To recap – the recently relaunched Contest strategy for countering terrorism in the UK included the back-filling of armed police by the military, likely to happen in an emergency whether caused by terrorists or others. What part should private security play in backing up the state, at its request, as part of the more general contracting out of work by the state to private industry? asks Mark Rowe.
The question matters because the private sector – commercial or voluntary – has always been there to help the state, in vital ways, when most needed. Take the climactic year 1940, when Nazi Germany looked likely, and well able, to invade Britain. In the crisis of late 1940, when the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) had retreated to Dunkirk and looked trapped if it were not evacuated across the Channel, the British state drew on ‘the little ships’. At extremes, single mariners, even kayakers, crossed the water (at risk of death and presumably uninsured, and well before such things as risk assessment) to bring troops (even a single soldier at a time in a kayak) home. In the only crisis to Britain’s existence at all comparable since, the covid pandemic, again the state turned to the goodwill of volunteers (at vaccination centres) and via commercial contracts private companies, to deliver services that the state could not create, either at all or within the prompt time demanded.
The question also matters because it never goes away. To take one of the most pressing political questions in the UK, the asylum seekers crossing the Channel; the Home Office is responsible for asylum and protection in the UK; it places destitute people seeking asylum them in ‘dispersal accommodation’ in local authority areas, ‘which private suppliers procure on behalf of the Home Office. If there is an insufficient supply of dispersal accommodation, the Home Office places people in contingency accommodation such as hotels’; again private, as the National Audit Office sets out in a recent report. While much is said about the cost of such placements, any efforts by the state to house asylum seekers in its own property (such as disused wartime airfields) is met by local protest. Private security may have contract work here as during covid when guards enforced covid restrictions on travellers entering the UK from airports at hotels.
The state has always drawn on private industry – no-one is proposing that the state has factories to make its own paper clips (if such things are still called for) or crockery or office water coolers. Historically, when the state has to (usually without much warning) enter a state of war, it finds itself short of everything, so that its Army carrying its baggage and troops in bakery vans and private buses (as in France in 1914) or faces scandal about the lack of medical services for the wounded and sick, and is bailed out (the nurse Florence Nightingale and other well-wishers in the Crimean War of 1854-6). In fact, whatever war you think of, the two world wars, the Boer War, Britain was either not well prepared, or its belief that it was well prepared proved to be dangerous complacency.
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the British state – having withdrawn from Germany after the fall of Communism in the early 1990s – is now having to contemplate deploying an armoured division to what it coyly terms ‘central Europe’.
To be blunter, if Russia’s aggression widens and it threatens a NATO ally such as the Baltic countries or Poland, Britain would face a repeat of the Crimean War; sending an expeditionary force. While still highly unlikely, it’s no longer as outlandish as the Crimean War now looks. For example, a commentary on the website of the UK defence think-tank RUSI after the recent NATO summit in Vilnius asked if ‘we’ were already at war with Russia.
Bright colonels at the Ministry of Defence are already at work on plans to deploy. The undertaking would test the state – from the logistics of how to get troops and equipment across the Continent, to cloud data to who does the laundry.
It begs also homeland defence questions; how safe from sabotage would Britain’s ports and airports be, or power stations and other CNI (critical national infrastructure)? Or indeed the armed forces’ bases left behind by those thousands on an ‘article five’ deployment – to explain the jargon, under the NATO treaty, where members will come to the aid of any member under attack (as invoked after the 9-11 terror attack on the United States, when Britain and other NATO countries went into Afghanistan with the US)?
It’s not giving away any state secrets to say that all those CNI places – while needing more security during a state of alert or actual war – would not be able to draw on the armed forces busy on operations. That’s been an emergency option (to give only three examples) during floods, or the pandemic, or even the London Olympics, when weeks short of the opening the security contractor G4S had to embarrassingly admit it could not provide all the officers required, and uniformed troops staffed venue entrances to carry out searches of ticket-holders.
It’s no criticism of the British state that it would run out of uniformed, trained people quickly: it did in the two world wars; hence (in both wars) ‘home guards’ and special constables were widely recruited. A little-known force before the Second World War was the National Defence Companies, of middle-aged men, typically soldiers of the 1914-18 war, who guarded ‘vulnerable points’ such as power stations and ports, and (once the war got going) prisoners of war. Now as in the late 1930s, the demand for such security personnel outstripped supply. The security industry is reporting shortages of suitably well-trained, literate and numerate and English-speaking officers, or any at all, just as in the late 1930s National Defence Companies found it hard to recruit as men preferred not to do boring guard duty in out of the way places.
The contract guarding sector is wearily used to customers ringing to ask for officers – and even making specific requests for ‘a big black bloke’ – for the next day, after for example a robbery at a shop; as if guarding contractors have a stock of personnel. If Britain were to be in a state of tension if an Army division were going abroad under article five, how could private security meet all demands?
Part one: what about back-fill back-up? – click here. Part three: British resilience.
Photo by Mark Rowe; World War Two home defence pill-box, Lampeter, west Wales.
