No member of the present Cabinet, apart perhaps from “Sleepyhead” Ken Clarke, is old enough to have been present at the final press conference of Margaret Thatcher’s 1979 election campaign, on the eve of her fateful victory over Jim Callaghan.
But if any of them had been there – wearing, no doubt, their Etonian tailcoats – they might have learned a useful lesson about how to go about launching a major onslaught on the public sector trade unions.
The very last question at the conference came from a widely disliked West German reporter with a cartoon accent. “Mrs Satcher”, he said, “if you vin zis election, you vill certainly face much violence in ze streets. Vot are you going to do to be confident of ze loyalty of ze police and ze army?”
This sally, which I remember thinking was a highly pertinent one in spite of its provenance, was greeted by a gale of mocking laughter from the assembled hacks. It was a reaction which enabled Mrs T to swat it aside as an absurdity.
But in spite of her refusal to answer the question, it later became clear that she was privately taking the matter very seriously indeed.
Presumably advised by her guru, Nicholas Ridley, one of her first acts as Prime Minister was to increase the pay of policemen and soldiers substantially, while Nigel Lawson was beginning the process of stockpiling coal at the power stations.
The stage was being carefully set for her battle with Arthur Scargill and the miners – and without the total loyalty of the police, she would never have been able to win it. In effect, she bought her victory.
The approach of the present bunch of dangerous amateurs has been exactly the opposite. Instead of increasing police and army pay, and generally buttering up the boys in blue in advance of the wider onslaught on the public sector, the Government has gone out of its way to include the police and the armed forces in its programme of cuts.
Police earnings are being reduced rather than increased, while thousands of soldiers face the sack, some of them while actually on the front line in Afghanistan. There has been nothing like it since the Geddes Axe in the 1920s, when cuts in service pay led directly to the navy’s Invergordon mutiny.
So it wouldn’t have been entirely astonishing if the police had been a little less than totally committed to coping with the antics of the wreckers who tried to hijack last weekend’s superb TUC march against the cuts.
Some of them may even have felt that there should have been a police contingent on the march itself, with their own banners and placards, (“Don’t steal coppers from the coppers”, perhaps?)
However, I don’t imagine many of them felt even a twinge of sympathy for the idiots who were throwing petrol bombs and smashing shop windows after everyone else had gone home.
In fact, people’s attitudes to the police used to be central to the whole business of party politics in this country. By and large, Labour supporters – especially working-class ones – were suspicious of, or even hostile towards, the police. They were traditionally seen as the enemy, there to defend the rich from the poor.
For exactly that reason, the well-to-do saw the coppers as their protectors, existing to defend their property from the have-nots. These attitudes still prevail to some extent, but not with quite such clearly defined boundaries.
This is partly because the number of people who see themselves as working-class has fallen steadily since the Second World War. But no less significant has been the discovery by the middle and even the upper classes that the coppers are not exactly saints – a lesson that has reached them through being accused of motoring offenses, and their children getting involved with drugs.
I shall never forget the indignation of a very grand Times journalist when his son was stopped while driving the family Jag. The boy had long hair, and the coppers simply didn’t believe the car was his. So they took it to bits, hunting for the drugs they felt sure must be in it, and carted the boy off to the calaboose. That was one Times man who was never again going to write about standing up for the police in all circumstances.
But the situation has been further complicated by the arrival of large immigrant populations in our inner cities.
Just what that has meant in policing terms was made clear by BBC Radio 4’s The Reunion programme last week, which brought together a collection of ex-policemen, black rioters, local politicians, witnesses and reporters, all of whom were involved in the Brixton riots in 1981.
One of the ex-policemen, when asked whether his force had been institutionally racist, replied: “It wasn’t institutional, it was compulsory.”
What we learned from the programme – brilliantly chaired by Sue MacGregor – is just how far we have travelled in terms of race in the 30 years since the riots.
But I am not at all sure that that progress would have been made if the black youths of Brixton had not, to all intents and purposes, defeated the Metropolitan Police in 1981. Unlike last weekend’s loonies, they were fighting back against years of mistreatment by racist police – and they won.
