I was pretty pleased with myself for having managed to take a recent Friday afternoon off to go to my youngest daughter’s school Open Day followed by Shrek 2 on the first day of its release. I am always being accused of never doing anything for my children (by my children) when apparently all other parents are perfect in every way.

However, the best laid plans of mice and men and politicians…

All media hell broke loose before lunchtime, as the media woke up, following the publishing of a report on the rise of police stops under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, to the fact that stops of Asians had risen 302%.

No surprise there! As Vice-Chair of the Stop & Search scrutiny at the London Assembly, I had raised this very issue during the scrutiny itself which reported only a month or so ago. Overall, our findings showed racial bias in the police force led to disproportional stops on black and ethnic Londoners. Stops on black members of the community have risen 30%, stops on Asians 41%, whilst on whites they have risen only 8% over 2000/2001 and 2001/2002.

The Met is committed to improving its record and has been making great strides in the right direction – but clearly from the evidence it still has a very long way to go. The hard-hitting and well-received scrutiny report delivers many useful recommendations on supervision, training, leadership, monitoring and IT data collection which we now expect the Met to implement.

Normal stop and search is exercised at the discretion of an individual police officer and is supposed to be ‘intelligence’ led – the officer having to have reasonable grounds to suspect that an individual is carrying stolen goods, weapons or drugs. However, once an area has been authorised under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act, stops can be carried out by officers on anyone they please without further ado.

Following 9/11 and the heightened security because of very real threats to London, this had led, unsurprisingly, to a rise in Section 44 stops on Asians. Now, whilst the long-suffering Asian community might well be able to deal with a rise in stops as a consequence of this heightened state of alert – the huge scale of the increase in stops of 302% is way beyond the acceptable. We heard evidence during the scrutiny from the Chair of the Islamic Human Rights Commission to the effect that people were being stopped because they ‘looked muslim’.

Nearly 18,000 people have been stopped under Section 44 powers, but this has resulted in only 9 arrests for terrorism and there is no data on whether those 9 arrests led to successful prosecution. It is no wonder that the Asian community is questioning the use of these powers. All of us want protecting from the terrorist threat – but there is also a real need to better protect our communities from any inappropriate use of the necessary but swingeing powers of the Terrorism Act. It is a very difficult balance to get right.

I was still fielding media calls as I left for school Open Day. The last call I took was from a TV station sending an outside broadcast truck to my home especially – as I couldn’t get to their studios in time.

I couldn’t get to their studios in time because of going to Shrek 2 – although I don’t think I particularly made my reasons clear to them! It was to be live TV and it had to be at 6.15pm. I thought that would be fine as the film began at 4pm and ran 93 minutes.

Sitting in the darkened cinema, I realised my miscalculation – 25 minutes of adverts and trailers before the main feature. I abandoned the kids at the cinema telling them to get the bus home and left twenty minutes before the ending to do the interview in the pouring rain in my garden.

Hopefully, they all lived happily ever after…

I had to resort to a Marks & Sparks birthday cake for my daughter this week.

This breaks a long tradition of me producing artistic masterpieces on both my daughters’ birthdays. Let’s not pretend I am a cook. I don’t cook. I never have – probably never will. But twice a year to salve my non-cooking conscience I have rolled up my sleeves, cheated only slightly by buying Betty Crocker ready cake mix for the chocolate sponge bit, and let the creative force be with me.

I used to be a designer and on birthday cakes I give full vent to my old creative tendencies. Over the years this has delivered a chocolate rat cake (my oldest used to have pet rats – clearly I am a liberal parent!), a tower in the form of the Jenga game, a football pitch, numerous cartoon characters then in vogue and many more – but this year I have failed. The birthday coming three days before polling day, I couldn’t do it. Too many leaflets to deliver and doors to be knocked on.

By the time you read this, the votes will all have been cast – and the electronic counting machines are whizzing as the Ham & High hits the streets today. Tonight we will know who is Mayor, how many Assembly members from each party have been elected and tomorrow, Saturday, all the parties meet at City Hall and the hard negotiating will begin.

I’ve drawn the short straw with this column – having to write a political column before an election – but which will be published just after – is always a tricky one.

But almost regardless of the result, life on the London Assembly is likely to be quite different for the next four years. Last time, we Lib Dems held the balance of power and both Tories and Labour wanted to be our best friend.

