Pay Cops – a Grim Prophecy May be Coming True

Some of you may remember a specially grim future fantasy which appeared on British TV in 1979.  It was called 'Quatermass', and aroused memories and shudders in millions who recalled the astonishing and terrifying 'Quatermass and the Pit' (1958) TV series ( and the even earlier 'Quatermass Experiment'  from the early 1950s). As a small child I was absolutely forbidden to watch 'Quatermass and the Pit' but managed to catch a bit of it from halfway down the stairs before being detected by my parents and ordered back to bed. I've since seen recordings. I'm glad they sent me to bed. I wouldn't have slept for weeks.  The inventor of Quatermass, the late and much-missed Nigel Kneale, was brilliant at scaring the (then) settled and safe English middle classes with fantasies which originated in normal suburban settings and then exploded into utter horror and dissolution. He is also author of  'The Stone Tape' perhaps the most terrifying ghost story ever shown on TV anywhere, and of 'Year of the Sex Olympics', broadcast in 1968 and believed by many (especially the Guardian's illustrious and thoughtful TV critic Nancy Banks-Smith) to have been a prophetic prediction of the reality TV show. 

The 1979 serial opened with the words : 'In the last quarter of the 20th century, the whole world seemed to sicken. Civilised institutions, whether old or new, fell... as if some primal disorder was reasserting itself. And men asked themselves, "Why should this be?"'.

In the series, this decay is blamed on alien forces, anxious to consume the young people of this planet, so explaining the curious madness (based on the actual youth spasm of the 1960s) which grips only the young. Maybe Kneale meant this as a metaphor. But it gives him the chance to explore a fantasy about a society in the extreme of decay – books are no longer read, but sold and burned as fuel, terrorists having destroyed the North Sea pipelines. British broadcasting has decayed into an amateurish and crude shadow of its once inventive and culturally responsible self.

The young are almost invariably crazed in one way or another. Gangs fight, horrible, unnamed things happen (sex trafficking is suggested)  in luxury hotels, politicians hide behind security barriers, the old live in fear behind boarded-over windows. It didn't go down very well with critics or viewers, probably because it was too gloomy, , though I found it completely impossible to miss and remember the dark evenings in Belsize Park, the agreeable London quarter where I then lived in a tiny flat,  as I stared at the screen recognising an imagination which worked on the same lines as mine, but much, much more productively and inventively .A knife-murder had recently taken place outside the nearby Tube Station, leaving a opatch of sticky vblood covered in sand for us to walk past. The whole country had a generally twilit, finished feeling - the 'Winter of Discontent' had recently taken place and Geoffrey Howe had embarked on his interesting experiment in economics,  creating a post-industrial society by accident. I spent all my time in glum industrial cities reporting on strikes.

And one of Nigel Kneale's prophecies involved what he called 'Pay Cops' , police you paid for, or they didn't come.(To give them added dislikeability, they were mostly racially bigoted Afrikaner South Africans).

He saw such an idea as an ultimate callousness – that the law was no longer a moral occupation in which the strong came to the aid of the weak in the struggle to protect good against evil, but that the muscle of the state would officially only be available to those who could pay for it.  It is a particularly horrible idea, for anyone of my generation. We all know that in reality the rich are generally better-treated by the law than the poor. It would be hard to devise a system that did not have this bias – and the alternative, a bias towards power, is far worse.(For example, the Soviet system, where the militia were entirely subservient to power - see a personal experience I had of this, recounted in my book 'The Rage Against God'. Readers will be relieved to know that it operated very much in my favour, as I was at that time a neighbour of the Brezhnev family).   But I would say that in mid 20th century Britain, the law-abiding poor got reasonable protection from a police force that was not (as Marxists claim) the army of the rich, but was genuinely the guardian of the good.

How and why did this end? Some of the answers are given in my book 'The Abolition of Liberty', in which I explain how foot patrolling was discontinued, and the pretexts given for it, and how small and responsive local forces were merged into bureaucratic, centralised bodies which had no proper relation to the areas they policed.  And then there is the Bramshill Police College and its command course,  and the Scarman Report, and the Macpherson Report, and all the other incessant equality and diversity inquisitions to which all police officers are repeatedly subjected , and all the other devices by which Home Office liberals have imposed their dogma on policing in this country. And under it all lies the shrivelling away of the fundamental shared idea of right and wrong which made British police officers the allies of the people, and made policing by consent so easy to achieve.

What I should have made more of, and would were I to rewrite the book, was the amazing number of jobs the police used to do which became the preserve of highly profitable private security firms – security of commercial promises above all, parking enforcement, unconvicted prisoner escort. And then all the jobs which were passed to civil servants – the huge white-collar bureaucracies wrongly described as 'civilian' police employees (police are civilians in English law) and the Crown Prosecution Service. So, part nationalisation (the destruction of truly local forces) , part privatisation (the passing of jobs to private security firms and parking enforcement officers hired out to local authorities) , part Quangoisation (the Crown Prosecution Service). But as long as people viewed law enforcement as a moral activity, how could that be farmed out to profit-making bodies?

Now, it seems we have reached that point. A story in Saturday's Guardian (not in my view followed enough in the rest of the media) reported that two major forces, Surrey and West Midlands, have invited bids from private security companies to 'take over delivery' of a wide range of 'services' currently carried out by police officers.

It's not quite clear whether this will involve actual patrolling (not that today's police *do* much patrolling). But the power of arrest is not (yet) to be privatised. I'd guess that some lesser power of detention, similar to that given to PCSOs, will probably come about, and this will then need to be rubber-stamped by a *real* policeman back at the station. But the distinction will in time become meaningless.

Activities that are involved apparently include 'investigating crimes, detaining suspects (see what I mean?) , developing cases, responding to and investigating incidents, supporting victims and witnesses, managing high-risk individuals, patrolling neighbourhoods,(that sounds like patrolling to me, but apparently this is disputed) and ' managing intelligence'.

There seems to be little doubt that the planned contracts are pilots for a much wider use of private security staff, not just restricted to these two forces (or services, as they now like to call themselves) . Last month a major security firm won a £200 million contract to build and run a police station 'on behalf' of the Lincolnshire force. There have been reports of private firms funding police to carry out specific tasks.

Allegedly,  the idea is driven by the need to cut costs , an aim achieved by reducing the numbers of sworn constables (expensive, and with expensive pension expectations) and replacing them with cheaper security employees. Maybe. It'll be interesting to see how it works out. Most Whitehall cost cutting, especially when it involves farming out services to private providers, seems to end up more expensive than the things it replaced. I'm told EU competition regulations may even be involved.

To me, it's revolting (as are private prisons – how dare you imprison someone unless you have a *moral* purpose for doing so. How can anyone so such a thing for money? ). The enforcement of law is not a neutral, commercial or bureaucratic mediation between 'victim' and 'offender' (himself allegedly a 'victim' of 'addiction' or 'deprivation'), and a passionless management of crime and disorder to meet targets. It is a profound moral duty.

Or it was.

How many more of Nigel Kneale's gloomy predictions, all of which seemed to be very distant when he first wrote them, will now come true in the Country Formerly Known as Great Britain.