The Iron Law and The Blob
Who do you think really runs Policing?
Meanwhile, at McKinsey; “Ed’s so hot at the moment, he spent six months on Police Now!”
Jerry Pournelle was a polymath; a scientist, IT genius and award-winning science-fiction author. After his experiences working for the US Government, he wrote ‘Pournelle’s Iron Law’;
“First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization…Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.”
Now I’ve been writing this Substack for a while, I’ve begun to realise the significance of Pournelle’s law.
This is a story of what I saw from the trenches during my service - how the Blob grew legs, like the creature in a dodgy 60s monster movie, absorbing everything it touched. It’s not a conspiracy, either. It’s a process. The Blob moves slowly. It’s occasionally transparent about its intentions. It’s patient. Confident in its righteousness. Insulated from reality and consequence.
Consider this a sort of after-action-report, based on a quarter of a century serving an organisation I both hated and loved (it took more from me than I took from it). Many who leave policing are embittered by the experience; the Iron Law is probably one of the reasons why - the Blob in charge of policing honestly doesn’t care about the people who justify their existence in the first place - operational police officers.
I can only call it as I saw it (too many articles on policing in the mainstream media are written by ex-senior officers, occasional blobbers, biased pundits with no policing experience and think tank wonks). QED, there’s a space for voices like mine. Not least because, if anything, things have got (even) worse since I left. I talk to lots of coppers. They tell me it’s become, to use a phrase you won’t hear on a College of Policing press release, a complete shit-show. This isn’t to the detriment of the officers holding the line - they’re the people telling me, after all.
This article builds on two of my earlier pieces in particular;
The Everything Police and Dancing (The Macarena) Before the Storm
You don’t necessarily have to read them. I’ve simply linked them in the interest of completeness. They broadly describe how;
During the 1990s, Blairite Britain created a nexus of official, unofficial and sort-of official bureaucracies to run / advise / regulate EVERYTHING. Although there was an element of good faith in this, there was an unhealthy dose of politicians subcontracting out accountability for when things went wrong. As per the Iron Law, these organisations ended up working to suit their own agenda (and those of their peers), not those of the public.
This became ‘The Blob.’ Policing has its own special Blob, too, networked into the others (and now, thanks to senior direct entry recruitment into the police, senior Blobbers can transfer across with ease!).
The Blob has engineered a situation where a great deal of police activity no longer resembles what you or I might reasonably identify as ‘policing.’ Instead, over the past thirty-odd years, it’s mutated into a quasi social-service. Part of this is accidental, as police forces plugged gaps left by cuts to other public services. For a variety of reasons, the Blob and its hench-people acquiesced at every stage. Then they got to the point where they actually preferred social work to policing.
Therefore, much of the business the Blob favours is displacement activity for the messy, icky and deeply-contested stuff of everyday policing. Like searching people, arresting them, kicking their front doors in and occasionally hitting them with sticks or tasering them. The Blob prefers conferences-with-buffets. And promotions and research grants. It doesn’t like stopping and searching feral kids on sink estates (although it loves issuing instructions, diktats and guidelines). Blobbers aggressively avoid operational policing, yet overwhelmingly shape the terrain on which it occurs.
Vibes. Modern political culture and discourse is about vibes. It’s about being nice, popular and social media friendly. Yet some communities are no-go zones for police. Vibes aside, policing is as often about coercion as it is persuasion. The officers we ask to serve at the pointy-end are demonised by an increasingly puerile, naïve and clickbait-driven media machine. The Blobby senior officers who lead them seldom have these officer’s backs, either.
“Not stopping was a defensible decision, Chief Constable”. A rare image of the National Police Chiefs Council’s annual deckchair rearranging seminar. I bet the pre-iceberg buffet was nice though.
Which brings me to the unlikely environs of the occupational health department at the Empress State Building, circa 2007. I was having a mandatory hearing test for officers issued with surveillance radio earpieces. If you’ve ever had one of these tests, you’ll know they’re quite frustrating; you’re played a series of bleeps and buzzes at very low volume. So imperceptibly low, it makes you begin to imagine you’re hearing things. You have a trigger-thingy to push when you do, and before long you’re like a Spitfire pilot on a Messerschmidt’s tail.
Anyhow, waiting for my test I saw a magazine on the waiting room table. Police Manager, I think it was called. Thumbing through it, I saw an article quoting our Commissioner at the time, Sir Ian (now Lord Blair). I was so struck by this I remember the context vividly. And, unlike the hearing test, Sir Ian’s intent wasn’t at all quiet. I’ve tried Googling it, but was unable to source a copy.
In it, like Antonio Gramsci in blue serge, Blair described how he would change policing to meet the demands of a new century, about how rapid developments in technology, society and culture required a brave new service. One attuned to social justice, crime prevention, safeguarding and unicorns-dancing-on-rainbows (ever the self-styled iconoclast, ‘New Labour’s Favourite Policeman’ was too hubristic to realise he was merely spraying progressive glitter on the Peelite wheel). To achieve this, he declared, a new model copper was required. And this was the bit that got me - Blair declared the type of people typically attracted to policing were the wrong sort of people to make his radical new service work.
