PFCC election choices: Rock, Paper….. and Gun???

Ah the local police fire and crime commissioner elections, lets be honest now, the run up to casting a vote in these relatively new political appointments do not tend to ignite the fires of passion within the locals. They are overshadowed by being paired with the local elections for ward Councillors, something that in itself can never hope to generate more than mild voter apathy and serve as a protest vote against the main governing party.

For most people, while you may at some point have need to email and pester your local Councillor about an issue of overflowing bins or potholes needing to be repaired, by contrast the chances are that you will never have any reason to meet or contact your local crime commissioner. Their role is one of oversight and governance of Police & Fire services, being responsible for the hiring of Police & Fire Chiefs to manage the day to day operations of each service.

Even if you ever have need to complain about either service, then it is the staff of the commissioner’s office who deal with it, the person actually elected being a relatively unknown entity to the average voter.

The upcoming choice for our new police fire and crime commissioner is further buried into relative obscurity by competing with far more entertaining online content, which pushes said content higher up the search results for anyone trying to get some background info on the candidates.

If you were to go and use Mr. Google to search 2^nd May, Police, Elections & Interviews, you would come across the now infamous 2^nd May 2017 interview by a politician wanting to get elected and setting out her stall by explaining her promises for Police officer recruitment. If you’ve never seen it before you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a parody skit by a comedian.

In years to come, much like John Prescott punching the man who threw an egg at him in 2001 or Margaret Thatcher pushing ahead with the Community Charge in 1989, this interview will live on as one of the biggest political gaffes during an election and is the very epitome of a car crash interview.

How on earth can a local election of such a politically obscure person ever hope to compete with that.

Well like everything else, here in the county of the People’s republic of Northamptonshire, we always try to buck the trend and do things slightly differently. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year then I’d wager that even those not normally engaged with politics have a good idea of who the incumbent PFCC of Stephen Mold is, due to his numerous gaffes and involvement in scandals that have made multiple national headlines on a regular basis throughout his tenure.

He succeeded in putting Northampton on the map by demonstrating how critical a role the PFCC is, by showing us just how much havoc one lone elected person can inflict on a town. Corrupt Police officers can only flourish if their actions are covered up by their senior officers who encourage and nurture a culture of wrongdoing, bullying and punishing those who speak up against it. Domestic abusers can only be stopped if their victims feel empowered enough to come forward knowing they will be believed. The victims having their abusers crimes covered up, with senior Police officers they report such crimes to, standing shoulder to shoulder with their abusers as best mates is just one example. This rotten culture all feeds down from the very top, so ensuring the PFCC actually holds the Chief of Police to account as he or she is supposed to is crucial. Currently we are seeing the kind of person that gets through when no vetting or basic checks are done prior to any appointment of a Chief Constable, with the PFCC then avoiding the awkward decision to sack the Chief, instead passing the buck.

The Fire Brigade must also not be overlooked in this, they too demand strong leadership, but from someone with experience of the job, ideally from having been at the sharp end. Having slid down a Fireman’s pole is not essential, but doing so helps to build a rapport with your teams you will manage.

The litany of failed fire appointments speak for themselves. The first appointment openly coming out and confirming they have no experience or knowledge of sliding down any poles, Fireman’s or otherwise and whose only experience of being on the job comes from a previous professional working relationship being under the commissioner as a monitoring officer.

The further appointment approaching the realms of parody, with the suspension and investigation by the IOPC of Police Chief Constable Nick Adderley as something to aspire to, has Nikki Watson, a former Deputy Chief Constable sharing not just a similar name and rank, but equally bringing with her, her own ongoing IOPC investigation making her unable to take up the role, one that she is notably lacking any experience of firefighting in.

