More bobbies on the beat, please!

Law and order is a crucial issue for me – and many people here in Suffolk.

As many regular readers of my column will know, I’m an unabashed libertarian.

For me, the individual is sacrosanct: they have inalienable rights that are neither granted nor legitimately taken away by collective entities, including the state.

It is right that individuals enjoy the security of such rights; the burden of proof always lying with those who would take these rights away, whether they be ones of thought, action or legitimately accrued wealth.

Decades of so-called liberal and socialist programmes have chiselled away at these fundamentals. Even after nearly a decade of nominally right-wing governments, the prevailing tendency among the British political classes is marked by the theft of the wealth created by productive people, more and more restrictions on voluntary interaction, and more and more challenges to property rights.

So the issue that concerns me this month is very crime-focussed: both in terms of the big crimes of the big state and the smaller, but still devastating crimes committed by individuals or gangs.

In spite of attempts to caricature the philosophy, libertarianism is not the same as hedonism or an ‘anything goes’ approach to life, regardless of the consequences.

Libertarianism looks for a society of liberty under the law, in which individuals are free to pursue their own lives so long as they respect the equal rights of others.

The primary role of the law and order function, mainly the police, is less the enforcement of the law per se (there are, as I’ve alluded to above, too many laws based on theft in any case), rather it is the maintenance of public order.

When public order breaks down, either at a micro level through the activities of one person or a few people or via many during civil disturbances or even riots, individual rights under the law are imperilled.

I believe that more emphasis needs to be placed on the police being freed up to preserve public order than jumping through the PR hoops dangled in front of them by Home Office civil servants or by having to address woeful failings elsewhere in the public sector, not least the education, mental health and public prosecution systems.

Here in Suffolk, we are more fortunate than most. In Tim Passmore, we have a police & crime commissioner who is bravely taking on vested interests who seek to tie up police resources in anything but the preservation of public order.

I fully support his campaign for fairer funding for Suffolk Constabulary that could result in Suffolk recruiting an extra 170 - 190 officers by the end of year 2022/3. It is excellent news that our new Prime Minister and Home Secretary now both recognise this. More good news for Suffolk.

We suffer in this county from a lack of equality in terms of police funding compared not only to large cities, but other rural areas just as public order is being tested to the limits by the proliferation of drugs gangs and the resulting violence.

Rising crime not only ruins people’s lawful exercise of their liberties, it degrades the reputation of places, leading to a reduction in business investment, jobs and overall economic activity and wealth.

Linked to that, I would like to see a continued use of stop and search, based on appropriate police intelligence, to target those people at the heart of the so-called county lines networks.

Tim has also been brave in channelling funding to the scourge of domestic violence which is in effect a form of public disorder.

That said, I would like to see some further reforms. Firstly, I do think a greater day-to-day police presence assists the reinforcement of their core public order role. So more bobbies on the beat, please!

Secondly, there is deep within the British soul a distrust of over militarism, the respect accorded to the members of our armed forces notwithstanding.

I think that the quasi-military uniforms adopted by the Suffolk Constabulary can be rather inflammatory to some and are not always conducive to their primary role. Perhaps a return to something more traditional, including the old-fashioned helmets might help?

At the same time, new technologies offer the opportunity to reduce the use of the police away from this public order function. For example, why not use drones to record vehicle crashes, allowing a swift identification of the causes without tying up too much police time and inflicting delays on hundreds or thousands of other motorists?

In short, I’d like to see a country and a county with fewer unnecessary laws and a lot more order.