and Town Hall paedophilia.
Once again Tom Watson stands alone in the Commons on this issue, silent for the time being. Do not be surprised if he suddenly becomes the victim of smears and stings set up by a motley alliance of security collaborators and Newscorp tabloid hacks. We have seen the influence of former security officers in the care system cover-up before…as well as hack threats of retribution aimed at MPs during the Hackgate affair.
But it may well be the City dimension of crime where the Conservatives have most to protect and hide. The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is not formally part of the police, but once things get ‘political’, it is usually very quick to call Plod in. Like the BBC over Iraq, the SFO attracted the wrath of the political class when it uncovered massive evidence of bribery paid to Saudi officials during a BaE deal in 2004. But it was the police who pushed things on, resulting in a blatant perversion of justice by Tony Blair in 2006 to get the investigation stopped. Ever since, the SFO has been quietly starved of the funds it needs to investigate small matters like rigging Libor, or the alleged dabblings of ‘The Insider’ Piers Morgan in the stock markets.
There are several people at or near the top of the Coalition Government (and one or two Labour elder statesmen) who would like both Operation Fairbank (the Met’s successor to Yewtree) and Operation Pallial (the North Wales care home investigation) discreetly scaled down. In turn, they want the trials of Rebekah Brooks and Andy Coulson to represent closure of the Hackgate affair. And finally, they are uneasy about any hint of future SFO/police involvement that might embarrass the Party further via its City links.
This group is said to include Jeremy Hunt, Michael Fallon, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson, William Hague, a Plymouth MP, two very significant Party donors, and the Prime Minister himself. They are indeed the usual suspects, but there is no sign of anyone being rounded up: only the rounding down of crime figures in a Murdoch title is in evidence thus far.
I’ve spent the last ten days trying to piece this jigsaw of influence and privilege together, and my frank view is that I’m still miles from sorting it out: almost certainly, nowhere near all the right motives have been uncovered in this piece. But The Slog has always maintained that libel-free speculation is a perfectly good journalistic tool: as the City boys are fond of saying, you have to speculate to accumulate.
So think of this as me trying to leverage the amount of jigsaw pieces in my possession. If you have anything to tell me, write in the strictest confidence to jawslog@gmail.com
Otherwise, stay tuned.
The Slog 