When the police want the right to strike you know something has gone badly wrong.

Evening all; under plans contained in the Windsor review the lot of a policeman (or woman) soon really won’t be a happy one.

The Police Federation is to ballot its 135,000 members on whether they want the right to strike in response to government plans for a 20% cut in funding for the service and the widest ranging reforms of how it operates for thirty years. Included in this is the suggestion, made in the Windsor review that Chief Constables should be able to make officers redundant to cut costs.

The review says that for some staff associations, including the Police Federation, the absence of the right to strike is seen as the reason for protecting their members from the risk of compulsory redundancy. It challenges this claim citing as an example the armed forces, members of which don’t have the right to strike but can be made redundant.

Speaking about the review to the BBC this week a spokeswoman for the Home Office said ‘We must tackle the deficit and police forces need to play their part in making savings. We believe this can be done whilst protecting front line services.’ She added that the government would ‘consider the proposals in the independent Windsor review carefully, ensuring that the remuneration and status of police officers continues to reflect the important work they do.’

Even by the impressive standards set by the civil service this statement lifts mealy mouthed piety to a truly Olympian level.

The Police Federation, the national committee of which unanimously supports its members having the right to strike, will hold a rally before its conference in May so that, as a statement says, ‘police officers, friends, families and supporters can show the strength of their feeling against the budget cuts being applied to policing and the consequences for public safety.’

If you dress to the left politically there is something deeply ironic about the idea of the police going out on strike. Who will ‘kettle’ the people who usually do the ‘kettling?’ Maybe they’ll have to take turns at beating themselves up on the picket line.

Facetiousness though shouldn’t blind the left or anyone else to the seriousness of what this means. The idea of the police going on strike would only a couple of years ago have been unimaginable; now there is an outside chance of it actually happening.

There is a good reason why we pay police officers good salaries and generous pensions, because we also ask them to do the things we either can’t or won’t do. Not just the truly awful things like picking up the pieces (often literally) after road traffic accidents, but the niggling repetitive things like dealing with persistent anti-social behaviour or being a verbal punch bag for angry burglary victims who think the theft of their TV should be treated like the crime of the century.

These so called reforms will do nothing to make the police more efficient, in fact they could do irreparable damage to the service. Take 20% from the budget of any organisation and it will inevitably have to radically alter the way it operates, cut back on almost everything in order to continue delivering the most basic level of service, meaning that much of the work the police do to build links with often hostile communities will have to stop. As a result they will become an organisation that reacts to problems instead of trying to tackle their potential causes in a proactive way; a sure recipe for disaster.

If Chief Constables are given the power to make their officers redundant they will almost certainly end up doing so, just as once given the power to raise fees to £9,000 all but a handful of university vice chancellors did so. This is because these days such positions are often held by ambitious middle managers who can be easily strong armed by the accountants rather than people who understand the service their organisation delivers, be it teaching art history or catching criminals.

Incidentally saying that police officers should constantly live under the shadow of redundancy because soldiers, sailors and members of the RAF do is nonsense; one staggering act of ingratitude does not justify another.

These cuts are yet another example of the obsessive myopia afflicting the government; in the absence of anything resembling a vision for the sort of country they want Britain to be cutting the deficit at all costs has filled the resulting vacuum. This is allied with a uniquely Tory pig headedness that sees only policies that cause pain as being effective and equates a reasonable willingness to consider and change the course of your actions where appropriate as a sign of incipient weakness.

Perhaps after their epic year long battle over NHS reform the government thought the police would be an easier target for their cut at all costs tactics. In their fevered imagination they perhaps saw the late Jack Warner touching the brim of his helmet and stoically getting on with things, ours not to reason why, at least not to reason why when the orders are given by people who went to Eton and Oxford.

What a surprise it must have been for them to find out that modern police officers aren’t all cosy clichés; instead they’re professional men and women with an understanding of their value and the values they uphold. There is very little likelihood the police ever will go on strike, the fact though that they are willing to discuss the idea of withdrawing their labour should make a government that is increasingly remote and complacent think again about how and what it cuts.

Divorced from reality

Marriage is the best antidote to the ‘celebrity self obsessed culture we live in,’ according to Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith. He claims that ‘over the years the political establishment has frowned if mainstream politicians mention marriage’, because they are perceived to be ‘stigmatising those who are not married.

Not so brave ex army officer Mr Duncan Smith, he thinks marriage is marvellous and doesn’t care who knows it, as for claims that his comments are in any way critical of the unwed he, that, he says is an ‘absurd and damaging assumption.’

