THERESA MAY'S ASSUALT ON THE CULTURE OF POLICE IMPUNITY

Theresa May

Despite the local and EU elections dominating the past week’s political coverage the real political moment of the week had nothing to do with the elections. I am speaking of Theresa May’s speech to the Police confederation. This is the first time in my lifetime that a Home secretary has stood up to the once all powerful police lobby. It may represent a turning point in our political culture much more significant than UKIP’s success in the polls.[1]
The Police Federation has previously bullied, intimidated and savaged a string of former Home Secretaries who have failed to see the world their way. Now a Home Secretary has finally outfaced them and called their bluff. It took a Conservative to do it. The Labour Party has always been afraid of standing up to the police, frightened of being seen weak on law and order, of lacking a commitment to uphold the established order. Afraid too of the literal power of the police and security services. That said Labour Home Secretaries do not seem to need much encouragement to go native’.’ Tony Blair once famously declaring that whatever legislation the police demanded, he would provide. Consequently we have seen Labour Home Secretary after Labour Home Secretary genuflect at the altar of the Police Federation and, as it were, its partner in crime, the Association of Chief Police Officers, ACPO. I will talk about ACPO shortly.
When I heard Theresa May reading out the charge sheet against the police force in this country:-
‘…Hillsborough, the death of Ian Tomlinson and allegations of corruption in the Lawrence and Daniel Morgan murders. She also cited the Plebgate affair, which cost Andrew Mitchell his cabinet job after he allegedly swore at a member of Downing Street's police staff which Mitchell denies., and the refusal of officers to answer questions from their own watchdog – which she said the federation encouraged.’[2]
She was doing the job ducked by Jack Straw, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, John Reid Jacqui Smith and Alan Johnson. She missed out a number of cases that she could have added to the charge sheet, not least Wapping and the policing of the miners’ strike. Of course to draw attention to these would be to draw attention to a time when the police force effectively became a militia, an arm of the Thatcherite/Murdoch state. She also failed to mention the killing Blair Peach.
The Funeral of Blair Peach
The killing of Blair Peach, an anti-Fascist protestor, in anti-Fascist demonstrations against the BNP in Southall West London in 1979 was for me a wakeup call. Peach’s death and the travesty of an inquest that followed are well described by David Renton in the current edition of the London Review of Books, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/david-renton/the-killing-of-blair-peach. That someone could be killed in this way made me realise that the police could murder someone with impunity. Nothing since has served to lesson my disquiet; as Renton goes on to point out ‘…more than 750 people died in police custody between 1994 and 2013, but there have been barely a dozen inquest verdicts of unlawful killing and just eight prosecutions, some of multiple officers – none succeeded.’                 
The Thatcher years solidified this sense of police impunity, the majority of the items on May’s charge sheet refer to those years. These were the years too when the Murdoch press entered into a pact with the police, particularly The Met.[3] It was a pact whereby the police would be guaranteed a tame and supportive press in exchange for providing an endless series of ‘scoops.’ The interests of the public whom the police were supposed to be serving never entered the equation. It was this pact that the Leveson enquiry exposed.  Leveson was the beginning of the end for the Met’s corrupt and cosy relationship with press, at a time when other stories were beginning to finally emerge into daylight, particularly the behaviour of undercover cops, [4] exposing something very rotten indeed at the heart of Britain’s police force. Some however still did not get it. Some members of the Police Federation thought this a good time to stitch up a member of the government.
And it took the, relatively, trivial ‘Plebgate’ to finally turn the stomach of the Tory party. This gave Theresa May the ammunition, which to her universal credit she was prepared to use to take on the Police Federation.[5]  The fallout from her speech to The Federation will take considerable time to be felt. Things will however never be the same again.
Not that the sinister hold the police have on British society has been yet fully broken, for in the background there lurks the modern equivalent of the great feudal barons, ACPO. They have their Magna Carta and it guarantees them a say in the implementation of social policy. 
As far back as 1979 E. P. Thompson, in his essay collection, Writing by Candlelight, noted the emergence of ACPO as a political force.[6]
‘This is new. This is formidable. As a historian I can say that I know of no period in which the police have had such a loud and didactic public presence, and when they have offered themselves as a distinct interest, as one of the great ‘institutions’ and perhaps the first in the realm. And I know of no period in which politicians and editors have submitted so abjectly or ardently to their persuasions.’
Thompson hadn’t seen the half of it. ACPO had arrived and they demanded that they be accorded their legitimate place in the constitutional order, to be consulted on social policy and deferred to on matters pertaining to ‘law and order.’ Emerging from Hendon police college, or rising through the ranks they could not possibly accept the classification of being mere ‘civilians in uniform,’ but began to perceive themselves as possessed of special insights, unique perceptions and consequently began to demand special powers. Governments of all persuasions happily obliged.
The consequences are now there for all to see. Like a rock lifted to reveal the rotting decomposition and decay underneath, a bed of crawling sub life. Hillsborough perhaps best encapsulating the true depths of the malodorous moral decay. 
But in turning to confront the thuggish ranks of the Police Confederation May is confronting a monster of the Tories own creation. These are the heirs to all those ‘loadsamoney’ coppers waving their fat wads of overtime payments in the face of the striking miners, these really are Thatcher’s offspring.
I carry no torch for Theresa May but I do recognise political courage when I see it. True the timing was perfect for her and she was offered something of an open goal, still it took some courage to put the ball in the back of the net and she has shown more courage than the half dozen Home Secretaries who proceeded her.[7]
What happens next I don’t know, but Theresa May, almost certainly having had her hand forced, has opened a Pandora’s box, and made a small start on addressing the distorted balance between the public as a whole and the over mighty sectional interest of the police. This needs to be pushed further and the police forcefully reminded again that they are our servants and not our masters.

[2] Ibid. And this barely scratched the surface. 
[3] I.e. London’s Metropolitan Police Force, the largest in the UK. Dacre’s Daily Mail didn’t need to be bribed or seduced, it was already the harlot of Tory HQ and could be guaranteed to bark loudest, to mix my metaphors, whenever the police needed to frighten the middle classes.
[5] It is difficult seeing the Tory party supporting her if it had not been for the Police Federation’s attack on Andrew Mitchell.
[6] Writing by Candlelight Merlin Press 1980, On the New Issue of Postage Stamps, p191.
[7] Nothing illustrated the moral correctness of her position more than the crass sexism of that political creep Ken Livingstone, whose lurid burbling’s about dominatrix on LBC, the London Talk radio station, made me want to throw up. It is also worth noting Livingstone’s uncomfortably close relationship to Sir Ian Blair former Metropolitan Police Commissioner, whilst it was a Labour Home Secretary, Jack Straw who blocked an enquiry into Hillsborough.


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