It’s taken a while, but as the Blair-Brown Empire crumbles, voices of common sense are slowly beginning to make themselves heard.
One of Britain’s most senior police officers, Peter Fahy, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, has launched a scathing attack on the Labour obsession with central control and has called for an end to the ‘performance target’ approach and a return to old-fashioned, proper policing.
He says that the obsession with performance targets prevents the police from doing their job effectively, buries them under a mountain of paperwork and undermines public confidence in the police force.
The Chief Constable wants to get away from the current system whereby police officers are shackled by administrative procedures, targets and paperwork and can only react to situations rather than actually tackling crime directly.
In the past, those expressing such opinions were generally shuffled into earlly retirement, but the times seem to be changing at long last, although it will, one suspects, take many more voices and quite a long time before public confidence in the police force can be restored. The damage caused by New Labour and it’s desire to become ‘Big Brother’ runs deep.