Shroud waving? 07 July 2010

When someone of the standing of John Yates, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and its counter-terrorism chief, gives a warning about what cuts to his budget will mean you would think we would all take heed. When he tells his colleagues in ACPO of £150m cuts to the counter-terrorism budget and that this could result in greater danger to the public we should all be concerned shouldn't we?  And when he says some of his current number of counter-terrorism officers will be sent back to their home forces and the public would have to accept a higher level of risk as a result, we should all look for a less dangerous alternative - right?

Wrong - at least if you are Cabinet Office Minister Francis Maude.  Without any apparent in-depth examination of Yates' assertions, Maude immediately accused him of "shroud waving".  I didn't know what "shroud waving" meant so I looked it up. One of the best definitions I found has it that:

Shroud waving is when someone says that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong because, "they don't know what I know and have not seen what I have seen."

Was that what Yates was doing or was he simply giving his professional view of the results of cuts to his budget?  Maude apparently said, "The obligation that rests on all of us is to make damn sure that we take the cost out to the maximum extent possible out of our internal processes, [and] not alarm the public with that kind of talk."  He also said, "It's going to be pretty important for people who are managing big public services like police forces to focus on cutting out unnecessary costs, driving down costs, being as efficient as they possibly can before they even begin to contemplate talking about alarming the public in this kind of way."

That's maybe where I went wrong, I thought the obligation on John Yates was to keep us safe from terrorist attack; I thought he was a police officer but maybe he's actually an accountant!  As a member of the public I want to know what cuts to vital services will mean.  Politicians surely cannot be saying that they don't want to hear from professionals about the implications of cuts. Is it to be cuts no matter what the result?

Mr Yates was doing precisely what he should be.  He should be pointing out to politicians the operational policing implications of the proposed cuts. None of us are in any doubt about the dire financial situation and that cuts are going to be required.  We have people to do the accounting and rightly so, yet too many of our supervisors and leaders are still doing far too much statistic gathering and accounting and not enough operational policing.

Politicians cannot say they have ring fenced budgets for health and overseas aid and that everything else is going to have to take an across the board share of the pain.  They cannot expect us all to be happy about it or meekly accepting of it and further prioritisation and hard decisions are going to be necessary. Mr Yates was providing the type of information politicians will need before making these hard decisions.  He apparently gave Government Officials the courtesy of a pre-delivery copy of his speech and they cleared it. Mr Maude clearly was not advised of that and clearly didn't give Mr Yates the courtesy of a hearing before throwing around allegations of shroud waving.

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