I’m about to make what is called a slippery slope argument. I am aware that this tactic can be rather flawed but I will try to stay away from drawing too much inference from the initial postulate and stick with what is likely in an effort to not appear to be a tinfoil-hat wearing internet keyboard warrior. I do not have all the details, I am not an expert on this subject, but I thought it important to put my thoughts here anyways.
During a visit to a local town in Shropshire, Oswestry (we live on the Welsh side of the border), we encountered two individuals wearing security style clothing and blue high visibility style bibs with the logo ‘Street Ranger’ written on. Both of us were curious as to what exactly these people represented and what was their role and remit? So I asked a friend of mine, who happens to have lived in Oswestry for many years and has familial links to the town council. My friend sent me the below link.
Which led me to look at this BBC article –
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cle0l0xnnd6o
Now before I go any further in analysing and possibly scrutinizing this emerging force I must point out that I am aware that there is a problem, in that the social fabric is obviously deteriorating in some places, and I have some thoughts on that as you probably do also, but we’ll get to them later. So I am not against methods of intervention in principle, I just think maybe by the end of this piece, we might establish that they must be democratic and not in any possibility authoritarian, or maybe based solely on the will of those that hold collective wealth-power. I am focussed mainly on how power is expressed, is it legitimated, is it justifiable? Not on if it is effective, power is always effective and always a possibility, we can see that from Trump’s actions in the US or Duterte’s in the Philippines. Achieving the goal you set out to does not legitimize the goal, nor the actions taken to complete it (a little bit of Liberal Utilitarianism for you there).
Legitimacy
The most important part of any law within a democracy is its universal application (that it applies equally to all citizens), but the most important part of the establishment of any law is the consent of the population in forming it, and this is what local and national political actors primarily do with their time (in case you didn’t realise). The reason why these two things are vitally important is so that we have a democracy (governance by the will of the people) and not a plutocracy (governance by the will of the wealthy).
It then follows that if we as a populous have enforced upon us a power that can curb our rights, but that power is not derived from the state (local or national politics), and that power is applicable within public spaces (not privately owned premises/land), then we can say of that force that it is akin to a militia. Now I am not calling this force a militia, and I am not stating that people have the right to be anti-social or break the law, I am merely examining the situation with the term militia in mind, we will get to why when we explore the slippery slope part of this piece.
A militia is the application of any force that is external to private property, is ungoverned and not enabled by the state, and that applies restrictive or punitive action towards modifying the behaviour of a citizen or group within public spaces, even if the behaviour of that citizen or group happens to be unlawful. The fact that the behaviour of a person may be anti-social, or unlawful, is irrelevant, and the correct action of a concerned or effected citizen is then to inform legitimate power of the act in question and await their response (call the police). At this point I need to assume that this force is in place with the support of the existing force of the state that then legitimises it, else I would assume that it is in fact a militia and the argument against it would not merely be an examination of it’s validity, it would be a protest against it.
Someone else’s behaviour, in being antisocial or acting criminally, does not legally enable the behaviour of private citizens to restrain, detain, or disable them, unless they are on your property or threatening your safety (different laws will apply in different situations of course). Granted there are exceptions to this that we mostly tacitly understand, the circumstances whereby harm needs to be prevented being one example, and of course some people may act in certain circumstances to correct undesirable behaviour at their own behest. This must be measured however, we have seen that when excessive force has been used the person intervening can be also prosecuted for their behaviour/actions. This is also applicable to law enforcement, their response has boundaries in law. I must also assume that this new force has these powers, or what use would they be?
Who is driving this?
In the second article, from the BBC, we discover the body of persons behind this force, a self validating cohort of interested business persons and land owners named ‘BID’. This is not a publicly elected body, it does not hold state power. It can apply coercive force in the form of collective economic power, and it likely does have the ear of the elected establishment in the area as these groups often do, but it does not have any rights to form militia (at this point we need to again remember what a militia is, these are not security guards nor bouncers because they are not on private property). BID is an influence group, lobbyist we might describe them as, they have likely formed so as to use collective economic power in a political fashion, and that is not an uncommon act for business leaders. They will of course postulate the idea that their efforts are underpinned by a desire to improve the areas they do business in, but a legitimate question might be ‘improve for whom?’
