Today's news is that the Home Office has decided to cut police pay, particularly for new recruits. Earlier this week, it was revealed that the police is suffering a huge decline in the young intake and thus the police forces are becoming older. In short, it looks like police recruitment is in for a rough time and there is no way that the current members of the police can see this scenario as anything other than they are getting screwed. A more Machiavellian outlook would be that this is a deliberate change that so happens to benefit companies such as G4s who just so happen to be significant contributors to the Conservative party coffers...
I will declare that I am not a police officer nor do I have any particular interests to defend on this issue, but I cannot help but imagine that the police feel pretty hard done by. Having covered for the Olympics thus not had much holiday, suffered pay freezes and pension cuts and worried about being on the front line at the next set of riots, I don't expect they feel particularly benevolent to the government right now. Traditionally, the Conservatives used to be able to count on a decent proportion of the police to vote for them. I doubt very much that is true any more.
In fact, I am pretty confident that the coalition has rather significantly lost of the vote of most of the civil service too. They feel pretty screwed over too. And with recent news that business leaders are worried about the anti-EU rhetoric, as is the US, and it looks like the coalition are fast running out of support from most quarters, including areas that would traditionally have been counted upon for some support. Like the Republican party in the US, they are in danger of running out of 'angry white men', or Euro-sceptics as they are otherwise known in the UK!
When they were in power Labour were terrible for making policies and promises specifically geared towards shoring up their political support rather than promoting good government. There are countless examples of this and the result were a lot of promises that were not funded. The coalition seems to have gone completely the other way and while this can be argued as possibly a good thing, if a bit politically suicidal, I would find it hard to argue that they are making good policies and winning support either. Without the support, they have almost no chance of implementing their policies, good or bad.
This behaviour from a politician is pretty hard to explain, after all, most shallow politicians are willing to sell their soul to win at politics right? Labour certainly did and it successfully kept them going for 13 years. So when one examines the behaviour of the coalition government and their apparent suicidal approach to gaining votes a rather disturbing pattern emerges. All those polices (cutting police pay, reforming the NHS, selling off national forests, privatising defence procurement, etc) all by amazing coincidence benefit significant contributors to the Conservative party. A coincidence? It is just too widespread to be written off as a conspiracy theory. If you take the view that privately the coalition knows it was left with an impossibly unpopular mess to fix, it can be easily imagined that those at the top have lost their motivation to win more votes. Thus we should ask what motivates them to shape government policy and endure the gruelling hours and criticism that results? A rather wealthy life after the general election in 2015 perhaps?
Before David Cameron became Prime Minister, he said that lobbying will be the next political scandal. That has yet to properly happen and so that particular cow will be milked for all it is worth before the game is up. Recent news coverage also states that MPs think they are not paid enough. I actually agree and I think these two issues are linked. Politicians should get a pretty generous pay from the state on the condition that they do not have second incomes or outside interests. If they are not prepared to accept this, then maybe they should accept, and the electorate should insist, that a career as an MP is not for them at that time. My sincere belief is that British politics would be in a better place when this happens. Sadly it cannot happen fast enough.
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