Life On Mars

What a curate's egg is the Reform report into policing.

On the one hand, it says that the existing Forces are too large, that ACPO is "a self-perpetuating oligarchy" (it is also a nice little earner for its members, and a public nuisance with its campaigning to liberalise the drugs laws and other things), and that SOCA is a waste of time (it also has a ridiculous logo, more suitable to a breakfast cereal packet).

But on the other hand, it pretty much wants the Met to take over the policing of the entire country where everything above the traffic control deemed within the capabilities of non-London persons is concerned.

This attitude was explained as soon as the Reform spokeswoman, who sounded about 12, came on the Today programme. She had the sort of accent with which one assumes that someone like Euan Blair would speak, complete with the tiresome habit of intoning every sentence as if it were a question. Not, in other words, a person to be taken too seriously. And duly eaten for breakfast by the Wolverhampton councillor on the other side.

A report calling for a return to preventative policing based on foot patrols, with budgetary sanctions against recalcitrant Chief Constables who failed to implement this. For Police Forces at least no larger than at present, and subject to local democratic accountability, most obviously though Police Authorities, but if appropriate by means of elected sheriffs.

For the abandonment of identity cards, control orders, the admission of anonymous evidence other than from undercover Police Officers, the provision for conviction on anonymous evidence alone, the existing erosions of trial by jury and of the right to silence, the existing reversals of the burden of proof, the provision for majority verdicts (which, by definition, provide for conviction even where there is reasonable doubt), the provision for Police confiscation of assets without a conviction, stipendiary magistrates, Thatcher's Police and Criminal Evidence Act, the Civil Contingencies Act, the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Act, and the Official Secrets Acts.

For the minimum age for jurors to be raised at least to 21. For the pre-1968 committal powers of the magistracy, and the pre-1985 prosecution powers of the Police, to be restored. For each offence carries a minimum sentence of one third of its maximum sentence, or of 15 years' imprisonment where that maximum sentence is life imprisonment.

For a single category of illegal drug, with a crackdown on the possession of drugs, including a mandatory sentence of three months for a second offence, six months for a third offence, one year for a fourth offence, and so on.

And for a Bill which ran out of parliamentary time to be lost at the end of that session.

Now that would be a report worth reading. And implementing.

No such report will ever be produced by anyone who has the tiresome habit of intoning every sentence as if it were a question.