We Do Not Want Or Need A British FBI

The Morning Star editorialises:

Met Commissioner Sir Mark Rowley’s demands for an FBI-style National Police Service are in line with plans set out by Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood in January. Like the fact Mahmood remains in office, this reflects a worrying continuity with the repressive agenda of the Starmer government — and even a failure of imagination. Some fresh thinking is required if Andy Burnham’s government is to attempt the reshaping of the British state and economy he promised. Like Mahmood before him, Rowley presents centralisation as a necessary modernisation, citing rapidly developing cross-border-organised and cyber crime. Yet the Met already wields a range of national powers to tackle such crimes — and it is not obvious that further centralisation is the best defence against them.

Last month’s cyber attack on supermarket freezers across 11 European countries, seeing their temperature controls overridden remotely and spoiling tons of food, was only possible because food retail is too centralised — corporate supermarkets outsourcing control of in-store functions to large third-party providers to cut labour costs and increase profit margins. That’s outwith the scope of policing powers, but like Rowley’s complaint that police resources are diverted to tackle mental health problems, it illustrates the need to approach the question of security — which does include resilience of food and energy supplies disrupted by climate change and war — with a wider eye to increasingly urgent social and economic reform. Our government cannot think beyond military and policing “solutions.” 

For policing that solution is no neutral response to technological change (even if the application of new technologies were neutral, which it isn’t) but political. Mahmood’s January white paper tied the proposed national police service to “the largest-ever rollout of facial recognition” technology and increased use of AI, despite privacy, accuracy and race-bias concerns. Advocates of greater surveillance and repressive power for state agencies seek support from popular exasperation at neighbourhood crime and anti-social behaviour, though the causes lie less in an underpowered police than a hollowed-out public realm: the lack of conductors and guards on public transport, the reduction of staffing in retail and public services, remove barriers to problematic behaviour itself rooted in the Thatcherite destruction of community.

Nor should we ignore the records of those advocating major restructuring of the British police when considering their motivation. Rowley has been a very political Met Commissioner, imposing unprecedented restrictions on the mass mobilisations for Palestine — regularly obstructing planned routes, for example — on the basis of lies, such as the claim that organisers sought to march past synagogues. He also consulted pro-Israel lobby groups on the policing of such protests while refusing to meet the Palestine Coalition that organises them. And the connections of US surveillance-tech firm Palantir to violent racist repression in the United States through its use by the Ice agency in mass arrests and deportations, and to war crimes by the Israeli military, did not deter him from contracting it to help police British citizens — until blocked by the mayor of London, something likely impossible in a national police service set-up.

Mahmood’s plans explicitly include giving the home secretary the power to sack chief constables — a further politicisation of policing by a minister who helped force the resignation of West Midlands Chief Constable Craig Guildford for entirely political reasons. His ban on fans of an Israeli football club with a history of violent disorder, Maccabi Tel Aviv, attending a match against Aston Villa could conveniently serve the government’s strategy of smearing Israel critics as antisemites, so Labour ministers led a character-assassinating witch-hunt. We do not want or need a British FBI. The rationale for one does not withstand scrutiny, and its advocates are demonstrably enemies of our civil rights. Nor does such centralisation tie in with Burnham’s stated ambition to devolve and localise power. He should face pressure to disown this Starmer-era scheme.