Political opinion with Sussex PCC Katy Bourne: January column
As the new year brings slightly lighter days, many of us make plans for home improvements and holidays and resolutions about self-improvement. One of my commitments to myself this year is to spend more time appreciating what Sussex has to offer.
In 2026 I’m looking forward to some regular annual events from the Arundel, Petworth and Glyndebourne Festivals, to Eastbourne Airbourne in August and my favourite, the Goodwood Revival in September.
Anyone who knows me or has seen my social media feeds will see I have some great friends and colleagues who share my love of swing dance and big band music. It’s great to see so many people these days in their finest pleats and high-waisted trousers joining us for a lindy hop to Benny Goodman or swing out to Glenn Miller.
Dancing holds an appeal across generations – you only have to see the enduring popularity of shows like Strictly - and it’s a guaranteed way to stay fit and meet people. Before I entered politics, I ran a large dance company and I constantly bump into students from 20 years ago all across the county who are still stepping out most weekends.
During WW2 our grandparents and their friends enjoyed the company and largesse of better-fed and better-clothed GIs stationed in Sussex and the touring big bands. Many a couple met to dance at Horsham’s Drill Hall to see local bands like The Southerners and The Serenaders who often shared stages with American military bands. They toured to boost morale during the build-up to D-Day. Older Sussex residents may recall that Serenaders trombonist Derek Garman went on to become a regular on the post-war Sussex jazz scene leading his band Swing Fever into his 90s until passing away in 2023.
I hadn’t realised until recently that the Allies used the Crowborough-based Aspidistra transmitter - the most powerful in the world - to broadcast swing and jazz across the channel to occupied Europe to show how socially integrated and free the US and UK were. One of the fake stations they broadcast from Crowborough was ‘Soldatensender Calais’ which pretended to be a station for German troops and was so convincing it was singled out by Joseph Goebbels for its effective fake propaganda.
Talking of liberty and the rights of men, there will be celebrations in Lewes this year to mark the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence and acknowledgment of one of the era’s key thinkers - Thomas Paine.
One of Sussex’s most famous inhabitants is also one of the three most famous bears in the world. This year, we celebrate 100 years of AA Milne’s Winnie the Pooh and I’ll definitely be heading to Ashdown Forest for his 100th birthday.
In October it’s the 960th anniversary of the Battle of Hastings and the start of the Norman conquest of Anglo-Saxon Britain. Since then, the English Channel and our British Bulldog spirit has managed to hold off pretenders to the crown, including Napoleon and Hitler. Now we face a daily procession of small boats crammed with economic migrants and asylum-seekers drawn to the comparative safety and security of our islands.
With over 500 male migrants soon to be housed at the Crowborough Army Training Camp, as Sussex Police and Crime Commissioner, I’ve had to bid for £5.6m in additional funding from the Home Office to ensure sufficient police resources to respond to incidents in and around the camp, without denuding cover for other parts of Sussex. I’ll write more about the policing of Crowborough in a future column and what we could and should do to reassure the safety of local residents and to protect migrants from exploitation.
Keeping people safe is why I welcomed Sussex Police’s use of new Live Facial Recognition Technology (LFRT). There has been a lot of hand-wringing by civil liberties campaigners that this technology is the creeping edge of state surveillance - I say to them, whose rights are you more concerned about? Let’s use the right tools to take dangerous criminals off our high streets. Recent evidence from Sussex Police’s initial deployment of LFRT is very reassuring about its accuracy in identifying the right people on pre-determined watch lists so the wrong people are not detained. And, what’s more, the public in Sussex overwhelmingly support its use.
I’m firmly of the view that Live Facial Recognition is about safety not surveillance but some politicians prefer to put ideology above public safety which surely is just giving sex offenders and violent criminals the edge over police officers?
It does rather remind me of one of Pooh’s reflections: “When you are a Bear of Very Little Brain, and you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out into the open and has other people looking at it.”