PCC election should be open to all candidates (From Salisbury Journal)

PCC election should be open to all candidates

11:46am Thursday 6th September 2012 in Postbag

SO now we are told that we have two ‘political’ candidates for the post of police commissioner. The Labour candidate has had the obligatory £5,000 deposit paid by that party and we are not allowed to know who has paid the same deposit for the Conservative candidate.

What is more alarming is that any independent candidate would need to find a £5,000 deposit just to stand - ten times the amount necessary for parliamentary elections. And if that candidate achieves less than five percent of the vote that money will be lost.

And remember that the Labour Party opposes the introduction of police commissioners anyway.

This particularly manipulative process has been designed to keep out any candidate who might ask awkward questions about the management of our police force and thus embarrass the local authority, the Home Office or both.

An election of this kind should be freely open to all candidates whatever their financial status. It purposely isn’t. Only by refusing to vote can we demonstrate our distaste for this contrived process and for any candidate who will be foisted upon us as a result.

ERIC G HART, Salisbury

• POLICE and Crime Commissioners (election November 15) will be politically elected officials. They will swear an oath which, though promising to “serve the people” and be “held to account by the public”, leaves out allegiance to the Queen and her subjects, unlike the police. The police are servants of Her Majesty and thus the people, not Parliament.

As chief constables appear evermore political themselves, isn’t the real purpose of this new officialdom not just to replace the police authorities with as many new members but to ensure political line-toeing such that police control falls firmly in the hands of the Prime Minister ?

We are increasingly to serve the state, which is governed by an “elite” believing themselves above the law. The state is the law and it heavily influences the papers and TV media. Our children are state brainwashed by state syllabus and the state spies on us with “security”

cameras and telecom surveillance.

Isn’t political control of the police another step in our mushrooming police state?

REX POULTON, Salisbury