The New Police Commissioner

[sparkindarkness]

 

I voted and the guy I voted for didn’t get in.

 Actually, that’s not strictly accurate. One of the guys I voted against got in. Since I didn’t vote for anyone, not liking any of them but felt I had to vote to try and keep out some of the vileness on the ticket.  The fun part is that I was supposed

 My choices were:

 The three main parties

 1 – a Labour Bloke (Prescott himself)

2 – A Tory (I will slowly feed my arm into a blender and serve the puree that forms as a ridiculous smear on a plate and serve it in Michel Roux’s restaurant before voting Tory).

3 – A Lib Dem (after the last election, I’m more likely to vote Tory than vote Lib Dem).

 Then there was a UKIPer – yeaaah not going to happen. UKIP is the BNP and EDL with better press, I don’t vote far right fascist.

 And the independents:

An ex-police big-wig whose website had “read more” and a damn PDF download EVERY SINGLE PAGE! Seriously, you clicked on a link and got a page that said “what I will do as Police Commissioner” then a link to a PDF download. Some of them were only a paragraph long! Anyway, style aside it was a lot of waffle and amounted to “I was big boss policeman so I’m ideal to run big boss policeman now let me convince you I’m going to make changes despite having the power to do so in the past and not doing so”.

 A candidate whose site informed me time and again how much he hated party politics (give me money) and party politics is wrong (give me money) and we need less party politics (give me money). Shame it didn’t tell me why his politics are better. Or, indeed, what those politics were. Also, really awful website

 And an ex-Tory MP who is an executive member of the Freedom Association. Who are basically rather nasty libertarians. Among their record of nastiness is opposing boycotts of Apartheid era South Africa. They want to starts a British branch of the American Tea Party Movement.

Awwww Hell no.

 

 Behold, democracy in action folks! Then they wonder why turnout was so low?

 Well not just because of the candidates but, without google, who can tell me what the Police Commissioner actually does? What are they supposed to change? What are they supposed to achieve?

Right, now, other than cost money, what changes do you think this role will actually make?

And it's not like they made an effort to broadcast the election - there are people around me who had no idea what a police commissioner was and the first they heard of it was their polling cards arriving