We Won't Go Back

Last night's television hatchet job on Arthur Scargill indicates just how long the shadow of the Miners' Strike still is.

One of its longest-lasting and most destructive effects was the loss of confidence in the Police on the part of people who had previously been related to them, played football with or against them, drunk with them, and so on.

No one did more than Margaret Thatcher to erode the sense that the Police were simply the community, acting both proactively and reactively in self-defence.

Some of us have been involved for many years in small ways, and some people have been involved for many years in large ways, in work to overcome that legacy, and to restore, as far as practicable, the previous happy state of affairs.

We refuse, we absolutely refuse, to return to the Thatcher and post-Thatcher order.

It is difficult to distinguish between Andrew Mitchell, whose admitted behaviour was a clear public order offence for which anyone else would have been arrested, and Mark Duggan. It is practically impossible to distinguish between their respective supporters.

That is to be expected.

The total non-enforcement of the drug laws over the last 40 years means that those who hold sway in inner city communities have long decided for themselves which laws shall or shall not apply in or to those areas.

The hunting ban, which the Police have said from the outset could not possibly be enforced even if they had nothing better to do, has now had the same effect on the deep countryside.

The lords of the manor and the lords of the streets might not resemble one another at first sight. But the squires' ancestors were essentially gangsters.

And the pharmaceutical habits of the squirearchy's scions, at least when in Town or at School, mean that points of contact between the two already exist.

Certainly, they have a common enemy.

The Police.

A key frontline public service and a bastion of traditional trade unionism in defence of that service, which believers in public services and in strong trade unions ought therefore to support vigorously. As, until That Woman, they did.

The Andrew Mitchells and the Mark Duggans of the world both look down on the Police, and for very much the same reasons. In this, starkly, the Police really are us again, with our middling incomes and with our middling mores.

When Andrew Mitchell thought that he could swear at the Police, then he thought that he could swear at us. When Mark Duggan looked to be about to shoot a Police Officer, as he clearly felt entitled to do, then he looked to be about to shoot you or me, as he clearly felt entitled to do.

But when a Police Officer shot Mark Duggan, then he scored a direct hit for you and me.

And when another (or, presumably, another) Police Officer wins a libel action against Andrew Mitchell, then that will be another victory for each and every one of us.

Two classes were created by Margaret Thatcher and entrenched by Tony Blair, an overclass and an underclass, neither of which feels constrained by the standards of behaviour that are obvious to anyone else, and each of which feels utter contempt for, above all, those of us whose role it is to enforce those standards.

But, just as Thatcher's own reputation is collapsing on a weekly basis, with the latest revelation being that she deployed an SAS officer to assist the storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, so her baleful bequest is being set aside.

Her own party, despite the fact that it knifed her, remains utterly weeded to her memory, and presents itself as the conscious heir to her still-living tribute act. But his own party has lately chosen a much nobler path.

Just as Labour is the only force for the Union on at least three fronts, so it is also the only force both for the existence and for the values, not merely of people whose incomes happen to hover around a statistical mean or median figure, but of a middle class, properly so called.

Including what was once the working class, before, as such, it was destroyed. Any fully formed social class is a product of chosen public policy, of the central and local government decision that there shall be that class in particular.

Thatcher made her choices. Blair made his. Miliband will make ours.