Marriage is, in his view, ‘about understanding that our true value is lastingly expressed through the lives of others we commit to,’ and so it is too, apart from all the times when it isn’t because marriages like casual relationships can be built on selfishness and exploitation as easily as more noble sentiments.

Keen to avoid being tagged as a finger wagging killjoy Mr Duncan Smith went on to say that government ‘cannot and should not lecture people or push them on this matter’ but that it could and should spend £30million on relationship support and removing the perceived prejudices against couples within the welfare system. All of which is fine so far as it goes, or it is if you happen to be ignorant of what else has been going on this week.

After all that was the week when Chancellor George Osborne announced the ludicrously named Project Merlin that will raise the amount of money clawed back from the banks from £1.7 billion to £2.5billion, saying that ‘now the banks know where they stand with taxation’. In keeping with the pantomime spirit of the moment the big city banks were reportedly ‘livid’ about the antics of Robin Hood aka Chancellor Osborne and ready to take their ball home to Hong Kong, Wall Street or somewhere like that.

It was all so much sound and fury signifying nothing very much at all, when a politician gives something a silly macho sounding name like Project Merlin you just know it is going to be a damp squib. That’s just what happened too, George Osborne was right that banks do know where they stand with this government, squarely on its throat since the biggest donors to Tory funds just happen to also be big noises in the city. Robin Hood and his merry men at the Treasury are where they have always been, in the pockets of big business; and they’re even flogging off the forest to the highest bidder too.

This was also the week when ninety Liberal Democrat councillors from across the country signed a letter to the Times saying that the cuts the government claims will bring down the deficit whilst protecting front line services are ‘structured in such a way that they will do the opposite.’ A point further strengthened by massive cuts to services and job losses announced by councils in Manchester and Birmingham.

All of which makes Iain Duncan Smith look rather silly, partly because of what he said; but mostly because of what his party are doing.

All but the most unreconstructed of Tory backwoodsmen, and probably even they admit it in private, recognise that marriage whilst a valid option is only one of a number of options. To privilege it above all others is anachronistic and impractical, human beings and their relationships have always been more various and complicated than narrow moralists would like us to think.

Far more dangerous is the way that well meaning relics of the old Conservative Party like Iain Duncan Smith are, like the handful of Liberal Democrats who haven’t yet sold their principles for a red box containing a mess of pottage, being used as human shields by David Cameron, George Osborne and all the other public schoolboys who wish it was still the eighties. Their irresponsible dismantling of society and the embracing of greed did untold damage to this country then, not least because it encouraged the Labour Party to ape many of their policies in as a means of regaining power; it could do much worse this time round.

Tories of the type Iain Duncan Smith represents have always eschewed grand political theories in favour of an old fashioned British commitment to fair play and an active conscience. These cuts are not in any way fair; so what does their conscience tell them to do about it?

What we should REALLY fear this winter.

This week the Trades Union Congress (TUC) held its annual conference in Manchester, for the first time in decades it seemed more like a living breathing political event than a historical curiosity.

In his keynote speech General Secretary Brendan Barber savaged the massive budget cuts planned in the spending review due to be unveiled this autumn saying they ‘will not only decimate the services we rely on but do untold damage to our economic prospects.’

As a result a post cuts Britain would, he said be ‘a darker, brutish; more frightening place.’ Unashamedly apocalyptic stuff that captured the very real fears of union members in the public sector and beyond that jobs and services are about to be slashed to the bone.

RMT leader Bob Crow was, as ever less modulated and more straightforwardly passionate in his call for union members to engage in ‘civil disobedience’ such as strike action timed to disrupt the party conferences and even sit down protests on the motorways. Needless to say the audience lapped it up, for the first time in years the trade union movement had rediscovered its roar.

Concerns were also expressed at their conference by Derek Barnett of the Police Superintendents Association that ‘in an environment of cuts across the wider public sector, we face a period where disaffection, social and industrial tensions may well rise.’ He called for police budgets to be protected from the harshest cuts to allow them to respond effectively to any rise in public disorder.

It should come as a surprise to nobody that the media responded to this with varying shades of alarm. All week we were treated to lurid tales of a return to the industrial unrest of the seventies and eighties designed to make our flesh crawl and, from the right field at least, to accept the line that only a return to the policies followed by Mrs Thatcher could save us from disaster.

