Yesterday morning at the annual conference of the London Fraud Forum (LFF), a mention of the prime minister prompted laughter from the audience, writes Mark Rowe.
At the LFF were lawyers, people with data in their job title, investigators, cops; hardly the most disrespectful crowd. When any leader, political or otherwise has become a laughing stock, that’s not good for the personal brand, to use the jargon. Worse in fact was the silence, giving tacit approval, from those that did not laugh. We now know that was the last half-day for Liz Truss as PM.
One of the LFF’s morning speakers, Ruth Evans, chair of Stop Scams UK, articulated what others may be too polite to do, or may feel it’s beyond their pay grade, about what she called the ‘political instability’. While the Government is in a state of crisis, she said, ‘scammers are still operating. We can’t wait for the Government to get its act in order.’ She recalled a meeting arranged in the summer with officials from the Treasury, Home Office and Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) – all those central Government departments having a say in the tackling of (largely online) scams. Due to the earlier crisis when ‘that prime minister’ left (Boris Johnson), the meeting was cancelled.
She said: “How long are we going to carry on putting up with a Government in crisis, with the political instability we have, when we are also looking at financial instability caused by scams and consumers being scammed. We really have to say enough is enough.”
We can add that the instability, that has meant a lack of debate about and sign-off of public policy, goes wider. What of (to name only things relevant to private security) the Online Safety Bill; a new data protection law, as mooted by DCMS minister Michelle Donelan in a speech to the Conservative Party conference; the counter-terror Protect Duty. The lack of action extends to all public affairs. The Boris Johnson regime published a (ten-year!) drugs strategy, and a crime strategy last year. Have ministers that have taken office since even read those documents?
While two weeks of inaction was proper on the death of Queen Elizabeth II, otherwise the public policy paralysis began with the ructions in June, in the weeks before the resignation of Boris Johnson. Then came the process of electing the next Conservative Party leader; then Liz Truss’ ministers had to master their briefs. If a new PM chooses new ministers, that will make six months of inaction.
In what sense then can we call yesterday a triumph of British democracy (and with a link to private security work)? In terms of shortness of stay, Liz Truss only compares to Lady Jane Grey, the nine-days queen of 1553. The difference is that Lady Jane Grey was beheaded, as remembered in the (bloodless) painting in the National Gallery.
The reality was more grim. Half the kings of England of the 1300s and 1400s died violently – Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI (eventually), the Princes in the Tower, and Richard III. After the finding of Richard III’s body in Leicester city centre, forensic archaeologists reported that a sword had gone up his backside – presumably to humiliate the already dead body.
An intriguing question that history teachers don’t ask in schools is – did Henry VII know that happened to his predecessor that he beat on Bosworth Field? Did the country know (and that presumably would have happened to him, if he had lost)? For their own survival, the Tudors went about taking the violence out of high politics, out of the inevitable change from one regime to the next. The University of Leicester sociologist Norbert Elias termed it ‘the civilising process’. The Tudors outlawed private armies. When a challenge came in the 1930s from Sir Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts, the authorities took the threat seriously enough to pass a law (the Public Order Act 1936). That law caused the police for decades after to distrust uniformed guard forces.
The threat from the other end of the political spectrum, the Communist Party, was partly precisely because Communists did not wear red shirts; CP members might clandestinely work in trade unions, in war-weapons factories and shipyards, and pass intellectual property to the Soviet Union, or subvert from within the civil service. Hence the work by the security services, as told in Kevin Quinlan’s book The Secret War Between the Wars: MI5 in the 1920s and 1930s; and personnel vetting by UK Government (mentioned in passing yesterday afternoon at the Security Institute annual conference).
