THE POLICEMAN'S LOT IS NOT A HAPPY ONE
Christopher Montgomery says that the
fuzz face a new and vocal foe: the British middle classes
Not all right-wing rancour is without sub- stance. Most of us have had experience of police incompetence and insolence. A little while ago a friend of mine was attacked by a gang of feral thugs on the King's Road, the five of them spanning the height and weight Permutations afforded to 17-year-old mem- bers of the World's End underclass. He escaped and, in due course, with another friend pursued the gang, cornering them outside the Chelsea cinema. There was another fight. Eventually the police arrived in a howling van. Did they thank my public- spirited friends? Of course not. 'Sorry, can't do nothing, really. They claimed you Punched them first. If I charged them, I'd have to charge you.' The police did not search the thugs for the knives they had already displayed, ignored witness state- ments volunteered by passers-by who had seen them launch the attack and, with cus- tomary Met charmlessness, insulted the ini- tial victim by telling him that since a) he had got away and b) his attackers were only teenagers, he 'wasn't mugged as such'.
But the anti-cop middle classes are not particularly worried about crimes against the person. After all, many crimes against the person involve only the underclass or, to put roughly the same idea another way, they are often 'black-on-black' violence. No. Middle England is far more worried about crimes against property: burglary, vandalism and theft. Of course, we should all be worried about these, though there is no evidence of a rise in such crimes. Quite the reverse — the horrendous recent rises have been in rapes and muggings. What really troubles the middle classes and explains the bile of Tory hacks is that the fuzz are giving grief to the cavalry-twill brigade. The bobby is no longer deferen- tial. These days, he is interfering with such harmless middle-class pursuits as drink- driving and taking soft drugs, and, at least among the upper-middle classes, hard drugs. Instead of confining their attention to the degenerate plebs, the police are making a nuisance of themselves by feeling the collars of decent, law-breaking, public- school-educated professionals. What is the world coming to?
In the great newspaper offices of London the lights burn late into the night as the guardians of traditional values devise schemes for putting the pushy policeman in his place. For some, Mrs Thatcher's misty pre-war memories are an inspiration. Remembering the retired generals who subsequently became chief constables in her youth, she expressed enthusiasm in the 1980s for the idea of creating an officer corps for the police, and was supported in this by such grandees as Mr (as he then was) Peregrine Worsthorne. It is impossi- ble to underestimate the con- tempt of the middle classes for the tortured vowels and frac- tured syntax of the 'police spokespeople' they hear on the
radio or television. Even at The Spectator there are occasional 1 hints of this snobbery. One member of staff, asked why he did not approve of the new headmaster of his son's public school, said, 'The man has the manner and bearing of a senior police officer at Scotland Yard.'
It is true that if the police did have an officer corps — a John Mills here, a Jack Hawkins there — the middle classes would at least be able to identify with the law-enforcers. On those awful occasions when they do have to endure the police, they would at least encounter chaps to whom they could relate, who could see things from their point of view. But the creation of an officer corps would mean introducing a paramilitary wing of the state on the Continental model and abandoning the fine tradition of citizens- in-uniform. It isn't going to happen, though, and everyone knows it.
So the more sophisticated middle-class polemicists have taken to abusing the `police monopoly', i.e. the state monopoly of law enforcement. It's rarely put this bald- ly, but what advanced thinkers of the Right — the sort that produce pamphlets with footnotes for the Centre for Policy Studies — really want is to see the cops privatised. To some the real trouble is 'producer cap- ture'. This, as Ferdinand Mount explained recently in the Sunday Times, 'is the jargon phrase that political analysts use to describe the situation where the producers, usually in a state monopoly, provide the sort of ser- vice that suits them, rather than the service that suits us'. If 'producer capture' exists, then the 1980s, when the police found their numbers, perks and pay cheques dramati- cally swelled, was when it happened — and few on the Right complained then.
It is true that the state can be a tiresome law-enforcer, At the recent Carnival Against Capitalism (thoughtfully held in the West End and City) some of my friends, having never witnessed a riot, were greatly looking forward to watching the fun from under the portico of St Martin's-in-the- Fields. Tragically, the police didn't provide a service that suited them. They failed to get an unhindered view of the main event, the great police rumpus in Trafalgar Square, because of the 'riot-gear-clad goons' in their way. But I would far rather be bossed about by the police proper than by a private security firm's employees. Talk about police monopoly should give way to thoughts about what would replace it.
As ever, the Middle Englanders find an answer in America. 'Why can't we be more like New England? Couldn't Lower Tit- bury-in-the-Wold dump bloated, bureau- cratic, remote Barsetshire constabulary and hire its own peelers, just as Manteuffel, Vermont does?' Of course they could, in Barsetshire. Probably money would be tighter in villages outside Gateshead, so, presumably, they would hire only second- raters but that's the free market for you. And God knows what community-financed and controlled policing would throw up in Brixton or Liverpool, or anywhere else the commentariat doesn't live.
When the mainstream Right really gets its blood up, it comes close to advocating vigilantism. Although we await the verdict of the courts, the Daily Mail doesn't, and the obviously sorely tested Norfolk farmer Tony Martin is already close to being anointed its man of the decade, What is being suggested here is the ultimate in indi- vidualism — that we should have the right to take the law into our own hands. One suspects that there are large numbers of people out there in the war zone that is Middle England who would be happy to `take out' at least one teenage burglar a week because the state's law is worthless; or, as a retired major inquired in the Mail's `Tony Martin Letters Special', 'Why else is
it necessary for me to have a Gurkha knife alongside me when I sit reading in the evening and not go to bed before setting a booby-trap designed to remove the ankles of an intruder?' Indeed, but then what else does one expect in inner-city Eastbourne?
Well, vengeance is always satisfying, but moral principles must come first. While I consider it reasonable to contemplate use of lethal force in my own defence or that of other people, I find it impossible to accept that I should have 'the right' to shoot anoth- er human being simply because he's walking off with my signed first edition of Slouching Towards Gomorrah. If such a right were to be conceded, how exactly are we supposed in this new Sparta to go about `self-defend- ing' our property?. Are we all to have guns? And to use them, not so much at the drop of a hat but at the drop of a stolen CD player? Guns used to kill people are best left in the hands of those who we can trust to use them, i.e. the state and its agents.
The police have a nasty job to do and some of them are nasty people. Occasion- ally they are ill-mannered. The word 'sir' is disappearing from their vocabulary. But that's no excuse for whining broadsheet journalists and their even more excitable colleagues on the tabloids to pretend that their peeved selfishness is high-minded libertarianism.
The author is currently working on a history of the Suez Crisis.
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