My issue is not with proper protective policing, but with a knee-jerk authoritarianism that is intended to give the appearance of control whilst doing nothing genuinely effective.

As much as anything, they're expensive, uselss and intrusive. It's not enough to say you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide. The chilling effect is enough. That's fine with genuinely illegal behaviour, my concern is that the US & UK have demonstrated time after time that measures introduced for the intrusive control of terrorists and violent offenders are also very effective at controlling legal but inconvenient behaviours.

An example we all know are tazers. Initially intended as non-lethal weapons on criminally violent and aggressive behaviour they are now routinely used to create compliance irrespective of intent.

So, whilst I have no problem with the concept of security and policing, that covers a multitude of sins and requires an executive with a firm grasp of civil liberties, something in short supply right now.

keep to the Fen Causeway

Here my difficulty is that bringing the family into left discourse brings with it a whole lot of assumptions that are generally invalid across populations.

I like the idea of "voluntary love", but I still fear that, whatever the intent, rightist conservative voices will hijack or usurp the discourse. Starting of course with the definition of a family. This is less contentious in Europe, but in the US right now a whole cultural battleground has been staked out by the Talivangelical over this subject.

It's no good saying that the left can talk about this without the right intruding. Their emotive language, being more culturally conservative, always has more resonance, however much ours is more inclusive.

Therefore it is easier to talk in meaningless generalities and legislate for the particular.

keep to the Fen Causeway

I agree with you that security is a progressive issue, when it is an issue at all. The problem with the "security" discourse in much of Europe is that it's a phony issue. You have a greater risk of being put in the hospital (or the graveyard) by a car accident than by mugging. By orders of magnitude.

So what the right is doing when it puts more police on the streets is securityness. It's phony. And it's counterproductive to duplicate it, because you cannot cure a perception of insecurity with more cameras and more police walking the beat. In many cases you simply enhance the feeling by making people go "wow, there's a lot more police on the streets these days - it must be getting more dangerous." Which, of course, is the entire point of the exercise.

And then you have the people who - not without some justification, I'm afraid - view the police as a negative influence when it comes to personal safety.

As for family, I would dearly love to take the "family values" issue back from the right. But I don't think that it's an issue where the political gains justify the bother of doing so.

Additionally, the left cannot go the whole nine yards on "family values." When a right-winger says something like "the family is the fundamental unit of society" then I have to disagree. The family as the fundamental social unit implies that the family is where responsibility for social and economic security (and in some cultures even personal safety) begins. And all too often ends.

By supporting it citizens irrespective of their standing within their family and irrespective of their family's standing within society, the progressive state thus breaks down the strongest power structure holding the family together. In effect, it destroys the family as a political unit and renders it "merely" another circle of social associates.

In many cases the emotional bounds that hold a family together will be stronger than those between friends, colleagues or political comrades-in-arms. But in other cases they will not, and supporting the family as a privileged social unit in the cases where they are not can hardly be ranked as progressive.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.