Who Moved My Fucking Cheese?

The chief implausibility of Channel 4's Babylon was the suggestion that the Metropolitan Police have a powerful, if somewhat dysfunctional, PR department, central to every decision and constantly evaluating the impact of every statement by the Chief Commissioner. This was made clear when Bernard Hogan-Howe chose to issue a business-plan-cum-manifesto that looked like a marketing spoof tie-in with the culmination of the TV series. While a number of UK Chief Constables have taken to the air this week to insist that Theresa May's austerity plans may endanger the public, Hogan-Howe was making a slightly different pitch, as befits Copper Number One. "Cuts without reform put the public at risk" is about advancing his case for greater authority as the quid pro quo for not downing tools and standing by as Foot Locker is looted.

Central to his argument is the neoliberal spin on stakeholding: the idea that the obligation of the powerful to all affected parties should be replaced by the responsibilities of those parties to support the powerful: ""Public safety isn’t just a challenge for policing. A range of partners is involved: emergency services, criminal justice, local authorities, the third sector, business and, critically, the public itself ". I doubt that he has in mind improved burglar alarms when he thinks of "business" in this context. "Our partners face their own cost pressures, and the big concern is that if we don’t work together, with a shared view of the risks, public safety will suffer ...  Take CCTV. A factor in falling crime rates has been good video coverage of much of London. But most of these cameras are funded by local authorities. As they face more cuts there is active discussion about whether they can afford to keep CCTV going".

Despite decades of use, there is no evidence that CCTV prevents crime, hence Hogan-Howe's use of the weaselly "factor". It certainly doesn't stop drunken brawls in city centres, as the routine news footage - often culled from CCTV - proves, and career criminals have been wearing masks since Dick Turpin's day. What most studies have found is that it improves conviction rates - because of the increased likelihood of a positive ID - and thus reduces court costs through plea-bargaining. In fact, cost appears to be the chief reason for the police's enthusiasm, both because CCTV (along with cheaper PCSOs) can allow for more efficient rapid response, so reducing the need for high-cost specialists, and because so much of the cost can be transferred to local government budgets.

Hogan-Howe's case is dressed up in the usual cost-benefit garb: "We must be open about these risks [to public safety] with the public, politicians and the media, so we can together make informed choices about our priorities. We should share support services where possible, and make them as efficient as the best of the private sector. That means opening up all but core policing functions to competition". Of course, informed choice does not extend to questioning the exemplary role of the private sector or the value of competition or shared services. The Commissioner, in a contribution worthy of the scriptwriters of Babylon, then proceeds to display his grasp of technology: "We need a common infrastructure and to utilise cloud memory rather than serried ranks of hard drives". As any fule kno', cloud memory is just serried ranks of hard drives. This is followed by the age-old delusion that the apparatus of the state could be made self-financing: "A policing faculty that included cyber-security could access a commercial income stream wider than the £12bn presently spent on policing". Ker-ching.

Babylon was not only acerbically funny about the corporate ambitions of the police, and the authoritarian ambitions of corporations, but managed to take the piss out of British dramatic culture from Shakespeare (the finale was a mashup of Macbeth, Coriolanus and Much Ado About Nothing) to soaps. My personal favourite was the foul-mouthed Welsh copper who was more of an anarchist than anyone you'd encounter at a Black Bloc demo. The careful negation of ethnic and gender bias in the characters and casting brought the class boundaries - between the different species of copper as much as the politicians and the frontline - into sharper focus: the communications staff terrified of meeting the public ("can I just stay in the office and do Twitter?"), the flat-foots wondering which side of the barricade they should be on ("I will not take a bullet for a bookcase"), and the stress-addled marksmen who know they are pawns rather than knights.

One trope the series did accept at face-value for dramatic convenience was the "lone gunman". This is such a fixture of our culture that the news of the Sydney café siege was promptly met by David Cameron warning that we face more "lone wolf" attacks, though by definition there cannot be much of a causal link between a now-dead loner on the other side of the world and public order here. The idea of the individual who threatens society through terror, as opposed to treachery, dates from early modern times and is essentially a product of urbanisation and its ills. Just as roving bands of brigands gave way in the collective imagination to the urban mob, so the evildoer as outsider shifted from the rural witch to the deracinated ne'er do well of the town. Where the former was the scapegoat for the property obsessions and sexual jealousies of the countryside, the latter was an emblem of the thwarted ambitions and godless immorality that the city was thought to breed.

