Author: Prof Tim Newburn
ISBN No: 9781472137968
Review date: 08/05/2024
No of pages:
Publisher: Hachette
Publisher URL:
https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/andrew-ward/orderly-britain/9781472137968/
Year of publication: 17/11/2022
Brief:
price
£18.99, hardback
The criminologist Tim Newburn’s new book, Orderly Britain, about the ‘informal social controls’ taken for granted that keep Britain ticking, is a breath of fresh air, writes Mark Rowe. But by ignoring the contribution – indeed, the existence – of private security, as the necessary glue to enforce order, the book ultimately stinks, he feels.
Seldom have I swung so violently in how I feel about a book, from admiring the original idea to disgust at its shortcomings, stemming from the author’s chosen material. It’s only fair to state how refreshing the book is when it’s always easy to write a book of woe about how much crime is around. Tim Newburn chapter by chapter takes the nuisances rather than the crimes of Britain or any civilised society – such as toilets, dog shit (his term) and drinking – and ends with the covid pandemic. He shows how the country runs not so much according to laws, but rules and regulations. He concludes that ‘we continue to be largely self-policing’.
It’s one of those arguments that brings a nod of appreciation, as it’s taken for granted. You get on a bus or train or aircraft, and at the bar for a drink, and you wait your turn to get on and off. Yes, society will always have crime, but the less noticeable (and newsworthy) reality is that we get along, and despite profound and seemingly ever-faster social change, and the challenge of covid, we continue to do so.
Tim Newburn is a distinguished criminologist, the author of among many books a thousand-page doorstopper textbook called Criminology that ought to be at the elbow of any criminology student, if they still read physical books (or if they ever did).
So what’s my problem? No mention of private security and not even in the index; and only a few of CCTV. To take CCTV first and its role (that Tim Newburn does touch on) of enforcing orderly behaviour. To take an academic example. Some time in the 2000s, the north-east corner of the research room on the first floor of the National Archives at Kew got walled off. What is the mystery inside the created windowless, unexplained room? It’s a CCTV control room. Now few places are more orderly than the archives at Kew; but you can still break the numerous rules. If you do – in archive terms, are guilty of such wrongs as using a pencil with a rubber on the end – an attendant will be alerted thanks to the CCTV and walk over and quietly ask you to stop. But perhaps Prof Newburn is not a user of archive material.
He certainly hasn’t using actual lived experience in his book, whether as seen for himself or told him by others; rather, he has used reported events (not the same thing). Let’s take the pandemic. He makes a shrewd point about Dominic Cummings (remember him) and his notorious breaking of covid lockdown rules in spring 2020, that perhaps Cummings provided a model of how not to behave. A sort of pantomime villain. Newburn also quotes Derbyshire Police’s over-zealous fining of people for breaking rules about gathering. Anyone who was actually in Derbyshire (or indeed other counties) will recall that such fines were the exception to the rule – you hardly ever saw the police. Understandably, because police had personal concerns about not getting infected by going close to people, and their leaders wanted to avoid running short on roster.
The truer evidence from the pandemic was on the trains and buses between the two lockdowns of spring 2020 and the winter of 2020-21; many people, mainly young, who flouted the rule about wearing a mask, presumably because they could not be bothered to or resented the losses of liberty (no Glastonbury Festival in 2020! Or 2021!). But, on trains and buses, order reigned.
That’s a problem with order; you can queue for a drink at the bar or a bus stop, but among you may be wife-beaters, drug dealers and shop thieves. Criminals want order too, because it makes for an efficient movement of people and a quiet life. once challenged – shoplifters stealing, drunks asked to leave premises – they turn violent. Yes, it’s still the exception to the rule; but the trouble with order is that it’s like beauty – it doesn’t take much to ruin it. How many warts have to be on a beautiful face before it’s ugly?
It only takes one person to park in an anti-social way (or to lock their bicycle on a cycle rack and wrap their lock around another bike) to upset others. Because we don’t like it done to us, most of us do the right thing. Tim Newburn is a professor at the London School of Economics – as it’s in central London, it doesn’t have parking problems; the LSE offers next to no parking. But at universities that do have car parking, it’s often private security that enforces the rules (and hands out fines).
Precisely because parts of Britain are crowded, inter-connected and complex, informal controls (enforced by plenty of signs, that prompted Tim Newburn’s book, because he’s fascinated by signage – pictured, north London utility site) are necessary for life to run smoothly. Otherwise we’d forever be like The Three Stooges, each trying to get through the doorway first, and only jamming it for everybody. It only takes a few anti-social people to upturn order. Such as the Just Stop Oil protesters on pavements and motorway gantries. Or the thousands who tried to storm Wembley without tickets for the England-Italy Euros final in July 2021. Or the pub-goers who routinely make noise and bother the neighbourhood when they leave late at night, or the students stumbling home. All exceptions to the norm of order, yes, but disorder matters emotionally. A shop assistant is only verbally abused for a moment of her working day – but if threatened by a thief, that day is spoiled.
This is not new. In the 1950s, travelling football fans broke light blubs on trains. They don’t do that now because trains have ‘designed out’ that crime, and train operators long ago stopped running ‘football specials’. It only means that rail passengers on Saturday evenings have to endure loud, drunken men returning from a day’s drinking interrupted by two hours of football. Surely the defining characteristic of British society is not order, but tolerance; including of the occasional disorder. That is under-reported and under-recorded, perhaps grossly (who knows?). The dirty little secret of criminology is that it relies on official crime statistics, or estimates, when anyone in insurance, or business security, or anyone with their eyes open, knows Britain has far more aggressive begging, shop thefts and assaults than ever reach the police. Crime, to repeat, is not the same as disorder (an absence of order), except that police do have, and use, great discretion about their use of Public Order Act powers. And as police have largely retreated to their cars, and first responders are routinely private security, and police only attend and record 999 incidents, incidents of disorder must be hugely under-recorded. Would anybody even dare to put a percentage on it?
A flaw in Tim Newburn’s argument is that like so many academics he is more comfortable using printed source material than actually seeking lived experience; of pub door staff, shop workers, security officers who enforced social distancing. Is the growth within living memory of uniformed private security to 400,000 SIA-badged people – far outnumbering the police – of no account in the sheer number of bodies required to keep order? The retail trade union Usdaw runs a “freedom from Fear’ campaign, as shop staff suffer verbal and physical abuse; the National Association for Healthcare Security (NAHS) conference earlier this month was all about violence against paramedics and other NHS workers – when does the evidence pile up enough to undermine Newburn’s case?
Police have distanced themselves from enforcing everyday order, such as in on-street car parking, or even responding to everyday on-street disorder. Go to any city centre high street or central square at 9am, and on benches and other gathering places of the ‘street population’, to use the jargon. To listen to a town’s retail radio net is also instructive, the low-level disorder of thefts of cakes from Greggs and women acting ‘erratically’. Who’s speaking on the radio comms, let alone responding to it? Private uniformed staff, not the police. Private security, like the police, are ‘keeping a lid on it’, as a policeman at POP (Problem Oriented Policing) awards once put it.
Tim Newburn’s case is a welcome corrective to the cycle of news about violent and other crime, that blinds us to the fact that in most places, most of the time, Britain enjoys order; its pavements do not have dog shit on them. But in the end Tim Newburn shows that he’s just another professor who knows jack shit.
