May I start by making a correction to the news item in last month’s edition on page 16, about AddSecure taking on the BT Redcare line of alarm signalling products. It’s not a Dutch entity as I said it was; AddSecure is, I’m told in fact, a Swedish company, majority owned by Castik Capital. Redcare by AddSecure will be operated through a UK subsidiary, AddSecure Limited, based in Reading.
“When I first stood on the steps of Downing Street as Prime Minister, I promised to back the police and make people safer, because we cannot level up the country when crime hits the poorest hardest and draws the most vulnerable into violence.” So said Boris Johnson in July 2021, launching a ‘Beating Crime Plan’. Three summers ago, yet how times have changed! Who reads that plan, now? Not me. Yet, in passing, much it sounds good still, for the country in general and private security in particular – money for violence reduction units, and more rounds of the Safer Streets Fund, that has meant renewed public space surveillance cameras on many high streets. If you’d said then – and I would not have – that Labour would take power in July 2024 with a colossal majority, everyone would have called you a lunatic. That shows how unpredictable politics (and life) can be – who plans further ahead than a year? It’s a question I do ask security people with their own businesses. Quite apart from it’s a brave man that takes his health for granted, the world has got plain stranger (hence the call for risk forecasting, a field of security that does attract the young and bright; see page 52). We can now see that events that led to Johnson’s fall had already happened. The conviction that he and his henchmen would be around for years lasted longer – as late as December 2021 they brought out a ‘ten year drugs strategy’; left unspoken was that they were the ones to carry it out for ten years.
The anti-Labour grumble is that Labour got in on a low vote (and a low turn-out; in both Barnsley constituencies, for instance, and including new Home Office minister Dan Jarvis, fewer than half the electorate bothered to vote – a comment on all the political parties). While the grumble is correct, it is more proof of how voting and life has become more unpredictable.
See page 21 for what the July 4 result might mean for private security. I will add this. The Times in an editorial after the Conservative defeat asked ‘how it was that a creed which once valued a small state, law and order, the preservation of the countryside, fiscal prudence and institutional continuity ended up delivering so many contradictions of those precepts’, such as ‘a crumbling justice system’. Some reasons why the Tories failed and voters punished them so are still around: as I have wondered before, maybe there just isn’t enough money; or policy-making and life have become too complicated for anybody’s good. When in recent weeks on Manchester trams (pictured), at the Excel exhibition centre in London (see page 42) and in and around the regenerated Battersea Power Station, I have seen SIA-badged private security as the routine, visible, reassuring presence. While so many of us are ready to give up on Labour before they have even begun, let us take a minute to appreciate what a generation of security people (under Labour and Tory) have built.