The old adage of pay peanuts and get monkeys has a lot of relevance and mileage here. While we the good folk of Northants cannot pick and choose who our Police and Fire Chiefs are, we DO have the choice to put into post the person who can pick who they are, and also have the benefit of seeing the consequences of making a very bad choice when casting that vote. The current PFCC being said bad choice, with all of his decisions appearing to be motivated by nepotism. Even when a situation that needs to be dealt with is a mess of his own making, he shies away from making the difficult decisions needed to clean up his own mess, passing the buck to the IOPC to deal with Nick Adderley while we all foot the bill of what is now an 8 month suspension salary totalling £110,000 as of May 2024.

Quite simply, elect a bumbling buffoon into a position they are woefully incapable of and ye shall be blighted with a term of bumbling buffoonery.

Therein lies the difficultly, most people generally WILL happily vote a buffoon into office and excuse away the consequences due to tribal political thinking. You only need to look at 2 current sitting MPs of Diane Abbott and Chris Grayling, both vying for the title of biggest number of gaffes and embarrassing headlines, with their constituents voting them in not for their actual record, but because they will only vote for a certain political party. Voters mistakenly seeing this tribal dedication to one’s party as some form of loyalty is a very dangerous catalyst for empowering politicians to act as they please, and something I’d encourage you to consider thinking long and hard about before voting in this pivotal election for the county.

I am what you might call a swing voter, in that apart from the Greens who have never stood a candidate in any seat I could vote in, since 1999 I’ve voted for every major party in some capacity. I’ve had some red lines I couldn’t cross for a certain election. I wrote about them here in 2017 and my views seem to have stood the test of time far better than the named leader’s careers. This doesn’t mean I write them off totally and that I’d never vote for these parties, just they need to address certain issues in order to win me back as a potential voter.

My message of the moment is very much, for a local election, vote for the person and the policies, NOT the party!

So with that preamble out of the way we move onto our 3 choices, with a choice that mirrors most general elections options in terms of rock, paper, scissors, each party seeming better than the last on one policy pledge, but having an area where the next party outshines them in a never-ending circle, where no one party or candidate is overall superior to the others.

Or perhaps not?

Rock

We start with clenched fist of rock in the form of Danielle Stone, representing the Labour party.

I’ve never really come across Danielle Stone in her career as a Councillor to date, this is not a bad thing as I approach her record with a very open mind and no preconceptions about what she represents and what her approach to the role will be. Her background is mainly one of education outside of her politics. This is not an essential skillset for the role of PFCC, nor does it appear instantly obvious as a transferable skill to enable her to deal with managing Police & Fire services. That said having worked in the public sector in frontline services, I’d agree she has an understanding of how broken and bureaucratic the public sector is and she likely has experience of the challenges of trying to cut through all of that.

When I was a hiring manager for an investment bank living and working in Singapore, I used to have to review many CVs before interviews for staff that would work in my department, one where we supported traders and bank staff across the globe. One of the best candidates I ever interviewed and hired did not look the best on paper, but she was a really great all rounder, giving a great interview showing she could adapt herself into any role and leverage on her skills. This event 17 years ago still sticks with me now about not judging a book by its cover and taking the time to find out more about the person. So even if being a teacher in her 70s doesn’t instantly fit the bill, I wanted to give Danielle every opportunity to set her stall out and show me why she was deserving of my vote.

I listened to the hustings at Northampton Uni last week and took stock of some of what Danielle said. The role of PFCC is currently a political one and despite her mild comments about the role not needing to be political, she failed to say anything to convince me she truly wanted to change this. She is standing on a Labour ticket so I appreciate she has to represent the interests of the party funding her campaign and her deposit, however she mentioned Labour 5 times during the hustings when answering questions about the role and local issues. Many of these comments had no reference to anything she would have powers to change and appeared to be about what an incoming Labour government would do. I’ll accept having the PFCC as the same colour as the main party of government will create synergies and open up opportunities for local change, but we are not at that stage yet, so its both presumptuous and conflates issues for voters and encourages the very broad tribal voting I am so against.

On a personal level I made contact with her in June 2023 about my own issues with regards to Nick Adderley’s corrupt behaviour and Stephen Mold being aware and seeming to take no actions, appearing to be covering this up. This was all prior to Nick Adderley’s fraud being made public.

