Has she lost the plot?

Jacqui Smith seems strangely to fail to understand what is happening. In an interview with the Guardian about why she withdrew her half-baked proposal for elections to police supervisory boards, she displayed at best naivety and at worst dishonesty.

According to her the Tories are trying to turn policing into a politcised area, something we would all oppose, I imagine. She claimed that this was the reason why she had not succeeded in getting he proposals through.

Her evidence is firstly that the Tories have brought politics into policing over the Damien Green business. This is strange, as it was her party, the government, that prevented an immediate investigation into what occurred. If this investigation, with cross-party support had gone ahead, we could have known soon whether the Tories were right, that political considerations had dictated the police actions, or whether they were quite wrong, that there were genuine national security issues.

Given what we know already, the police were called in (and instructed to act?) over a national security issue by a senior civil servant acting, at least in broad terms under government instruction to deal with leaks. If there were genuine security issues, this could have been confirmed and an appropriate investigation held.

Secondly, her evidence consists in insisting that Boris Johnson sacked Sir Ian Blair. This in itself is not true, as he had no power to do so. He may have made his opinion clear to Blair, but in theory Blair could have carried on.

What her two points have in common is the concern of the petty tyrant that diktats are not being enforced, but more important it is the attempt to impugn others' motives over something the tyrant is probably guilty of herself. In other words, it is permissible for government to extend its powers in an extra-democratic way, to appoint cronies and scratch their backs or to use the police to threaten members of the opposition, but it is not right for opposition to engage in party politics.

And to be fair to her it does all tie in with he complaint about police reform, but not in the way she suggests. Some of us want democratic control of police, and we are suspicious of Home Office or government control over local forces. This is our chief complaint about the police, and the reason why we are losing respect for them, that they are behaving in a way laid down by London and by political correctness, rather than policing in a way which reflects local needs and wishes.

We would go further than her timid proposals. We would take control of the police away from the Home Secretary, and make the police responsible and accountable to local people. With election of commissioners coming round regularly to prevent politicisation. Above all we would remove control for distant and unknown regional politicians.