Boris is already demonstrating how his government will be all tell and no show

Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister - a phrase that used to sound like a joke - made a lot of promises in his first speech from Downing Street. His announcement of £1.8bn has been reported as the first down payment on these pledges.

Here-in lies a key sample of what we can expect from Boris Johnson and his verbose new government. A big promise and an announcement, with all the PR trimmings to follow, which on inspection fails to live up to the terms.

All tell and no show. The Boris way.

It's also been the Tories way through all of their time in government, whether under Cameron or May. Announcing old funding again as new funding, relabelling and reannouncing, fiscal politics played out in the media rather than in the treasury. And all the while, the cuts go on.

In the present case, Boris has offered up a lump of extra cash for the NHS. But it isn't what it seems. In fact, the £1bn 'upfront' is money that the government had already promised to the NHS - in exchange for three years of trusts slashing their budgets - only to then block hospitals from spending it.

The second half is for what is know as capital spending, long term investment to pay now for projects that will be ready years from now. This kind of spending is deeply important, but does little for struggling hospitals in the present - and even that sum isn't coming right away.

What the government cares about are the flurry of headlines that follow these press releases - often printed wholly and uncritically in the media. While the front pages tell people what the Tories want them to hear, the analysis is buried and with it the debunking of the government's claims.

These headlines are the heart of a long term government strategy, all about governing by telling and not showing. It has allowed them to slash and slash again at budgets, and the services they fund, and to deflect criticism on to others - mostly the vulnerable, exposed by the Tories' own austerity politics.

Don't be fooled by the headlines. Don't let the Tories, as John Harris puts it, sow "discord and resentment via austerity" only to reap the rewards of the chaos with a sharp PR strategy. If we're not sharper ourselves, we'll face the consequences of Tory disaster politics while they profit.

Policing and Crime Bill, with oversight and transparency reforms, goes to Commons unlikely to face much opposition

Theresa May's Policing and Crime Bill has a stated aim of improving disciplinary and complaints systems, along with the Inspectorate, in order to improve public confidence in the Police.  Photograph: Police Motorbike from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

In Parliament today, Home Secretary Theresa May presents her Policing and Crime Bill to the Commons for its first formal vote (Parliament, 2016). With a Conservative majority, its passage at this stage should be just a formality - particularly when English Votes for English Laws is applied. That only makes it all the more important for those outside of Parliament to pay particularly close attention.

The government claim the bill will 'finish the job' of police reform (Home Office & May, 2016). Included in its aims are reforming the police disciplinary and complaints systems, strengthening 'the independence of HM Inspectorate of Constabulary', increasing protections for people with mental health problems, allowing chief officers to "confer a wider range of powers on police staff and volunteers", and introducing a requirement for 'suspected foreign nationals to produce a nationality document'.

While moves to increase oversight and accountability are always welcome, along with further considerations for mental health, elements of the bill have faced some criticism. For instance, the expansion of volunteers in police service with police powers has raised some concerns (BBC, 2016) - with suggestions that it may be an artificial way to inflate police numbers in the face of austerity and cuts. There is also some scepticism regarding the continually expanding role of the Police and Crime Commissioners (Russell Webster, 2016), though it has been argued that accountability brought by PCC's election are having a positive impact (Baird, 2016).

The Policing and Crime bill itself is being steered through Parliament by Theresa May. As Home Secretary, Theresa May has already overseen a number of disputes over law enforcement and policing policy.

May has been the force behind the slow and controversial progress of the Investigatory Powers Bill, the so-called snooper's charter (Watt, 2016). Nick Clegg, as Deputy Prime Minister, had forced early bills covering public surveillance, particularly on the internet, to be withdrawn. The most recent attempt has been criticised, not just for being an infringement of liberty, but for being largely unworkable (The Guardian; 2016).

By way of contrast, a positive move was made by May in response to Boris Johnson's wish to deploy water cannon in London. May promised never to deploy police with military style equipment, for fear of undermining the legitimacy of the police (Dodd, 2015) - which is supposed to be based on the principle of policing by consent.