I didn’t tip my hand about everything I was sat on, but wanted to make her aware of the corruption issues and to gauge if she was worthy of my vote, by trying to determine what, if any actions she would take to appropriately sanction Nick Adderley if she got voted in.

The response was polite but felt ultimately dismissive telling me more of what she could not do, rather than taking on board the issues and at least feigning interest in changing them with what she could do. Very much a politician’s answer and not a great one at that.

I’ve since contacted her twice in October 2023 and more recently January 2024, again about issues relating to other lies Nick Adderley has told that were covered up by Stephen Mold to see if voting her into office would bring about any change.

Both of these emails were ignored which naturally impacted my opinion on how she would approach issues regarding corruption if she replaced Stephen Mold and I had to contact her in an official capacity as PFCC when she was a lot busier.

Currently she is not an absolute NO from me, but she has done nothing to win me over, making me actively want to vote for her in favour of someone else. At best if there was no other candidate that was better, rather than spoil my ballot, I’d probably be forced to vote for her, which in itself is hardly an endorsement.

Paper

While the name Emberson doesn’t immediate resonate with “paper” in the same way Stone does with Rock, regular scandals making the broadsheet & tabloid headlines have been pretty much synonymous with being a member of the local Conservative party in Northants over the past decade. Mold, Bone & Nunn have all made the headlines with tales of sordid activities, all toiling away under the banner of the Conservative party who happily support them.

I’m limited by what I can judge Martyn Emberson on as a prospective candidate, mainly because he is quite elusive and doesn’t seem to want to put himself to the test of public scrutiny, by refusing media interviews. He was originally going to be at the hustings with his opponents last week but cancelled at the last minute.

Rather than try to sort out a new date for the original various media appointments that he dodged and bumped, the Conservative candidate opted instead to appear to show distain for voters, and ditch any potential reschedule of attending any hustings.

Me personally, were I trying to win voters over, being the continuity candidate for someone with a track record so colourful and chequered it looked like a kaleidoscope had shat itself, I would have tried a little harder to reschedule my diary and face some questions.

Alas no, as it seems for the person put forward to replace Mr Mold, he opted to ditch the bump!

With this in mind it makes it hard to know what he would do if elected that would win my vote in favour of the others. I was considering rewarding his absence by giving him the Roy Hattersley treatment.

For anyone not of a certain vintage who might not get the reference, on Wednesday 2^nd June 1993, Roy Hattersley, the then Labour MP for Sparkbrook who had accepted the invitation from Have I Got News For You to take part as a panellist on the gameshow, cancelled on the morning of filming, leaving the show unable to source a replacement in time for transmission on Friday 4^th June. Being the 3^rd time this had happened the show went one step further than simply empty-chairing him, and instead replaced him with a tub of lard quoting that it was imbued with many of the same qualities.

To be totally fair to Martyn, his record at face value appears to be quite impressive in terms of the fire service, both having 34 years as a firefighter, with 9 as the Fire Chief in Northants. Perhaps if he loses the election he can consider stepping back into this role that we are in need of being filled.

Moving on from where he has been to where he is going, I have only his campaign leaflet and party soundbites over Twitter to try to determine what he might do that would make him the better choice.

His main campaign slogan includes the Tweet on 24th April with the very bizarre notion that Only a #Conservatives PFCC make Northamptonshire safer. Putting aside the caveman grammar, this is a line I could understand if they were saying Martyn personally can make the county safer than his predecessor, but this appears to be how only the party of Conservatives as a whole can do this. This is a strange position to take as they are currently the party in power, implying the county is NOT safe under them and only they can do better than themselves.

This line is repeated a lot on social media posts, such as the Tweet on April 19th in East Haddon, so is not just a one off typo to compliment the caveman grammar.

So the message I infer from this is vote Conservative to remove the current Conservative PFCC and put a Conservative PFCC into power who will make things safer than the current one.

Err right okay then.

