Millionaires aren't bothered

Thatcher kept the police onside for the mass confrontations sparked by her government's single-minded determination to effect a major redistribution of wealth from working people to big business and the rich.

She looked after police pay and pensions and they dutifully accepted their role as "Thatcher's boot boys," smashing into the picket lines of print workers, miners and anyone prepared to make a stand.

Today's Tories are prepared to go further, treating police as just one segment of the public sector.

The police are recited the same mantra as civil servants, local authority workers, health service staff, prison officers, firefighters and others - funding will be cut, but this will not affect front-line staff nor should it be used as an excuse for failure to meet targets.

In one sense, police are treated even worse than other public-sector workers in that David Cameron is displaying his contempt for experienced senior officers by importing US "supercop" Bill Bratton as his senior adviser.

Home Secretary Theresa May has joined Cameron in confirming the government line that they returned belatedly from holiday to instruct the police top brass to take a different tack in dealing with the riots.

The two things are related. They indicate a government lack of confidence in the ability of the force to implement the "robust" policing that hard-right ministers favour.

That lack of confidence is mirrored in the attitude of the police to the government from beat constables to the highest police ranks.

Police naturally gravitate towards the Establishment, recognising that they are accorded a legal monopoly on the use of force in society, ostensibly to defend life and property, and they expect to be looked after in terms of pay, conditions, retirement age, pension and, most crucially, social standing.

To be demeaned in the same way as other public-sector workers as overstaffed, inefficient, complacent and self-concerned plays havoc with morale.

The Tory multimillionaires are not bothered. They have their own priorities, led by the obsession with slashing public expenditure and slimming down the state.

They have no truck with the previous consensus on policing by consent, preferring to see a smaller police force acting as an occupation army in troublesome poor communities while wealthy areas and gated communities rely on cheaper and less professional security companies to defend their property against outsiders.

Contracted-out security in a slimmed-down state is the logical extension of what the occupation powers developed in Iraq and Afghanistan as a cost-cutting strategy.

As Association of Chief Police Officers president Hugh Orde has made clear, the European convention on human rights forms no part of the Tory-approved Robocop style of policing that Cameron and May have in mind.

Nick Clegg's pitiful attempt to deny a government-police rift, claiming 100 per cent support for the force, indicates his personal irrelevance to coalition policy and confirms the extent to which he has sold any conscience he had for the trappings of office.

Ed Miliband's faltering recognition that a "smaller state solution" is not the answer and that serious lack of opportunity and inequality must be tackled has to be welcomed as a first step to challenging the government's dangerous ploy of dismissing riots as "criminality pure and simple."