In the hours since my last blog I have heard calls for police to use rubber bullets and water canons to disperse rioters. I am generally curious how large scale government incompetence and irresponsibility over the last year have resulted in calls for more aggressive policing. Is this not the sign of a government that has no idea how to handle a section of its population?
The truth is that the Coalition Government represents the very rich, and at a push the upper middle classes, leaving the rest of us to put up, shut up, and swallow austerity measures designed to protect the rich. My feeling is that the current riots in our major cities are the result of what happens when a political class actively constructs and pursues the creation of an ultra-divided society comprised of included and excluded peoples. What is happening now is that the excluded – the scum, the rats, as one women called them today – are returning to remind Cameron et al that they are part of the society that he governs whether he likes it or not.
As has been noted endlessly over the last few days, these riots are not about political protest. Of course, they are not. Politics are irrelevant in our society because those in power are entirely dis-interest in the views of the people (consider student demos and strikes which had absolutely no impact on government opinion) and the opposition is too weak to offer any kind of worthwhile opinion. New Labour may as well not exist.
Instead of occupying a political society we live in a consumer society. Consumption is what matters and this is why protest today has to take the form of looting and stealing – if subjective protest takes the form of demos and strikes, objective protest is on the side of the rioters and looters. Of course, there is no defence for this behaviour, but let us make no mistake, the Conservative government is responsible for this situation. They have taken an already divided society and pulled up the ladder of social mobility leaving the excluded with nowhere to go. They have created social chaos.
In response to this, I do not think we should listen to popular right fascists who want to see military police on our streets. This is not the answer. Instead, what we need is a government who can manage our society responsibly in the name of everybody in our society, including those people Cameron, Gove et al, think are scum. Unfortunately, I do not think this is the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition. Our current government is clearly not fit to create and oversee an equal, peaceful, society.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Monday, 6 October 2008
Blair, Boris, politics and the police
By Dr Bill Dixon
The resignation of Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (and ‘Britain’s top cop’) following a meeting with the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson has led to bitter recriminations about ‘playing politics with the police’, and to unprecedented levels of interest in the constitutional position of the police.
As Chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), Mr Johnson has been accused of overstepping the constitutional mark by forcing Sir Ian out of office. Worse still he’s been condemned for politicizing policing in London at a time when the capital is plagued by knife crime and faces a continuing terrorist threat. Meanwhile, Sir Ian himself has been blamed for contributing to his own downfall, amongst other things by lobbying too enthusiastically in favour of key New Labour policies. Stuck in the middle of this firestorm is Labour Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who will eventually have to appoint Blair’s successor.
Although Commissioners don’t resign every day – the last Commissioner to fall on his sword was Sir Edward Henry in 1918 – control over policing in London, has been fiercely contested by national and local politicians, and successive Commissioners, since the Metropolitan Police was established way back in 1829.
In the early days, the Home Secretary had the whip hand and one of Jacqui Smith’s predecessors, Lord Melbourne, even went so far as to give detailed instructions on how the police were to handle a demonstration at Cold Bath Fields in Clerkenwell in 1833. As it turned out, the operation was a disaster and ended with a running fight between police and demonstrators in the course of which an officer was stabbed and killed. Half a century later, in 1888, local politicians called on the government to transfer the management of the city’s police to the newly elected London County Council.
The high point of what became known as the ‘doctrine of constabulary independence’, and the heyday of the Met’s chief officer as the master of all he surveyed, came 40 years ago when one of the most famous judges of the 20th century, Lord Denning, ruled that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was ‘answerable to law and to the law alone’. The responsibility for enforcing the law in Britain’s capital city, he went on, was the Commissioner’s, and no mere ‘Minister of the Crown’ or ‘police authority’ could tell him how he should discharge it.
Then, 15 years later, the soon to be abolished Greater London Council (GLC) published a consultation paper calling for the Metropolitan Police to be brought under democratic control. Under the GLC’s proposals an elected police authority for London would be given a statutory duty to enforce the law and have ‘ultimate control of all decisions relating to deployment and policing methods’. The Leader of the GLC at the time was none other than Ken Livingstone, the recently unseated Mayor of London and one of the sternest critics of his successor Boris Johnson’s ousting of Sir Ian Blair.
