News from the New Party

Standing idly by

Ten year old Jordon Lyon drowned trying to help his eight year old stepsister, who was in difficulties in a pond.  The two PCSOs who turned up at the scene failed to try to help Jordon - but instead called a "real" policeman.  Libby Purves draws the obvious but damning conclusion:

When Jordon himself dashed in to help his little sister he did not think: "Major incident, am I trained?" He just went for it. The PCSOs were, not to put too fine a point on it, less use than a brave ten-year-old. They were designed to be less use. They (and indeed many regular police) do not take lifesaving tests: given that thousands of sixth-formers do, it is hardly reassuring to know that chaps in fluorescent uniforms and policemanlike hats don’t.

And that’s the problem, and why Mr Owen had to say they "acted correctly". It’s the very correctness that is wrong. Many PCSOs are no doubt excellent and idealistic, but there is a gaping hole in the thinking that created them. Too much of their function is decorative ? the official line is "to deter criminals and reassure communities by their high-visibility presence". Unlike specials ? part-time volunteers fully trained and empowered ? PCSOs have very limited scope but high visibility.

The notion that PCSOs have any serious role to play has now been comprehensively torpedoed.  To continue to promote the idea that they represent a meaningful response to crime and insecurity in this country is to perpetrate a fraud on the general public.  If people are to take from this episode the thought that the emergency services are likely to be of no help, there will be many more Jordon Lyons in the future.

Yet it is not just PCSOs who are the problem.  The same rules effectively apply also to police officers and firefighters.  Melanie Phillips comments:

Police and fire officers, we are told with the straightest of faces, are not taught to swim or trained to save people from drowning. This apparently means that even if they can swim, they still have to fold their arms and stay put.

So when Sergeant Craig Lippitt, a regular police officer, attempted to rescue Jordon by stripping off and diving in without hesitation, he was actually breaking the rules. Last March firefighter Tam Brown, who rescued a woman from the River Tay, was informed he could face disciplinary action for doing so.

What on earth have we come to in this country, when attempting to save someone’s life might be considered a disciplinary offence - in occupations which exist for precisely that purpose?

The police and fire service jobsworths say that such rescue attempts might result in the death of the rescuer. True enough; such tragedies do happen. But if we all followed that reasoning, no one would ever try to save anyone from any danger at all.

And isn’t the whole point of paying people to be police and fire officers that they put themselves in risky situations - for which we expect them to be fully trained?

But it seems that precisely the same reasoning prevents them from being trained in the first place. Earlier this year, the Metropolitan Police were fined for breaching health and safety laws after two 14-year-old boys died at a children’s event in the swimming pool at the force’s training college in Hendon, North London.

Up to that point, all police recruits were taught to swim and many were trained in life-saving. But after that tragedy, the pool was filled in and all such training stopped. And the message then went out to all emergency services: take no chances.

It echoes another case in which, after a police officer fell to his death while chasing a suspect across a roof, the Met was prosecuted under health and safety laws. Although this prosecution failed, the police are now wary of chasing criminals in case they fall foul of the law by hurting themselves.

One might also mention the death of Vicky Horgan in Oxfordshire in 2004, where the Thames Valley police actually ordered their officers not to approach the scene until almost an hour after her killer was believed to have fled. 

All of this points to a generalised failure of nerve: a raft of legislation designed to protect the public is having precisely the opposite effect.  Health and safety legislation prevents the emergency services from acting to save children from drowning; the Human Rights Act which freed Anthony Rice, a convicted sex attacker who subsequently denied Naomi Bryant all of her human rights by murdering her.

Melanie Phillips remarks:

Such law has had an even more profound effect than fuelling the ruinous compensation culture. It has actually changed the default mechanism that governs assumptions about behaviour.

This is because it is based on the belief that rules governing behaviour have to be explicitly codified. This happens to run directly against the grain of the English common law, which holds that everything is permitted unless it is specifically prohibited.

This principle is the very basis of our liberty. It has allowed us to make pragmatic decisions which meet situations as they arise - otherwise known as the exercise of common sense.

Indeed - and it cannot even be claimed that our freedom is being sacrificed for the sake of order.  On the contrary, in place of freedom is a strange sort of anarchy - an anarchy ironically buttressed by mountains of legislation, and harnessed by miles of red tape.  An anarchy which manifests itself in the increasing doubts as to the reliability of our emergency services, and the absence of certainty that the Rule of Law will prevail.  The trust between citizen and state on which our freedom depends is eroding.  A cultural change is needed.  Quickly.