As predicted, Thursday's rare House of Commons appearance of unity in condemning the rioters without too much political jostling for position hasn't lasted long. The mirages of potential glories from grandstanding and being "more aware of the sociological causes than thou" are just too strong.
Ed Miliband sees a great opportunity to offside David Cameron as being uncaring, out of touch and all those things by promising that if the Government does not hold an enquiry into the origins of the riots then the Labour Party will. Maybe he's overlooked the fact that most of the young participants spent their formative years under the 1997-2010 Labour governments but we can safely assume that any Labour "enquiry " would gloss over this small fact and instead home in on the evil "cuts" its successor has had to introduce in the last 15 months to try to erase the ongoing annual structural spending defecit generated during those years. Transparency is a great thing but Ed is so transparent as to be totally see-through.
Away from the whinges of the Opposition but in tune with them are other groups who are trying and will continue to try to ride the riots as evidence of the need to avoid cuts. Sadly amongst them are currently some Police leaders who are risking their required political neutrality by indulging in a little light " We got it right, the politicians were on holiday and we ourselves changed tactics at the right moment" banter. Nice try but very clearly the Police, for all the bravery of many individuals, did not get the first two or three nights right. Their primary duty has to be to defend life and property and say what they might, they failed to do so. Once they did follow Manchester's lead and literally crack down on the out of control young it was very quickly game over. To then say that effective policing is threatened by cuts (only in fact to 2002 manpower levels in fact) is nonsense. Their real problem is that as in many other areas of the public sector and ex public sector, a myriad of "Spanish practices" -a term probably unfair to the Spanish,- has grown up adding cost and undermining numbers and effectiveness on the front line. Amongst these, rostering, overtime and how it is calculated,allowances and manning levels (how often do you see a solitary policeman?) are all in need of thorough examination and overhaul. The numbers are and will be adequate,- it's what they actually spend their time doing that's the problem.
This would be a much better nettle for Ed to grasp. He could join in working on a total redesign of public sector effectiveness and the working practices, manning levels and reward systems to make it deliver more at lower cost. The private sector has been doing this for a good thirty years and much more if you read some company histories. Unfortunately it is a total no go area for his paymasters, the Union barrons who effectively control Labour Party policy. One very useful byproduct of the disturbances will therefore go untackled by the Party and instead they will wander in the wilderness of urban deprivation while denying that their own legacies of poor education standards,working hard at school being uncool and a bullyable offence in some communities have anything to do with it. They will simply carry on saying that welfare dependency and the rest are not great problems or that they do not exist at all. For all their expressions of reasonableness and wishing to genuinely find solutions there is only one scapegoat they are really after, -"The cuts". They may throw in bankers and a few others as well but the cuts are the real target. Labour benefits if they can prevent the government carrying on with defecit reduction and showing that balancing the books has happened and begun to work by the time of the next General Election in 2015. For this reason Cameron may well have to head off Labour's own enquiry by announcing a government sponsored one. In that case Ed will just have to make do with claiming it was he who forced a reluctant Cameron to hold it. That way he would hope to achieve some good PR with the expenditure of very little effort. Another brief chapter in the everyday story of political folk. Just don't look for any integrity here.
Just two more weeks of the holiday "silly season" to go. Then we get onto the even sillier one. It's called Party Conference time.