If the same happens again, the decisions will be harder. After the last elections in 2000, Ken was still the devil incarnate for the Labour group on the Assembly, but since he rejoined Labour they have become his number one fan, tabling wildly sycophantic questions to him at every opportunity.

If Simon Hughes is Mayor, Labour certainly won’t want to get on with the Mayor! And if Ken is Mayor, it’ll be hard for any other party to work with a Labour Party that has suddenly turned itself into a group of super-Ken loyalists. Meanwhile, the behaviour of the Tories over the four years was hardly endearing – with internecine splits and destructive behaviour.

So who knows what will happen? Until I get into City Hall tomorrow and see how the land lies, I can’t tell you.

What I do know is that the Assembly has done good work – not much publicised – both in holding the Mayor to account and raising issues of importance to London. Four years ago in the first campaign – I would knock on a door and have to explain what the Assembly was. This time, at least everyone knows it exists. Last time it was an idea, a piece of legislation. This time, people know about it. They don’t always know much about what it does – but they know it is important and that London government isn’t only about the Mayor.

So, hopefully my cake sacrifice will not be in vain – and London will have a strong LibDem voice to fight her battles and look after her.

Four years after the London Mayor and Assembly were created, the first term of office for us all is coming to an end next month.

I remember four years ago, just after I was elected, Graham Tope – the Liberal Democrat Leader on the London Assembly – coming to me and asking what I wanted to do. I said transport and policing. In the blink of an eye, I found myself chair of the London Assembly’s transport committee and a member of the Metropolitan Police Authority. Two more interesting and challenging briefs I cannot imagine.

Here’s how it was for me…

Much of the work of the Assembly is to keep the Mayor and others in check by carrying out detailed scrutiny of key areas – a bit like Select Committees in Parliament. The very first scrutiny carried out by the Assembly, and the first I scoped and chaired, was my committee’s scrutiny of the proposals for a central London congestion charging scheme.

Now, despite the Mayor’s severe failure on the customer services side of the scheme, it has been successful at reducing traffic and congestion. But back then there were huge horror stories about how it would turn central London into a ghost town, circled by the gridlock to end all gridlocks around the perimeter. You would have thought world as we knew it was going to end on February 17th, 2003.

Widely praised even now as the best scrutiny of the Assembly, we did good work examining the details of the scheme. Even Derek Turner, the man who is responsible for the successful implementation of the charge, says it did much for the success of the scheme.

Other highlights on the transport committee included work on improving safety on public transport (including dumping all my fellow committee members in Leicester Square after midnight and challenging them to make it home by public transport!).

Less media-friendly, but hugely important in the long-run, was the opportunity my role gave me to push individual transport plans. I’ve been greatly impressed by these in Australia – where direct marketing to individuals of the public transport options for their most common routes has brought about big increases in public transport usage, even without having to further improve public transport. From being a strange foreign concept, they are now increasingly part and parcel of the transport debate in the capital.

And of course most recently there was our report into speed humps. A lively topic that! And so many more issues – far more than I can put into this column.

On all these issues, and many others, I think a key criteria on which Assembly members (including myself) should be judged is how well or badly we’ve used the access being on the GLA gives you to raise those questions people so often get frustrated about.

Like why is it so difficult so often to contact the police? Well, when a GLA member (me) does a survey showing that 40% of police stations with front counters don’t answer the phone – you can get the Met’s top policeman to listen.

It’s been the same with two other of my long running campaigns. In the battle to get Muswell Hill police station’s front counter reopened, there was a period when the idea seemed to stall within the police’s bureaucracy. Being on the GLA meant I could get Sir John Stevens to put a stop to that!

Similarly on the battle to get a bus route linking Muswell Hill and Swiss Cottage, you can get the ear of Transport for London’s chiefs if you’re a member of the body to which they are accountable. And that’s certainly been needed in the long battles to secure first the trial and – hopefully later this year – an expansion to a full service.

There’s been lots more, such as bus driver behaviour, tube privatisation and cleaning up stations; I’ve been hoisted up on a fireman’s lift, ridden in the cab of a London tube train, driven a double-decker bus and done tours of duty with Haringey police on a Saturday night.

I am really grateful for the opportunities I have had and perhaps a final thanks to the Ham and High for letting me and other Assembly members have a regular column – hopefully giving readers a bit more opportunity to find out what we all get up to in your name. (You can read the old columns on my website, http://www.lynne.featherstone.org).