I’m afraid I don’t buy it and I don’t think anyone else should either. Moral panic may sell papers but it does little or nothing to address the real dangers we face this autumn.

It is based, in part, on a faulty understanding of the way the unions operate in the modern world. Bob Crow’s threats of civil disobedience and something close to a general strike play well to the membership, they put a little fire into bellies and steel into the collective backbone for the fight ahead. That fight though, as Brendan Barber and many other union leaders know only too well will have to be fought using the tactics of the twenty first century not those of the 1970’s.

That means making a reasoned case for protecting growth for the long term over cutting the deficit now and not worrying about the long term consequences for individuals and communities. The trouble is that said case must be made to a government that is signally lacking in reason. A point amply demonstrated by Chancellor George Osborne’s conviction that £4 billion can be cut from the welfare budget without worrying about the consequences because the only people likely to be harmed are those who make a ‘lifestyle choice’ to live on benefits. His language and attitudes alike seem frozen somewhere in 1986.

The awful truth is that as it faces its worst economic crisis since the war Britain is led by a government that seems determined to do to the country’s economy what Godzilla regularly did to the Tokyo skyline at the prompting of an outmoded ideology. This development skilfully combines tragedy with pure farce because the driving force behind it comes from Eton, Oxford and the Bullingdon Club rather than the TUC, the RMT and the outer fringes of socialism.

Any cuts to public services must be made on grounds of principle alone.

At long last the cat is out of the bag, in his speech to the TUC conference on Tuesday Gordon Brown finally used the ‘C’ word, he said that if re-elected a Labour government would: ‘Cut costs, cut inefficiencies, cut unnecessary programmes and cut lower priority budgets.’

All well and good, but the real issue is the size of the cuts that would have to be made by any government after the next election, treasury documents leaked to the press this week suggest a cut of 9.3% over the four years from 2010. The only alternative to this, as suggested by the Institute for Fiscal Studies this week is a huge hike in taxes at the very moment when the economy is starting to take its first faltering steps towards recovery.

An IFS source told the BBC this week that the recession and the banking crisis could put ‘the tightest squeeze on spending on public services since the UK was negotiating its spending plans with the International Monetary Fund in the 1970’s.’

Predictably the Conservatives sought to make political capital out of the government’s embarrassment with shadow chancellor George Osborne saying that Gordon Brown had ‘misled’ parliament over spending cuts and David Cameron accusing him of being the prime mover in a long term ‘cover up’ of the extent by which the public purse strings will have to be tightened.

The Liberal Democrats, in the shape of their economic affairs guru Vince Cable, took a more high minded line criticizing the Tories for trying to make ‘a big political issue’ out of spending cuts that, he said, most people had known were imminent for months.

As sunny Jim Callaghan put it back in the seventies ‘the party’s over’, now we have to face the mess it created in the cold light of a hung over morning and it is not a pretty sight.

Over their twelve years in office Labour have splashed the cash in relation to public services often with the very best of intentions, but little idea of how to bring about the much needed reform of the public sector, matters weren’t helped, of course, by their inability to negotiate with the unions representing public sector workers.

Now the battered and bewildered government led by Gordon Brown must spend its last few months in office contemplating a question that will define political life in the UK for the next decade, what is to be cut and why?

It is, to say the very least, something of a curve ball thrown at a political class that long ago abandoned tricky subjects such as defining what it means to belong to the left or the right for media friendly sound bytes and a cosy seat on the fence.

The method favoured by Mrs Thatcher in the eighties of standing back and letting the markets fix the problem, or not fix it if that suited their mood has been proved a failure. Whole cities have been turned into little more than reservations for the disengaged with a disastrous knock on effect in terms of health problems and spiralling welfare costs, social problems that have become engrained over a generation will take the same length of time to cure and cost billions.

Cuts are an inevitable part of reducing a budget deficit that has been allowed, again for the very best intentioned reasons, to reach levels never before seen in peacetime by a government that is fast running out of time and energy. Whoever wins that next election must make them though from a standpoint of first having decided what services it wishes to preserve and how much pain we will all have to endure in order for it to do so.

Soaring levels of debt, deep social problems and a growing suspicion on the part of the electorate that the political class simply isn’t up to the job of governing the country are returning Britain to the status of the ‘sick man of Europe’ it held in the seventies. The cure will be painful in the extreme, but to work in must take the form of laser surgery not the brutal and often counterproductive butchery practiced by an eighteenth century barber surgeon who knows how to cut well enough, but must rely on trial, and often fatal, error in order to work out where to do so.