If the answer to that question is themselves primarily then they are, to my estimation, rendered dubious since they are acting for themselves as merchants not as citizens. Now I have no doubt that people who hold wealth-power believe of themselves that they are benevolent actors, that the exercising of their influence is legitimated by their conscious will to promote better lives for the people they think of as their consumer, and I won’t exclude the possibility that some of this may be actually true and noble. But I am often sceptical when it comes to power enabled by wealth as you may know from my previous posts. I also have no doubt that folks like these often also hold a shared belief in the idea of trickling down, a long established and much disproved (by the GINI index) economic theory that what is good for business is good for citizens. The legacy of Adam Smith lives long only because it serves power, not because it holds true (it demonstrably does not). So if we can successfully challenge false benevolence as maladapted reasoning and we can be successfully cynical about it, then everything that follows as an action because of it is then invalidated. Here we have attacked the premise that allows the false reasoning of this power and not just the process of expressing it, which we had concentrated on up to this point.
I read on and I discover that funding support for this was not gained by engaging the Police and Crime Commissioner, so this project is being funded by the business cohort themselves. That should make us as citizens think further about who governs and directs this power? The article states that the “Rangers” are trained by the police, and representatives of the police in the area concerned are very positively in favour of this measure. I however would contend that it would be more optimal to have an increased number of actual police on the streets of Oswestry than what we might call pseudo-police standing in their place, and I would also contend that the police force is accepting help maybe because it is some help, not because it is the correct directive in their estimation (that is a guess).
To the actual ‘Street Rangers’.
Let us also look at the persons who are playing this role, assess them to guess at what they are and what it is they think they are doing. My assessment, and remember also that I have been a soldier so maybe I might know what a security style uniform looks like and how people of force and authority may act, add to that that I grew up in troubled time in Northern Ireland also, maybe I might also know what an ever present military or civilian style security force feels like to the private citizen. A person that has any small power over others requires the consent of those persons that obviously will outnumber them, they also need to be able to impose power upon those that may not immediately recognise it. We all know fools that drunkenly think they can fight the bouncer, I’ve been there myself on occasion. So to be taken seriously they must act seriously, in that effort I think they do a good job, not only did the two I encountered look the part, I could sense by the way they conducted themselves that they felt the part also.
A mistake was the dark glasses one of them was sporting, trained military personnel know that dark glasses worn by people in assumed authority will put the people they deal with ill at ease, that’s why they are not used by UK police or armed forces when operating among civilian citizens (take note rangers).
This though, gives another worry. In my experience people who feel empowered to exercise authority over others are often hyper-vigilant, or will become so. We see this in the attitude of some policemen and soldiers, and I have personally encountered it in both my home country (NI) and while serving in the British Army. Ennobled and enabled, on a personal quest for what they believe ought to be the correct way to arrange the social fabric they find a way to be part of authority, policemen, soldiers, firemen, doormen, security guards, prison officers etc seek the institutions of authority that enable their personal need to express power. ‘Thuggish’ is one way to describe this type, a person looking for the legitimate grounds for a power that validates and promotes them and their inner drive to be the weapon of a skewed moral trajectory which they do not often fully understand and could likely not explain, ‘trigger happy’ is possibly another term. I’ve extrapolated here, these guys could be the nicest pair of folks you ever met, I do not know as I have not met them. What I am getting at here is the idea that any power, no matter how small, that is not consented to, can draw argument, and some folks may pick that fight in reality rather than in words as I am doing.
So, we have contended (not established, remember I may be very wrong) that an often glaringly obvious problem concerning any power is that it is often attractive to the wrong type of persons, it enables in them a legitimacy toward the types of action that we might expect they already strongly desire in some hidden place deep within their subconscious, to release and realise in reality. This is an important reason why, in a democracy, power structures are restrained by codified governance. So that they cannot grow beyond that which is granted by the state, and that mechanism we describe as ‘checks and balances’ in political terms. Nobody should seek power for the sake of their own legitimacy because power is not a legitimizing object, having to enact force must be seen as the result of a failure to win over persons using reasoned argument. Though I will grant that persons engaged in unlawful or anti-social acts are rarely reasonable, hence the need for legitimate force.
Viewed in this way, actual force is the opposite of reason, and persuasion (reason) is the fundamental of a parliamentary democracy (the clue for that is in the name, parliament means a meeting of people to discuss). No person or group that seeks power should ever really be allowed to have it, power should be foisted upon individuals and groups that would be the best persons to hold it, and forced with reason rather than actual force. I am summarizing the work of Plato, Machiavelli, and others now. I am sure though that for now the power of these Rangers is restrained by the power of the actual police force, but my point still holds that when they are funded from outside the public purse to do work that is mooted as being within the public good, they may at some point hit a fork in the road where that relationship is not as clear.