This idea of the human "timebomb", who will one day explode and wreak havoc on innocent neighbours, increasingly has an analogue in the realm of cyberspace, notably the "rogue line of code" that was supposed to have crashed the UK's air-traffic control system. The facts behind this incident are opaque, to say the least, but the limited information provided by NATS suggests this may either have been a procedural (i.e. human) error in managing transition from standby to live, or the consequence of a change control failure (i.e. new software not adequately tested). The claim by the NATS CEO that this was the product of a single faulty line of code buried among millions is disingenuous. If a line of code fails, it will fail every time it is run, so either this is redundant code that has never been run before, or its "faultiness" has never previously been consequential, which implies an omission elsewhere. The implication that a few million lines of code is a lot, and therefore difficult to manage, is patronising (to give you some sense of scale, Microsoft Office 2013 has over 44 million lines of code). Most software is written by, managed by and tested by software. If you're worried about Skynet, it arrived with the first compiler.

This corporate failure has seen the usual political distancing. Vince Cable got his retaliation in early by claiming it was due to historic under-investment, with the obliging media reporting that NATS is using software that dates from the 1960s. Unlike hardware, software does not wear out, so its vintage is immaterial. I doubt they're still running it on the same hardware, so Cable is either revealing his ignorance or his contempt for the public's understanding. If there has been under-investment, this probably relates to the lack of full fault-tolerance. The reasonable inference is that this has previously been kyboshed by government as the cost (effectively doubling-up) does not justify the inconvenience (a few days of bad headlines). We shouldn't be surprised by this hypocrisy, certainly not in the week that saw the death of Mandy Rice-Davies.

What her history revealed is that the misbehaviour of the establishment is always known about, but that knowledge is strictly limited to elite circles. Of course, the idea of the "elite conspiracy" (currently being aired in respect of historic child abuse) is as much a trope as the "lone wolf". Just as individuals do occasionally commit sociopathic crimes, so elites do conspire and sometimes for criminal ends. But just as the media use the loner as a scapegoat for wider anxieties (e.g. Christopher Jefferies), so they use the suspicion that the powerful are unfairly protected to advance one elite faction at the expense of another (a theme of Babylon, where the media and PR bods are slow to realise who is being manipulated). In the UK, business is currently besting politics (it's election fundraising time), which explains the focus on the sex-crimes of dead MPs and Vince Cable's testiness. In the US, the boot is on the other foot.

We like to imagine that in the era of the Internet there are no secrets, hence the Sony hack, but this ignores the standard modus operandi of power, which is not to hide the truth but to obscure it with noise, such as the trivial opinions of Hollywood producers and naked photos of Jennifer Lawrence (let the entertainment industry entertain us). What the Sony hack purports to reveal is that corporations are ethically spineless, because they are concerned only with profit, and that big government must intervene to protect free speech. Obama's careful distancing ("they should have talked to me") is not evidence of a gulf between state and business (Hollywood is thoroughly penetrated by the agencies, and not just in the charmingly amateurish way outlined in Argo), but a reminder that business is subservient to the state in the realm of international relations, where the government must act in the interest of the mass of capital, not just a particular industry. The renewed focus on North Korea precisely balances the defocus on Cuba this week and should thus be read as part of the ongoing "pivot to Asia".

Similarly, the ambition of Bernard Hogan-Howe to transform the Met into a super-force, able to charge councils and businesses in the rich South East for its services and monopolising cyber-security in the UK, is simply a continuation of the force's historic determination to be top dog. There was never a realistic chance that the government would welcome such a proposal ahead of next year's general election, and every reason to believe that they will continue to be reluctant to support large-scale mergers thereafter, not because they value local accountability, but because they fear the cost and risks associated with such a change, much as they do with NATS. As Babylon showed, changing an organisation is not something to be embarked upon lightly.