So, how was it for you? I guess I’ll find out when the votes are counted on June 11th!

“I could have kissed Ken last night!”

That was how I began my first newspaper column almost four years ago when he delivered his first big speech at the Lord Mayor’s dinner for the new Greater London Authority. He had made a great speech – a brave speech – arguing that Britain must join the Euro or suffer the consequences.

But that was way back when he stood up for London’s interests against all comers – including Tony Blair.

I guess, like lots of other Liberal Democrats, I was a bit enamoured of the Mayor – a bit seduced by his wit, humour, directness and anti-establishment stance. I’d have preferred Susan Kramer – our 2000 candidate – to be in City Hall, but Ken didn’t appear to be a bad second choice.

I couldn’t understand why everyone who had worked with Ken did not have a good word to say about him. I couldn’t understand why the Labour Party treated him like the devil incarnate – particularly as it lost them the last Mayoral election and left their own mayoral candidate stranded in the obscure political wastelands. Poor old Frank Dobson – Frank who?

I had always thought Ken was a bit of lad, a champion of the people – a working class hero!

But I was so wrong. Four years on I am sadder but wiser.

Need and pragmatism has drawn sworn enemies into the same camp. Now Ken is Blair’s Mayor – and four years on from the birth of London Government he dances quite clearly to Labour’s tune.

What a shame!

I stood shoulder to shoulder with Mayor Livingstone in the fight against PPP on the tube and shoulder to shoulder in the fight for congestion charging.

His early vitriol towards the Government for condemning London to the appalling PPP on the tube and his attacks on Labour for providing London with too little money have petered out entirely.

Livingstone now stands for Labour not for London. Labour has in the past claimed to listen to London – now they follow a Mayor who when asked said the only views he was ever interested in were when people voted.

But credit where it is due. He has had some success – congestion charging (our policy), bus improvements – although he has no means to pay for the ever widening gap between revenue and rising bus costs. Budgeting is not his strong point – understatement. There are also more police on our streets – which we, London, are paying for.

Indeed, Livingstone has doubled the amount of money he takes from our Council Tax bills in just four years.

Just imagine what most councils could provide in improved services if they could get away with doubling their Council Tax! So yes, he’s achieved some things – but at what a cost. Where is the scale of improvements to justify the enormous increase in tax?

Think how little he has really done across London, particularly in the huge swathes of London where the Mayor’s sun don’t shine – like outside of zone one, for the millions he has extracted from us and spent – on his pet projects, pet areas and his own publicity machine. He now has even more spin doctors in City Hall than the Prime Minister has at Number 10.

He is no longer cuddly Ken, cheeky chappy. He’s signed up to New Labour, warts and all. He now wants us to vote for the party that rushed into war in Iraq at George Bush’s request, for the party that spent £500 million on privatising the tube – rather than improving services, and for the party that is ploughing ahead with top-up fees and foundation hospitals.

Perhaps that’s why he still feels the need to drop his trousers in public with politically incorrect outbursts from time to time – to show the old Ken hasn’t died. Labour now has to tolerate his ill-judged remarks like the recent ones about stringing up the Saudi royal family from lamp-posts.

So – he’s off my list now. I’m his ex-best friend and I would rather kiss a newt than Ken (although there is a distinct similarity between those two)!

I really thought we would see a new form of politics with the Assembly working to hold the Mayor to account – but so often the old pull of adversarial politics has sent Labour and Tory scuttling to their political corners – with the Mayor getting away with waste and incompetence.

But we can put that right in June!

Humps or no humps – that is the question. And it’s a question I have been trying to answer by bringing some analysis and fact to a debate that has often generated more heat than light. The London Assembly’s Transport committee (which I chair) has just concluded an investigation into the issue.

In the beginning, it appeared that humps saved lives and serious injuries. They were driven by a groundswell of popular demand and campaigning, whilst appealing to councils as cheap and quick to implement. They spread like rashes across our boroughs. Indeed, a friend recently told me that they are one of the few things he remembers seeing on Tomorrow’s World that have actually come about.

But we are now some years on from the first appearance of the hump on our streets. As they have proliferated questions have began to arise about their effectiveness, the possibility that they cost lives through slowing down emergency vehicles, damage to cars and property, noise, pollution and discomfort caused to passengers.

The clamour has grown to fever pitch as the Borough of Barnet, led in its mission to rid the world of humps by Assembly Member Brian Coleman, began to remove humps from their roads.