How he will achieve this though does deserve a little more praise and recognition. He has promised in a tweet of April 13^th how he will write “A new Police, Fire and Crime plan in consultation with you”

The plan being written by the PFCC is a mandatory legal requirement. This means Martyn is committed to doing the bare minimum expected of him in accordance with the law, so much so that he thinks this is something to impress & woo voters.

When you consider Mold appointed his monitoring officer Nicci Marzec as Fire Chief without following the legal requirements to hold a confirmation panel, failed to discharge his duties by performing any checks on Nick Adderley’s background claims of joining the Navy in 1981 at the age of 14 and then fighting in the Falklands War when he was only 15 before appointing him TWICE, and then compounded this by failing to actually sack Nick Adderley when this all came to light, actually having a PFCC who WILL obey and follow the legal requirements that the role demands IS actually quite a step up from the current clown show of Stephen Mold.

When doing the bare minimum is both an improvement on the last candidate and seen to be worthy of making the limited character space on a Tweet as a potential vote winner, this really doesn’t inspire confidence. The fact his own Twitter account is locked down and he fails to put himself before any public scrutiny means he is a total unknown in terms of what we would be letting ourselves in for with him.

I can therefore only judge his suitability on the basis of those who put him forward as their choice, the very same people who never actually deselected Stephen Mold as a candidate, meaning had he not bowed to public pressure and stood down, he would be standing for election with the backing of the same people who now hold Martyn Emberson in the same regard.

Since the first PFCC election of May 2016 these same people who made up the local Conservative ran Northants County Council managed to beat all others and get ahead of the cost of living crisis by declaring insolvency in 2018, leading to the  biggest April Fools joke to date with the formation of 2 new unitary authorities of West Northants Council and North Northants Council coming into being on 1^st April 2021, all run by the same Conservative Councillors and seeming to be on the same trajectory as their predecessor.

West Northants Council up until earlier this month was fronted by Jonanthan Nunn, a man whose position on domestic violence made the news in Private Eye in 2 subsequent issues. Mainly due to his stance of framing the claims of the 5 victims who came forward to speak about his violence toward them as baseless, somewhat contradicting the message of the “it only takes one” event.

An event where WNC got £800,000 of central government money to spend encouraging victims to come forward assuring them they would be believed and listened to with their message “it only takes one person to say enough is enough to challenge the attitudes and inappropriate behaviours of some men.”

It would seem in the case of Nunn it does not only take one, in fact it actually takes far far more than one, as even five women coming forward is not enough for any of them to be believed.

Nunn has yet to comment on what the threshold is that needs to be reached before they can be be believed. The WNC website page is currently down, no doubt waiting for confirmation of the actual number of women it takes so it can be amended.

The archived copy showing all the central government money awarded to Nunn, Mold and their colleagues lives on thanks to the Wayback Machine.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220430060019/https://www.westnorthants.gov.uk/news/it-only-takes-one-campaign-tackle-violence-against-women

You might instantly cry out that Nunn has nothing to do with this election and my own words higher up the page were encouraging people to vote for people not party. I will stand by that statement and caveat it with looking at the character of the people both who you are voting for and who selected and backed them to go on the ballot paper. The very people who helped to select a local candidate have a very questionable record when it comes to how they approach wrongdoing and criminality of people in public office in their own party, not the best advert for putting trust in them to choose someone who will give suitable oversight to a service rife with corruption and scandal.

You just need to look at how, out of the pool of 63 Conservative Councillors in West Northants, only 4 took actions or spoke out against Jonathan Nunn when the 5 separate women came forward with historical allegations of violence against him.

The lady mayoress even came out publicly berating Cllr James Hill for doing so, asking where was his loyalty to a fellow Conservative, indicating that blind loyalty to your colleagues is what the party values most.

In the same way when Stephen Mold as the current PFCC dragged the name of the Conservatives and Northants through the mud, the Police Crime Panel, a committee intended to hold him to account, made up of 5 WNC Councillors and 5 NNC Councillors giving the 9 Conservatives Councillors any deciding vote, continually propped him up by looking the other way.

