Abstract
I was assailed with a troubling anxiety when I started to read this timely, accessible and critically informed historical analysis of the role of the private sector in the British State. In the context of the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic which has highlighted how a weakened and fragmented public health system is left having to cope with the consequences of years of contested reorganisations in which the role of private companies has played such a crucial part.
This book sets out with admirable and thoughtful clarity, the shaping role of the private sector within the British state (a UK bias is owned by the authors) with those activities most associated with the exercise of coercive force. At the outset a distinction is drawn between outright privatisation meaning handing over the activity entirely to private corporations and that of outsourcing, where the state retains ultimate control, but delegated tasks fall within the purview of private companies. The six chapters are helpfully structured in a way that assists the reader to closely follow the argumentation regarding the changing historical timeframe in which the boundaries of the state, security industries, justice system and the military are viewed through the lens of privatisation. Having sub-headings within each chapter means that a narrative develops in a very readable format.
Chapter 1 outlines some of the main contours of what the authors refer to as ‘old privatisation’ as it existed in the 18th and 19th centuries, from armed trading companies to private policing and prisons. Within this wide ranging canvas, brief but characterful vignettes of some of the early penal and social reformers operating at a time of rapid industrialisation and Britain’s capitalist and imperial expansion are referenced. An example of this imperial reach is the role of the East India Company, which by the late 1700’s had an army greater than that of the British crown. Away from colonial administration, the absorption of forms of coercive control by the state on the domestic front, witnessed an emergent penal welfarism which included an embryonic probation service, albeit still organised at a distance from official state control.
The theme of the steady decline of what is defined as old privatisation is pursued in Chapter 2 with the consolidation of public state authority exemplified in the gradual absorption of a privately run prison system and charity run probation service by the state. In policing it was not until 1934 that Chief Constables were accountable to the law rather than the local watch committees. Aligned with these developments in the period covered by the welfare state and the end of the Cold War the authors allude to the concept of corporate liberalism-namely a grudging acknowledgement of the sovereign equality of the other side, before the emergence of the now dominant neo-liberal society in which widening societal inequality is sanctified.
The next three chapters offer an adroit and limpid overview of the resurgence of the private sector, pitted with some well documented and egregious examples of abusive power by private contractors enacted against civilians in foreign conflict zones. This resurgence of the private sector in the wake of wider global military interventions (made more morally ambiguous by the growth of remote drone warfare) is well covered, as are the more familiar issues of delegated policing powers and ever expanding private security arrangements in quasi-policing roles.
The role of the private sector in the management of prisons is outlined as is a punchy excursus on the probation service tellingly sub-headed ‘From Rehabilitation to Warehousing’ which does not need reprising here. These developments are pitched against the changing understandings of the notion of citizenship, in a neoliberal post-welfare state and are enlivened with examples of the pervasive move of private security into public spaces as well as a reversal of the classic 19th century doctrine of less eligibility.
The concluding Chapter 6 entitled chillingly ‘Towards a Private State’ outlines in a incisive and prescient overview the increasing power and dominance of the private security industry (in which private operators such as G4S and Serco feature prominently) within a shrinking state sector. The authors usefully employ the term ‘lock -in’ (p. 149) to delineate ‘the too big to fail’ and seemingly ‘too big to prosecute’ approach of the state to outsourced monopoly private providers. This over dependent relationship will be readily familiar to readers.
It is perhaps instructive that the author’s final pages are devoted to what they denote, in dystopian terms, as a growing repressive authoritarianism at the periphery directed at sections of the poor and marginalised, probation clients are included in this description, as the private sector continues to play a significant role in the implementation of state policies. This is a compelling, highly readable and important book which challenges the reader to reflect on and consider how the ever-increasing privatisation of the state now needs to be urgently reversed. It offers a timely primer for understanding what might lie ahead if we fail to do so.