At the same time – the ambulance service was reported as claiming that lives might be lost due to the slowing down of ambulances by humps. Transport for London research indicates that three seconds per hump are lost, which sounds like it might be a problem. However, much to my amazement – given how much publicity there has been about the ambulance issue – when we put the ambulance service on the spot they could not produce any actual evidence of loss of life from any study.

So what did we find? Well – the lowly hump may indeed be a poor, simplistic, third world sort of a speed reduction measure – but it is effective.

The evidence was overwhelming in terms of the success of humps in reducing death and serious injury. On average the rate was more than halved. For any public policy which councillors control to be able to have a direct effect on so many lives is, in my experience, extremely rare and a sobering reminder of the importance of many of the decisions which local government take.

But there is no doubt that speed humps are a nasty, cheap solution that councils reach for first rather than utilising the more expensive versions or other measures available.

There is very little solid evidence available (so far) about the noise, pollution and damage to properties from humps – though there is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence. Whilst many individuals report these effects, no accurate research appeared to have been carried out to establish this. The Assembly has recommended that this work be done, as it is very difficult for individuals thus affected to prove their case on their own. On such an important issue we need some solid evidence to inform future decision making.

This wasn’t our only recommendation in the draft report. Better use needs to be made of the range of speed reduction alternatives that now exist. The boroughs and the emergency services must work together to produce a locally agreed plan as to which roads emergency services use frequently and so need to be kept clear – which may be quite different from the roads designated ‘strategic’ by the Department of Transport. And we need accurate monitoring of the effectiveness of each scheme and the dissemination of results and best practise across London.

The Mayor of London has threatened to withdraw funding from Barnet if it doesn’t behave. He has also gone on record as saying he wants a speed camera in every residential street. A bit over the top I thought (well – no change there) and a hideous invasion of privacy.

I hope that the Assembly report (assuming it passes the committee stage next week) sends out a strong message to London that humps save lives and that any borough removing humps must replace them with an equal or better alternative – but at the same time makes it quite clear that humps are neither the only nor necessarily the best tool in the speed reduction box.

If you want to see the report for yourself, it’s on the GLA website.

A few weeks ago I phoned the Chief Executive of Tube Lines, Terry Morgan, and the Managing Director of London Underground, Tim O’Toole, to ask what they were doing with the embankment by Highgate Tube station. (There are some advantages to being Chair of Transport in London!)

I already knew that work was being done to stop Archway Road falling down the embankment, but – the vegetation has been cleared out in such brutal fashion that confidence amongst local residents and the Highgate Society about what it would look like after the work was done has been sinking. It has also undermined confidence about what sort of fence (cheap and ugly or attractive and appropriate?) we would end up with along Archway Road and whether other improvements for pedestrians would be made.

I have an obvious interest both as a resident of Highgate and as twice daily user of Highgate station. And the news was getting worse – word had reached me through nefarious means that Tube Lines had not been working as closely as one might have wished with Transport for London (TfL), who are in charge of London Underground.

According to one mole, Tube Lines had steamed ahead with the construction (or rather deconstruction!) works. This had resulted in TfL not having any control over how the street aspects of the works would be designed or co-ordinated – and without TfL having time to produce decent designs for the pedestrian environment and the all-important fence. They were now in the process of rushing through designs on the hoof.

I spoke to Terry because I wanted to speak to someone high up enough to make decisions but low down enough to know what was actually happening. He duly obliged and the project manager rang me the next day.

There I am, all ready to harangue him about Tube Lines dashing ahead without proper consultation, when he points out to me that this isn’t true. Tube Lines, in order to commence any such works has to pass through a series of formal and contractual stages before they can get anywhere near the site.

And who gave the go ahead? Knock me down with a feather – London Underground, who are managed by Transport for London – the very people from where the story "Tube Lines didn’t talk to us in time" has come from.

Then Tim O’Toole from London Underground rings me. Now Tim is a sharp cookie in that way that smart American lawyers can be. And he knows how to schmooze too. So he says he will do some digging and get back to me. I say to him that I want a meeting arranged for me (and key stakeholders) with all the main players so that we can not only get to the bottom of all of this but make sure that we get a really good outcome in terms of the fence, the pavements, vegetation etc.

This is a rare opportunity to design something decent, aesthetically and practical at a site many people use or pass by. It mustn’t be lost.