For this reason while Martyn may actually be a competent and decent bloke and worthy of voting for, the support of people who fail to speak out about domestic violence, nepotism and misfeasance and openly criticise anyone who does really is the kiss of death for his campaign. The lack of any public conversation to offer any challenge to the views of the electorate just cements it for me that Martyn is very much the continuity candidate, with no appetite to undo or correct any of the missteps of his predecessor.

An emphatic NO from me.

Gun

So having saved the best till last, we then move onto the scissors part of the metaphor, I could quote the late great Sean Connery in The Untouchables, about bringing a knife to a gunfight but I’m already stretching the metaphor beyond credibility as it is.

Suffice to say in place of scissors that can be bested in the game by being blunted by a rock, I’m offering up a gun as my alternative in the form of Ana Savage-Gunn who is backed by the Liberal Democrats.

First and foremost in what immediately got my attention and tipped the scales into being a potential voter winner, Ana while standing on a Liberal Democrat ticket for election, has announced that she has funded her own deposit, rather than being beholding to the party and donors. This is a strong show of character about Ana and how she is NOT a politician, merely seeing being elected into office as a stepping stone to other appointments, nor as a way to push a party political agenda. Ana speaks from the heart and puts herself forward as someone who wants to actually improve the county, and is taking positive action to do so. During hustings all of her comments were about actions she will take without any reference to wider political aims or aspirations of the party.

So being a person with some integrity is great, but does this translate into someone who can get things done? It is very easy to be swayed into voting by how slick someone’s advertising campaign is, or what a great orator they are.

I say this without shame as someone who voted Conservative at the last general election because I found Boris Johnson a very good political speaker, who connected with me and many others with his promises and the way he delivered them, not totally but far more than the other party leaders. I took him at his word with everything that he promised to do, but see now he was hopeless with details and had neither the intention nor ability to actually carry out much of what he promised.

Lacking a flashy campaign, with soundbites about party promises, I’ve only got Ana’s background and abilities to judge her against, so lets dive into what she has done that make her the best choice.

On 21^st March 2024, she addressed the West Northants Council, proposing that all Councillors should be DBS checked in line with the Angiolini Inquiry as to how Wayne Couzens escaped detection for so long. This was before any recent mainstream media coverage of Jonathan Nunn and his criminal conviction for GBH against his then wife was supported by his other former partners. Getting ahead of the curve and proposing changes in a proactive way rather than becoming the news and needing to react to it, in how the current PFCC does is a quality that is lacking in many politicians now. You only need to look at Nick Adderley having an official complaint against him raised in July 2023, hitting the press in September 2023 and Mold being entirely reactive to public pressure, waiting until mid October until he actually suspended him.

In the same way Ana attended the Police Crime Panel meeting in February 2024 where she spoke out and formally complained about the sexist language of Stephen Mold, something that were any formal complaints not received, the PCP may well have succeeded in brushing under the carpet with their weak words of condemnation about him appearing purely performative. Danielle Stone was also in attendance and while she appeared to support the removal of Stephen Mold, she did not speak out in the same way as Ana did.

You might think at this stage this latest blog of mine is little more than a press release and advertising statement for Ana Savage-Gunn. In the same way of how others across the county have come out and offered to lend their vote to the Liberal Democrats for this to ensure Ana gets voted in, my support being offered here is quite obvious and I make no efforts to hide it. I mentioned previously how I consider myself a swing voter, not aligned to any particular party and how the last major vote that I cast was for Boris Johnson, which I hope goes someway to show that my support is not easily won.

The final and most decisive reason in what swayed me in voting for Ana Savage-Gunn is her background as a Police officer within Northants Police. For anyone who has read my previous blogs there is a lot to unpack with a choice of me putting support behind a former Police officer. The comments I have got have all revolved around the apparent contradiction of support for a former Police officer while also exposing corruption within Northants Police, with the assumption that through being a victim of Police corruption, I am naturally anti-Police.

