Sorry is the hardest word
The Tories must apologise for decimating Britain’s Police
DOMINIC ADLER
Have you ever seen the film Misery? You haven’t? It concerns an obsessive reader who takes her favourite novelist hostage. She insists he writes a book resurrecting a character killed-off in a previous story. In a now-infamous scene, she discovers the writer attempting to escape. She breaks his ankles with a sledgehammer.
During the David Cameron / Theresa May years, the Tories did something similar to policing. When it wouldn’t – or couldn’t – write a story the post-Thatcher Tories demanded, it resorted to the sledgehammer. Savage cuts were camouflaged as ‘reforms.’ There was the College of Policing, stuffed to the gills with progressives, yes-people and grifters. More Blair-inspired law – meaning another wave of legislative handcuffs for Old Bill. Police stations closed and officers resigned. May, when confronted by police representatives, accused them of ‘crying wolf.’
The Tories were wrong. The wolves arrived. The result? The sorry mess/ bad joke that is contemporary UK policing. I shan’t re-litigate the entire saga; if you’re interested, I wrote a fairly comprehensive account for the Pimlico Journal.
In short? The Tories have much to answer for and Kemi’s ‘well I wasn’t in charge then’ spiel ain’t gonna cut it. Not while guilty men like Nick Timothy are promoted to the justice brief. People who seem not only indifferent, but oblivious, to their mistakes. As the recent Tory defector Robert Jenrick suggested, the Conservatives are loath to accept they really, genuinely broke anything. So it’s back to the old game – keep your heads down, let the other lot fuck up, squeeze back in at the next election and trebles all round!
British politics is febrile. The slow poison of the Mandelson affair? It hasn’t even properly begun trickling into the wider body politic. So who knows who’ll end up governing our disunited kingdom? Policing, I would suggest, offers a significant policy opportunity for Conservatives.
Therefore:
- The Tories should atone for their sins by making amends with rank-and-file officers. Political atonement for egregious errors is a novel political strategy. It demonstrates humility and a willingness to change. The centre-right, in particular, is especially vulnerable when it neglects – or actively damages – institutions such as the police and armed services. Which it unambiguously has.
- The safe money is on the Tories becoming part of a coalition government come 2029. Instead of their usual deference to the Home Office Blob, they should embrace innovative, counter-establishment thinking on law and order issues. In particular, they must strongly oppose key elements of the current police reform White Paper.
- Governments, broadly speaking, need the police on-side. Margaret Thatcher once implemented Labour-sponsored reforms designed to win officers over. It was, interestingly, One Nation Tory wets (led by Ken Clarke) who planned carving up the ‘last great unreformed public service.’
- Which, apparently, it still is. I know, because that’s what Shabana Mahmood called policing the other week. It’s the Home Office line whenever they make their latest power grab. Hey, Shabs, you’re a sock puppet. How does that feel? The Tories need to finally grip the mandarins who’ve long been part of the problem.
- Certain things bend towards immutability. This includes the basics of policing the devious, cunning and often violent bipedal mammal known as homo sapiens. Politicians who fail to realise this are doomed to failure. Apologies set the tone. Policy seals the deal.
Note: I should mention I’m not a member of any political party. Nonetheless, I believe the centre-left are currently incapable of providing the type of policing the public demands – the Blue Labour wing are toast due to the Mandelson imbroglio. As for Reform and the broader (populist) right? They enjoy the advantage of not having been the ones to screw policing in the first place. I’m yet to be wildly impressed by their policies – such as they are – on policing. Time will tell. I’m keeping an open mind, I’m hearing the right noises.
So, what of those wacky Conservatives?
At least, unlike most of his colleagues, he said what he really thought.
Any Tory rapprochement with rank-and-file officers requires them to consider:
Vibes
Mood music’s important. And, from 2010, the Tories made it clear they considered coppers bloated public sector parasites. I remember speaking to an officer who once attended a Downing Street garden party during the Cameron years. He told me about a conversation with a very senior Tory who sneered about police pensions and how they’d be sorted out. Now, coppers could live with the snobbery typified by the Plebgate scandal. They couldn’t live with cuts to pay (which, in real terms, amounted to a near-20% reduction), pensions, conditions and the Mayite barrage of neo-Blairite legislative bullshit. Which is why so many officers retired early or left. Those who remained – the most experienced – remember those years. Kemi? They hate your party.
How, then, to atone? A realistic and equitable review of pay and conditions. A reformed police representative body, replacing the long-suffering Police Federation. Legislation reflecting the realities of the job, not the dinner party opinions of grifters and the activist / NGO elites. Changes to hopeless police leadership and promotion processes, liberated from the Home Office’s mummified grip.
Policing isn’t the private sector
Conservatives are instinctively more comfortable with the private sector than they are with the public. “When I was CEO of MegaCorps, we wouldn’t have done it like that,” they say airily. Well, sparky, policing ain’t MegaCorps. We don’t make widgets. We can’t outsource our response teams to an overseas call centre. As for performance? Don’t even get me started. Managerialism killed policing, with untold bandwidth dedicated to performance management – set your finest minds to squaring that circle.
