Protecting MPs involves more than sentry duty for one hour a fortnight

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There’s a story about a man living in a remote house who spots two burglars entering his shed. He immediately phones the police, telling them that, if they’re quick, they can catch the two burglars red-handed. This being austerity Britain, he gets the inevitable response that there are no police officers available to respond. He waits ten minutes, then calls again. This time he tells them that he saw two burglars entering his shed so took his shotgun out and that, after shooting one of them, the other is now cowering in the shed. Within minutes, three police cars full of armed officers pull up outside his house and a police helicopter is circling overhead. “You told us you’d shot someone”, said the senior police officer on the scene, after failing to find any evidence of a corpse. The householder replied, “And you told me that there was no-one available”.

The point, of course, is that any under-resourced police force is always going to have to prioritise which calls it answers – and the result is that the police simply no long respond to a growing number of crimes, as many victims of burglary or car theft palmed off with a crime number for insurance purposes will readily attest.

It is, of course, right that MPs going about their business meeting constituents should be properly protected (although I can’t help but observe that some of the politicians shouting the loudest about the need for protection following a single fatality are the same people who tell us that between 800 and 1000 preventable premature Covid deaths each week for the last two months, and for the currently foreseeable future, is an ‘acceptable’ price to pay: all lives matter, but some, it seems, matter more than others). The question, though, is what the police will not do to enable them to divert resources to protecting MPs. It isn’t as simple as having a policeman on duty at a fortnightly hour-long constituency surgery, which is the way it has been largely presented. Surgeries may be one of the easiest ways of gaining access to an MP, but if someone is determined to murder an MP there are plenty of other opportunities.  Considering only surgeries looks like a tokenistic response. Providing sufficient coverage of all possible attack opportunities for 650 MPs (and then, what about MSs, MSPs, and MLAs, the inclusion of which would add significantly to the requirement?) would probably need a couple of thousand full time officers, allowing for 7 day working, holidays, sickness etc.

I wouldn’t argue that MPs should not receive a suitable level of protection, but it is entirely reasonable to ask two questions: firstly whether the resources required would be additional to those currently available, and secondly, if not, which other policing activities will be deprioritised as a result. Pretending that a significant additional responsibility can be loaded onto already overstretched police resources is just dishonest. I don’t believe that most people would begrudge the provision of appropriate protection to elected public servants, but withdrawing from even more police activities supporting local communities might be a good way of changing that. The response needs to be rather more nuanced than the knee-jerk reaction we’ve seen to date.

Protection and insurance

Tweet There is a mantra oft-repeated by politicians keen to spend more and more of our money on acquiring and using weapons that “the first duty of any government is to protect its citizens”.  It’s duly parroted by the media, solemnly pronouncing on whether party A or party B is actually behaving in a way consistent with the mantra.  It’s treated as unarguable truth, largely because it’s ‘obviously true’.

But one of the things that life has taught me is that truth isn’t always obvious; and that which is ‘obvious’ isn’t always true.  In this case, I’m not at all sure that the statement means anything, shorn of context and without defining what ‘protect’ means as well as ‘protection from what’.

The latest outing that I saw for the statement was in the Sunday Times, when former Labour leadership candidate Liz Kendall trotted it out in support of the proposition that it is Labour’s ‘patriotic duty’ to back Trident.  In this context, it is, in effect, a substitute for argument and debate; a sort of trump card which over-rules any objection.  That isn’t helpful to rational consideration.

I don’t disagree with the statement as such; I think that governments should seek to protect their citizens from those things which threaten them.  But I don’t see nuclear blackmail as one of the biggest threats facing me or most other citizens.  Nor, in reality, do I see terrorism – a blanket word which in itself needs a lot more definition and refinement – as being the biggest threat to citizens of the UK.

For most of the population (although I’d accept that this isn’t true for those who move in the same circles as most of our politicians) their economic situation, and concerns about health care and education are much bigger threats to their lifestyles and well being.  And it’s hard to see how diverting money away from those fields to pay for a new nuclear weapons system does anything other than increase those threats.  In essence, even if the politicians really do believe that the mantra is one by which they should govern, their actions seem destined to achieve the opposite.

Another argument which is regularly advanced for Trident is that it’s some sort of ‘insurance policy’, and that wise people don’t go around without insurance.  But that’s simply not true.  Insurance policies don’t prevent things happening; they can’t.  Insurance is about pooling risk so that those who lose are, in effect, compensated for their loss by those who don’t.  The ‘protection’ offered by Trident is more akin to that traditionally offered by the mafia than a conventional insurance policy.  Insurance is about compensation for damage, not striking back - there’s nothing in my life insurance policy about posthumous retaliation.  The comparison with insurance is nonsensical.

Trident isn’t about protection; it isn’t about insurance; and it has little to do with the threats currently facing most of the UK population.  What it is about is keeping the UK government in the big boys club, pretending that the UK is still some sort of global power, and closing our eyes to the realities of the twenty first century.  It’s no way to build a safer world.