As a young teenager in the early 1980s, I remember chatting to someone
involved with the Labour Party hard left. He was of the firm view that the Metropolitan
Police should be wound up. While I don’t recall this position being
particularly mainstream, the policy of the hard-left administration on the Greater
London Council at the time was certainly that police officers should become
local authority employees. Yes, they were planning to defund the police nearly
40 years ago.
The Brixton riots of 1981 had been sparked by aggressive policing
of young black men and officious use of stop and search. In an era of recession, high unemployment
and social tension, we saw a huge ideological rift between the Thatcher
government (which stood for authoritarian law and order policies) and leftists
of various persuasions who flew the red flag over town halls from Sheffield and
Liverpool to Brent, Haringey and Lambeth.
The London politics of the era were shaped by figures such
as John McDonnell (who was Livingstone’s finance chief at the GLC) and Paul
Boateng, who chaired the Police Committee and later become MP for Brent South.
This was also the time in which a certain Jeremy Corbyn was first elected to
Parliament for Islington North. The radical urban leftism he championed, which
had been brewing in an ideological vat throughout the 70s, was finally bottled
up and left in a cellar to be uncorked in 2015.
While Thatcher was keen to give law enforcement greater
powers through what became the Police and Criminal Evidence (PACE) Act, the
Labour left provided a direct counterpoint. As well as demanding that police
officers receive their wage slips from the local authority, they championed the
idea of democratic control over the Met (an idea that was opposed 2-1 by
Londoners in polling in 1983) and a purely operational role for the
Commissioner.
Of course, with the advent of the Blair government in 90s, a
sensible system of democratic control over the police was eventually
established in the capital by the creation of the Mayor and Greater London
Authority. We were given a grown-up version of accountability appropriate for a
large modern city, without the posturing and extremism associated with the 80s ‘loony
left’.
Today, what people mean by defunding seems to vary quite
widely. It can signal anything from a modest diversion of funds away from law
enforcement to social services of various kinds; a commitment to ‘demilitarise’
police forces – preventing them from buying unnecessary and deadly kit; or
outright abolition of policing.
Sir Keir Starmer, the first Labour Leader in a decade to
claw himself ahead of a Tory PM in the polls, has quickly denounced the idea as
‘nonsense’. He is busy trying to bring the beleaguered party back into the mainstream
and cannot afford to be associated with such a radical notion. As a former Director
of Public Prosecutions, it would be pretty odd for him to take any other
position anyway.
What’s more interesting are the twists and turns of the hard
left. They are very keen to associate themselves with the radical intent of the
Black Lives Matter movement and are ideologically attracted to the ‘defunding’
slogan. But just last year, their spiritual leader Corbyn – now retired to the
allotment – was pretending to favour greater police funding. Awkward.
The accusation against the veteran socialist was that he was
always anti-police. Equivocal about shoot-to-kill policies in terrorist
incidents; someone who announced Hezbollah and Hamas to be ‘friends’. Because of
the toxic nature of these associations, the Corbynite left pretended to be
concerned about the decline in police funding and used this as a stick to beat
the government. No one with an understanding of their political ideology believed
their position to be anything other than entirely disingenuous. And now, of course, it’s fully
exposed.
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