Middlesbrough Cleveland PCC: The Empire of Evil

Another police commissioner candidate stands down... because of minor crime he committed as a teenager 47 years ago
• Alan Charles, vice-chairman of Derbyshire Police Authority, was given a conditional discharge in 1965
• 'Non-violent' offence was not revealed by criminal records check
• Case echoes withdrawal of Bob Ashford, who quit as the Labour candidate in Avon and Somerset over £5 fine he was given in 1966
By Rob Preece 11 August 2012

A senior councillor has pulled out of the race to become a police commissioner because of an offence he committed 47 years ago as a 14-year-old - the second candidate in a week to withdraw from the elections.
Alan Charles, the vice-chairman of Derbyshire Police Authority, had intended to stand as a Labour candidate but withdrew after revealing he was given a conditional discharge for a minor non-violent crime in 1965.
His case echoes that of Bob Ashford, who quit as the Labour candidate in Avon and Somerset on Tuesday over a £5 fine he was given for two minor offences committed 46 years ago when he was just 13.
Mr Ashford has described as 'absolutely ridiculous' rules which bar candidates from standing if they have been convicted as a juvenile of something that would carry a prison sentence if committed by an adult.
Mr Charles did not disclose the nature of his previous offence, which had not been revealed by a criminal records check.
He said: 'I have taken the difficult decision to stand down as the Labour Party candidate for police and crime commissioner for Derbyshire.
'The Labour Party has only now received clarification from the Home Office and the Electoral Commission that juvenile convictions for imprisonable offences will bar people from becoming a police and crime commissioner.'
Mr Charles added: 'Despite serving as vice-chair of Derbyshire Police Authority, I have received confirmation that a minor criminal offence I committed around 47 years ago, for which I was given a year's conditional discharge, has barred me from standing.
Mr Charles's withdrawal is a further policy setback for Home Secretary Theresa May, who said earlier this year that it had not been ministers' intention to bar people who were guilty of minor offences as teenagers.
Police commissioners, due to be elected in November, will have the power to hire and fire chief constables.
Among the other candidates is the former Deputy Prime Minister, Lord Prescott, who is seeking office in the Humberside Police area.
Mr Ashford, who has Whitehall security clearance, stepped down from his £90,000-a-year job as director of strategy for the Youth Justice Board partly to run for the role.
But he was forced to withdraw from the race because he was convicted in 1966 of trespass on the railway and possession of an offensive weapon.
The father of four, of Frome, Somerset, has received hundreds of emails of support and is to seek legal advice on whether there are grounds for him to challenge the legislation.
He said: ‘This was a flawed policy idea from the beginning and it’s now proving to be absolutely and fatally flawed.’
The rules had already led war veteran Simon Weston to pull out because he feared that his £30 fine at the age of 14 for being a passenger in a stolen car would have disqualified him.
The former Welsh Guardsman suffered horrific burns to 46 per cent of his body during the Falklands conflict in 1982.
As a teenager he was arrested when he was in a stolen car with two or three other males aged between 18 and 27.
Mr Weston always said he was not aware the care was stolen, but on advice, pleased guilty at the subsequent trial.
He was fined £30 and put on probation for three months.

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Should my shameful brush with the law 20 years ago really bar me from a job open to expenses fiddlers and that ass Prezza?
By Tom Utley 9 August 2012
Between you and me, I don’t think I’d make a very good police commissioner. After all, my attempts to maintain any sort of law and order in my own household, with four raucous boys running amok, have always ended in dismal failure.
So I don’t suppose I’d have much more success if I were given charge of policing a wider community, infested with criminals guilty of even more serious offences than playing football in the kitchen, failing to hang up the bath towels and making a filthy racket downstairs when people who have jobs to go to in the morning are trying to get some sleep.
Perhaps it’s just as well, then, that under the provisions of the Police and Social Responsibility Act 2011, I’m barred from seeking election as one of the Government’s new commissioners. This is because the law disqualifies any would-be candidate who has a criminal record for an offence that carries a potential prison sentence.

