Yesterday an event ran in London on ‘the talent pipeline’, to discuss questions of equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) for the security industry, an idea of Dawn Holmes’, ably arranged by Phelim Rowe of CTG Intelligence, and hosted at HMS Belfast courtesy of Riyaz Somani, head of security at the Imperial War Museum, which has the WW2 destroyer as part of its estate. Mark Rowe (no relation to Phelim) was one of the panel speakers in the last half hour of the event, speaking about the Professional Security magazine annual WiS (Women in Security) awards.
After the event I decided not to go for a drink with others and instead walked to London Bridge and towards my train, so as to digest all that was said over the eight hours. Much was said. In fact that can prompt the fear about EDI and ‘the diversity agenda’ and any number of well-meaning campaigns; are they just talk? Except that, as I walked, it occurred to me that Martin Luther, 500 years ago, was all talk. Dr Martin Luther King Junior; what would he have achieved, but for talk?
I walked through Hay’s Galleria. A security officer on patrol bent down and waved a hand at a child in a pram being pushed by a woman and wished them a safe journey. While I made a note of it, opposite an entrance to London Bridge station, that officer walked past on his ‘beat’. I walked against the flow of commuters going home, seemingly happy to enjoy the relatively balmy first warm days of spring. They were all shapes, sizes, colours. I walked past a doorman in black, even a bowler hat, at the door of the posh hotel The Ned; a few straight-backed white males in dinner jackets on their way to some evening do in the City.
I went into the British Library at St Pancras for an hour’s reading of 1960s newspapers about crime and security, past two security officers in blazers at the bag check table; then at St Pancras station at the M&S convenience food store a security officer called me sir as he directed me to the shopping baskets. All those security officers were BAME men.
There was the answer to all those who hate diversity or pay it lip service: the bosses who bugger off to their home in the country on a Friday afternoon; the English patriots in their villas in Spain. You are at liberty to belittle EDI, because (the paradox of liberalism) diversity has to include all, including the blokes sat in pubs in front of football on screens; meanwhile London and cities like it get on with being diverse, and private security serves and reflects that.
Two things I did not say to the HMS Belfast event. One was about a children’s book I saw recently at a supermarket check-out, called, When you are fast asleep, who works at night time, published by Nosy Crow. Among the occupations featured on the cover is a security officer, shining a torch, and carrying a set of keys from his trouser belt. Ought we to be glad that security is acknowledged, as a service on a par with someone pushing a hospital patient in a wheelchair? Or, should we find fault that the security officer is a bloke in a peaked hat? Or neither view, or both?
The other thing was a reflection on HMS Belfast itself, which famously took part in the bombardment of the Normandy Beaches on D-Day, June 6, 1944. You were talking of ‘the talent pipeline’; what of the terrible time that the British Army (and Canadian, and American, and the great men of the Polish First Armoured Division) went through, in that summer of 1944? We know that the story had a happy ending; that the western Allies beat the German Army on the battlefield. But at the time they did not know that. As infantrymen were killed and wounded, privates had to act as sergeants, sergeants as lieutenants.
The British Army survived and triumphed because not all, but enough of those infantrymen were able and willing to step up, beyond their rank. There was no chance of induction training when infantry were in holes in the ground, ditches and hedgerows, toe to toe with the Wehrmacht, and SS and Hitler Youth fanatics. Rather, those men could step up, took command responsibility, because there was a known and agreed process; they did not have to re-invent wheels.
What does this have to do with diversity and inclusion? Only this; what I did say at HMS Belfast; that diversity and inclusion has to become bureaucratised. Bureaucracy has a bad name, but its advantage is that it allows individuals to slot in, as inevitably predecessors leave or get promoted. Or, in war, die.
Something I wrote about recently was that in private security not only this ‘diversity agenda’ but other things, such as sector-specific training, seems to have to be carried by a relative handful of industry body volunteers, who already have demanding and full day jobs, who are also putting in shifts in industry bodies. When they finish their term, or have enough, because their volunteering is unpaid and much of it thankless, newcomers have to start over, re-inventing wheels; there is goodwill, but no bureaucracy.
Something else little mentioned on the day: while individual, company and industry-wide diversity and action against discrimination is important, so is economic justice. There’s little point in having diversity if a worker feels without job security because of zero hours contracts, is dismissed for no good reason; if working in-house, is made to join an outsourced services provider (those services including security) with poorer working conditions, or is paid not enough to be able to afford rent in London. If someone works full time but is unable to support a family, where is the elementary justice in that?
Picture by Mark Rowe; Tower Bridge from HMS Belfast.
