Schadenfreude
Can the Tories ever win back the Police?
You know who.
Schadenfreude; the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, pain, suffering, or humiliation of another.
Dear Conservatives,
So, here we are. The end. You’re sitting in your bunker with your pasty-faced SpAds, old mates from public school and worm-tongued camp followers, politely ignoring the sound of Red artillery pounding hitherto safe constituencies. Meanwhile, your right flank has been infiltrated by a grinning jester in mustard trousers and a Barbour jacket. You never took him seriously, or the people he represents. You’re snobs of the worst kind, too interested in dinner party opinions and luxury beliefs.
You’ve had 14 years. For what? The longest intra-party civil war in British political history, punctuated by ruining the economy after placing the nation under house arrest?
Oh well, soon you’ll be resistance fighters. Living ragged in the woods, firing pot-shots at His Majesty’s Government as their mighty armoured columns thunder by. You might not even be the official Opposition. The jester in the mustard trousers might be. Or that strange Lib Dem chap, the one who likes amusement parks and canoeing.
But not you.
At this point I’m meant to be reasonable. Mature. Argue how important it is to have an effective, cogent opposition in an advanced First World democracy.
But I'm not going to be. Despite having absolutely no confidence in Keir Starmer, or his desperately unimpressive soon-to-be cabinet, I’m still going to laugh like a drain at the evisceration of the Conservative and Unionist Party in the early hours of July 5th. I’m going to be like Tyler Durden at the end of ‘Fight Club’, gleefully watching the Tory world collapse. Centrist zombies like Jeremy Hunt, losing their unassailable Surrey seats? Fucking delicious. Champers all round!
Why?
Mainly because you deserve it. It’s about your selfishness. Your betrayals. Your complete lack of discipline, or any empathy, for the British people. Your gurning ‘posh boys who don’t know the price of milk.’ Dave and Gideon, thinking they could keep Blair’s simulacrum alive, like the guy pretending to be the Wizard of Oz.
Also, because you destroyed British policing. You did it on purpose, screwing over Plod out of pure spite, a simmering blood feud from the days of Ken Clarke. It was a most un-conservative type of wrecking. I thought conservatives ‘conserved’ things. I was wrong. As a result, virtually every police officer I know thinks you’re a sick joke. Isn’t defence and security - in classical conservative thought - the primary responsibility of government? Yet you leave behind a lame duck police service and an army the size of a provincial cricket team.
As an aside, I’m sure many left-wingers will find it deeply ironic how my generation of serving and former police officers view Theresa May and the Tories the same way the Miners viewed Margaret Thatcher. The difference being, of course, coal was a legacy energy source. The demand for policing only grows.
Over a decade, the Tories closed half of the UK’s police stations.
You might ask, not unreasonably, why I’m not addressing Labour’s manifesto proposals for policing? Mainly because this iteration of Labour gives the impression of hiding a damp, 70’s style centre-left fist in a velvety Blairite glove. It’s going to be boilerplate machine politics, possibly offering police extra resources while simultaneously stymying it with new rules, regulations and wokery (which was the Blairite playbook).
Their promises of more officers (13,000 including specials and PCSOs) is thin gruel. Their new ASBOs (‘Respect Orders’) are reheated Blairism. Only their plans to build more prison places sound encouraging. Although it’s unlikely to happen as the cash-strapped government finds other things to waste our money on. As for their border policing and immigration enforcement pledges? It’s already been tried. It’s camouflage for a party fundamentally uncomfortable with border controls and the subject of immigration.
In which case, is this just a shouty hit-piece (sorta), a cathartic howling at the moon (mebbe), or is there a point (yes)?
You see, I’m offering the Conservatives (and, indeed, any other political party open to some uncomfortable truths) my tuppence. I also think Starmer might be a one-term PM. I wonder if the British public are voting him in just to give the Tories their richly-deserved kicking. The plates are shifting. I smell the whiff of cordite in the air as voting patterns and allegiances change irrevocably. I also think a huge Labour majority will, ironically, be a nightmare for Starmer. The Party’s leftish underbelly, fed after dark like Gremlins, will come out to play. I expect Sir Keir to spend half of his time on party management rather than running the country.
This means any opposition has five years to get its act together when it comes to policing and law and order. To make a manifesto offering that will appeal to voters by delivering a genuinely effective police service. A police service the people want to see, not the version the presenters of the ‘Today’ programme might prefer.
The Labour back benches, 2025.
Without any further ado, here’s my message to policy wonks, wannabe Home Secretaries, comms gurus, SpAds and politicos seeking to outflank Starmer on law and order in 2029/2030.
