Police Leader Demands Special Protection To Impose Public Order

There have been some interesting and, in my view, ill-informed responses to comments by Derek Barnett, the president of the Police Superintendents' Association, who has warned that "in an environment of cuts across the wider public sector, we face a period where disaffection, social and industrial tensions may well rise" and that widespread disorder is "inevitable".

On sections of the left, Barnett's conference speech has been described as "a noteworthy intervention" or alternately as "a realistic intervention" into the debate on public spending cuts. The Morning Star has gone as far as suggesting that the trade union movement owes him "a strange debt of gratitude". At the other end of the political spectrum, the right-wing Daily Telegraph's Scottish editor Alan Cochrane has distraughtly accused Barnett of displaying "little difference between his tactics and those of Bob Crow, the militant rail union leader."

Cochrane is quite wrong, of course, to compare the Police Superintendents' Association to a trade union. Like the Police Federation representing the lower ranks, its history is intertwined with the passing of the Police Act of 1919, which barred police from striking, from belonging to a trade union or from affiliating with any trade union confederation. This statute was created following industrial action by police officers in 1918 and 1919 and out of government fears of the alternatives. Britain's police associations are instead semi-statutory bodies, creations of the state and completely incapable of militancy.

But those suggesting that Barnett has anything useful to say about cuts are also missing the point. He is not an ally of those opposing the government's planned austerity programme. Far from condemning cuts in public services, the police superintendents' leader is simply demanding that the police are excluded from them so they have sufficient numbers to impose order and defend the interests of the state if and when this becomes necessary.

By rattling off, in his speech to the Police Superintendents' Association's conference in Cheshire, a list of professions who will not be called upon "to restore order on our streets", Barnett is restating the separate and distinct status of police officers from other workers. By raising the spectre of the Peterloo massacre in Manchester in 1819 amongst a list of reasons why police officers "must be sufficiently resilient", Barnett is not threatening the government - he's threatening the rest of us with a reminder of the police's unique powers to lawfully exercise force against other citizens.

Paul Sagar, who blogs at Bad Conscience, has asked whether Barnett is an idiot or a thug. To my mind, you can't rise to the level of a chief superintendent in the Cheshire constabulary by being a complete idiot - but you certainly don't reach such a senior position without knowing how to confidently wield a baton when called upon to do so.