By David Webb
It is rather galling during the recession to read of telephone number payouts to senior police officers–who are, in all cases, individuals who have allowed high levels of crime to flourish. None of them has sought to return the low levels of crime that were normal until the 1960s to British streets. Yet they are not so remiss when it comes to picking up their own emoluments.
The former Met Commissioner “Sir” Paul Stephenson had to scrape by on £276,588 per year plus pensions and benefits that took his package to £299,377. I have not been able to find out what pension entitlement he has accrued, but with his total package more than £20,000 in excess of his pay, it is fair to presume around £20,000 a year has been taken from taxpayers to fund a pension that will keep him in luxury until he expires.
We haven’t been told how high his expense claims were, either, but no one will be surprised if they amounted to a small salary in themselves. Now today we read that the poor soul–having been forced to resign for accepting a £12,000 five-week stay in a luxury health spa, which was exposed as part of the News of the World investigation–has received a large payoff. He shares a £500,000 payoff with another officer (anti-terrorism chief, John Yates, whose emoluments were on a similar level, but slightly lower than Stephenson’s). It is fair to assume, as the senior officer of the two, that Paul Stephenson is receiving at least £250,000 as a payoff, effectively a reward for having allowed his police work to become intimately connected with media outfits like the News of the World.
What has any of this got to do with keeping the streets safe? I would like to see Paul Stephenson and John Yates punished via a retrospective law classifying these awards, which are currently perfectly legal, as “embezzlement” of public funds. And before anyone says that retrospective laws are bad, the Stephen Lawrence case has shown that all respect for proper constitutional procedure has long gone in this country. What about the people authorising these awards? I would arrest them for conspiracy to commit theft of public funds–diverting public funds to ends not authorised by parliament–with retrospective legislation as required to move the goalposts and ensure a conviction. We can all play the game of retrospective justice–and in this case, the conviction would be deserved.
Why are we paying to fund these people’s lifestyles in the first place? This is worse than the behaviour of the French aristocrats before the French revolution! If the council tax were abolished, I would like to see every estate set up an elected committee to manage security: all those who chose to pay what they were previously paying in council tax to fund a private security firm to patrol the estate would have access to a 999 emergency policing number. Those who didn’t pay would be outlaws: they would be responsible for their own security (and could bear arms in their own defence). I am living in a small house and I pay only £70 a month in council tax, every penny of which I resent paying. Now, if on the average estate of, say, 100 people, they were all paying £70 a month, I believe £7,000 a month would be a sufficient sum with which to finance a round-the-clock patrol of an estate of only 100 adults. Burglaries, criminal damage and anti-social behaviour would become almost non-existent.
True, housing estates are not the only locuses of crime, but as much of the cost of policing is provided for apart from the council tax, then the government could be left with responsibility for policing shopping centres or railways themselves. Businesses that agreed to fund private security for their shopping centres could be exempt from the uniform business tax. This way, the money we pay would be monitored at the grassroots level and not dissipated on large managerial structures.
I am sick of the “help yourself” mentality in the public sector. While the current recession has not been a boon for me in many ways, I often wish we could have a real slump, with collapse of the euro and the banks and all, in order to force the government to cut the slack it will not address at present. As Lenin said, the worse, the better! Bring it on! It is the only way I can see of cashiering the public-sector looter.
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
