On New Year’s Day I almost went to Telford to watch some football. It was a reminder of ‘new towns’, whose creation and heyday was in the 1960s, and closed with the laying out of Milton Keynes in the 1980s. The idea was that London above all was declining, and that the state could and should plan on a town-scale. Such was fashion.
It shows the sheer power of the state, and the confident assumptions of the planners. Both arose out of the two world wars, when the state had to take drastic action in a hurry for Britain to be on the winning side twice (not quite the same thing as ‘winning’).
Consider the D-Day landings in France, that have their 80th anniversary this year. To plan for tens of thousands of men to land on beaches after crossing the Channel in ships; and thousands more to parachute-drop inland of them. To plan also to feed them; and send fuel by undersea pipe across the Channel. Imagine if the states that landed on D-Day – notably the United States, Britain and Canada – now decided to commemorate the event, by running a re-enactment. It couldn’t be done; certainly not to the timetable of World War Two. And add to that, that in 1944 waiting for the invaders was the German Army with orders to kill them.
What a contrast the British state makes now. We may hear talk of what a bad thing short-term thinking is; the High Speed 2 rail was long-term thinking, if a project ever was. It showed the value in short-termism; if that means attention to costs and priorities. In a word, planning.
That’s not to say the state in 1944 was perfect. Few historians of the Normandy campaign stop to consider that all the planning went into getting the troops ashore; the armies would inevitably, a few miles inland, come into the densely-hedged bocage country, yet they were without equipment or tactics: it meant a bloody season of fighting, and improvisation.
This history (it might as well be pre-history to the young) matters in security management because – to name one of the great postwar projects, atomic research and the development of nuclear power stations – we can trace there, and in the military more generally, the origins of security management (a 1950s head of security at the Atomic Energy Authority was Guy Liddell, a senior retired MI5 man), whether physical security of perimeters and gatehouses, or personnel security – vetting of staff to keep out spies for Communist Russia.
Numerous fiascos, tragedies and scandals, some more to do with security management than others – Grenfell Tower, the Post Office’s IT system for sub-postmasters, the Manchester Arena bomb and Inquiry that led to grovelling public apologies by all the emergency services – point to dysfunction. And a tendency to go to great lengths and at great (public) expense to inquire into what went wrong, and then move on (the Arena Inquiry website is now part of the National Archives).
An uncomfortable truth for those working in counter-fraud and protective security is that when the state does act in a hurry, or come up with an idea – in spring 2020, to give out loans to tide people over the covid pandemic lockdown, in 2023 to shut most railway station booking offices – counter-fraud and security management aren’t given a thought. Untold billions in loans went to nimble fraudsters (and nor is the state doing much of a job in clawing the stolen money back); the closure of booking offices would leave railway stations with less ‘natural surveillance’ and fewer uniformed figures of authority, staples of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED). It’s little comfort that the idea to close booking offices got dropped; even then security was not a consideration. Those in authority, if they speak of fraud, and security, therefore, are paying lip service.
What’s changed between the 1940s and now is the switch from the ‘planning state’ to powerful businesses. The guiding principle of the Mark Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks of this world sounds equally uncomfortable for security (and indeed safety) managers: move fast and break things. It means that whether they are building social media networks, or space rockets, they accept, even embrace, things going wrong, in the name of reaching the goal. It has meant, besides rockets blowing up before they reach orbit, online scams and frauds; hate speech; radicalisation of the young and impressionable by terrorists of all sorts. And more lip service paid by the big tech firms to doing something about them all; because at root none of those social problems belong to the tech firms, which are there to make a profit.
Which makes it all the more disappointing that Labour under Sir Keir Starmer has not used the years in opposition to ready some ideas; guiding principles; or at least rallying slogans, to do something about all this; or at least to acknowledge that these things merit political retorts. Or if it has (and I wrote about this more fully last year), the party is not being transparent about it; and you would hope transparency would be one of those principles.
Photo by Mark Rowe, Caen Canal, Normandy, summer.
