The police we deserve?

A blueprint for police reform, part 1: diagnosis

There’s an old saying in policing, usually uttered after the latest scandal or disaster: ‘The public get the police they deserve.’ It reflects how police officers feel about the elites who set their rules of engagement, as well as the occasionally capricious public they serve: whatever the police do will be criticised by somebody. Which, probably, is as it should be; policing isn’t a popularity competition. If a police officer is performing their duties properly, ‘somebody’ is going to have their day ruined. That ‘somebody’ used to predominantly be criminals. Sadly, that’s no longer the case. Yet still, I wonder, What did we, the British people, do to deserve the police we have now?

The hopelessness of the British police has become received wisdom. In this article, the first of a two-part series, I’ll discuss how both New Labour and the Cameroon Tories were the architects of modern policing’s decline, and what we should do about it.

The British police were once considered paragons of reasonableness. Unlike America’s gun-toting cops, or the Continent’s unshaven gendarmes, our coppers were supposedly a model of tolerance and discretion. They were too soft for some. Too violent and corrupt for others. Yet, for many, the police were the temperature of Mother Bear’s porridge. Just right. We, more or less, had the police we deserved.

Now British policing is synonymous with knee-taking and Pride parades. Acting as the paramilitary wing of social services. Of enforcing political dogma masquerading as ‘law’. Many Britons now view the police, at best, as providers of crime reference numbers for insurance claims. What caused this fall from grace? How did they lose their way?

I’d like to report rumours of British policing’s decline are exaggerated. They are, sadly, anything but. The rot is real. During my service, I witnessed successive governments rip British policing to shreds. I worked in Special Branch and the Counterterrorism Command, then as an Anticorruption investigator. These were deeply controversial areas of policing; areas where I witnessed the political interference with police decision-making. This is why I know this story of decline is an uncomfortable one for politicians of all parties. It’s also a story of near-criminal neglect.

I talk to young police officers. The best, aghast at the decline in quality of their fellow recruits, want nothing more than to be the police the public deserve. Why they’re prevented from doing so is the nub of the problem.

Recently, I had a look at the law-and-order policies of our major political parties, from Labour to Reform. They’re all virtually meaningless. Padded with embarrassing platitudes about police numbers and ‘bobbies on the beat’. The British Right has until 2029 to formulate a cogent strategy. I’m not naturally inclined to doom-saying, but it now isn’t only police officers who are wondering if the clock’s counting down to midnight. The idea of partial social collapse has gone worryingly mainstream; fears of anarcho-tyranny are increasingly no longer the preserve of those wearing tinfoil hats.

---

It’s 1993. The Major Government, the architects of the ‘Cones Hotline’, sought to implement radical police reforms. This was the Sheehy Report, authored by Sir Patrick Sheehy (a friend of Home Secretary Ken Clarke’s from British American Tobacco). Sir Patrick came to a businessman’s conclusion: that the police were too inflexible. Too expensive. That they needed a dose of market forces.

Sheehy’s most controversial proposal was carving out what was known as the ‘X’ factor in police pay. Intended to reflect the rigours of the job and lack of industrial rights — British police, unlike their European counterparts, are forbidden from taking industrial action — the ‘X’ factor provided a ten percent pay premium over comparable public sector occupations. Policing is overwhelmingly a people business; the single biggest overhead in any force is staff. The ‘X’ factor wasn’t cheap. But nor was it introduced for fun, or out of some kind of great respect for the police: it was introduced quite simply because forces were seriously struggling to recruit sufficient numbers of competent officers. But the Tories, following on from the many real successes of Thatcher, were determined to cut the last ‘unreformed public service’ down to size; as Ken Clarke declared, ‘It’s time to sort out the boys and girls in blue.’

The Conservative Party, with the exception of Margaret Thatcher, has never really understood policing. It’s instinctively more comfortable with the military, with its relative political docility and baked-in notions of class; when the arch-wet Andrew Mitchell (briefly an army officer) was accused of calling a police officer ‘a pleb’, few police officers were surprised. Policing is, and always has been, a working and lower-middle class trade.

As a young constable, I attended a rally against the Sheehy reforms at Wembley Arena. A fresh-faced Labour MP gave a speech. He was the then Shadow Home Secretary, Tony Blair. Although he spoke little of Sheehy, Blair hammily proclaimed that a New Labour government would be ‘tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime’. I shall discuss how that boast worked out later — but I digress.

Partly due to pressure from an effective pro-police lobby in Parliament, the Sheehy Report became politically toxic. The Report’s defenders might suggest it was simply before its time, but in the end, Michael Howard, the new Home Secretary, ditched most of it. But Ken Clarke’s Spad, who was closely involved with Sheehy? He didn’t forget. His name? David Cameron.