Political neutrality
Without Fear or Favour, right? My manifesto would review all hate crimes legislation to ensure they are consistent with freedom of speech and thought. The police should be as apolitical as possible, not troubling themselves with social media spats or otherwise grown-up people using Old Bill to score points off each other. Police forces should be empowered, and encouraged, to say ‘that’s nothing to do with us’. This feeds into a general sense of ‘what are the police for?’ I’ll discuss this later, as it seems to me the people who run policing, the people who deliver policing and the people who ultimately pay for it (the policed) all seem to have different ideas.
Policing isn’t a private business, deal with it
I know centre-right politicians feel more at home with business than the public sector. “When I was the CEO of MegaCorps, we wouldn’t have done it like that.” Well, sparky, policing ain’t MegaCorps, we don’t make widgets and we can’t outsource our response teams to an overseas call centre.
So dump the MBA bullshit and free market dogma. Realise there are State functions which must be delivered by the State, especially those concerning the use of force, interference with property rights and deprival of liberty. The army, police and prisons are fundamentally different from other public services and yes, they are expensive. They are, however, a non-negotiable investment.
Are there areas where business principles are useful? Sure. Procurement is an obvious area (Defence, please stay quiet). Why the UK police has 43 different uniforms and IT systems is beyond me. But promotion, direct-entry, performance management systems? These are mission-specific. Let the police work to shape them, not third parties imposed from above. This will, of course, involve dismantling Vichy policing structures like the College of Policing. Ha ha ha.
Managerialism, which under Tony Blair accelerated to ridiculous levels, is one of the primary reasons why we’re in this mess in the first place. Home Office Counting Rules and Sanctioned Detections? They’re pointless bullshit, designed to give deliberately skewed stats for politicians to throw at each other across the House of Commons. Any party that talks about reducing bureaucracy without wanting to reform the performance monster is talking shit. Don’t talk shit, Tories. You did that for 14 years and look where that got you?
People aren’t fooled by the police numbers game
Police numbers are important - policing’s a people-intensive business. Having said that, people want to see police officers. Sensible, grown-up, well-trained and disciplined police officers. They know the difference between them and PCSOs, Specials, local-authority accredited security staff, municipal patrol auxiliaries, ridiculously-hatted ‘town rangers’ and all the other rentacop stuff New Labour and then the Tories introduced as part of their ‘reform’ agenda. Which, really, was all about saving money and stealth-privatisation.
I know, Rupert the SpAd, this chafes against your true blue-blooded Hayekian economic training and the stuff you wrote about for your PPE dissertation. Tough shit. The plates have shifted. This is about reality. As I said before, we ain’t making widgets, we’re protecting the public in an increasingly atomised and dangerous world. Stick your economic theory up your fundament and get real.
While I’m at it, ‘reassurance policing’ is a load of old balls too. People generally only notice the absence of police when their neighbourhood’s gone to shit. If you can keep the streets safe by, say, being sneaky in plain-clothes and catching drug dealers, then that’s easily as good.
Yes, I feel better for writing all that.
The accountability vortex
Now, I might be fairly statist on police funding, but I’m an unapologetic radical when it comes to organisation. For example, here’s exhibit ‘a’, my article on how the ‘Police Blob’ took over.
The current Byzantine arrangements for police accountability are a dog’s breakfast; elected mayors, Police and Crime Commissioners, the Home Office, College of Policing (a self-serving quango known as ‘Hogwarts’ to rank-and-file police officers), the clown-show IOPC and so on. There’s an old saying, ‘a camel is a racing horse designed by a committee’, and UK policing’s a classic example. The system simply multiplies the distance between decision-makers and those who actually police.
The 2029 Starmer-busting manifesto should promise to depoliticise or get rid of police and crime commissioners and bring back streamlined police authorities. There was little wrong with the old tripartite relationship between chief constables, police authorities and government. Then in wanders Dan Hannan with his bucolic Merrie Old Englande stuff about sheriffs. Please.
You might also be surprised when I say part of the answer lies with supporting the Home Office (most coppers are sniffy about the Home Office and the feeling is entirely mutual). Starmer’s Labour Party will create an uber-blobby cat’s cradle of quangos and third-party organisations to embed its interests, principles and people deep inside the state’s operating system. The best way of countering that, for policing at least, is to keep accountability structures streamlined and clearly delineated. The centre - i.e. the Home Office - must hold.
How do you do that? Improve, finesse and reform the Home Office. Turn it into an anti-Blob rather than pro-Blob ministry. You’re politicians, right? This is what you’re meant to do. Get on with it.
Robust Policing; an honest conversation with the public
There’s two old sayings I enjoy, because both contain a nugget of truth. The first is ‘a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged.’ The other is ‘a liberal is conservative who’s been arrested.’
