A group of Hampstead residents are crowd-funding their own police force. What a brilliant idea

“Donate £15 toward my heart transplant and I'll send you a copy of my CT scan. Donate £50 and you'll be entered into a prize-draw to receive my new heart if I die on the operating table!”

Will the crowd-funded Hampstead police officers look like these? (AFP)

Over the years people have crowd-funded some seriously weird stuff: a collection of academic essays on My Little Pony; a Doctor Who rap album; farts in a jar. Now the well-heeled residents of north London’s Hampstead are getting in on the act, and while I’m mildly disappointed that they're not trying to raise money for a massive bronze statue of local hero George Michael, their campaign to crowd-fund a private police force still ticks the boxes marked 'slightly disturbing' and 'great fodder for an opinion piece'. Hence this article. Which I crowd-sourced from some news stories.

At the time of writing the campaign for a Hampstead branch of BOPE has raised £180,000. But now the media has sniffed it out and begun bouncing around its ankles like a slobbery old Labrador the £600,000 target – enough to fund two officers and a sergeant for three years, who’ll be supplemented by a further three officers paid for by the Met – will probably be smashed by the end of the week. Which will be great news for the residents of Hampstead: instead of a small team of police officers dedicated to tackling violent crime, they'll be able to fund a private army of ex-SAS mercenaries and declare themselves an independent state.

Stray onto the Heath after dark and you’ll find a hardened solider lurking in the bushes, face smeared with boot-polish, ready to double-tap anyone they suspect of being a burglar. Countless dogs will be inhumanely destroyed by land mines planted around the ponds. And anyone seen flying a kite on Parliament Hill will taken out by the second-hand reaper drone brought with the excess funds raised by the campaign. It'll be carnage. But it should keep local house prices stable when the London housing bubble pops and the city descends into anarchy.

But why stop at the police? Why not crowd-fund...oh, I dunno, hospitals? Schools?

Just imagine a system where everybody contributed as much money as they could afford and we all got to benefit from a top-class education and world-beating medical care. It would be revolutionary! Wait, what's that? We already crowd-fund these things? And the ‘platform’ is called ‘tax’? Well stone me! I thought that money went towards sky castles for illegal immigrants and Muslim Christmas tree burning festivals. You learn something new every day, eh? Especially when you source all your news from right-wing tabloid newspapers.

Unlike other forms of crowd-funding there are no bonuses for those who contribute the most tax; you don’t get a private room in a hospital or a guaranteed place at Oxbridge for your offspring. Everyone gets access to the same NHS, the same policing, the same schools. But for some reason that’s not good enough for many of the wealthiest backers of tax-funded projects.

A fair proportion of those who can afford to give the most – say a 45 per cent donation rather than a 20 per cent one – don’t want to fund public services at all. They’d rather save their money for military-grade Range Rovers and great-big-fuck-off-empty-buildings in central London. Which are obviously far more valuable than hospitals and schools and council houses and libraries. I mean who the hell wants a library? All those books, just hanging around waiting to be borrowed, for free, whenever you like. Basically a benefits system for those who shirk their book-buying duties.

It looks increasingly likely that many big Taxstarter projects won’t reach their funding targets by the 2020 General Election deadline. The NHS, for example, is already struggling to attract the support it needs, despite a recent high-profile campaign by junior doctors. And things are looking even worse for council housing, launched in 1919 by Lloyd George, which attracted strong support until the arrival of right-to-buy. The Met has also seen a £600m drop in support over the past four years, and is facing further reductions of £800m.

One can easily imagine a future in which we're all encouraged to launch our own crowd-funding campaigns for medical treatment or an education or a decent home. Just think of the pitches: “Donate £15 toward my heart transplant and I'll send you a copy of my CT scan. Donate £50 and you'll be entered into a prize-draw to receive my new heart if I die on the operating table!” Or, you know, don't. Because it's a completely horrible idea.

Here's an alternative one: why not raise the top-rate of tax and close the loopholes that allow the wealthiest members of society to opt-out of paying their fair share? Perhaps some enterprising soul could even launch a Kickstarter campaign for an investigation into the tax avoidance schemes used by some of our highest earners – a fair few of whom, we're willing to bet, live in leafy Hampstead. Behind a giant wall. Mounted with machine gun turrets. And paid for through crowd-funding.