HOW LABOUR WILL DEAL WITH POLICE AND OTHER INEFFICIENCIES

In observing the current Alice-Through-the-Looking-glass world of "New" Labour, I will make some predictions as to how this monstrous waste of police time is tackled:-

Jacqui "Let's fine everybody £1000" Smith our lights-out-but-nobody's-Home-Secretary-of-the-Week will announce the formation of a new Quango, the Police Regulation Attainment Taskforce (PRAT).

PRAT will then immediately take on 500 staff to carry out an "extensive reappraisal" of police functions via a 200 page survey on each and every PC, PCSO and civilian staff.

In addition, all officers at any level will have to fill out an additional PRAT form for every arrest or stop, that will be used to assess the effectiveness of current forms as well as the efficacy of the new PRAT form.

It will become mandatory for local police chiefs to then collate this information on a monthly basis, via a new team of PRAT-monitoring officers in order to feed this via PRAT-Central to a new department within the Home Office and thence to a new junior PRAT-Minister reporting directly to the Home Secretary.

Needless to say, there will be pressure for widening the scope of PRAT to include the Justice Ministry and any other departments that have any form of contact with policing.

Therefore PRAT will demand that similar operations are set up within other ministries.

The result should be that once all appropriate ministries have their own PRAT ensconced, it should theoretically allow all PRATs to liase on a common basis to work to a common goal of putting PRATS at every level of government from parish councils upwards.

Due to system incompatibilities and intense jockeying between departments, coordination could be difficult, with the result that PRAT will require a overarching and dedicated Police Ministry to be set up and that will be separated from the Home Office. The new Department of Police Executive (DoPE) will be a cabinet level portfolio with the creation of the new post of DoPE Secretary and for which there are any number of experienced potential DoPEs on the government benches

With the inevitable difficulties and cost overruns and implications, the Prime Minister will then take "Personal Charge" and will appoint a well connected lawyer or think-tank head to lead a coordinating body the Central Response Action Panel (CRAP) that will deal with all of the PRATs in government and pull together the disparate information allowing the lights-on-but-nobody-Home-Secretary-of-the-Week to conclude that the police are seriously understaffed to deal with day to day policing and that a new body be set up to work with the police to try to identify the problems by 2050 etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc........... or until the Sun goes nova, whichever is the latter...

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