The Sheehy Report was an enduring policy blueprint. Some readers might, not unreasonably, wonder how something as superficially anodyne as pay and conditions could pose such an existential threat. This was the question politicians asked themselves, before they drew the wrong conclusion. Policing is, to put it bluntly, not a particularly attractive occupation. It’s one that the British middle classes have traditionally avoided. Policing combines mind-numbing officialdom and public opprobrium with occasional bouts of violence. Without wishing to give the impression of self-pity, that policing is an unhealthy occupation is simply a fact: I’ve seen colleagues badly injured at work, and I’ve lost more than a few friends and colleagues to suicide. Appeals to public spiritedness, while not worth nothing, will only go so far. This leaves pay and conditions as one of the few levers available to forces in retaining competent officers. Yet the Conservatives, from Sheehy onwards, gave the impression of viewing policing — especially neighbourhood policing — as a service they’d prefer to palm off on the private sector in order to save money. This, to put it mildly, has not been a success.

Fast forward to 1997: the ‘Blairite Reformation’. A Matrix Chambers-inspired, Von Schlieffen-esque blitz of constitutional and human rights legislation. It struck me the Reformation served two primary purposes: first of all, to forever enshrine the values of the North London dinner party into British jurisprudence; and second, to soften up our Common Law system for amalgamation into the EU. In this, New Labour was spectacularly successful. Public bodies have pandered to human rights utopianism ever since, to the detriment of service delivery. Blairite law satisfies only our legal clerisy, activist quangocracy, and the criminal classes. The police soon found themselves stymied by their duty to act compatibly with ECHR convention rights by the Human Rights Act 1998. But the Human Rights Act was only the start: later, intersectional politics ran riot in forces due to the ‘protected characteristics’ requirements under the Equality Act 2010 — enacted in the dying days of New Labour, but supported and primarily implemented by the Tories.

As a detective, I found one of the most egregious examples was the Regulation of Investigatory Procedures Act 2000 (RIPA). This was intended to make instances of ‘snooping’ on the public compatible with the Human Rights Act — not an unreasonable objective. However, its principles aped elements of the Napoleonic Code. It turned decision-making by senior officers into analogues of European-style investigating magistrates, but with none of the institutional infrastructure to make such a system work. Navigating RIPA for hitherto basic police functions, such as staking out a house, became like swimming through treacle. I remember patrolling officers being warned to seek written authorities before parking up on the houses of disqualified drivers, lest it constitute ‘Directed Surveillance’, or cause ‘Collateral Intrusion’. Opportunistic lawyers wondered if neighbourhood watch schemes in themselves constituted ‘Covert Human Intelligence Sources’ under the Act. To mitigate these legal wrinkles, gold-plating compliance units, inspections, and paperwork in triplicate followed. And, just when I thought peak madness had been achieved, a RIPA compliance unit demanded that all binoculars used in an operation were individually logged and authorised for ‘legal audit and disclosure’. Internal obstacles to fighting crime became the norm, based on specious ‘what if?’ legal challenges based on the Human Rights Act.

Another New Labour vehicle for radical change was the Macpherson Report of 1999, heralding the introduction of Critical Race Theory into policing. For senior police officers, an obsession with the politics of race became a totem to be worshipped, not a problem to be resolved. The quangocracy latched onto the report’s findings, having sniffed out a rich seam of funding and social engineering opportunities. This process was accelerated by the appointment of partisan police chiefs, like Sir Ian Blair, and the Home Office gerrymandering of senior officer promotion processes.

Younger readers may need to be reminded of another important characteristic of the policymaking of this era: namely, that the Blairite chimera blended human rights dogma with a fascination for performance management. The notorious ‘Home Office Counting Rules’ and ‘National Crime Recording Standards’, an attempt to map police performance via statistical pedantry, did to criminal investigation what RIPA did to proactive operations. The measures did, however, ensure that more police officers were chained to computers — bogus performance metrics became the currency of advancement.

Meanwhile, Private-Public Partnership initiatives planted a financial timebomb under policing. Forces who hitherto (and, to be fair, often wastefully) operated in virtual autarky — from police stations to IT contracts — were now subjected to blanket outsourcing. This, as far as I could see, was something of a curate’s egg in how taxpayer’s money was spent; PPI partners were perfectly good in parts, prone to shameless profit-gouging in others. Then, when the world economy imploded in 2008, the time bomb exploded. Too much police infrastructure, which should have been shielded from any economic turbulence, was compromised when many of the PPI providers floundered.