Tim does his digging and soon afterwards we set a date for the meeting later this month. We will go to the site and then have a meeting with all the key players where I’ll have the chance to ensure residents’ views are heard. (By the way, if you have any comments about the existing works, please do let me have them – you can call me on (020) 8340 5459 or email me on lynne@lynnefeatherstone.org).

Who knows what story will come out about TfL and London Underground (not) talking to each other – but at least TfL have moved swiftly now. And, of course, schmoozing always helps!

Close friends and colleagues, knowledgeable about my tenuous relationship with technology, are currently much amused by my elevated geek status, having been pronounced a runner-up in the Guardian’s Political Blog of the Year awards.

For those thinking “what is she on about?” a blog (or web log) is a kind of on-line diary / stream of consciousness / view of the world that individuals or groups place in the public domain on the web to communicate with the wider world.

Political blogging is now becoming a new phenomenon in terms of engaging with the public and making elected politician more accessible and more open. My own blog is a running commentary on my daily activities and thoughts both at the London Assembly and as a Haringey councillor.

“Down to earth and good humoured” is how the Guardian described it. It is a very personal engagement, I have to say. For me when I write, I am writing alone in a room and imagine myself actually talking to people about my day.

I started it last September as a result of a discussion with a close colleague (who is a mega-geek and has been since birth) suggesting that I might like to do this. As a workaholic – I couldn’t quite see where I would get time to do it – but I thought I would give it a go.

It has become therapy in a way. A personal commune with myself – I sometimes even forget that there are people out there reading it. Some have emailed me to say they read it every day – so I have to be careful to remember that it is not a private diary. I don’t record my personal life but inevitably you do get insider information on the behind the scenes rows that cross my path.

It has developed a life of its own – out there in cyberspace anyone can hear you, including an avid reader from Mexico! I have emails from across the world arguing with me over various entries in my blog. It also meanders its way into the pages of other print media from the Scotsman to the Liverpool Echo.

But perhaps best of all, since I appeared in the On-Line section of the Guardian (which I confess to never having read prior to elevation to its pages) my own teenage daughter now rates me!

I have to say I am thrilled to have won this award. I was astonished when I got news that I had been nominated. Amazed when the Guardian shortlisted me into the last twelve and stunned when I was pronounced a runner up.

It was won by thegayvote.co.uk which is a very serious blog where people post their views on the issues of the day and their impact on the gay world.

I think in an age where so few people vote and there is a view (not mine – I’ve met too many!) that politicians are all the same – this intimate and personal recording of a politicians work provides an opportunity for people to see and understand better what politicians are actually doing and thinking.

Readers will be pleased to note that the swelling of my head to gargantuan proportions has been somewhat reduced by said geek friend sending me the actual voting figures that delivered my new found fame. It wasn’t millions or hundreds of thousands of votes I garnered. But I can always dream of next year’s competition…

Carlton TV put me head to head with the Chair of the Association of British Drivers (ABD) in a live debate last Sunday on their current affairs show ‘The Week’.

Having had a gander at their website – it was clear to me that they are very firmly of the view four wheels good – and anything inhibiting the free passage of those four wheels bad. They present themselves as the fearless champions of the downtrodden motorist – who just last week suffered yet another brick in their wall with the second reading of the ‘Traffic Management Bill’.

As if speed cameras, bus lane enforcement and the congestion charge weren’t enough of a trial to poor beleaguered motorists, there’s now this bill.

Without boring you to death, an example of the new measures in the bill would be the conversion from criminal to civil offences of transgressions like taking no notice of a “no right turn” sign or being caught in a yellow junction box – not to mention parking over 50cm away from a kerb.

Downgrading from criminal to civil offence might sound like something the ABD would welcome, but the sting in the tail is that it would mean a traffic warden could now give you a ticket for these offences.

Visions of traffic wardens chasing cars across yellow boxes or on their knees with tape measures by the kerb…

Despite these practical challenges, I like the general principle of taking more action against the small number of selfish drivers who block junctions, shoot across red lights regardless of others or cause jams by parking in unsuitable locations.

That’s not being anti-car – indeed, car drivers benefit as much as pedestrians and bus users from having safe junctions and fewer obstructions.

