Who can be trusted to tell the truth?

You would not think it now, but I was a very trusting child. I believed my parents when they told me you could always trust a British bobby.

Evening, all. A classic octogenarian British PC.

I even believed my first headmaster when he told us, at the time of the 1961 census, that its secrecy was so complete that one could put down one’s occupation as “burglar” without any fear of retribution.

Scroll on to 2014 and it seems that you can report as many thefts as you like without anyone lifting a finger, though the European Union presumably marks them down as further evidence of burgeoning economic activity, justifying another whacking increase in its membership fees.

After all, it has just slapped in a £1.7 billion demand that seems to be largely based on previous under-recording of such vibrantly healthy UK economic sectors as tobacco smuggling, prostitution and drugs. By which I guess they mean the sort favoured by that “crystal Methodist” banker rather than my own statins and low dose aspirins.

Maybe this is the sort of British success story George Osborne has in mind when he bangs on about his “Northern powerhouse”, led by a directly elected mayor. You remember, the sort that the people of Manchester (and many other places) rejected in a referendum only two years ago but are now apparently going to have anyway, whether they like it or not.

Among his or her many other useful functions this new mayor will take over the role of the police and crime commissioner that a handful of people bothered to vote into office a few months later.

It all seems eerily reminiscent of voting ten years ago against both a North East assembly and a unitary authority for the whole of Northumberland. One of which has already been imposed upon us while the other is clearly trundling down the tracks once again, thinly concealed by more waffle about “city regions”.

Really, what is the point of voting for anything at all when no notice is taken of the outcome?

How would it go down if I adopted the sort of approach to the Government that it takes with me? Maybe sending my tax demand back with an offer to pay a token amount because it’s all I can afford (which has the virtue of being true).

Oh, and I’m terribly sorry, HM Revenue & Customs, but you won’t be able to check my records yourselves because I’ve shredded them all to comply with the Data Protection Act, as the House of Commons has done with all those dodgy expenses claims.

... apart from the ones we shredded

Regardless of election results, politicians of all parties display a shared and cynical determination to plough on with policies they have never deigned to explain properly, whether those be elected mayors or the encouragement of mass immigration.

Small wonder that the result has been a collapse of trust in authority over the last half century, which means that most of us no longer look up to anyone or accept what they say at face value.

In some instances, this is entirely beneficial. For example, if you were crazily thinking of buying a ticket to outer space from a music industry entrepreneur with a proven track record of failure in the technologically less demanding task of running a reliable train service into London Euston.

In others, the results are more questionable. Virtually no one but the most gullible green fanatics believes that there is a case for massively increasing our reliance on wind and solar power. But then virtually no one readily accepts the case for massive increases in fracking or nuclear capacity, either. 

If the UN’s scientists are right, and we need to get used to the idea of doing without gas and oil completely by the end of this century, a lot of us are going to need to do some pretty radical rethinking about who we can trust quite soon.

Either that or prepare to spend rather a lot of time sitting in the cold and dark. On the plus side, though, we won’t be able to hear George Osborne banging on about powerhouses. And, if the scientists are right, it won’t be quite as chilly as it might have been.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Hello, hello, hello. What's all this, then?

My whole life flashed before me when the two men in black unexpectedly appeared on my doorstep on Saturday morning.

Or at any rate it did once I had grasped that they were policemen. This took me a while: first because they were implausibly young, secondly because they were wearing combat fatigues rather than crisp white shirts, and finally because they were simply the last people I was expecting.

How a policeman looks in my mind's eye

I had not spoken to a policeman for around 20 years, when my last Border terrier but two made a poorly judged lunge at the letters our temporary postman was ill-advisedly waving at him.

This time I was pretty sure that my dogs had not harassed anyone, so the part of my life that chiefly flashed by was the 1980s, as I tried to work out which of the secretaries I dallied with at the time might finally have dobbed me in for sexual harassment.

I started croakily making the speech I had been taught by a legalistic friend at university: “It’s a fair cop, guv. You got me bang to rights. It’s bird for me this time. Society is to blame.”

(The theory, as I recall, is that the arresting constable will solemnly read this out from his notebook when the case reaches court, whereupon it – and hopefully the rest of his evidence – will be dismissed as an obvious fabrication.)

Luckily they interrupted my speech by advising me that they had not come to arrest me, but to follow up “the incident” of last Tuesday.

What incident?

Oh yes, when the lady who tends our garden called to drop off some plants, and decided that she “did not like the look” of the men up a ladder on our roof. Men with a property maintenance company’s marked van, who were carrying out some long-awaited repairs to stop water pouring into my younger son’s bedroom whenever it rains.

Mending the roof when the sun shines, in fact. If only Gordon Brown could have got the hang of that, how different all our lives might have been.

They tried to explain this to her, but she was not to be fooled. In her mind, their undoubted criminality was exposed by the fact that they were doing the work at 5.30pm, when everyone knows that all genuine tradesmen knock off by mid-afternoon and go down the pub.

A roof repairer and a burglar. Easy to confuse, I'll admit.

I had also been criminally irresponsible in leaving some of my upstairs windows open, though this did not seem altogether unreasonable to me given that (a) there was a Category 3 heatwave taking place at the time, (b) there were two Border terriers in the house in need of a spot of ventilation, and (c) they were the sort of small windows that only an anorexic contortionist could stand the faintest chance of climbing through.

To be fair to my gardener, she did ring me on my mobile before calling the police to arrest the malefactors, but I failed to answer it because I was desperately busy at the time.

I later got a message asking me to ring the police on their 101 non-emergency number to confirm that the roof repairers were indeed genuine, as they had already told the officers who had turned up to suss them out.

This my wife duly did on my behalf, making me all the more surprised to receive a follow-up visit in person.

We had an inconclusive chat about the wisdom of leaving small upstairs windows open even in the height of summer, then the PCs went on their way.

As they did, I wondered to myself how much more police time is wasted by no doubt well-intentioned Neighbourhood Watch curtain-twitchers, whose willingness to call in the law evidently matches some people’s inclination to dial 999 because they can’t find their TV remote control.

But I also felt profoundly grateful to live in a country where the overstretched police can still handle such encounters with patience and good humour.

And, above all, profoundly glad to live in a society in which “not liking the look” of someone going about their lawful business does not provide an excuse to shoot them dead, just to be on the safe side.

www.blokeinthenorth.com

Originally published in The Journal, Newcastle upon Tyne.