The politics of trends: Defund the Police UK

It is now the norm for contemporary political and cultural issues to be trends.

According to a recent Redfield and Wilton poll of 2019 Labour voters, fifty per cent oppose the defunding of the police. Ben Walker of The New Statesman deploys this information to remind us that ‘the Labour party’s base isn’t as ‘woke’ as you think’, yet if this poll was conducted only two years ago, I would bet that close to one hundred per cent would oppose this policy. I wonder what changed?

Walker says an awful lot by letting the reader guess the other half of the equation he is trying to disguise. Roughly twenty-five per cent of Labour’s 2019 base do support defunding the police (the other twenty-five per cent sitting in the ‘neither/don’t know’ category). One in four. At party conference, one-quarter of the auditorium would back the party if it was placed on the manifesto.

Although far from a plurality, this is no small number. Cutting into the age demographics, the young, those aged between eighteen and twenty-four, are – rather unsurprisingly – the flag bearers of such an idea, with forty-three per cent, nearly a majority, declaring themselves supporters of the notion, with only twenty-eight per cent of this age group being opposed. On the polar opposite end of the spectrum, those aged sixty-five and over oppose this motion outright by an astounding seventy-four per cent.

Until very recently, the Labour Party’s diagnosis to rising levels in violent crime and street warfare was Tory austerity cuts. The police were starved of the appropriate funds necessary to effectively stamp out crime in Britain’s towns and cities. Resources were spread far too thin, so the innocent remained unprotected while criminals roamed free.

Then the thought of pouring more finances into a forgotten police force quickly became taboo when, last summer, George Floyd was murdered by a Minnesotan police officer, sparking the nebulous rise of the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM). BLM did not remain caged between the Pacific and Atlantic oceans but spread more quickly than Covid did across the Western world, and its dogma became institutionalised and hegemonic.

Protest placards demanding the defunding of the police were to be seen in this country, a nation with different circumstances and history regarding race relations and policing. Defund the police is a more appropriate message for the United States, however alienating and uncontextualized it may be.

American law enforcement can be seen as akin to military occupation, given the heavy handed and over-the-top methods routinely wielded to deal with the public (as in the case of George Floyd), as well as due to tensions between cops and high-crime ethnic minority neighbourhoods trapped in inter-generational poverty (I think a more accurate slogan should be ‘demilitarise the police’).

In the midst of the BLM protests in London, crowds outside Westminster chanted 'hands up, don't shoot', which is yet another social justice catchphrase that has little relevance here. Very few people are shot by the police, a number which is a drop in the ocean when compared with the annual figures from across the pond.

But taking into account the uniqueness of one’s individual environment plays second fiddle to what’s getting all the hashtags on Twitter. ‘Defund the police’ became popular in America and, with the increasingly Americanised cultural nature of Western Europe, it inevitably became popular here.

So, when Labour’s old stalwarts wonder with shock and amazement why it’s youth wing is gunning for all these radical ‘woke’ ideas that have no place on this island, they should look to who is transmitting these messages. They should recognise that Britain is a cultural puppet state of the United States, and proceed from there.

It is now the norm for contemporary political and cultural issues to be trends, usually acquired by the cultural centre which has its headquarters on another continent; picked up when it’s briefly popular, and then disposed of and forgotten about when something new comes along. This means that ideas become fickle, flexible, and within the space of a few months or years, completely contradictory of one another.

The modern world has built its principles on sand, and it is doomed to fall.