My TV adversary was definitely not a fan of bus lanes – and even less of a fan of getting a ticket for entering one. As pour moi – I’m a natural-born goody two-shoes, who sits patiently in the traffic lane whilst a stream of cars sail by in the bus lane. I fume at each transgressor that undertakes me, hooting my horn to signal my displeasure. I desire vengeance and long for justice to be visited upon them. And I feel a complete mug – the only fool obeying the rules?

Motorists who get done for speeding or abusing bus lanes deserve to be done. I will be delighted to see yellow junction box sinners done too.

And there is an answer for motorists. If you don’t do it – you won’t get a ticket. It’s not rocket science.

There’s a reason for all this – speed kills. Three thousand five hundred people a year dead and a further 35,000 injured.

Just think about that number a moment. If they were all reported, it would mean nine or ten deaths in the evening TV news, each and every night all through the year.

Which brings me to my last point – humps! I hate them. They are horrible. Well-behaved, non-speeding, bus lane observing car drivers like myself, have to suffer them as much as the irresponsible ones.

However, there is a new hump on the horizon. I am currently conducting a scrutiny investigation at the London Assembly on road humps. As we are in the middle of the work, it is too soon to come to conclusion but one thing of note that has come into the frame is a clever hump – a scientific hump.

This hump only acts as a hump if you speed. If you go at the set speed – say 20mph – then it deflates as you go over it as if there were no humps there. Miraculous. This hump rewards the good!

None of which would have been of any interest to my friend from the ABD. I don’t think there is anything in the world that could divest him of his belief in the divine right of motorists. After the program, I asked him whereabouts he lived in London. Spookily enough, he didn’t!

Once upon a time – not long ago or far away – lived twenty-five political elves and a handsome (more of a frog really – but for the sake of the story, handsome) Mayor. And they lived in a beautiful glass palace, designed by the most famous architect in the land, which stood glistening on the banks of Old River Thames.

And everyone in the land loved The Mayor and his elves.

The people had believed that when the Mayor came to power he would bring light and goodness to their darkened and difficult land. They believed that he would solve the problems that beset them as they tried their hardest to survive against the grinding, bleak reality of their daily life. The streets were dark and dangerous. Vicious criminals lurked in corners waiting to pounce on unsuspecting victims. The streets were filthy. Travel was well nigh impossible – particularly underground, where human beings were packed like cattle being taken to market. Life was grim in old London Town.

At the same time, there was another force in the land. This was an even more powerful force – which ruled over many lands with an iron grip, controlling everything that went on in every single household in the land. This ruling council was led by a strong-willed young prince who would not listen to his advisors or his people.

Years before, the Mayor had been a member of this ruling council – but they had cast him out as a traitor and a villain. The Mayor was sad. He felt friendless and alone and wanted so desperately to be back in the fold that he would do anything they demanded of him. He even let them take away all the wealth from his people and use it for their own diabolical ends in far flung regions of the North.

As the snow fell on Christmas Eve, a great darkness swept through the Mayor’s domain and a great silence fell on the City. Everything stopped. The people were afraid, for they did not know what had happened. They could not see. They could not get home to their families for their Xmas Eve cheer. It was cold and dark. In their hour of need – they cried out to the Mayor, "Save us! Save us!" But where was the Mayor?

The Mayor was nowhere to be found. "The Mayor is missing": the cry went out across the snowy landscape. The twenty-five political elves, who nobody took much notice of as a rule, held an emergency meeting to decide what should be done in his absence. But they couldn’t agree amongst themselves.

The little red elves all did as they were told by the ruling council. The little blue elves didn’t want to find him anyway. The little green elves didn’t even turn up to the meeting. And the golden elves flew all across the land delivering leaflets asking people if they’d seen the Mayor.

But where was the Mayor? Well, a sad fate had befallen him. He had turned to solid ice on the steps of a very nice house at 10 Downing Street, London – where he had been knocking for many hours begging to be let in. In fact, as a reminder to future Mayors who failed to be there for their citizens, he was placed on a vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square for all to see.

And the people, in their hour of need, came out onto the streets in their thousands, and turned to each other for comfort and warmth – and as they did so, they joined hands and a great force was created that breathed life into the City. And the lights shone out. And there was much rejoicing in the land as the old order died. And peace and good will and prosperity returned to the people.

And I’m the Christmas Fairy!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

Middle-aged, middle-class, white female – that’s me! I’m not overly happy with this profiling – particularly the middle-age bit! But on the other hand – I’ve never been stopped, let alone searched. Not the right profile I guess!