A new breed were required. A new cadre. Police officers living and breathing new ideals and values! Let a million flowers bloom. This is beginning to sound a bit like Mao’s cultural revolution, isn’t it? When he was boss, Blair presumably thought most of his workforce were already redundant. No wonder morale was so high on his watch, eh?
Look, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police - one of the police Blob’s architects - was making the direction of travel crystal clear nearly twenty years ago. As I said earlier, there’s no conspiracy here. No shadowy cabals. No tinfoil-hat wearing plots involving Common Purpose seminars. Although, now I think about it, Common Purpose did come across as Freemasonry for the LinkedIn classes.
Anyhow, I passed my hearing test. I wasn’t tone deaf. I’m not so sure about Ian Blair.
An aside; when Boris Johnson got rid of Blair in 2008, I was mooching around Leeds on a job. I remember seeing the joyous news on a big screen in the town centre. When I got home I cracked open the bottle of champagne I’d saved especially for the occasion. Blair, to ex-Special Branch officers, is like Margaret Thatcher was to the Miners.
It’s a year or so later. I’m visiting Jubilee House in Putney, working on the Met’s anticorruption command. It’s the sort of job where ‘you see how the sausages are made’, the old saw being if you did, you’d never eat one. It made me even more cynical about senior officers.
A middle-ranking detective I was friendly with popped over for a chat. Toying with the idea of going for another promotion, he’d returned from a seminar for aspiring high-potential coppers. “Ugh, have you had a hot shower?” I asked (he knew full well what a chippy bastard I was).
“No, but it was interesting.” He knew he’d get a rise out of me by sharing.
“Go on then.”
The headlines were, of course, entirely correct. As I’ve said, there were no surprises. The ‘Long March’ was carried out in plain sight. The aspiring seniors were all told to get on board with neighbourhood policing being turned - eventually - into an adjunct of local authorities. Rebranded street wardens, really. There would be direct-entry promotion into senior ranks (to ‘refresh the gene pool’). New terms and conditions (forget overtime and pensions, my friend told me - they need to save money after the Crash). A relentless internal culture focussed on Diversity (a war that still looks unwinnable fifteen years later, even as DEI budgets grow ever-larger).
More specialisms would be surrendered to other agencies like (the-then SOCA). This was my world. My friend looked around the office, at the sixty-or-so people tracking network corruption and serious wrongdoing. “The brass really hate this messy stuff,” he said, shaking his head. Then he smiled. “So much can go wrong with proactive work.”
We’d recently had involvement in a job where someone had been shot dead by SO19. “True.”
“The bosses are really into the internet though. Facebook etcetera.”
I laughed. “What do they know about it?”
“Not much. But it’s flavour of the month.”
“Well, are you going for promotion?” I asked.
“I might as well. Why piss in the wind? Are you going for sergeant again, Dom?”
“It wasn’t for me.”
“You’re probably right,” he said. “You’re insufferable.”
“Good luck with your dash for glory,” I said.
“Liar,” he laughed. I think he made superintendent.
Then the money really ran out. Cue Theresa May and all the rest of it.
Of course, the Blobbers at the seminars-with-buffets carried on regardless of reality. Reality’s stubborn like that. Robbers robbed. Rapists raped. Dealers dealt and burglars burgled. A troubling footnote in the reports written by senior Home Office officials, consultants, think tanks, civilianised senior police managers, QUANGOs, PCCs, College of Policing and aspiring chief constables. The Blob. All wearing an invisible finery of nakedness, tailored by an army of progressives in academia and pressure groups. Imagining they could control reality with the power of their minds, working groups and Zoom meetings.
A common misconception; people misunderstand ‘The Blob’. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s simply an organism that survives by getting bigger. A bit like Cancer, really.
And because the Blob isn’t a conspiracy but a process, many of the people in it are perfectly decent. Well-meaning. Only dimly aware of their role. Some are professional ‘Sensibles’, centrist dad types with fixed assumptions about the natural way of things (i.e. they should be calling the shots, because of course they should). Then there’s the army of civil servants, consultants, police national working groups (the scars on my back!), academics, trainers and the nakedly political activists who proliferate at the centres of police strategy and policy-making. It’s like the court of some extravagant 18th Century monarch. Every chancer is there, taking whatever crumbs fall from the table.
Their groupthink is real. Diversity, to them, is a handily-defined straightjacket of protected characteristics. Not opinions or ideas.
Remember earlier in my piece when I mentioned ‘The Vibes?’ The cringeworthy, trendy-vicar obsession with social justice causes of little or no everyday concern to the majority of end-users?
They love all that stuff.
Most of them have never worn blue. Never taken a kicking outside a Weatherspoon’s at midnight. Never been ‘Plod’. It’s why you end up with farcical bullshit in police stations like this.
Others, though, know exactly what the Blob’s all about. Either from conviction or ambition (and sometimes both - a particularly toxic combination) they see the Blob as a powerful instrument to be utilized at will. If they deigned to acknowledge the existence of a low-level critic such as I, they might ask what of the police before their arrival? You know, the racist, corrupt, sexist, Freemason-riddled world beloved of Guardian journalists, the BBC and earnest social historians?