So dump your MBA bullshit and Oxford PPE-inspired dogma. There are State functions which must be delivered only by the State, especially those concerning the use of force, significant interference with property rights and depriving people of their liberty. The military, police and prisons are fundamentally different from other public services. Yes, they are expensive. They are, however, a non-negotiable investment. They are the State’s physical security architecture. Are there areas where business principles are useful? Of course. Are there areas where business principles are an absolute fucking impediment? Ditto. Balance, people. Balance.
And it isn’t the army, either
This article addresses the age-old Tory obsession with a police ‘officer class’ and how a bit of square-bashing will sort out those hopeless plod (etc).
Time for the legislative hosepipe
This Substack partly chronicles the post-1997 legislative bullshit responsible for strangling policing. Say what you like about the Blairites, but they were clever. Cleverer, dear Tories, than you. Cameron and Boy George lapped that shit up.
Which means your apology should acknowledge how the Cameroons and Mayites failed to recognise new Labour’s bear-traps. Or, even worse, thought they were a good idea. The Human Rights Act. The Equality Act. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and all of the other process-obsessed bullshit designed by a dark cabal of Starmers, Hermers and other Matrix Chambers / Doughty Street ghouls.
So it’s time for a high pressure hosepipe. Boiling water. Disinfectant. Tell your One Nation wets to put on their Tena lady / man pads and get with the fucking program. Cleanse the entire post-1997 legislative settlement preventing anyone, anywhere, from showing any bloody initiative. And, for the love of God, give up on your obsession with X-Box policing.
Mister Tony, tinkering with an unwritten constitution.
Robust policing works
Theresa May (only ever whisper her name, lest she appears!) spent most of her career trying to persuade us the Conservatives weren’t ‘The Nasty Party.’ This was a problem as far as the police were concerned, because policing isn’t a popularity competition. So Theresa (Ahhh! I can smell sulfur in the room as I write) made a show of bashing up coppers, curtailing stop-and-search and turning police misconduct into a stick to justify her political virtue-signalling.
Dear Conservatives, where did that get you? Yes, ‘lawless Britain’ has become a culture war trope (but then again, hasn’t everything?). Sure, One Nation types can hunker down with a cuppa and a Fraser Nelson column, persuading themselves crime’s at its lowest for thirty years (etc). Never mind the stats are utter bollocks – see here and here.
The good news? Conservatives like Chris Philp seem to, finally, get it. Robust policing works – it simply requires political cojones and top cover. It ain’t complicated, despite the academic grifters who’ll assure you otherwise. As long as you renew their research grant, of course.
Big isn’t always beautiful
I’ve written about the new police White Paper at length, including my views on force amalgamations. I’m not rabidly against amalgamations, actually, as long as operational subsidiarity is retained at a local level. However, power is centrifugal; I doubt large forces will be able to help themselves – either that, or local police will fall under the rancid spell of local authorities like Birmingham or Merseyside. Ever-Labour swamps, run by corrupt machine politicians.
The answer? Well, it isn’t the Home Office and its creepy College of Policing. Nor is it a super-duper National Police Service, led by a Darth Vader-like chief constable. Personally? I’m an advocate of a ‘Free Forces’ model, partly-inspired by Toby Young’s Free Schools experiment. I can even imagine it fitting into elements of the White Paper, albeit stripped of claustrophobic Home Office control freakery.
I even wrote a semi-serious article about the day I was put in charge of a Free Force. Enjoy.
Conservatives are meant to conserve, right?
Our country bloody well invented civilian policing. Shouldn’t we at least try to conserve the model? Instead, politicians and civil servants obsess over FBIs and Gendarmeries, traditions running contrary to our common law system. Of course, the Blairites espoused a statute law model, partly to ease our eventual path into Mister Tony’s beloved EU. Which, again, triggers another Tory funny bone – it has lots of Remainers still hunkered down, waiting for the time to rise from their tombs humming Ode to Joy.
Conservatives conserve, apparently. Prove it. Remodel our police, sure. But remodel it on the principles which made it admired across the Globe.
Dear Tories, I end this piece by suggesting making amends offers the sinner’s classic reward – absolution. Access to the sunlit uplands of policy open goals. Places Labour are unable to tread. Of course, there are obstacles. You’d have to throw Theresa May’s legacy (whatever that is) under a bus. You’d have to order Nick Timothy to send me a message saying sorry. You’d have to set about your wannabe Lib Dem Wets with a damp towel, although I suspect a few would enjoy it.
And if you don’t? Watch others swarm over those sunlit uplands. Stick to Home Office orthodoxy. Be assured by Sir Humphrey’s nudge-and-a-wink about ‘plod’. Count the money from your donors, those with their eyes on private security provision and public sector outsourcing.
Business as usual, eh? All comfy and warm. You won’t be in power, though. And perhaps, after next time, you never will.
This article (Sorry is the hardest word) was created and published by Dominic Adler and is republished here under “Fair Use”
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