But profiling clearly does exist and appears to play a part in the decision of who the police stop when they use their discretionary powers of stop and search. The police see stop and search as a vital tool in their work to cut crime and make London safe. But are they being entirely honest when they say the decisions on who to stop are based on intelligence rather than racial profiling?

These are the issues being looked at by a panel at Metropolitan Police Authority, the body to which London’s Met police force is accountable. The investigation, for which I’m the Vice Chair, has been holding a series of public evidence-gathering sessions and also working through a wealth of written evidence. Witnesses have included the Met itself, the CRE, the Islamic Human Rights Commission, Boyhood to Manhood, Black Police Federation, young people, community reps, the Mayor’s adviser on race – and many, many others.

As we near the end of our examination, I cannot speak for the whole panel as we have not reached our conclusions yet – but I can speak for myself.

Whilst I think it is right to recognise that stop and search is an important tool in the fight against crime, I think it is also right to recognise that it can easily be abused. There is clearly is a problem and members of the ethnic communities are more likely to be stopped and searched despite the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that they are more likely to commit crimes.

At the same time the confidence of the local community is crucial to good policing, and the use of stop and search – a very visible exercise of police power – has the potential to have a big impact on how the local community sees the police. I think there is a link between the figures on lower levels of confidence in the police amongst Asian communities and the acknowledgment that Asian people are more likely to be stopped and searched.

An effective and fair use of the power is therefore also very much in the interests of the police, if post-Burnley and Bradford and post-9/11 they are to improve their relations with the Asian community.

Since 9/11 on the one hand we are more aware then ever that the police and security services rely on help from local communities, and so improving trust is crucial. On the other hand it has become more important than ever to improve the accountability of the police in stop and search given the apparent temptation post 9/11 to target Asian and other ethnic minority communities.

Right in the middle of the scrutiny came the BBC film expose ‘The Secret Policeman’ – a salutary reminder that significant racist elements remain in our police forces. We can never root them out completely, but we can ensure better education and training and better accountability. And it is vital that we ensure that there are enough safeguards over individual police officers’ behaviour so that, whatever thoughts are buried deep in someone’s mind, their behaviour remains professional and exemplary.

For me, perhaps the most telling evidence came from a question I asked at a scrutiny session last week of the ex-commander of Lambeth Police. He was saying that he monitored and supervised all the stop and search records to check that no individual officer or team of officers were acting unreasonably. When I asked him whether any of the top brass of the Met kept a check on what he or other commanders were doing in terms of supervision on stop and search, he said he had never been contacted by a senior officer in this regard. Never, ever. That spoke volumes to me!

It was also clear from the evidence that often the only experience young Asians had of the police was when they were stopped and searched. Now, if your only contact with the police is poorly executed, invasive, possibly discriminatory and offensive, you are not going to form a good impression of the police. From 31,721 searches carried out on Asians by the Met in 2002/2003 there were 3,883 arrests made. The actual conviction rate was not available because the police do not have that data – shockingly.

And it wasn’t just the relatively small number of ‘successful’ searches that counted. We heard evidence from young people about the way they were treated during a stop and how much difference it made when the exercise was carried out with respect and even more so, if it was done by a local police officer that they knew.

From the young people who came to the scrutiny I can quote you some of the evidence we heard: on the everyday reality of being a member of an ethnic community, one respondent noted that at one point he was being stopped ‘every couple of days … got used to being stopped’. On police profiling according to our witnesses, police seemed to ‘go after the black boys’ and the ‘hoodies’. Preconceived notions and stereotypes of which the police stop seemed to be based on dress, race, and ‘girls never get searched’. The behaviour and approach by the police was described by young witnesses as ‘rowdy … with no explanation of why they were doing it, they twisted my arms, searched me, handcuffed me and arrested me’. And on the impact of being stopped: ‘I cried’ said our witness.

It has been a gripping investigation to be involved with. We have already had ten evidence sessions with around forty witnesses and there is just one more to come. That will be our opportunity to question the most senior officer in charge of stop and search. And there were lots of other issues raised, including the lack of data – the Met don’t appear to know if they have reliable data on how many stops result in conviction – and the pros and cons of Recommendation 61 from the MacPherson report.

When the last session is over, we then have to try and make sense of it all and put forward recommendations to try and improve the use of stop and search – because if it goes on as it is now – the rift between community and the force that polices it will only get worse.