Hard as it might be to square that circle, I am not inherently anti-Police. The sheer number of incidents where I have been harassed by officers and experienced them lying and covering up for their colleagues’ actions which in some cases have been criminal, means that yes, I find it very hard to trust the Police at face value and am always on my guard around them. They are not all inherently bad and I actually have a few officers within Northants Police that I consider to be very good friends that have helped me a lot this past 2 years.

What I am is anti-corruption and the terrible “us and them” culture within the Police whereby the “blue code” means officers back up their colleagues no matter what. The exact same culture that makes officers blind to the crimes that helped facilitate and encourage Wayne Couzens to become as bold as he did, whereas if they felt safe enough to speak out against him, could have meant he was stopped and Sarah Everard would still be alive today. This culture all feeds down from the very top, and with the man in charge of Northants Police shown to be a career fraudster setting the tone as it were. The morale of good officers who want to speak out against this rotten culture is being impacted by this and having a PFCC who firstly put this man in place without checking his background and then failed to remove him, brings with it its own question marks over that what motivated those decisions.

Recognising the morale as one of the the key issues and utilising her role as PFCC to change that is what is needed if the culture is going to change and the public are to ever regain any trust back in the Police. Ana having previously pounded the beat in the county from the role of PC up to Inspector means she has proper experience of how things are at the sharp end and is likely to gain more respect of the officers she will have overall authority over, through the Chief Constable.

Naturally running 2 services means whatever someone brings in terms of experience in 1 service, will mean a shortfall in the other, as very few senior leaders ever have experience in both. A former Police Inspector may not be the natural vote winner for any firefighters in terms of operational experience, however Ana has been bold enough to show she is willing to make the tough decisions and has gone on the record to state how she would reverse the appointment of Nikki Watson as Fire Chief and appoint someone with actual experience to run the fire service. If you do not have the required experience as a leader to know the nuts and bolts of the job that the people at the ground level who work for you do, then having the humility to appointment someone who does shows true leadership.

So having determined that Ana is neither a political sock puppet nor a one trick pony full of one liners just to win votes, but instead has demonstrable leadership experience and the will to make the tough choices needed to get value for money out of the budget she has, I want to know the actual person I’d be voting into office.

Having learned that during Covid, Ana worked in her mother’s care home and is quite happy to roll her sleeves up when needed, speaks volumes about her approach to her work and the commitment and dedication she will bring to the roll. I’ve spoken to Ana in person and found her to be personable and approachable, beyond that false way that all other politicians seem to exude. I believe her to be a capable person with a fundamental morality to her that she will extend to all staff she will lead to bring them with her, but also sensing she has a no-nonsense side to her, not shying away from making the hard choices that the role demands, no doubt honed from her years as a firearms officer.

So in conclusion of the three candidates we have to choose from next week, they all fit quite neatly into three separate categories.

Labour’s Danielle Stone has done nothing to deter me from voting for her, but equally she has done nothing to make me actively want to vote for her either. For some politicians, apathy from voters is potentially worse than scorn as it just means you’ve failed to connect enough to even be disliked.

Conservative’s Martyn Emberson has equally done nothing to sway voters through his notable absence, and when the default opinion of the Conservatives, both at a local and national level is one of sleaze and scandal, then his failure to challenge the narrative and move the dial means this is still an emphatic NO from me.

Liberal Democrat’s Ana Savage-Gunn was the outlier in this and someone who not really on my radar, despite her winning 15% of the vote in the 2021 PFCC elections and standing in the Wellingborough by-election when her colleague stepped down. The fact that she as a former Police officer has done so much through her actions to win my trust and support in such a short space of time speaks volumes of the positive force for change that she could be to others if she was elected. I do not throw around the emphatic YES lightly as it cheapens how tough it is to actually win me over, so when I say I’m voting for Ana Savage-Gunn on 2^nd May 2024, know that she deserves it!