The politicization of policing in London and the desire of locally elected politicians – be they mayors or councillors – is nothing new. In attempting to exert a measure of control over policing in London by toppling Sir Ian, despite the continued - if lukewarm and ultimately ineffectual - support of the Home Secretary, Boris Johnson has only succeeded in doing what generations of local politicians have tried but failed to do. Whether you prefer the politician or the policeman, Boris or Blair, is beside the point. Policing is too important to be left to the police. It is also, as Robert Reiner has reminded us, ineluctably political. If the sad end of Sir Ian Blair means that policing in London has become politicized again, and given locally elected representatives some influence over the strategic direction of their city’s police force, his resignation will not have been entirely in vain, and Johnson’s part in it not quite as reprehensible as Livingstone and others would have us believe.
Reference Robert Reiner (2000) The Politics of the Police, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
The resignation of Sir Ian Blair, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (and ‘Britain’s top cop’) following a meeting with the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson has led to bitter recriminations about ‘playing politics with the police’, and to unprecedented levels of interest in the constitutional position of the police.
As Chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA), Mr Johnson has been accused of overstepping the constitutional mark by forcing Sir Ian out of office. Worse still he’s been condemned for politicizing policing in London at a time when the capital is plagued by knife crime and faces a continuing terrorist threat. Meanwhile, Sir Ian himself has been blamed for contributing to his own downfall, amongst other things by lobbying too enthusiastically in favour of key New Labour policies. Stuck in the middle of this firestorm is Labour Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, who will eventually have to appoint Blair’s successor.
Although Commissioners don’t resign every day – the last Commissioner to fall on his sword was Sir Edward Henry in 1918 – control over policing in London, has been fiercely contested by national and local politicians, and successive Commissioners, since the Metropolitan Police was established way back in 1829.
In the early days, the Home Secretary had the whip hand and one of Jacqui Smith’s predecessors, Lord Melbourne, even went so far as to give detailed instructions on how the police were to handle a demonstration at Cold Bath Fields in Clerkenwell in 1833. As it turned out, the operation was a disaster and ended with a running fight between police and demonstrators in the course of which an officer was stabbed and killed. Half a century later, in 1888, local politicians called on the government to transfer the management of the city’s police to the newly elected London County Council.
The high point of what became known as the ‘doctrine of constabulary independence’, and the heyday of the Met’s chief officer as the master of all he surveyed, came 40 years ago when one of the most famous judges of the 20th century, Lord Denning, ruled that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was ‘answerable to law and to the law alone’. The responsibility for enforcing the law in Britain’s capital city, he went on, was the Commissioner’s, and no mere ‘Minister of the Crown’ or ‘police authority’ could tell him how he should discharge it.
Then, 15 years later, the soon to be abolished Greater London Council (GLC) published a consultation paper calling for the Metropolitan Police to be brought under democratic control. Under the GLC’s proposals an elected police authority for London would be given a statutory duty to enforce the law and have ‘ultimate control of all decisions relating to deployment and policing methods’. The Leader of the GLC at the time was none other than Ken Livingstone, the recently unseated Mayor of London and one of the sternest critics of his successor Boris Johnson’s ousting of Sir Ian Blair.
The politicization of policing in London and the desire of locally elected politicians – be they mayors or councillors – is nothing new. In attempting to exert a measure of control over policing in London by toppling Sir Ian, despite the continued - if lukewarm and ultimately ineffectual - support of the Home Secretary, Boris Johnson has only succeeded in doing what generations of local politicians have tried but failed to do. Whether you prefer the politician or the policeman, Boris or Blair, is beside the point. Policing is too important to be left to the police. It is also, as Robert Reiner has reminded us, ineluctably political. If the sad end of Sir Ian Blair means that policing in London has become politicized again, and given locally elected representatives some influence over the strategic direction of their city’s police force, his resignation will not have been entirely in vain, and Johnson’s part in it not quite as reprehensible as Livingstone and others would have us believe.
Reference Robert Reiner (2000) The Politics of the Police, 3rd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)