In 1991, the Soviet Union crumbling, an elite network of spooks, apparatchiks and oligarchs held fast. As Catherine Belton describes in her book, Putin’s People, they’d long-intuited the regime’s end. Their contingency plan involved a dark phoenix rising from the Kremlin’s metaphorical ashes, led by former KGB men such as Putin. As The Who famously sang, Here comes the new boss, same as the old boss.
Hyperbole aside, I was reminded of Belton’s book after studying the Home Office’s latest white paper on police reform. It’s pure Nineties-era policy redux — the greatest hits of the Blairite Centrist Dads running the Home Office. It is as if, sniffing populism on the horizon, they have activated post-regime sleeper cells.
They will establish mega-constabularies, reducing 43 to around 12 — overseen by a National Police Service. Shabana Mahmood has determined a “Pathfinder Force”, a proof of concept, will be operational by 2029. Mandarins will anticipate any incoming government will find the plan too big to fail.
Home Office wonks, led by the Labour-adjacent academic Rick Muir, have layered on a patina of localism — positing the virtual integration of neighbourhood policing into local councils. Yet, at heart? This is the Home Office being the same old Home Office. A plan involving a “more active” Home Office, gatekeeping police governance and performance. Cost-effectiveness features highly, as if a police funding crisis can be solved by centralising the procurement of radios, boots and helmets. Savings, it’s argued, will also be achieved via adopting a model not unlike the one preferred by European police, with a three-tier service made up of local, regional and national bodies.
Details are hazy. This isn’t uncommon in white papers, but the ambiguity is striking. Given the Government’s commitment to neighbourhood policing? The relationship between mega-forces and “Local Policing Areas” should be better articulated. Does the Home Office have a devil lurking in the detail? They envisage a greater role for local authorities, with elected mayors replacing Police and Crime Commissioners. Again, this speaks to the Home Office DNA running through the piece. Conservatives such as Kit Malthouse once sold such municipal policing as a Tory reform. The new proposals repackage them for a Labour audience, with mayoral or local authority control sold as enlightened governance. Yet, delving deeper, it becomes clear that real control is heavily centralised, power flowing from the civil service and murky policy directorates of the proposed National Police Service. Nonetheless, there’s still enough rope for the foolish to hang themselves with: Local Police Areas will be vulnerable to pressure from Labour’s rotten boroughs and urban Tammany Halls, environments where incidents such as the West Midlands Police-Macabi Tel Aviv scandal fester.
Equally concerning are plans for a National Police Service, which bundles a bizarre array of back office and operational functions into a single body. Nothing escapes the NPS’s dominion: a non-exhaustive list includes helicopters, technology, public order, roads policing, terrorism, organised crime, fraud, policy, procurement, overseas liaison, leadership and training. The brigading of terrorism and organised crime is especially controversial, given the chequered history of Britain’s abortive “FBI”. Counter-terrorism policing, on the other hand, works fairly well as-is. Does the Home Office hope some of its magic might rub off? Centralisation poses other questions. For example, those concerned about Keir Starmer’s sweaty fantasies of a national gendarmerie? The NPS includes a beefed-up role for coordinating the police response to public disorder.
Then there’s the folding of the controversial College of Policing — of “Non-Crime Hate Incident” fame — into the NPS. The College has long been an advocate of socially-progressive policies and ponderous “accredited professional practice”. Via the NPS, the College even intends to control who can or cannot police, through a controversial “licence to practice” scheme, similar to that used in nursing. I predict the licence will be used for ideological gatekeeping, purging “unbelievers” who fail to observe satisfactory compliance with DEI orthodoxy. Furthermore, readers won’t be surprised to learn the College is also funded and controlled by the Home Office, a place where civil servants take well-remunerated positions and secondments. As they used to say in Private Eye: Trebles all round!
British policing might well be saddled with a dysfunctional behemoth for another sixty years
Will these reforms survive first contact with any future right-of-centre government? Both the Conservatives and Reform are likely to find elements of the White Paper jarring. The Tory shadow Home Secretary, Chris Philp, is now a convert of “zero-tolerance” style stop and search. This has led to him locking horns with the aforementioned College of Policing, firmly on the liberal wing of softly-softly policing. Reform’s police advisor Colin Sutton, a former detective, and Mayoral candidate Laila Cunningham also seem to favour traditional policing models. Will their policy positions, once published, cause palpitations at the Home Office’s Marsham Street redoubt? Or is opposition factored in, with make-safes and compromises baked into the masterplan?
The British Right, such as it is, should make it clear, through whatever backchannels exist, which policies might or might not pass muster. Or will the mandarins prevail, presenting their plans as a fait accompli? If they do, British policing might well be saddled with a dysfunctional behemoth for another sixty years, while the wheel of policy failure — and civil service advancement — turns.
