My time keeping diary is an election day reminder

I DO not know about you but in the run up to the festive season my time just seems to vanish into thin air.

So, I have started to keep a detailed diary of what I have been up to in the simple hope of freeing some time to devote to important things.

First up, my new diary tells me that I am spending just over half  an hour a day reading my emails.

How can this be true?

Counting up, I get around a thousand non-spam emails a week.

A hundred or so need a reply, say two minutes each, then say five seconds to glance at each of the rest and hit the delete button. So that is where the time goes.

In response, I have tightened the settings on my spam filter to delete more email automatically.

That is great for all the rubbish and down right offensive emails but until I am sure that the settings are right, I have a quick review to check if something important has found its way into the spam folder.

Trouble is that I keep finding important emails in my spam folder, including a strangely entitled “Elections 2012/13 training day” email from the Labour Party that had to be manually retrieved from its deletion fate.

Now, Labour is well on the way to being ready for the county council elections in May 2013 but what elections are planned in 2012?

Then, it finally dawned on me that there is planned to be an election for a police commissioner on November 15, 2012. If I cannot remember then I know that this idea of an elected police commissioner has not even registered with the good folk of Northamptonshire yet.

I am hardly giving away any secrets that none of the two major political parties are even remotely ready.

Mind you the Liberals, in their true sitting on the fence style, have said that Liberals can back local independent candidates.

More cynically, this is probably because the Liberals know their chance of getting anybody elected as a police commissioner anywhere let alone in Northamptonshire is precisely zero.

Of course, part of the problem for politicians is that if you do not like the idea of an elected police commissioner and you say so publicly, then your comments will always be trotted out if you ever stand as a candidate.

While if you say that you like the idea, then everybody starts assuming that you want to stand.

Nick Ross, former Crimewatch presenter and now visiting professor at the Jill Dando Crime Science Institute at University College London, does not want politicians to stand.

But in the same political breath, he says he wants to stand as an elected police commissioner, although he is not saying where yet.

Now, while a Crimewatch presenter might have some idea of how the police work the same cannot be said for some of the self publicists and extremists that might get elected if turnout is low and it might well be low on a cold Thursday in November.

So, most politicians are keeping quiet until they have quietly sounded out colleagues as to their chances.

More importantly, we politicians have to address the crime and policing problems of today.

The biggest of today’s problems is that after 16 years of national crime figures falling, in the first year of the Tory-led Coalition Government crime went up.

And how have the local Tories reacted to this?

First, they axed half the county’s street lights. Now, they have removed the county’s £500,000 contribution to Police Community Officers which means there will be 25 less PCSOs on the streets.

I remember Nick Ross’s old parting line from Crimewatch,

“Don’t have nightmares, do sleep well.”

It would just be a lot easier if the county Tories had nothing to do with local policing.

This week’s guest columnist is Cllr Mark Bullock, deputy leader of the Labour group on Northamptonshire County Council