‘Street Rangers’ may be a business funded policing service that has state-derived authority to exercise power over free citizens (I may be guessing here). What it appears to be is that some Oswestry business people have hired bouncers to act as a security force in areas that are not owned by them, public areas, for the purpose of protecting commercial needs, and then pressured a police force that has seen funding cuts, into supporting their creation and training. I would argue that there already exists a force to do this task, and they are called the police. I wonder if those Oswestry business people (BID), who are likely just a few that believe they speak for many, might be interested in doing something about the lack of actual police in Oswestry instead, possibly paying more to the local police via a grant or some other financial mechanism? Possibly not, and maybe because the actual police is not their tool to exercise.
Again I am being sceptical, bear that in mind throughout reading this, I am not accusing anyone of doing anything illegal or immoral, I am merely speculating. We are in the realm of universality, and considering how wealthy people might feel a bit hampered in their desires by trivialities such as universality, and what they may post as a solution and put their political power behind? I also wonder what consultation went on with the council or the local MP, and how they thought this would be a legitimate trajectory for the area to take politically? What scrutiny has it faced, did anyone run this past the people of Oswestry at all or were they just as surprised as I was to encounter it? the person I talked to about it seemed unaware of where it had emerged from, and they keep a keen ear to the ground when it comes to local political matters.
Why does any of this matter?
The slippery slope aspect is where we allow ideas that go against, or circumnavigate, the established laws of the land without the necessary scrutiny of government (local or national) to invade the social circumstances of all citizens to the effect that those citizens are then under the directed power of an unelected body of interested persons that claims to represent them. What is normalised today can easily become legislation tomorrow. We maybe should not allow private interests to control, in any fashion, the governance of the social world, despite their interest in it as having direct links to their commercial world. It is a fundamental of democracy that people do not exercise power where they do not have the right to exercise power as enabled by ownership, and the wealthy do not own what are described as ‘public’ spaces so they should have no rights to decide how people then act within them.
Once you step into a shop you are complying to the idea that there are differing rules concerning that space, but if you are outside on the pavement you are not governed by any rules that apply in the shop. Businesses have long held the power to use economic force, this is a given, we must understand that this force is not that, it is actual force, pseudo-lawful force. David Cameron’s government proposed the privatisation of parts of the police remit in the early 2000s, but it was heavily criticised and watered down if it did actually happen at all. What is happening in Oswestry is almost the same thing, private interests trialling a private police-like force that has levers of power it was maybe not granted by the people. I don’t know the details, but I wonder who it was that said yes to this?
How is this any different to actual policing you might ask? The answer is simple, as a citizen you have governance that you can influence with the vote that you have a right to. So the police are a force that is granted state power at the behest of a majority of the people and restrained by agreed upon principles (laws), and if that needs to be corrected it can be by the will of the people when they next vote for Councillors, Mayors, and MPs. Is it perfect, no, is it democratic (at least nominally) yes. Is this the same thing? In my amateur estimation it is not.
There is nothing illegitimate about a police person enacting the letter of the law. Our laws are based on certain defining principles, one of the most important is ‘legitimacy’ as defined by the great Liberal mind John Stuart Mill. We must recognise that the state always has the power to curtail the actions of citizens, but democracy is the process whereby those persons engaged in governance reasons the legitimate actions of power and justifies them through a process of proposal and voting so as to reduce the power of economic actors to only that which remains acceptable to the stakeholders of the nation (we might describe citizens as this). In this way we maintain the idea we talked about earlier, universal application. How we get universal application is that no matter the desires of the wealthy they will always be outnumbered by persons from a lower financial class, so their power must remain in persuasion and economics alone, though these are not inconsequential powers in isolation (and are often restrained by other laws).
If the wealthy are allowed to exercise actual force (say like having a directed militia) then those in governance have breached the social contract between governance and the citizens of the state, county, country, nation, parish, etc and by doing so have at least in some way rendered themselves illegitimate. In the USA this would be a justification for citizens to overthrow their governance (second amendment) but in Britain we do not actually have a constitution. We do however have laws, and I suspect (and hope) that when the incidents that will of course arise concerning the actions of these ‘Street Rangers’ are challenged by those they have intervened to seize or prevent, end up in court, that this force will be scrutinised sufficiently.
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