My own brush with the law came some 20 years ago as I was driving home from my late aunt’s 70th birthday party.
A policeman pulled me over to tell me that one of my brake lights wasn’t working. But when I wound down the window to talk to him, he asked if that was alcohol he smelled on my breath.
To my deep and lasting shame, the breathalyser confirmed my admission — and shortly afterwards I was fined £350 and suspended from driving for a year (a punishment that fell much more heavily on my poor wife, since it got me out of my duties on the school run).
More... Police commissioner candidate forced to stand down because he was fined £5 in 1966 for being with group who shot air gun at cans http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... -1966.html
Strangely, one of the first people I saw as I walked away from the Westminster court after the case of Regina v. Utley was … Regina herself, driving past in her gilded coach to open Parliament. Was it just my imagination, or was that my driving licence she was clutching triumphantly in her hand as she waved to the crowd?
Now, I’m not going to make light of a conviction for drink-driving. With the wisdom of age and the shame of my court appearance behind me, I recognise it as a very serious offence — and with two of our sons now driving, and the others about to take lessons, you won’t find a more passionate preacher for sobriety behind the wheel (except perhaps my wife).
But although there are 1,000 other reasons why I’d be a disaster in the job, I can’t help wondering what earthly bearing my stupid decision to drive home from a party 20 years ago, when I was over the limit, has on my fitness to be a police commissioner now that I’m a reformed 58-year-old. Or is redemption impossible in the eyes of our irreproachable legislators?
Of course, some readers (and especially those with personal experience of the anguish and carnage that drink-drivers can cause) will say my offence makes me unfit for anything but voluntary work in a leper colony for the rest of my days. So I’ll shut up about me, and turn instead to a case on which every man, woman and child — even the most unforgiving and flint-hearted — must surely agree.
Isn’t it blatantly daft, unchristian and an affront to democracy that Bob Ashford has been forced to stand down as the Labour Party’s candidate for police commissioner in Avon and Somerset — because of a footling offence he committed in 1966, when he was 13 years old?
If his version of events is accurate, and I’ve heard nobody doubt it, a group of boys from his school persuaded him to go out with them.
‘We went to the railway embankment, and I felt very uncomfortable about this. One lad pulled out an air gun and started shooting at cans. I never touched the air gun and felt unable to leave, as I was frightened at what might happen at school.’
The police arrived and the boys with the air gun ran away, while young Bob and two others froze and were arrested.
Although he can’t remember being questioned by the police, he says he was told in court to plead guilty to trespass and being in possession of an offensive weapon. He was fined £2 10s (£2.50) for each of the two offences.
Now, 46 years on, after a lifetime of public service devoted to the rehabilitation of young offenders, latterly as Director of Strategy at the Youth Justice Board, his boyhood misdemeanour — which he has never failed to declare, though the Criminal Records Bureau appears to have no record of it — has come back to haunt him.
So it is that the voters of Somerset and Avon are to be denied the chance to vote for one of the more respectable candidates in the forthcoming elections (although he sounds rather too wet for my taste).
I don’t imagine for a moment that the MPs of all parties who agreed to this idiotic law actually intended to disqualify the likes of Mr Ashford. Or, indeed, Simon Weston, the Falklands War hero, who was convicted at 14 of being a passenger in a stolen car and has also withdrawn from the elections.
The MPs just didn’t think through how they’d be excluding reformed characters, of impeccable distinction, who got up to Just William antics in their boyhood — not to mention former members of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, or its Cambridge equivalent, the Pitt Club, who cut swathes of hooray-Henry destruction through town after their dinners.
Nor, I guess, did they consider how much harder MPs have made it for citizens to keep on the right side of the law, with their mania for banning everything from failing to wear seat-belts to smoking in enclosed public spaces, sending politically incorrect Tweets and selling vegetables in imperial measures.
But it’s when you look at the rabble of candidates who’ve slipped through the net, somehow managing to avoid criminal convictions, that the heart really sinks.
I must say I had high hopes of elected commissioners.
I thought, naively, that if voters were given their say, there would be more chance of getting the police back on the beat, fighting the real crimes that people worry about, instead of wasting their time on offences against political correctness. After all, similar arrangements work well in some parts of the U.S.
But to be effective, the system demands commissioners of the highest calibre, with the skill and forcefulness to make the public’s voice heard by senior officers.
Look what we’re offered instead: a sleazy array of useless ex-ministers and washed-up expenses fiddlers, who appear to regard the commissioners’ jobs, with their salaries of £65,000 to £100,000, as just another means of keeping their snouts in the public trough.
Take Alun Michael, former First Minister of Wales, who was forced to repay almost £20,000 in expenses for mortgage interest on additional loans, blaming a ‘clerical error’. He is a shoo-in for the Labour stronghold of South Wales, while his son Tal has been selected as the party’s candidate for North Wales.
Or consider former Solicitor General Vera Baird, Labour’s candidate for commissioner in Northumbria, who thought it legitimate to ask taxpayers for £286 to pay for her ‘festive decorations’.
Middlesbrough Cllr Barry Coppingers CPC election campaign running mate ex partnering pig at the trough of Redcar & Cleveland County Council and district
Then there’s that bumbling ass John ‘Thumper’ Prescott, who was lucky to avoid a criminal record for his retaliatory upper cut to an egg-thrower.
What kind of a law is it that allows such people to stand, while refusing to forgive a man for wandering onto railway property when he was 13 while his mates shot cans with an air gun?
Where hardened criminals are concerned, the Coalition is happy enough to offer ninth, tenth, even 15th, chances to escape prison, with its almost insane faith in the possibilities of rehabilitation and redemption.
So why does that faith desert them when it comes to offering a second chance to an erring child who grows up wanting to fight crime?

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