Join the Police
and see the world

Ponder the TV scenes of thug-less English football crowds, sanitised in Sapporo and Yokohama, accompanied by beaming Japanese policemen.   For the phenomenon symbolises the extent of the managed world.  In a different manifestation, my middle-of-the-night train journey to London this week was punctuated by a group of fast-talking Japanese couples studying at Swansea University.  That was the other side of the coin.

§       NB  I always get the 3.20 am train because it allows me to buy a Supersaver Return, reducing the Swansea-London fare to just £27.70p, with Senior RailCard…that’s cheaper than the coach.. 

All the indications are that this exercise in international crowd management, by the various police-forces, was a success.  Many hundreds of known football trouble-makers from the UK were prevented from travelling by banning orders, made by the English Courts.  Japanese policemen visited the UK to learn the ropes.  UK Police were seconded to Japan, to help with identification and crowd-control.  And there were presumably similar reciprocal links with other national police-forces.  It mounts up to a formidable network of police cooperation.  And to cap it all, the validity of the UK banning orders was upheld, on the grounds that banning was not to be equated with a punishment for crime, and that there had therefore been no unacceptable abridgement of anybody’s human rights.

All around us, cooperation between police-forces is proceeding apace, and is bound to go much further.  Within the EU, Europol provides an integrative policing framework whose agenda is steadily growing and is bound to develop much further – in the sectors of fraud, pollution, money-laundering, counter-terrorism, immigration, tax-evasion (to name but a few….)  Then there is Interpol, which is more shadowy and less accessible, but no doubt active in the war against terrorism. 

These are all manifestations of “The End of Infinity”.  We now confront a finite and managed world, and that brings with it a raft of new political challenges.  Who would have imagined, twenty-five years ago, that Japan/UK police cooperation in football-crowd management would have been regarded as routine?  We shall soon see the phenomenon of “foreign” arrest warrants being given automatic effect within the UK, in an effort to speed up and simplify the law enforcement process.  All these changes pose particular difficulties for the civil rights lobby, which has traditionally been content simply with resisting state interference.  Drawing that line, keeping the State within acceptable bounds, a caged Leviathan, has been the dominant rationale of the civil liberties sector. 

That old-liberal formula no longer fits the bill.  State management is everywhere, in every nook and cranny of society.  We in the civil rights movement face the challenge of having to devise new institutional protections which acknowledge the primacy of overall societal management.  The rationale of permissible intervention must be hammered out in positive terms, and rendered accessible to popular debate. 

One example this week posed this question –

• “Is it permissible for the Authorities, when faced with a mentally-ill patient who is incapable of giving consent, to authorise major frontal-lobotomy brain-surgery, of a kind that offers real hope of permanent improvement, even if there are also risks of failure or deterioration?”