The disclosure over the weekend that two police authorities, West Midlands and Surrey, have started the process of privatising the police service in their areas marks a further development in the creation of a fully private police force answerable only to the employers.
That this was just the start was made clear when their action in inviting private security companies to bid for work, including criminal investigation, patrolling neighbourhoods and detaining suspects, was wholeheartedly endorsed by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo).
Their spokesman stated that ‘radical and fundamental’ change to policing is essential in the face of financial cuts imposed by the coalition government and that privatisation is the only way forward.
Attempts by Acpo to head off complaints about private companies running the police force by pointing out that private security companies already perform huge amounts of police work, such as patrolling public spaces, transporting prisoners and detaining people suspected of shoplifting, merely serves to underline just how far down the road to a private police force the British state has already gone.
The private security ‘specialist’ company, G4S has been leading the way in privatisation of police services.
Last year G4S won a contract estimated to be worth up to £250 million to enter into a ‘strategic partnership’ with Lincolnshire constabulary – this has involved not just taking over the computer and back office function like personnel, but actually taking over and running a Lincolnshire police station.
It is further intended that the company build a large police station in the county with up to 30 cells that they will also staff and run.
G4S, which internationally provides ‘security’ services to the imperialist powers in Afghanistan, has also won a government contract, worth up to £250 million, to operate a ‘Welfare to Work’ scheme to drive unemployed youth off benefits in the Liverpool area.
This opens up the scenario of private companies policing workers and youth on the streets and on policing them on the dole as well.
This move towards a fully privatised police force has been condemned by liberals and reformists as being against the ‘British tradition’ of policing by consent, and of introducing the fear that a private police force will be answerable not to the people but only to the companies that hire them.
In fact, this myth of a neutral police serving the population has been exploded with the revelations that the Murdoch empire used the police and security services as its own private force.
Similarly, the neutrality of the police and security services was exposed as a sham at an employment tribunal last month which heard that a firm providing employers with names of workers considered to be left-wing, union activists so that they could be blacklisted, received its information from the police or MI5.
The police have never been neutral in the class struggle, but under the impact of the economic crisis gripping capitalism even the facade of neutrality has to be dropped.
What bankrupt British capitalism is demanding is a state apparatus geared up to take on the working class and youth in a decisive struggle; it requires a force that owes its allegiance only to the bosses and employers in an attempt to smash workers and their unions and drive them back to conditions that have not existed since the beginning of the 19th century.
To this end, it is turning the clock back to before the creation of a public police force, a time where law was openly private and exclusively for the capitalist class to use against workers.
There can be only one answer to this declaration of war by the capitalist state and that is to smash it through the socialist revolution.