The point being, when it comes to being policed, Joe Public can be a bit of a hypocrite. They enjoy watching police get stuck into wrong ‘uns’, but not when the wrong ‘un is their precious little Johnny, who’s a lovely lad really, a loveable rogue who fell in with the wrong crowd (etc).
A party looking to create clear blue water between itself and Labour’s traditionally Fabian-esque attitude to crime is to ask the public what they really want around the use of force and robust policing? Of course, I’m not suggesting a policy of ‘bring back police brutality,’ but rather a turning back the clock on recent decisions from the IOPC. These seem to work from the premise that behind any police use of force is a crime, then work backwards. Look, police have never been more accountable, given the use of body-worn video and social media - as a society we’re great at capturing evidence. We’re just pretty bad at contextualising or explaining it.
How to achieve this? Civic education, including teaching young people their rights AND their responsibilities. I’m amazed we don’t do this as part of the national curriculum, along with first aid and emergency life support. This includes input on stop and search and arrest, explaining what’s acceptable and what isn’t. The fostering of a general spirit of, for want of a better phrase, play silly games and win silly prizes. You’ve stolen a car, been chased, crashed it and now you’re injured? Diddums. You’ve been caught with drugs and your house is being searched? Awww. You punched a copper and got tasered? Those are the breaks, son.
Labour will invariably perform ideological acrobatics to argue how the scrote stole the car because of, uh, society and the lack of a youth centre (etc). No. Personal responsibility dictates sometimes, when you behave like a knob, bad stuff happens. And that’s down to you. Yes, keep the language simple too.
This was more or less the police world I was hatched into. It was called common sense. We need a political voice prepared to demand we claim some of it back.
Hosing out the stables
This. Quite literally, this.
The Tory austerity measures of the 2010s hindered police attempts to tidy up their act. Cuts to pay and conditions meant forces had to lower recruitment and vetting standards. Then came the pandemic and recruitment-by-Zoom. Budgets meant less resources for professional standards departments at a time when, ironically, they were needed more than ever. I argued here how creatures like Wayne Couzens might have ended up in the Met because of cost-cutting. Then, given the subsequent reputational evisceration of the police, even less people wanted to join. A vicious circle, indeed.
There needs to be a hard-nosed realisation police discipline involves both carrots and sticks. It seems pretty obvious the better the pay and conditions offer, the better standard of recruit. This is, in effect, spending to save. It also means bodies such as the Police Federation should accept there might need to be changes to T&Cs.
I’m not a dinosaur - if I were to rewrite police regulations for the 21st Century they’d look quite different from the way they do now. Check out the rest of my Substack and you’ll find ample evidence. Opposition parties who want to hit the ground running at the next general election, offering a serious, popular offer on law and order (that jabs the other side in its funny bone), need to start work now.
And, finally;
What are the police for?
I’ve written extensively on the subject of ‘social work policing’, whereby the police morphed from a crimefighting force into a quasi-social service.
If you take the time to listen to people who aren’t academics, senior police figures and other members of the buffet-attending elite, you’ll quickly notice how extremely pissed-off Joe Public is about this. They know what the police are for, and don’t like being patronised by highly-paid public servants who tell them Old Bill are too busy attending mental health calls to deal with shoplifters or burglaries. That’s an NHS job.
There is a great deal of political capital here, feeding into wider issues around the way the UK police is structured. Do we really need 43 different forces (no)? Do we need a ‘third way service’ that offers support to safeguarding and social services, but sits apart from policing (possibly)? Or, on the other hand, do we need a gendarmerie or national police for public order and ‘kinetic policing’ (I genuinely don’t know). Do we need a proper border police (Yes)?
The bottom line? There needs to be unambiguous political support for the fundamental mission of policing - maintaining the King’s Peace, protecting life and property and preventing crime. Have a Royal Commission or an Act of Parliament if it helps. But a party with a well-researched plan and the minerals to implement it - disruptively if necessary - would genuinely scare the Labour Party after five years of by-the-numbers law and order policy (feel free to read this in 2029 - I’m quietly confident I’ll be more right than wrong).
Right, now I’ve got that out of my system I feel much better. I’ll enjoy watching the Tories squirm on Election night, a bottle or two of Pol Roger to hand, wallowing in schadenfreude.
The next morning, though, whoever intends to make up the next government need to get to work. Sharpish. Why? Because things, despite what the New Labour theme tune might say, ain’t gonna get better.
I laughed and cried reading this Dom, if you were a political party you would get my vote!
I love you when you’re angry. Thank you for speaking on behalf of so many.