James Forsyth

The British Crime Survey shows that most people do not have confidence in the ability of the police and their local council to tackle crime and anti-social behaviour. Only 46 percent of people in England and Wales do, according to the survey. In a way this is not surprising, you see the police on the street less than you used to and the police do not seem concerned with many of the crimes that worry the public most. Jacqui Smith, The Daily Mail reports, is now going to scrap all other targets and instead require all police forces to reach a 60 percent level of confidence by 2012. But if public confidence is what the police are to be measured on, why not go the whole hog and make police chiefs accountable to the public at the ballot box?

Stan Greenberg, who polled for both Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, spoke at the RSA earlier this week. In his talk, he revealed that during the 1997 campaign Blair had a separate team of faith advisors whose role it was to check that his politics were in line with his religious beliefs:  Here is what Greenberg said, it is 39 minutes in if you want to listen to it for yourself: 'He had a separate religious group that met weekly during the campaign, the’97 campaign, which he met with weekly. He said that he would talk to them and make sure, kinda check he wasn’t going too far in his politics from his religious faith. But none of those people were introduced into the campaign. But that was a separate domain.

As Gordon Brown heads back to London he can content himself with the fact that his Washington trip has not turned into the disaster is threatened to during the whole not a ‘press conference but a pool-spray’ moment. His speech wasn’t up there with Blair’s 2003 effort, but his knowledge of American politics enabled him to hit most of the right notes and, at the risk of being guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations, Brown’s delivery was better than usual. Brown must, though, know that the trip has not changed the course of British politics which, from his perspective, it needed to. To use an American sporting metaphor, Brown needed to him a home run with this visit but only succeeded in getting on base.

Jenni Russell’s piece in The Guardian today about how the left should support the “progressive wing” of the Tory party has set tongues wagging. Tim Montgomerie has some interesting thoughts on it and attempts to identify “the important ten” who one Tory told Russell form the “progressive wing” of the party. Personally, I must admit to finding that these arguments over the naming of things generate more heat than light. In his Demos speech, David Cameron laid out four things that progressive Conservatism stood for: moving people permanently out of poverty, a society with equality of opportunity, a greener, sustainable planet and a safer society. These goals, though, can be achieved in very different ways; that is where the rubber hits the road.

Lexington, The Economist’s US political correspondent whose new blog is well wroth checking out, flags up an interesting post from New Majority, the site that is leading efforts to modernise the Republican party: “26% of the electorate is white evangelicals, and 74% of them voted for McCain.  McCain pulled slightly less than 46% of the vote, so about four-in-ten of McCain’s voters were white evangelicals. To put it in perspective, white evangelicals are nearly twice as important to Republicans as African-Americans are for Democrats.  Despite the surge in African-American turnout and the record high percentage Obama received from those voters, blacks comprised only 23% of the winning coalition.

One of the features of the Tory party now is that there is no defining split. But there are plenty of areas of difference. One, as Baeghot notes in his write-up of yesterday’s Convention on Modern Liberty, is on where the balance on civil liberties should be struck. Bagehot reports that: “Mr Grieve was obliged to admit that he wasn’t absolutely sure what "fewer rights, more wrong", a new slogan from Chris Grayling, the latest shadow home secretary, had meant.” Grieve must surely have realised that he was going to be asked about this new line from Grayling given the subject of the conference, so it is surprising that he did not have an answer ready. It is, perhaps, an indicator of future rows to come.

Matt in his Sunday Telegraph column sums up perfectly why it was right that PMQs was suspended following Ivan Cameron’s death:  “This was our unwritten constitution at its very best, as the Commons responded with nimble common sense to a practical dilemma presented by a private tragedy. It would have been grotesque to proceed with Prime Minister's Questions only a few hours after the death of young son of the Leader of the Opposition. The properly British solution was not to pore over Erskine May or to fret about setting a precedent, or sliding down a slippery slope. Does anyone seriously believe these extraordinary circumstances are likely to recur? As so often in our institutional history, the right answer was to extemporise judiciously.