They’ve even got a point.
My riposte;
When hosing out the stables, you often lose the good with the bad. So watch your back; one day you’re Robespierre, the next you’re Robespierre… facing the guillotine. Revolutions are usually like that.
Some of the most gruesome excesses of police misbehaviour have occurred on your watch. You’ve been marching to the beat of this failing drum for years.
Be judged by your results; do you honestly think your inputs are creating optimal outputs? But you don’t care, because you’re making north of 70K a year and there’s another seminar-with-a-buffet to attend. Failing upwards is what you do.
The policing culture you’ve created is inimical to effective policing because… you can’t handle the truth (sorry, couldn’t help myself).
Blobbers (both knowing and unknowing) will shake their heads now, more in sorrow than in anger. “Don’t call it ‘The Blob’ that’s so Dom Cummings. It’s pejorative. You gammon!”
By the way, love him or hate him, the patient reader will learn more about systems, processes and outcomes from Cummings’s occasionally impenetrable ‘stack than they will from attending any number of conferences-with-a-buffet.
During my service I was trained to investigate and understand networks. Social dynamics and engineering. Motives and ideologies. People. Criminals of every persuasion, from bent coppers to gangsters to paedophiles. Terrorist organisations. Domestic extremists. Even foreign intelligence services and bloody News International. I’ve met with and spoken to those involved, quite candidly.
Yes. I know a network when I see one.
And the Blob is a network. An amorphous, clever, well-funded network. Its genius, as I’ve said, is its lack of secrecy (but not opacity) and its shroud of virtue. It has leaders, hangers-on, outriders, fellow travellers and completely unwitting drudges. It creates and wields consensus like a cudgel. Potential threats are absorbed, ignored or accused of heresy. Try to make senior rank without its blessing.
As usual, I will offer a potential solution in good faith. An experiment. A chance for the Blob to settle the question in an evidence-based way. Except, this time, it doesn’t get to set the rules. Only some.
As long-time readers might know, I’m a big believer in subsidiarity. Which is to say I think decisions made locally are generally better. This is a very anti-Blob thing to think (I await a barrage of Blob-funded studies to hit my inbox proving the contrary, but they’ll have blobby strings attached).
My idea is partially inspired by the Free School experiment, another localist attempt to deliver an important public service free from orthodox constraint. It's also inspired by my experience of being unwell, housebound and existing on an NHS waiting list. Now there, I’ll wager, is a blob!
Let’s choose two medium-sized police forces. They should be of comparable size, population and of a similarly mixed ethnic composition. Forces with significant urban and rural or semi-rural policing environments. I’m sure the Home Office can identify two, perhaps one in the south and one in the north of England. Say, for example, Avon and Somerset and Lancashire.
The first police force (Force ‘A’) will be run strictly by current diktat, with a locally-voted PCC (probably in hoc to one of the big political parties). All Force ‘A’ senior officers will go through the usual NPCC / College of Policing / Home Office grooming processes. This elite command team will publicly sign up to the experiment in good faith. It will follow all mandated accredited professional practice, rules, regulations, procedures on EVERYTHING including recruitment to every rank. It will be funded fairly and appropriately (as will the other force in the experiment). It will be restructured, run and overseen as a model police service, a showcase for progressive modern British law enforcement.
The second police force (Force ‘B’) will be a ‘Free Force’. It will be given latitude to pay only lip-service to all of the above. It won’t have a PCC, but a local police authority as in days of yore. It can set its own recruitment procedures. The Chief Constable (who should be chosen as a maverick with a bloody-minded desire to win the experiment) will be appointed by an independent group acting as the project’s arbiters. Force ‘B’ can structure every division, police station, department and unit as it sees fit. It is free to establish novel service-level agreements with local authorities and Crown Prosecutors. It can hire whatever police officers and staff it likes, as long as they meet national vetting standards. It will have no staff associations with any political agendas. Force ‘B’ is pretty Vibe free. It can set its own pay and conditions for ALL RANKS.
Now, we run both forces as per these rules for three years. At the end, we take stock of the results. I’m not a gambling man, but I know which force criminals would hate and the law-abiding public would prefer.
Which is why it won’t happen. Because, you see, there’s one thing the Blob can never do. Shrink.
My Substack’s free because I prefer it that way. If you want to support my writing, though, take a look at my Amazon page. There might be something that catches your eye.
Cheers,
Dom
At first I thought you’d lost the plot and were resorting to the American MAGA style conspiracy of everything. BUT you go on to draw all of the disparate pieces together. Well written and extremely credible piece. From my vantage point as an ex Met DS, retiring after 31 yrs in 2012, to now working within a small force, I see the Blob daily. The blob won’t be swayed from NPCC diktat. What’s worse is that they espouse evidence based policing as their rationale but can never actually produce the evidence to support this. Nor will they listen to anything that might conceivably challenge their norm. Keep up the great work Dominic.
Nailed it again. Well done.