Although he deftly side-stepped the question during this week’s emergency debate, David Cameron and his aides are acutely aware that cross-party pressure is growing for a Royal Commission into policing. It has to be said that this unashamedly lobbied option represents a handy recourse for MPs eager to be regarded as simultaneously pro-reform and pro-police by their constituents.
The problem, as Cameron himself remarked on Thursday, is that Royal Commissions have the ability to “take minutes and go on for years”; which is probably exactly what the Police Federation has in mind. An equally ticklish aspect from the PM’s perspective is that once a Commission gets started it is difficult (if not impossible) for the government to stop it. Including a practical finish date within any terms of reference therefore would be big consideration.
As for being any sort of solution, some will doubtlessly point to the Wakeham Commission which looked at length into reform of the House of Lords in 2000 and the inaction that followed publication of its key recommendations.
The smart money says that Cameron will need to be put substantially more on the back foot before agreeing to even consider kicking police reform into the long grass. The former PR man is also aware that it only needs a couple of ‘new’ press revelations of further collusion in hacking victims’ phones before the current high levels of public empathy for the police start to wane. Just as importantly, the Fed know it too.
2 Comments:
Never underestimate the power of the force.
I think that Cameron is keeping the Royal Commission option (or some sort of bastardized version) in his back pocket. The polls show that the police are currently held in far higher esteem than the government and the Fed and ACPO know just how to exploit this situation. Ministers were caught sunning thier fannies in Tuscany whilst London burned and it will take a lot more than sound-bite references to a "slow motion meltdown" to make people forget.
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