“These are the most significant changes to how policing works in this country in around 200 years”. Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s assertion to the Commons this January is true, if the core restructures in her white paper are implemented. From Local to National: A New Model for Policing contains the only proposals from this pro-capitalist Labour government to show any semblance of ambition. It is telling that the proposals in question are an attempt to consolidate the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state.
In the 19th century, Tory home secretary Robert Peel – who Mahmood has prominently invoked – pioneered the modern police force amid the class clashes of ascendant industrial capitalism. Responding to Cold War class tensions in 1948, existing police leaders’ bodies merged into the Association of Chief Police Officers, a private company, to coordinate political intelligence and public order policing nationally (ACPO was succeeded by the National Police Chiefs’ Council, hosted by the Home Office-controlled Metropolitan Police, in 2015).
Margaret Thatcher coordinated an informal national police force in the 1980s, through an ad hoc ‘National Reporting Centre’ at Scotland Yard, in anticipation of the great miners’ strike. This exchanged local officers with community ties to pit workers for outside forces ordered to assault their picket lines.
Today’s government faces a new era of turbulent class relations in decaying capitalism. Its prescription: regionalised police governance, even more removed from what passes for local democratic scrutiny – subject to overt national integration and control, and implicit reorientation to political and public order policing.
At present there are 43 forces in England and Wales, organised separately at or near the level of counties. Most are formally overseen by directly elected police and crime commissioners – which would be abolished in 2028 – or strategic authority metro-mayors. These would amalgamate, in stages, towards around a dozen regional forces, ultimately to be overseen by new ‘Policing and Crime Boards’ composed of constituent local authority leaders and their co-optees.
Above them would be a new National Police Service (NPS) for the whole jurisdiction (local policing in the Scottish and Northern Irish jurisdictions would remain under their devolved governments). Mahmood has called the NPS a “British FBI”. It would absorb existing national forces, most importantly Counter Terrorism Policing (which includes socialist organisations in its extremism guidebook) and the National Crime Agency, plus some regional and national responsibilities currently held by local forces. The likely exception is the financial fraud specialisms of the City of London Police, a decision left open for now. Independent of Greater London’s Metropolitan Police, and governed by the only local authority where businesses have a vote, finance capital may prefer to keep policing in the family.
The NPS would have additional power to standardise regions’ policy and training, and command their resources during major incidents. At its head, the home secretary – whose authority to intervene directly in all police leaderships, curtailed in 2011 by Theresa May’s police and crime commissioner model, would be restored and expanded.
The white paper specifically names two new leadership roles to sit within the NPS. A “single, national decision-maker” on “data-driven policing” would oversee pooling of intelligence files and rollout of AI technology. The “Senior National Coordinator for Public Order Policing”, repeatedly mentioned, would plan for and direct nationwide police mobilisations. The Home Office cites the riots of 2011 and 2024 as warnings.
This is not all there is to the proposals – and certainly not how they are sold. The police have a dual role under capitalism. At base this is defending private property interests by maintaining the state’s monopoly on coercion and violence. In consequence, and because of the state’s need to disguise its class character behind false neutrality, they are the public’s official recourse against attacks on personal property and safety. Anger at their failure in the latter, explicit role is undermining both.
While violent crimes have officially been trending down for some years, crimes such as theft have spiked. The Home Office’s own data showed that 94.3% of reported crimes resulted in no charge or summons in 2022-23. Some of this will represent backlog or genuine lack of evidence, but it is long established that police ‘screen out’ a huge proportion of potential cases either way – never mind those not reported due to lack of confidence in outcomes.
Repeated exposure of institutional bigotry and brutality, most recently at Charing Cross, has not helped. Nor have the widely covered mass arrests of peaceful protesters defending Palestine Action. Even some officers seem to have questioned this, with anonymous comments of feeling “ashamed and sick” and that this was “not the work I came into the police to be doing” reported by Novara Media.
On crime prevention, the emphasis is on awareness campaigns or still more enforcement, including further measures to criminalise youth. The flagrant need for investment in youth services is swept under Labour’s ‘Young Futures’ promise to create 50 new youth ‘hubs’ by 2029. Councils in England and Wales closed 1,243 youth clubs between 2010 and 2023, according to Unison research.
The white paper’s claim that AI processing of cases “will free up six million policing hours each year (equivalent to 3,000 FTE) while also ensuring victims and witnesses get a faster service” has too many obvious dangers to list, foremost to the interests of victims and the accused.
Mahmood’s bids to improve police morale are dubious, and any hope the state can restore public trust is utopian. Centralisation could deliver economies of scale and free up staff, but meaningful increases in funding are not pledged. ‘Local Police Areas’ to address ‘community priorities’, within regionalised forces promising better distribution of expertise and support, cannot resolve policing’s fundamental contradictions.
Nonetheless, could key planks still be implemented? The next step is reviews due to report this summer. Mahmood’s timeline is for completion by 2034. The unlikelihood of Labour being in government by then is obvious.
Doomed police and crime commissioners have inevitably opposed mergers. Across parties, rural politicians in particular have objected to the likely consequence of regionalised forces sucking resources towards towns and cities, while warning all areas could pay more in the council tax police precept to chase national funding shortfalls. The Tory front bench has attacked the white paper, partly playing to its remaining rural base.
However, the Police Foundation think tank is right to speculate that “many Conservatives might privately support that it was really Parliament… which is the rightful source of public priority-setting for the police”, reflecting a growing instinct to fortify the central state. Chief constables have cautiously welcomed the proposals. The judgement for serious bourgeois strategists will be what elements of the boldest reforms make risks of failure or exposure preferable to existing, less methodical, central control mechanisms like the National Police Chiefs’ Council.
On taking office in 2024, Labour declared its character as a continuity austerity regime by crushing a bid to lift the two-child benefit cap. Its first major crisis followed within days: a wildfire of confused anti-migrant protests and riots across the country. The state was humiliated by the apparent incapacity of police and government to suppress this disorder, only ended by mass counterprotests that hinted at the superior potential power of the working class. Immediately preceding this was the biggest strike wave in a generation, 2022-23, which helped seal the fate of an historically spent Tory party, then the mass anti-war movement which damaged both the outgoing and incoming governments.
The proposed reforms have nothing to do with serving the needs of ordinary communities – let alone the democratic working-class control of police policy and staffing that, as part of a socialist programme, could. They flow from British capitalism’s insoluble weakness – the full extent of which is barely sketched by those watersheds – and still greater trepidation for the future.
So do proposed cuts to the right to trial by jury, and quiet reneging on repeal of undemocratic strike ballot thresholds. The High Court’s initial ruling this month that the ban on Palestine Action was unlawful shows again the power of mass pressure. Nonetheless, this weakness does not mean authoritarian measures represent no threat. It means the workers’ movement must press the advantage to defeat that threat – by mobilising for mass struggle, and building a working-class political alternative to the failed capitalist system that is producing it.
James Ivens