The public order authorities in the United Kingdom. Elements towards a political analysis of the British public order system ; Les autorités responsables du maintien de l'ordre public dans le Royaume-Uni. Eléments pour une analyse politique du système britannique de maintien de l'ordre public

Open Access

Abstract

This work tries to demonstrate through a case-study, that of the United Kingdom, that the study of the authorities in charge of maintaining public order inside the State helps to reveal the great divides, the fundamental characteristics, and the mechanisms, of its political system. The case of the United Kingdom public order system has been approached here through a socio-historical and political analysis. The idea was to identify the principles that govern, over a long period, the structures, features, fields of action and workings of the authorities responsible for public order in the United Kingdom. The search for the historical roots has enabled us to reveal the specificity of these structures of authority. They are both ancient and contradictory in the sense that they are the result, but also the reflection of a major tension within the British polity, the one that exists between the "local" and the "central" levels. Indeed, not only the historical approach helps confirming the persistence of very ancient structures of local government, widely acknowledged as a fundamental feature of the "British model", but it also reveals the importance of the much less well known tradition of a centralised model of authority inside the political decision-making system. It can be asserted, in our opinion, that today as well as in the past, in the field of public order operations and policies, the decision-making process is structured by major tensions : centre-periphery, partisan, ethnic, social, but also inter-services tensions (rivalry between the Police and the Army). These tensions express themselves through power relationships and influences, i.e. in terms of direct or indirect negotiation, conflict, and domination, between the various authorities responsible for public order. They also express themselves through several "doctrines", and are therefore susceptible to be informed by ideologies. That is why the study of what we have called the "public order system" is a privileged point of observation for those who want ...