Among the many inauspicious circumstances surrounding Rishi Sunak’s announcement of a general election this summer, an overlooked factor was that his campaign for re-election was launched the day after the police were told to make fewer arrests because Britain’s prisons are full. With raw sewage and disease polluting Britain’s coastline, waterways and tap water, as well as crumbling infrastructure and public health, many citizens are already well-versed in the decay of the country’s public services. Yet surely the state’s unwillingness to maintain law and order by arresting and indicting those who break the law must rank highest among the many examples of institutional failure today.

The Labour Party has promised to recruit 13,000 more police officers if elected to office, and overcrowded prisons are reportedly among the top five problems that an incoming Keir Starmer government expects to have to tackle. Yet only a few brief years ago, the Labour Party was less effusive about boosting Britain’s police forces. After all, it was only a few years ago that Starmer signalled his support for the global Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests by being photographed symbolically “taking the knee”.

This ostentatious gesture in the midst of a rolling wave of mass protest subverting the strictures of lockdown at the time indicated the profound unreality of Britain’s public debate on racism and policing. For while Tories criticised Starmer’s participation in the public rituals of the American empire, it was those same Tories who had already been implementing the BLM programme for at least 10 years — the programme of police abolition.

As with most radical projects today, its tenor is conservative insofar as the theory of abolitionism draws from the authority of the past more than it looks to the future. In this case, the anti-police campaign borrowed the 19th-century discourse of opposition to slavery on the grounds that American policing is irredeemably corrupted by its historical origins. The fact that modern British policing emerged as part of the effort to crush the Chartists’ struggle for working-class suffrage rather than colonial slave patrols did not stop our tenured radicals from warmly embracing the latest ideological export from the imperial metropole.

But here, too, Britain’s radicals were as behind the curve as ever, for it was the ruling Tories who had in fact been stripping back Britain’s police forces ever since Theresa May was Home Secretary from 2010-16. It was this period of austerity which saw a reduction of 20,000 police officers as part of the drive to reduce state spending.

How do we explain this convergence between Tory austerians and BLM radicals? The answer is neoliberalism — the dominant paradigm of national government, predicated on stripping back the state in favour of the market. The delegitimisation of public authority, and with it the belief in any collective capacity to steer society, is part-and-parcel both of austerity and the progressive radicalism that dominates campus politics.

Doubtless Theresa May does not see herself as the pioneer of BLM policing in Britain, just as Britain’s BLM campaigners don’t see themselves as the loyal foot soldiers of austerity in public services — yet they are. That is the way ideology works. The traditional parties of both Right and Left have contributed to perpetuating the erosion of public security in Britain today.

We will not escape the vortex of state failure until we have a politics that is dedicated to nation-building rather than public decline. In the meantime, the choice is clear: if you want to further erode national policing, you can vote for either the Tories or Labour.

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Philip Cunliffe is Associate Professor of International Relations at the Institute of Risk and Disaster Reduction, University College London. He is author or editor of eight books, as well as a co-author of Taking Control: Sovereignty and Democracy After Brexit (2023). He is one of the hosts of the Bungacast podcast.

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