Then came 2010. The coup de grâce: a ConDem ‘austerity’ government of ‘technocratic’, pro-EU ‘modernisers’. Policing, for Ken Clarke’s former spad David Cameron, was an obvious target for swingeing cuts. Legend has it George Osborne persuaded Theresa May, the Home Secretary, to wield the axe. It would be painful and messy. It would damage May in the eyes of the British public — which, for Osborne, made complete sense. Like Osborne, she would fight for the crown when Cameron chose to leave Number 10; but of course, history had different plans for George.

The upshot was the Winsor Report, led by the lawyer and former rail regulator Sir Tom Winsor. It was a stitch-up from the start, dogmatically ignoring how police service delivery turns on people. May rolled the pitch with barely-disguised hostility, citing historic corruption cases and, in a preview of the left-wing social policy that marked her time as Prime Minister, her opposition to stop-and-search (principally on the grounds of disparate impact). Home Office briefings to the media were vicious. Relations with the Police Federation were poisonous. At their conference, she accused the Federation of ‘crying wolf’ over cuts to policing.

Sadly, the Federation’s warnings were thoroughly vindicated by subsequent events. The police, forbidden by law from taking industrial action, were an easy target for the Coalition. After all, these cuts affected only a small number of people in the short-term; they were more likely to result in policing’s gradual decay, rather than a very sudden (and politically damaging) collapse. Winsor’s reforms introduced Sheehy-like reductions to pay and conditions (including a nearly twenty percent real-terms cut in police pay between 2012 and 2022), direct entry to top ranks (leading to compliant civil servants parachuted into senior management, sapping morale), and cuts to estates and operational budgets. The cuts were savage: transport, personnel, and equipment all suffered. Police stations were sold off, with forces advised to establish ‘pop-up’ stations in supermarkets. This is why many towns now have no 24/7 police presence.

May did promise, however, a quid pro quo. Her reformed British police would be ‘leaner’, but would enjoy full operational latitude. Under the Conservatives, they would concentrate only on fighting crime. This was nonsense, not least because the Tories refused to acknowledge — let alone dismantle — the Blairite Reformation. The plates chief constables were required to spin multiplied exponentially as other parts of the public sector — especially health, education, and social services, themselves struggling with slower or non-existent budget growth coupled with increasing cost pressures — began relying on police for out-of-hours support. This was mandated under safeguarding principles baked into legislation, in another example of policymakers simply ignoring police capacity to deliver. As public services atrophied, policing stopped being… policing. At one point, over two-thirds of Metropolitan Police response officers’ time was spent supporting social services and the NHS with mental health cases.

Nor did May’s reforms address the cadres of technocrat cops; the Blair-era police leaders. Instead, they doubled-down on them. The result? A catastrophic hollowing-out of policing. Thousands of experienced operational officers, the backbone of British policing, resigned mid-service, never to be replaced. Potential recruits baulked at mediocre salaries, with standards dropping massively as a result. The focus on identity politics over crime-fighting intensified, driven by a powerful activist quangocracy.

Many commentators suggest that Theresa May lacked a sense of humour. I have to disagree. She appointed Tom Winsor, who officers considered the axe-murderer of British policing, Chief Inspector of Constabulary. In policing, the small gestures count: Winsor wore police uniform as part of his new role, despite having never served. Police officers, many of whom were natural Tory voters, swore never to vote Conservative again. May is, to coppers, what Margaret Thatcher was to the miners. The difference? Unlike coal and coal miners, the demand for policing and policemen isn’t — and never was — artificially propped up by the state.

---

As we have seen, much of the damage was already done long before Covid and the explosion of social justice mania in the early ’20s. Policing was left deeply unsuited to the challenges of an increasingly balkanised society; of collapsing legitimacy coupled with surging (if often unreported) crime. How, then, to restore policing to a semblance of its former self? And do our policymakers even understand the issues, let alone know how to address them?

It won’t be easy — in fact, the task is Herculean — but I believe that there is still hope. In the second part of this series, I’ll discuss today’s problems in more detail, along with some possible solutions which, better yet, aren’t expensive to implement either. With policing, those who are seeking to replace Labour in 2029 will have a big opportunity. I sincerely hope that they will take it.

---

Image credits: UK Prime Minister, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0

This article was written by Dominic Adler, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Mr Adler is a former Metropolitan Police detective who worked in Special Branch and the Counterterrorism Command, and then as an Anticorruption investigator. He has written about policing for Unherd and on his own Substack. Have a pitch? Send it to pimlicojournal@substack.com.

If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?