I wanted to wind back to this but I've edited to concentrate on the issue of the Met Commissioner's responsibilities and accountability
Jdsk wrote: ↑14 Feb 2022, 7:31pm
(.....)
The accountability of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police is different from that anywhere else in England.
]If the national and local responsibilities of the MPS were separated this would be much easier.[/b]
thirdcrank wrote: ↑14 Feb 2022, 7:44pm
This is one of the first, if not
the first signs I've seen across the several Cressida threads that anybody sees that change is going to be needed, but I think it will need to go a lot further than eg hiving off things like royal and diplomatic protection to the National Crime Agency.
As with so much else in our society, changes occur through drift, rather than a clear decision and the current control of the Metropolitan Police is an example of that. The background is that London had the first police force and London is the largest conurbation in the UK so it has always had the biggest police force. Simples. London is the political centre of the country (not the universe as some seem to believe) so the Metropolitan Police under its Commissioner has naturally had responsibility for protecting all the people like royalty, diplomats, and ministers, and places like the London palaces, high commissions and embassies, and Downing Street. Again simples. And the secret squirrel squads - not simple at all.
The benefits of having it all under one roof, have to be weighed against the sometimes conflicting demands of general policing - protecting the general public - as against the protection of VIPs.
Among what I see as the problems are giving the impression that those doing this work are "ordinary bobbies." Another is that the costs of security are partly buried in policing budgets. What seems to have happened recently is that the more the specialist protection people have specialised eg permanent, prominent arming with firearms, the more that has detracted from the perception of normal policing.
These drifts are long-term - occurring gradually over almost two centuries, but they have come to a head over Partygate: those performing protection duties in Downing Street have apparently not been carrying out the admittedly abnormal enforcement of lockdown rules expected of the normal police. This has highlighted the imo untenable situation in which the Met Commissioner is accountable to both the Home Secretary and the Mayor. This shouldn't really come as a surprise: when he was Mayor, Boris Johnson got rid of an openly defiant Ian Blair, apparently because of his being too close to the other Blair, or at least New Labour.
Whatever the problems of implementation, it seems the change is overdue. As I said above, I think it will need to go a lot further than just this. The initial aim should be to create clear lines of political accountability not least to give the Mayor more clear responsibility for policing in the capital. IMO, Most of the other changes - to reverse the drift in policing methods - affect E&W as a whole
(This may seem incredible but I've tried to keep that concise.)
