Have the Tories just created yet another way for voters to kick the government?

I'm not really sure what the turnout will be for the Police and Crime Commissioner elections but I'd be surprised if it's much above the 23% for the 1999 European Parliament elections which was the record low for a national election.

I'm also ambivalent about the upsides and downsides of elected police commissioners in general as it seems like one of those things that works in theory but runs into difficulties in practice.

Pros:

• In theory being elected by their local areas will make the police more responsive to local concerns which may be different from priorities set at a national level
• ...and that seems to be it.

There's the possibility that making individual police forces more autonomous will lead to creater experimentation in policy and thus the free market of ideas will make commissioners eager to be re-elected copy the policies of those that are seen to work and therefore the effectiveness and quality of policing across the country will gradually rise in a form of benign competition.

But this seems unrealistic given the tendency of local elections to become simply referendums on the performance of the national government and for non-national elections  to be dominated by partisans who are generally more likely to vote than those without much attachment to a particular party.

I'd expect these elections to be no different with Labour doing well in Labour areas, the Conservatives doing well in more Tory areas and the opposition tending to benefit from the unpopularity of the government. While the Conservatives in government Labour will continue to do better, as the opposition tends to do in local elections, and if Labour return to government nationally then the situation would be reversed.

So what the government seems to have done is simply create a new way for voters to kick them and their successors during the mid-term blues with another set of local elections set to be dominated by the established party machines.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing because it should, in theory, neutralise some of the cons of elected police commissioners.

Cons:

• The police do much more than just catching and locking up bad guys but this is the only metric by which the commissioners will be judged, leading to the pursuit and prioritisation of tabloid-friendly policies to the exclusion of everything else that the police do

This may or may not be a con depending on your political persuasion but can anyone seriously imagine the candidate who promises that criminals will be hauled off in chains being defeated by the candidate who argues that Community Support Officers should be helping local teenagers organise football games to keep them from idling in the street and getting into trouble?

At least if the elections are dominated by the party machines then there is an extent to which this tendency will be moderated and policy will be at least partly formed by the larger party network of whoever gets elected. There is still the risk of low turnout and preferential voting causing someone less than mainstream to be elected but hopefully eccentricity and fringe behaviour will be no more common than they are for local councils.

It is possible for the Police and Crime Commissioners to grow into what supporters hope they will be, the London Mayor is far more powerful and prominent than was originally intended and Tony Blair once compared the Scottish Parliament to a parish council when Alex Salmond now dominates Scottish politics. But I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that most of England's media is based in London and that the only area of the UK where the media isn't totally dominated by London is Scotland?