Between refusing water cannons and promoting mass data gathering, and her lack of surety on elected Police and Crime Commissioners (BBC, 2016{2}), Theresa May has cut an inconsistent path as Home Secretary. That inconsistency, along with the Conservative government's poor attitude towards human rights, since cutting loose the Liberal Democrats in May 2015 (Bowcott, 2015), call for a particularly critical eye to be turned on any reform efforts they spearhead.

It is only the early stages for this bill. A bill whose aims will likely be disrupted by disputes over further 'efficiencies' to be found in police budgets (ITV, 2016) - and maybe still further cuts as those scarcely avoided by the Chancellor last time, through heavy dependence upon the prediction of an improved economy, may well come around again in next week's budget with the economy struggling and tough choices expected (Elliott, 2016).

Yet whenever one party seeks to make changes to the enforcement of law and order, it is important to stress the need for the public to remain vigilant. Reform is need. Oversight and transparency are needed. Clear statements of powers, who has them and when, are needed. But the process of reform should too be constrained by those principles.

The Met Police's water cannon and the dangers of ideology, escalation and suppression

Earlier this week came the news that London's Metropolitan Police want permission to deploy water cannon. On their behalf, London Mayor Boris Johnson has petitioned the Home Secretary Teresa May, and it seems that a public consultation is soon to follow (Dodd, 2014; Merrill, 2014).

If the growing publicity that protests have received in the last few years, and the obvious tensions that there have been between protesters and the police at those events, are taken into account, this response from the capital's police force should not be a surprise. It should, however, make you wary.

The British Police does already employ water cannon, but only in Northern Ireland - and there only controversially. The police of many European countries use water cannon too, alongside their armed officers, their Gendarmes. Yet, so far, since their introduction by Robert Peel, the British Met Police have largely managed to refrain from becoming militarised.

Water cannon being made available for policing in the capital would mark the passing of a watershed. It marks a step towards the abandonment of civilian policing and a step towards turning the police into a paramilitary force. It would be a step towards abandoning the principle of 'policing by consent' that has underwritten law enforcement in Britain, as point four on the policing principles stresses:

'To recognise always that the extent to which the co-operation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.'

Abandoning those principles in favour of a more militarised force risks throwing away consent in favour of suppression. That problem is only enhanced by making the extent to which the police enforce the law a political issue. Unfortunately, opinions on that matter are very much subject to ideology.

Conservatism is an ideology deeply wed to the idea that society is something constructed out of chaos by the imposition of order. The wealth of capitalism, the traditions of the establishment and the dogmas of the church all depend upon that order to function. And so, despite some apparent hypocrisy, it makes sense that the same voices that might decry 'meddling governments' for getting in the way of the unrestricted pursuit of wealth, are also the voices that are now calling for the increased armaments for the police to deal with civil unrest (Watt, 2013).

The widening gap between rich and poor is a source of fear for the poor, but it is also a source of fear for the rich. When the wealth gap is greater, the inequalities of a society are more starkly visible and more likely to provoke bitter resentment.  The struggles of the poor, as Thomas Paine (1797) pointed out, is of the deepest concern to the rich, since their affluence is directly won with the acquiescence of the poor to remaining orderly within an unequal social structure, that offers them little in the way of benefits for doing so.

As such it is unsurprising that those affiliated with conservative ideology, or those institutions such as the police, whose role is to maintain the order that conservatism craves, should want these enhanced weapons for the keeping of order. The problem with the ideologically conservative perception, though, is that it is based on an essentially negative view of human kind. Through that negative perspective it would be dangerously easy to coalesce incidents like the English Riots of 2011, with the massive political protests over the last few years in which a small minority became violent or damaged private property.

We must be wary of allowing conflicts to escalate, as the expansion of the available suppressive weapons to the police surely only encourages. We must be wary of the potential for those weapons to be missapplied, and dangers of injuries and resentments that would follow. We must be wary not to let these steps infringe upon the rights of people to protest in the name of reform, in the name of a cause, or in the name of broad institutional changes - all essential in a political process that continues to isolate people from power that is wielded nominally in their name.

We must not lose sight of the point of order. We must keep in mind what our methods say of us, of what we say to one another when we give a green light to using ever more dangerous weapons and tactics to enforce the law.